Public speaking coach Haritosh Srivastav breaks down three PowerPoint mistakes: cramming too much on each slide, getting the slide count wrong (aim for roughly one per minute), and skipping rehearsal. Clean slides with one idea each, proper pacing, and dry runs make the difference.
Are you also doing these 3 PowerPoint blunders? Hi everyone, my name is Haritosh Srivastav. I am a public speaking coach, certified mentor, and a best-selling author. Please watch this video till the end to hear about a special announcement. Now, are you also doing these top 3 mistakes while delivering the PowerPoint presentation? What are those? Like you, I have attended, I've given, I have advised people, are giving so many PowerPoint presentations. I've seen so many people doing these 3 PowerPoint blunders. And what's those? Number 1, having an information traffic jam. What do you— what do I mean by that? I've seen people using slides which has got not 1, not 270 lines of text. And too many images and too many graphs, and it's all confusing. And what does the audience feel? Why am I here? Exactly. So number one blunder that I have seen people do is having too much information on their slides, too many pictures, too many images, too much text, wondering their audience, why, why, why? So the, the basic rule is keep your slides neat. Keep only one main idea, one main information in the slides. And I know there are corporate templates, you don't want to mess around with that, but if it is allowed, try having only one idea in one slide. What's number 2 is having too many or too little slides. Now I've seen people using 100 slides in 5-minute presentation, and I've also seen people using only 5 slides for a 49-minute presentation. Now both of these themes, both of these are actually extremes, right? So what do you want to do is you need to have appropriate number of slides. Now typically in a virtual presentation, the number of slides tends to be little higher Typically, the expectation used to be one slide per minute, but with the virtual in the picture, you might want to have little more. At the same time, you don't want to have 150 slides for 5 minutes as well. So you want to have a balance between too less or too little. So have appropriate number of slides, because not having that is the second biggest blunder. Number 3, and that's something got to do with the preparation. And I've seen so many people who are just going through the slide, give me a second, I'll just take check the next one, give me a second, I'll go the one. They're not sure what is the agenda, and that all comes because they've not prepared, rehearsed, and done a number of dry runs. If you are having an important presentation, one thing you really want to do is have a complete dry run, have a complete flow of your PowerPoint. You want to know what's coming after the slide, otherwise it may look very messy, messy, and your audience will feel like, is he reading his own slides or has he taken from somewhere else? So you want to make sure that you have gone through your own slides enough and you are prepared enough. So that's the third blunder I see not preparing enough, not going through your slides enough. So those were the top 3 blunders when it comes to PowerPoint presentation: having an information traffic jam, having too many or too little slides, and also not preparing enough. What other blunders have you seen?
