PowerPoint Tips-The 10 Biggest PowerPoint Mistakes and How to Fix Them

If you are scanning the internet for PowerPoint tips, it’s most likely because something has happened recently that wasn’t ideal. Perhaps you stood up in front of a group and forgot what you were going to say. Or, maybe, you got tongue-tied during the delivery. Or worse, your audience looked sleepy-eyed or even walked out of the room while you were speaking.

These are all symptoms of related to a few of the biggest PowerPoint mistakes that almost every presenter makes at some time in their speaking career.

But if you avoid these mishaps, you’ll make a better connection with your audience. In fact, even if you don’t consider yourself a great speaker, if you just eliminate these mistakes from your preparation, you’ll deliver better presentations than 90% of business presenters out there.

Shownotes: PowerPoint Tips-The 10 Biggest PowerPoint Mistakes and How to Fix Them

(https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/power-point-tips/)

Transcript

If you are scanning the internet for PowerPoint tips, it’s most likely because something has happened recently that wasn’t ideal. Perhaps you stood up in front of a group and forgot what you were going to say. Or, maybe, you got tongue-tied during the delivery. Or worse, your audience looked sleepy-eyed or even walked out of the room while you were speaking.

These are all symptoms of related to a few of the biggest PowerPoint mistakes that almost every presenter makes at some time in their speaking career.

But if you avoid these mishaps, you’ll make a better connection with your audience. In fact, even if you don’t consider yourself a great speaker, if you just eliminate these mistakes from your preparation, you’ll deliver better presentations than 90% of business presenters out there.

PowerPoint Tips: The 10 Biggest PowerPoint Mistakes and What to Do Instead.These 10 PowerPoint mistakes can derail even the best speakers, turning a great talk into a snooze-fest. From overloading slides with data to reading them word-for-word, these slip-ups make you look unprepared and lose your audience fast.

By avoiding blunders like busy charts or cheesy images, you’ll keep listeners engaged and project confidence. Small fixes can transform your slides into powerful tools that support your message, not steal the show. Skim these tips, and you’ll be amazed how they boost your next presentation’s impact, maybe even landing you that big win!

1) Designing a “PowerPoint Presentation”.

Remember, a presentation is a verbal communication to your audience that may or may not use visual aids. PowerPoint is just ONE type of visual aid that can be used to further explain or clarify your presentation. If you focus entirely on this one type of visual aid without putting an emphasis on what you are actually saying, your presentation will tend to have a disconnected flow and will be difficult for the audience to follow.

Instead, design your presentation and get good at delivering it first. Once you get good at delivering the presentation, then decide what visual aids you might be able to use to help you clarify your points.

PowerPoint Tip #1: Design Your Presentation First, Then Add Visual Aids to Help the Audience.

2) Too Many PowerPoint Slides.

Another big mistake is creating too many slides and using them as a crutch to make sure that we don’t forget anything in our presentation.

Slide… Click… Slide… Click… Slide… Click… is a very boring way to deliver a presentation and makes the presenter look unprepared and uninformed about his/her topic. Only add a slide if it helps you better clarify your point.

By the way, this mistake is often made when designing the presentation. Most presenters think that they have to explain EVERYTHING to the audience. Otherwise, they will have failed as a speaker. However, the audience is only going to remember or retain a few things that you say as a speaker. So, instead of covering many, many points and adding many, many slides, limit your content to just a few key points.

Most really good presentations have fewer than 10 slides total. (The best have just four or five slides.)

PowerPoint Tip #2: Only Cover a Few Key Items in Your Presentation and Limit the Slides as Well.

For additional details about How to Design a Better Presentation or How Many Slides Should I Have, click these links.

3) Too Much Data on Your PowerPoint Slides.

Your slide deck should be a visual aid to help you explain your point, so if you put too much data on a slide (too much text, too many numbers, or charts and graphs) you will overwhelm your audience. Your PowerPoint slide should convey a simple concept at a glance.

We suggest that you put no more than five bullet points on a slide. You probably want to have 10 or fewer words on each line of text as well.

PowerPoint Tip #3: Use No More than 5 Bullet Points on a Slide. (Dump the Data!)

4) Overuse of Animation.

PowerPoint will do some really cool types of animation, but remember that if you animate something, it should help you clarify your point. Bullet points that fly in, spin around, make sounds, and blink are just a distraction from your message.

If you want your audience to follow you step-by-step, you can reveal your bullets one at a time. However, you’ll have more energy as a presenter if you just make your slide appear and physically move to your screen and point to your bullet point when you talk about it.

The exception to this point is in virtual presentations. When you are in front of an audience, you are the presentation. However, on a Zoom or Teams call, your slideshow is center stage. So, in that instance, a little more animation can be helpful.

