Business Presentation: The Basics

Business presentations not only speak for the person presenting them but also reflect the image of the organization for which they are presented. An effective presentation can result into creating success stories for an organization. A bad presentation on other hand will let down the business. There are some basics, though important to presentations that help us make better presentations. First thing to be concerned about is the time and interest of the audience. The most precious your audience’s time is, more important it will become to stick to the basics.

Presentations can become very challenging at times. Choosy audience and competitive environment in business puts much more responsibility on presenter to have a more focused approach. Presentation should contain only necessary information in a compact manner. Lengthy sentences should be avoided and one word substitution with one line phrases should be more appropriate. Professional approach should also be used in selecting the slide template and layout. Unnecessary or irritating colors can obstruct the ability to read and understand the words and resulting in uninterested audience. Don’t use capital letters unnecessarily, as that would distort the real message and confuse the audience as to what is important and what is not. Punctuation marks should also be used carefully and only when needed. Some of our business professionals are over obsessed with aesthetics of the presentation. They start finding new and unique styles of fonts (e.g., cowboy fonts or etc). They should understand that audience is only interested in the real message and aesthetics are only there to support the message. Unnecessary focus on aesthetics can stress the audience.

Colors play a vital role in presentations making. Intelligent use of colors not only increases the readability of the presentation but also gives it a professional look. Length of the presentation also counts. First of all the audience should be given a rough view of the outline of the presentation. And lengthy presentations should only be made once required. The length count will help audience realize the time it would take them to get through all presentation proceedings. Using large number of slides is not a very suitable option and their use should also be limited to need. Picture is worth a thousand words. Graphs, pictures and charts not only help reduce the amount of words and slides used, but also grace the presentation with colors. Their use helps the audience correlate a lot of information simultaneously. Animation effects should also be used sparsely, as their overload will result in distortion. Last but not the least is the portability of your presentation. It is important to make a presentation that runs on that computer on which you have to present. There have been format problems as well in word processors. For example it is better to save in old and new format of Microsoft Office Power Point, or else you can land yourself in trouble if the PC on which you are going to present has a different version of Microsoft Office Power Point then the one on which you are making the presentation. Caring these simple basics is sure to help you remain focused and make more effective presentations.