Content

Stating the obvious...

It's an obvious thing to say, but if your presentation has no story, no focus and no end-goal, it's doomed to failure!

As mentioned previously, PowerPoint has come in for undue criticism for "dumbing down" presentation skills.  This is not the fault of the software, merely a symptom of presenters spending too much time on creating high impact transitions, music, video and word art with nothing to back it up. 

To paraphrase - "All mouth and no trousers"!

Every presentation should have an aim - your job is to develop a communication piece that gets to this aim as quickly and effectively as possible...this is where careful planning of your content comes in.

Too many business people (especially last minute panickers!) start a creating a presentation without knowing how they're going to get to their end goal.  This simply leads to a rambling presentation, chock-a-block with text and bullet points and lacking any focus.  These same business people wouldn't dream of preparing a business plan or tender document in the same manner so why do it a presentation?

As a rule of thumb, the simple business rule of...

works well as a basic presentation structure. 

By all means, use the wizards included with PowerPoint but tread carefully - following someone else's storyboard can drain the presentation of all personality which in turn can lead to even more text and bullet points!

Finally, the trick is to invest time early on to plan out your presentation on paper.  Only when you're happy with the structure and pace of the information flow should you turn on your PC!