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Presenting the top five ways to kill your PowerPoint presentation, now this is based on several years of watching people lose an audience, put them to sleep and kill their presentation. Now there's probably about 50 of these and I've just picked my top 5 ways to make sure your presentation does the exact opposite of what you intended. Number one, too much text. Now if you're going to put text on a page there is a good chance people are going to read it. They just feel compelled to read what you put in front of them, and if your talking or trying to make point their busy trying to read your slide. Well on the other side of that coin if their sitting in the back row of the audience, their never going to be able to read this. This is too tiny, it's too much text and even though you may be laughing at this as a rather ridiculous example, I see this all the time. For some reason people feel compelled to put everything on a slide. If you have to have all this text break it up into multiple slides, simple rule. Number two, too busy. What happens here? Again this ties into killer number one, too much text, if it's on the page people are going to look at it and their going to be distracted by all of this information. So here we have text, a picture and a chart down at the bottom. Now teachers, if any of you who are listening to this are teachers understand this rule, if you give your students a handout they will sit there and read the handout instead of listening to you. When you're giving a PowerPoint presentation you are trying to convince audience of one or several facts, in order to do that they need to listen to you. Your voice is the main object, the PowerPoint presentation is back up to that. A lot of people get that flip flop and think the PowerPoint is what's going to save their presentation, not the case. Let's go on to number three, oh too artistic. We see this a lot with people who are new to PowerPoint or sometimes color blind and what happens is just because they can add hearts and smiley faces and change the font color, the font size, the font itself, they go crazy and they let their inner creative artist go unchecked. What happens is you have a very discombobulated page and once again the viewer is confused. They don't know where to go on the eye, this is a simple technique that artists use as not to have more then one dominate feature on the page or the canvas in your case of presentation page. So have one object that draws the attention of your viewer. In most cases PowerPoint sets this up for you by having the headline or you can have one graphic, try and keep it simple. Our next one, animation, eh, I don't see this too much because you don't typically have a whole lot of animations at your disposal with Microsoft Office suite, but there are enough for people to put them in. They are small and rather annoying, they do distract from the message, because people just are fixated by staring at these little movements on the screen. Again try and avoid animations if at all possible. If you do feel the need to use one, do so, so it just helps back up your main point and don't use more then one. Our last killer, goofy transitions. Again this is the hallmark of the amateur PowerPoint presenter. They go from transition to transition to transition, each one is different. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. What I like to do and suggest with presentation transitions is that you keep the same transition through out your entire presentation. Now you can pull out a different transition if you feel the need. OK there is a sound effect one, if you feel the need to emphasize a particular slide. I would restrict that to just one transition though, case in point you can have audio, don't do that, I was doing that more for our entertainment and I'm going to leave with the 10, 20, 30 rule, this is being advocated by a venture capitalist by the name of Guy Kawasaki, I'm a big fan of him and also the rule that he's putting forward. I'm not sure if he's the original author of this or not, but we'll give him credit for this. The 10, 20, 30 rule, live by this and you will do well. First no more then 10 slides, that may be tough in some cases but see what you can do to par it down to as close as ten as possible. I doubt there will be a lot of extraneous information that is in your first presentation, try and par that down. Number two, try and make sure your presentation last no more then 20 minutes. What can I say about that? Keep it short, keep it sweet and the biggest one, no font size smaller then 30 point. This goes back to our original and first slide on too much text. If you can't fit it in 30 point then you need to go to another page and that's what you need to do to try and keep your PowerPoint presentation interesting to your audience and yourself.