Using Powerpoint in a company meeting - Essay Example

The use of Powerpoint in a corporate setting. The emphasis is how to get the audience attention and keep them focused during the power point presentation. As technology has started to make ways into various fields and industries simultaneously it has spread it roots in cooperate organizations aswell. Use of technologies has made organizational work easy in many aspects. Various softwares and tools have been made targeting various functional areas of the organization and some are multipurpose softwares which can be used across organization.

Powerpoint is one of those softwares which made its way to being a common tool found and used in organizations. Though at first look Powerpoint may only seem like a tool limited only to making slides for presentations but a person who knows this software thoroughly can easily tell what POWER stands for in POWERPOINT. The tool is very advance in terms of technology put into it; it’s not just only a tool for making slides but a complete package that helps you to get that edge which you need while making and delivering a presentation.

It has all the functions and tools built inside that you’ll need to make you presentation attractive and effective at the same time. The major advantage of using Powerpoint in cooperate setting is that it emphasizes more on the key points and at the same time provides the limelight to the speaker aswell and not keeping the information only limited to text. At times due to the nature of the topic of presentation; presentations become quite dry and makes the listeners lose interest. For that purpose a few guidelines and tips should be followed by the presenter.

The purpose of these tips and guidelines is to help the presenter keep the listeners focused on the topic he’s presenting while at the same time keeping them entertained. Following are few tips that should be followed: A presentation should not be at first’ whole textual. That gives a listener a negative impression i.e. if they had to read everything then what different is it from a report. To remove this redundancy a selection of text along with visual components should be done. As researches have been done regarding what keeps a listener attentive results indicate that the population consists of two types of people , right brain thinkers ( who are more visually oriented) while other are left brain thinkers ( more verbal and textual oriented).

To keep both the major segments satisfied the presenter should be keen in keeping a mix of both text and visuals. Presenter should make sure that they don’t digress from the topic. It should be made sure that the discussion is relevant to the topic as previous experiences have shown that the audience is displeased and considers it as a waste of time if the topic was something else and the discussion shifts to another topic. “One of New Zealand’s most successful professional speakers make this mistake.

Her session was advertised as being on email marketing. But, she’d just got entranced by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites. She announced at the start that she didn’t want to talk about email marketing, but about SEO. The she asked how many people in the audience had a website. About 5 people out of 100 put their hands up. You’d think she’d change tack – but no. 95 people were subjected to a talk on a subject they had no interest in.” Questions should be asked from the audience so as to emphasize on the fact that the presenter wants to keep his audience involved and the presentation doesn’t come to a point where the audience feels left out.

Also if the feedback is positive and contribute to the topic then it should be repeated so that everyone can benefit from it and at the same time is a symbol of appreciation to the person who contributed. Distribution of handouts in the start of the presentation gives a brief outline of how will your presentation proceed and what topics will it be covering. The benefit of giving handout is that the people in the presentation session can make key points on the handout and they don’t lose their concentration while taking notes.

A general rule know as “Seven by Seven” should be followed which puts a lot of importance on the fact that a slide should not contain more than seven points and each point should not contain more than seven words unless necessary. By doing so the listeners don’t get much involved in reading the text of the slide and the presenter remains their center of attention. If there is some information which is important but is too textual then it should be mentioned in the handout rather than on the slide.

References and Citation: Ellen Finkelstein, P. S. (2007). PowerPoint for Teachers: Dynamic Presentations and Interactive Classroom. MITCHELL, O. (n.d.). Retrieved from speaking about presenting: http://speakingaboutpresenting.com/content/7-ways-audience-attention-presentation/ powerpoint best practices. (n.d.). Retrieved from groundwire: http://groundwire.org/resources/articles/powerpoint-best-practices