People use professional Power Point templates in public speeches. It is considered, they help make the process of communication with the audience more effective. But most of us, who has ever visited such a presentation, will confirm that in most cases this is not happening.

On the contrary, the use of PowerPoint presentation often seems inappropriate and irritating to the speaker and the audience as well. People want to exclaim: “Hey, after all, turn off the projector and tell us what you have to say!”

What’s the matter? Maybe badly chosen color scheme? Need more pictures? Poorly written text? Hardly. The fact is that most speakers use a PowerPoint presentation for false purposes, and do not understand what actually this tool is made for.

Nowadays nearly every major organization in the meeting room has multi-media projector. In voluntary-compulsory order the staff in the company is required to create and use PowerPoint template presentation to report on meetings. At conferences and exhibitions using PowerPoint presentation is often an obligatory for speakers. In the process of commercial negotiations, presentations show the seriousness and modernity of the organization. But no more than 10% of presentations can really help the speaker convey certain ideas, and the audience understand them. In a typical presentation, the speaker reads slides full of text, and feels uncomfortable because he suspects that others also know how to read. Such a presentation tires the audience.

Then tables and charts with footnotes come. People will be given about two minutes to understand the information. The speaker briefly comments: “Here is the data for the last six months”. The audience politely agrees and keeps silent. After 3-5 minutes after the beginning of the presentation, people start to switch to their own business – a set of sms-messages, reading documents, observing of what is happening outside the window or just sleeping. The speaker begins to feel more comfortable, as in the beginning of the presentation everyone was looking at him and he had to read the text secretly, but now he can look only to the presentation and easily read it. Trying to solve this problem, experienced speakers begin to use pictures wherever it is possible.

In general, this picture is so sad and familiar to everyone, who attends the presentations on a regular bases. Why is this happening? The reason for this situation will be obvious, if you ask a typical speaker, for what reason he uses the presentation. He will give you one of the most popular answers: “In order not to get off and tell everything that is planned. Following this logic, PowerPoint presentation has the whole text of the speech. Sometimes it is slightly reduced and transformed into a bulleted list. Of course, you will have to use a small text size.

There is another answer: “To give additional information”. In this case, the presentation is filled with all additional information to the topic. Often it is huge tables, charts and text boxes, copied from reports, technical manuals and other documents. Listeners are angry as they have to sort this information, which is not clear.

Another typical response: “to help diversifying the performance.” Accordingly, PowerPoint presentation has many visual effects. Each slide has artworks, photographs, drawings (sometimes not related to the subject). Some unsophisticated listeners may become very interested, as the photos can be more exciting comparing the speech of the speaker.
Some speakers honestly admit: “Because everyone is using it and I was told to use as well”. This is the frankest answer.

So why do we really need PowerPoint presentations? This is the most important question which can helps us in creating good presentations – those that actually help the speaker and the audience.