Winning The Room

SECTION 2Planning: Designing the Presentation

Before creating any slides, you must take the time to design your presentation. It is necessary to determine the story you want to tell, the order in which you'll introduce information, the level of depth you'll cover, what you want the audience to remember, and what actions you want the audience to take. You'll also need to plan how to verbally convey all of that information.

If you learn to be disciplined about taking the time to design your presentations, you'll soon realize not only how much better and more effective your presentations are but also that the time spent in the design phase is far less than the time wasted on revisions to a presentation that wasn't properly designed up‐front. Here are some of the concepts discussed in this section:

• Identify the type of presentation that you need for each situation.
• Determine how much detail to include.
• Make use of approaches, such as animations and appendices, to streamline a presentation.
• Keep practical implications front and center.
• Focus on what the audience should do with the results more than what you did to generate the results.

Moviemakers don't simply start shooting scenes without a plan or script and then hope to chain them together after the fact into a good movie. Rather, they design the overall story and each scene in immense detail before any filming takes place. You must follow this model to create and deliver an effective data‐driven presentation.

Tip 13: Different ...