PowerPoint presentations are the vacation slide shows of the business world: we’ve all sat through mundane ones that seemed to last forever. But there are several tips that you can follow to avoid preparing a PowerPoint presentation that bores your co-workers. This is important: You create PowerPoint presentations to spread your message, promote products and get results. You can’t make this happen if no one’s paying attention to them.

Don’t Forget Creativity

As the writers at Microsoft’s Business Hub say, PowerPoint doesn’t give you permission to get lazy. You still have to be creative if you want to produce a winning presentation that grabs the attention of your audience. This means that you can’t let PowerPoint’s ease of use trick you into thinking that you don’t have to put together engaging content. Simply because you can create an endless series of text-filled slides doesn’t mean that you should.

Come to your sales pitch or company meeting armed with interesting and useful information. Don’t just slap some sales numbers on a series of slides. Rather, discuss what these numbers mean.

Come with Solutions

You’ll also want to come armed with ways in which your company’s employees can increase these sales numbers. Another fault of many PowerPoint presentations: they provide information. But they don’t provide useful methods for how employees can use that information to improve the company’s performance.

Also, if the purpose of your presentation is to simply inform, add some intriguing details to the data. Tell them why there was a sudden spike in revenue last quarter, or why sales suddenly dropped. The more well rounded a picture you can lend to your data, the more likely your audience will remember it.

Don’t Get Too Fancy

We said to get creative but that doesn’t mean you should use all the gimmicks that PowerPoint offers. Many managers throw in needless or annoying images in an attempt to grab attention. Any irrelevant images will only serve as a disruption. Then they will only remember the cute jumping dog in the corner of the slide rather than the information you were offering. A frequent mistake you will want to avoid as well, is reading the slides verbatim. Your audience does not want to read along with you. Instead, leave the slide up for enough time for them to read the three bullets while verbally expanding on the single most important one. This way you can save your breath and avoid exhausting your audience’s attention span with redundancy.

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