Winning Strategies for Power Presentations: Jerry Weissman Delivers Lessons from the World’s Best Presenters

45. No More Mind-Numbing Number Slides

Five Easy Steps to Bring Your Presentation to Life

Businesspeople are perpetually faced with the challenge of one of life’s greatest burdens: presenting number slides without numbing their audiences into a soporific stupor. This narcoleptic effect is the result of four common missteps perpetrated by most presenters:

1. The presenter starts each slide by saying, “Now I’d like to talk about...” forcing the audience to restart the presentation with each slide.

2. The presenter reads the words on the slide verbatim, causing the audience to feel patronized and become resentful, thinking “I can read it myself!” (Just remember that the first time anyone read to you was to put you to sleep, and thus you are forever ...