For instance, during the pandemic, we created a virtual version of Fearless Presentations ®. When we created the slideshow for that version, we had our bullet points appear one at a time as we spoke about them. And, as the text came on the screen, a new image replaced the image that was there for the previous bullet point. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but since everyone is staring at their screens, the screen has to stay active to keep everyone’s attention.

PowerPoint Tip #4: Use Simple or No Animation Unless the Animation Helps You Make Your Points Better.

5) Too Many Busy Charts.

(Gasp… He is saying not to use charts and graphs.) For the most part, charts, graphs, and pictures make terrible PowerPoint slides. If the charts or graphs are simple, they can be judiciously used in a slideshow. However, if you are graphing total revenue of five different divisions on a quarterly basis for each of your ten major product lines, your graph will be way too busy to understand in a slide.

Use a handout instead. If you need a visual aid for it, make a big poster of the graph. But in most cases, you can just use the handout itself as the visual aid.

PowerPoint Tip #5: Put Your Charts and Graphs in a Handout.

6) Reading Your PowerPoint Slides.

Reading word-for-word from your slide deck is a big mistake because your audience can read faster than you can talk. So, they will be done reading your slide before you finish the first bullet point. This will cause your audience to get distracted while you finish reading the slide.

If you are going to use text in your slide deck, use a few words or a short phrase to help you remember your next point, and then just talk about it conversationally.

PowerPoint Tip #6: Less Is More on Your Slides. Say More than What You Write on Your Slides.

7) Turning Your Back to the Audience or Worse… Presenting from a Seated Position Facing the Screen.

When you turn your back to your audience, your voice projects away from them, and you lose eye contact. This makes it much easier for them to get distracted. Instead, set your computer up in front of you so you can progress through your slides without turning around.

If you need to point to the screen, turn your shoulders, point, and then immediately turn back to the audience.

But never deliver a presentation from a seated position facing the screen. The moment you set your room up like this, you’ll guarantee that your entire audience is bored to tears during the presentation. Remember you are the presentation, not the slideshow.

PowerPoint Tip #7: Present from the Front Center of the Room and Station Your Screen Off to the Side If Possible.

8) Inappropriate Humor or Cheesy Images.

Some presenters think that they can make their presentations more entertaining by adding jokes or funny pictures to their slide deck. However, if the humor is in bad taste, you run a big risk of offending your audience members. The same thing happens when you use cartoon-like images in a business presentation.

If you use humor, make sure it is appropriate, and always use professional images in your slide deck.

PowerPoint Tip #8: Use Natural Humor from Stories. Avoid Forced Humor from Cheesy Images or Memes.

For additional details about How to Add Humor to a Presentation or 100 Public Speaking Jokes, click these links.

9) Not Practicing Your Presentation with the Slideshow.

For some reason, very smart presenters will often create their slideshow but practice the presentation just looking at the slide deck. Basically, they never actually start the show like they would during the presentation. This can create a couple of strange mishaps.

First, they may remember the slides and just start talking from memory. Eventually, they’ll forget what was next and will start clicking the slides — often covering content that they previously said from memory.

Or, as they click through the slides for the first time — live in front of a group — they may realize that their animations just don’t work like they wanted.

Either of these situations can cause your nervousness to shoot through the room and make you look unprepared. So, practice your presentation once or twice all the way through so that you can deliver it with confidence. In the process, you’ll likely find areas that you need to fix before you deliver it to a real audience.

Another challenge related to this mistake is that presenters often practice alone so they can get good at the delivery without fear of embarrassment. However, a sample audience or at least friend to run through the presentation with can really help you add clarity to the presentation. These listeners can help you alter the delivery so the audience will understand the content better.

PowerPoint Tip #9: Practice Once or Twice with a Partner or Audience.

10) Not Using PowerPoint as a Visual Aid.

This last mistake comes full circle because it is caused by mistake #1. If you design the slideshow first, you’ll use the slide deck as a crutch. It will actually become the presentation. (This will almost always make the delivery very, very, very boring.)

You will spend all of your time explaining what is on each slide instead of delivering a presentation. Your slide deck is not the presentation. You are. Use your slides to clarify a complex idea or to add a visual explanation to a point that you are making.

PowerPoint Tip #10: Okay, It’s Really Just Tip #1 Again. But It’s so Important, It Bears Repeating. Design Your Presentation First, Then Add Visual Aids to Help the Audience.

Use These Simple PowerPoint Tips to Avoid Each of These Costly Mistakes.

Follow these simple guidelines, and your PowerPoint Slides will help you better deliver more powerful presentations. Violate them, and you’ll likely be more nervous and have a more difficult time delivering your presentation.

Full Transcript at Power Point Tips