Smart Presentations: Handouts Are the "Word"
October 10, 2008
PowerPoint isn't equal to Word when it comes to creating presentation handouts for your audience.
By John Windsor
Ah, the ubiquitous handouts. So much potential for good, but too often an ineffective recap that does nothing to help your case. Sure, it's easy for you to create handouts from PowerPoint or Keynote, but are copies of your slides what your audience really needs? Probably not.
Sure, many people want a written record of what you covered, and it’s important to honor their request. But consider what happens when you provide little images of your presentation: If your slides are filled with bullets and lots of text, people will get eyestrain trying to read them, and will likely give up quickly if all they see is page after page of bulleted slides. Eyestrain is also a distinct possibility with dense charts or tables, with the added problem of not having you as a guide to highlight the key parts.
On the other hand, suppose you have mostly graphic images—ones that highlight what you're saying in a live presentation. That's great for expressing your message, but a printout of those same slides will likely be meaningless to someone who wasn't in attendance (and probably not of the greatest value even for people who were there).
PowerPoint and Keynote were designed to help visually support your message. To use them as a document tool may be easy for you, but it's bad for your audience.
And for the legions in consulting and high-tech who rely exclusively on PowerPoint as their document creation tool. Stop. Now. I don't care who told you it was a good idea to use "slideware" for your documents. It isn't. It allows you to be lazy and it weakens your case by enabling you to waffle and ramble without end. (While you're at it, please stop using full sentences for your headlines. Nobody remembers all that text, nor are they reading every last bit of your slides.)
So, what do you do?
If you want easy (for you) and somewhat-more-effective (for your audience), then put all the things they should know into the notes section of each slide, and then print it out as "Notes." And create the notes version as a PDF, if you need to e-mail your presentation to someone.
But there's a serious limitation to this approach. If you have 15 or 20 or 30 slides, you’ll be giving them 15 or 20 or 30 pages—and, I guarantee, they won't read them all. They will give more attention to three or five pages, so take that challenge and create your handout or leave-behind in Word.
Limiting yourself to no more than five pages—including graphics—forces you to be clear, specific and concise. It will provide a stronger reminder for those who were present, and make your message easier to understand for those that didn't see or hear your presentation. Your document will get passed around if what you said was valuable or compelling.
Your formatting options are far superior in Word, as well. It allows you to better draw attention to the most important ideas. And if you have charts, graphs or tables with a lot of data points, you can more easily highlight the critical parts in ways you wouldn’t do in PowerPoint or Keynote.
Sure, it takes more time to create a separate document in Word. But what is your objective: to save effort or inspire your audience to action?
John Windsor, an online columnist for Sales & Marketing Management, is President of Creating Thunder, a Boulder, Colo.-based communications training and consulting company. As author of the popular YouBlog, John offers a unique mix of innovation, communications, sales and marketing ideas. An award-winning marketer, John has held vice president positions in marketing, sales, and business development and has worked with companies like American Express, Reuters, Staples, and Knight-Ridder.
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