Life After Death by PowerPoint (Corporate Comedy Video) DON MCMILLAN: There are some things I hate about PowerPoint, and I figure it's kind of my duty to point them out. So here we go. Here's common PowerPoint mistakes. Number one-- people tend to put every word they are going to say on their PowerPoint slides. Although this eliminates the need to memorize your talk, ultimately this makes your slides crowded, wordy, and boring. You will lose your audience's attention before you even reach the bottom of your-- aaahhhh-- first slide. Please-- please don't do that any more, please. Number two most common-- many people do not run spel cheek. Big mistak. Nothing makes you lok stupider than spelling erors. If it's got a red line under it, recheck the spelling. And, finally, I hate this. Avoid excessive bullet pointing, only bullet key points. Too many bullet points, and your key messages will not stand out. In fact, the term bullet point comes from the people firing the guns at annoying presenters. Hence, the bullet point. Bad color schemes-- not good. Clashing background and font colors can lead to distraction, confusion, headache, nausea, vomiting, and loss of bladder control. I can't stay on that one too long. Here's something I've noticed-- the number of PowerPoint slides you have in your talk, the less useful your talk actually is. Unfortunately, my presentation is right there. And then there is this. People love to pack data into their presentation. They just shove more and more data, thinking it's better, but it's not. The more data you have, the harder it is to read your slide, and the effectiveness plummets. Now you can improve the effectiveness by adding some shading and some 3-D effects and then some second order and third order effects, and then-- I know, let's add some labels. That'll help a lot. And that that's pretty much every marketing slide I've ever seen right there. Then someone, like VP of Marketing, standing there going, it's real clear in Q4. What the hell are you talking about? Now I'm into animation. People becoming animators in PowerPoint. You can have things flying all over the place. And that can be good. If you're a visual learner, that will improve the effectiveness of your performance. But if you're easily distracted, more animations and people will have no idea what you're talking about. They're just, wow, that is cool, wow. And there's regions here, by the way. There's the simple, but effective region. There's the active, but confusing. The effective, but boring. The active, but ineffective. The dull, but static region. The busy, but useless. The ADD only region. The useful, but amusing. The stupid, but confusing. The dull triangle, the hyper triangle, the sleepy square, the dizzying pentagon, and everything else I just call pointless motion. That slide right there took me an hour and a half to make right there. PowerPoint can just suck the life out of you. It's amazing. I've also come up with this. It's a kind of a little science I've invented called font analysis. Basically, the font you choose says something about who you are as a person. There's a huge list of fonts, and you choose one, and that says something about you. So be careful the font you choose. For example, if you choose Courier New-- it happens to be my favorite-- you're probably organized and structured. If you choose Matisse, it means you're artistic. And if you choose Times New Roman, it means you're lazy, apathetic, and unimaginative, and you always use the default.