It could be a specific data point on a chart or a number in a table.  I have a laser pointer inside my presentation remote, the Kensington33374 Wireless Presenter with Laser Pointer, and “occasionally” I use the built-in laser pointer.

If you like to use a laser pointer when presenting, you should do it with a bit of care and follow these two tips:

• Make sure you limit the movements to the bare minimum, and turn off the laser pointer after you have indicated the item you want to highlight.  Presenters who insist on circling around and around the items on the screen and move the pointer all over the slide think they are focusing the audience’s attention, but in fact they may cause everyone’s head and eyes to spin and get distracted.  Some speakers even forget they have the laser turned on and move their hand while dangerously pointing the laser beam everywhere.
• If you hand shakes too much,  maybe because you are a bit nervous, it might be better to find an alternative way of highlighting items on the screen, for example by

1. using arrows and different colors directly within the PowerPoint presentation
2. enlarging the font size to increase readability
3. breaking the information into multiple slides or  building a specific slide for each point you want to highlight

The same problems can happen during a webcast, this time it’s not the laser pointer but the mouse pointer.  Try to limit the mouse movements when you are recording or presenting to a live Internet audience.  Here as well too many movements can be very distracting.

1) Graphics Cheat Sheet (above left) produced by Mike Parkinson (read an interview with Mike on Using Charts in Powerpoint)
2) Chart Chooser from Andrew Abela (above right), also available online:  Chart Chooser from Juice Analytics

If you know of any others, feel free to add them in the comments.

Link to see video if it does not appear above

There is a part (around 0:41:55) that is very applicable to many presentations seen today. Simon makes a comparison between dating and a sales call.

Here is what Simon says:

“We sit across from someone at the other end of the table, we whip out our PowerPoints, and what do we start doing?

• we’re the biggest in our industry
• we’re very good at what we do
• we have beautiful offices, you should come and visit us sometime
• we do business with all the biggest brands
• we are pretty well known, you might have seen us in the press
• we’re doing pretty well for ourselves”

This does not work.  This is not how we should start a sales presentation.

If you watch the entire video you will understand why presentations that talk about “what and how” often don’t get any results.

Recently I was teaching a marketing workshop to a group of  Italian IT resellers and when they were developing the agenda for a hypothetical event the first item of the day was the company presentation.  But earlier in the day when we were talking about why they do customer events, the primary reason was “to solve customer problems”.

Remember to start with the why.
This engages the audience much more than beginning with a standard company presentation.

Simon Sinek is the author of a book titled Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. His website is Startwithwhy.com.

Nice layout, nice font, nice transitions, and very easy to follow.

Did you catch the bullet points?

No?

Well, reload the page again and think of which content could have been presented with bullets, but was not.

Be inspired!

Notice how everything is centered.  I know that PowerPoint defaults to centered headings so I can understand a centered title ( though generally I have a preference for left-aligned) but certainly not centered bullet items!

Here is a very simple make-over using PowerPoint SmartArt graphics to make the slide more readable.  If you want to show two options, the easiest way is to make two columns and use different colors. I used the same font everywhere, and did not use italics.

How would you have restyled the slide?