It’s all too easy to regurgitate raw data onto a deck of slides, which is what business PowerPoint templates have become. It’s another thing entirely to use presentation slides the way they were intended: as a tool.
PowerPoint has been around for a long time, and everyone in the business world has at least a working knowledge of the program; if not, they’re best friends with it. With that said, since we all know the mechanics of how it works and what it’s for, let’s focus on something that is terribly overlooked: the art of the presentation.
We’re all too familiar with the formula: Dig up sheets of raw data from your hard drive, pull up some business PowerPoint templates you found after a simple Google search, slap the data into the boxes, and abracadabra! Out of this mere device will appear a mind-numbing, life-sucking, time-wasting abomination: what we like to refer to as a “presentation.” However, this formula isn’t magic; it’s typical prep for the weekly scheduled meeting. When it’s done, we go through the motions, the audience zones out while it’s going on (most likely thinking about what they have to do for dinner that night, or some other mundane piece of unfinished business), and nobody is the better for any of it.
Here’s a new idea that successful entrepreneurs are re-discovering; business PowerPoint templates weren’t invented to be the meat and potatoes of your work gatherings. They were invented to help you save time and hassle so you could spend those energies better—you know, providing your audience with fresh, relevant data and then weaving together all that raw information with a charismatic tenor that tells the story of why all that information is important to the audience. In short, we’ve lost the art of storytelling when we give our presentations. Instead, we’ve gotten lazy, making the presentation itself the meat and potatoes of why you get together every week, instead of the product, service, or idea that brings you all together. If your business PowerPoint templates make you lazy, throw them in the garbage.
Some of the best innovators have dumped the complex, overworked PPT presentation altogether, opting instead for a modest presentation conveying the main points and relying instead on working the crowd with their ideas and energy instead of packing each slide with tons of stimuli. And you know what? It’s working! Steve Jobs was the master of this, but you don’t have to be Steve Jobs to make a great presentation; you just have to be passionate about your subject, and remember that the presentation is a tool. Ready to start thinking out the presentation box? Ready for new presentation tools? Great—Emaze is the answer. Start today!
