Every day, the average worker sees 1,387,469,000 PowerPoint presentations. Okay, maybe we’re exaggerating, but the number is high enough to send even the most caffeinated among us in to a sleepy haze by the end of the day. Nobody really loves PowerPoint, but is there another way to give a presentation requiring numbers and figures? We think yes.
If you’re ready to get rid of all electronic aid in your presentations, consider just standing up and giving them. Although it will test your public speaking skills not having documents to fall back on, your boss and co-workers will be impressed that you know your material well enough to present without any sort of aid. If you’re not quite ready for such extreme measures, try using an old-fashioned handout. They worked for years before computers were invented, so why not now? Another bonus of using handouts is that your audience can take notes directly on your facts and figures, making note-taking much quicker and simpler.
If you feel that you still need some electronic aid but want to escape from the boxy dimensions of Microsoft PowerPoint, there are a host of websites that offer sleek, sophisticated alternatives. A perennial favorite of ours is Prezi (online at prezi.com), which works more like a huge blackboard than a slideshow. It’s great for visually linking concepts and ideas, and supports a whole host of media styles beyond plain old text and graphs.
Whether you choose to go completely cold turkey or just change your poison, one thing is for certain: walking in to a conference room without your trusty clicker in tow will grab everyone’s attention.
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Whether you’re a manager or a team member, those mandatory once-a-week meetings can often feel more like a painful lecture. They often go something like this: boss walks in, rattles off the list of problems that people have been having this week, asks for suggestions on how to fix them, gives his or her own ideas, and then concludes the meeting with a half-hearted “get back to work everybody!” The only problem is, people’s problem solving skills aren’t usually at their peak right after they’ve been chastised for the previous half hour. If you’re the one being unwillingly subjected to these types of meetings, there’s not much you can do. If you’re the boss and the meetings are painful even for you, here are a couple of tips to make progress meetings more productive for everyone involved.