Better PowerPoint can be the boon of many a business presentation.
If you correct even a few of the most egregious errors, you can lift your presentation to a much more professional level.
One key to improving is recognizing that you might be part of the problem. And that like most any musical instrument, you can tune yourself up to play more beautiful melodies.
One strategic way of doing this is to begin broadening your professional perspective.
Your Learning Curve for Better Powerpoint
It’s the process of enriching your personal context so that you become aware of new and varied sources of information, ideas, concepts, theories. You become learned in new and wondrous ways.
Think of it as enlarging your world.
You increase your reservoir of usable material. And your business presentation can connect more readily with varied audiences.
You do this in a pleasant and ongoing process – by keeping your mind open to possibilities outside your functional area. By taking your education far beyond undergraduate or graduate school. And that process increases your personal competitive advantage steadily.
By doing something daily, however brief, that stretches your mind. Or allows you to make a connection that otherwise might have escaped you.
Expand Your World for Better PowerPoint?
By reading broadly in areas outside your specialty, you sharpen your acumen in your specialty. You understand its place, its context.
Read a book outside your specialty. Have lunch with a colleague from a different discipline. Dabble a bit in architecture, engineering, art, poetry, history, science.
It also means sampling some of the best offerings in the blogosphere on business presentations.
For instance, my three favorite PowerPoint gurus are Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, and Gene Zelazny. Sample their online work . . . purchase their books, as I have.
Their works are invaluable tools of my trade. If you become a serious business presenter, they’ll become your friends, too.
Light-Hearted Improvement
For a more immediate fix some of the worst PowerPoint pathologies, have a look at this fellow.
In this video, engineer Don McMillan demonstrates the most common PowerPoint presentation mistakes in a way that, well . . . have a look!