Practice under real conditions or in front of colleagues.
The best way to correct your mistakes is to repeat your presentation in front of your colleagues, or better still, to film yourself.
To do this, simply take your smartphone, put it in front of you on a table (possibly by putting it on a few books so that it is at the right height), and start your speech.
Ideally, a presentation should be made in front of a person who knows nothing about the subject to ensure that the presentation and the language used is understandable to all.
Use the powerpoint to illustrate your speech and not the other way around.
This is the most common error: read your Powerpoint and unwind your speech from its support.
We see this regularly: a tetanized presenter in front of his audience, who turns around to read his slides…
However, it is exactly the opposite that must be done: you must know your slides “by heart” and rely on them to move the discourse forward.
For example, 2 weeks ago I was at a technical defense to sell our products in front of 3 people. My colleague was looking at his slides on the screen of the video projector, instead of looking at the prospects… On the contrary, I kept in eye contact with the various interlocutors, talking to them with my eyes in their eyes, and adapting my speech to what they had said earlier, without really reading the Powerpoint (except looking at the key elements for the presentation structure at a glance).
How do you get away from your notes?
Here is a very simple method adapted for beginners:
First of all, you have to write from A to Z your speech with all the sentences you are going to say.
The goal is NOT to memorize your speech (that would be a big mistake!), but to know exactly what you are going to say.
Indeed, if you do not write the complete framework of your speech, you will not have an exhaustive vision of what you are going to say
Nb: you will have to reread this text 3 or 4 times maximum to be able to be inspired by it without doing anything by heart.
In this text, you must find transitions between all the slides so that the sequence is done as naturally as possible (avoid them “and in the next slide we will see…” which look really very amateurish).
To simplify the formatting, the easiest way is to start with the finalized Powerpoint slides, then export them to Word as a 2-column table (the slide + the text part).
To do this, use the “Send” to Microsoft Office Word function available in the File menu Send to Microsoft Office Word.
Then, it is enough to synthesize in a few key points the essential elements to be indicated by slides, as well as the 2 or 3 strong ideas that you want to convey so as not to forget them.
This document must fit on an A4 sheet folded in 4 (front + back) so that you can possibly hold it by hand during the presentation.
Nb: write with a ballpoint pen and not with ink or grey pencil, if you hold your cards by hand the ink will fade with perspiration…
However, it is essential to do this work several days before the presentation.
Indeed, memorization is done during the night… so it is necessary to give your brain time to record the speech via 2 or 3 nights of sleep. A good planning is to start 1 week before, then to do a rehearsal the evening before to “record the speech”.
Tip: you can record your presentation on your smartphone via the voice recorder, then listen to it from time to time this presentation in transport, a little before the appointment… and you will see that by listening to it, you will memorize it !
Write as little as possible on your powerpoint slides!
A powerpoint with complete sentences written in 14 font or with Excel tables is a sign of a presentation made by an amateur… For more info, visit https://www.naijatechguide.com/2019/05/transfer-microsoft-office-2010.html.
You should write as little text as possible and use as few graphics as possible.
To avoid this, once you have made your powerpoint, read it again and say if your text is still understandable, if you can delete a sentence or a word.
Remember that on the day of the presentation you will be there to illustrate your writings, so your listeners should not have to read sentences on the powerpoint and listen to you at the same time.
The powerpoint just needs to set tags and keywords for your speech.
For graphs, simply delete Excel tables that are too complicated to illustrate and prefer to quote key figures or even make a graph (pie chart, curves, etc.), which you illustrate orally by hammering out key ideas.
