PowerPoint Tips: What to Learn from Steve Jobs Presentations
Posted By Jane on May 8, 2012in Knowledge & Tips & Skills
Have you ever felt frustrated when you’re asked to give a PowerPoint presentation in front of your classmates or collogue? Do you want to become a great presenter like Steve Jobs? A lot of people have asked question about how to make a great PowerPoint presentation on the web like Yahoo Answers. One common is that they all mentioned they are nervous about the upcoming PowerPoint presentation. But in fact nervousness is not really the cause; the really problem is that you know you are not well-prepared. Here we’d like to share some of the tips that Steve Jobs did in this successful presentations.
1. Build your structure. A Steve Jobs presentation followed a very specific structure that left the audience with no choice but to focus on the message being conveyed. Each presentation began with a roadmap, he broke every segment into three parts, and he never spoke on one topic longer than ten minutes.
While PowerPoint presentations are usually short, you can still apply the Steve Jobs way into your PowerPoint. To make a clear structure, many people tend to use an outline slide which contains the basic structures of the whole PowerPoint. This gives audience visual guide on what to expect for your PowerPoint presentation.
2. The “Three” principle. A person can only retain small amounts of information in their short term memory. That’s why a Steve Jobs presentation always had three or four message points. However, the number three was more common than four because he discovered that the “Rule of Three” is one of the most powerful rules of communication theory.
Because human mind couldn’t process too much information in one sitting, so cut your bullet points to only three so that there will be no extra information that would distract the audience and weaken the impact of your PowerPoint presentation.
3. Why people listen to you. No one is doing something without purpose. So you should think it clear before you create the PowerPoint presentation that why the audience would spare their time to sit in the room and listen to you. Who are your audiences, Shareholders, engineers, sales people or classmates? You can tune your PowerPoint presentation in a manner that makes them more receptive listeners if you know what they want.
4. Keep the audience away from the slides. A common problem is that when you’re doing the PowerPoint presentation, the audience is just looking at your slides. So what you should do is to make them focus on you, listen to what you say. That’s why a lot PowerPoint tips suggested that you can press “B” to turn your slide into a black screen so that the audience has to look at you. Steve Jobs did this too. He inserted a blank slide into the presentation and draws the audience’s attention back to himself.
5. Memorize your presentation. PowerPoint is just a tool to make your work easier, not a burden. You should know your content well that you can give your presentation even without using PowerPoint. Steve Jobs was rather meticulous about his preparation and presentation. You see that he is really comfortable standing there in front of people and telling the story. So the best of what you can do is try to memorize what you will say in the PowerPoint presentation. It would be much natural speak to the audience face to face than speak to the screen.
What’s your best PowerPoint presentation tip?
- Poll: Who Was Steve Jobs to You?
- Steve Jobs Resigns; Tim Cook Replaces as New CEO of Apple
- Effective Tips for Great Public Speaking and Presentation
- 4 Tips to Prepare and Make a Great PowerPoint Presentation
- Back to School 2011: Top 10 Best Presentations of All Time
MY THOUGHTS
What's my take away? Everything. These are all good reminders. But I like two reminders the bestL the 'three points' strategy and keeping your audience away from your slides.
Oh, and of course, no more than 10 minutes for each topic. That's one tough hill to climb.
