Perfecting the PowerPoint Presentation - American Marketing Association

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Perfecting the PowerPoint Presentation

By Jim Endicott and Megan Lappi, GettyWorks.com
Jim Endicott, co-author of the Presentation Survival Skills Guide, is a nationally recognized consultant, speaker, and trainer specializing in professional presentation messaging, design, development, and delivery. Megan Lappi is a GettyWorks staff writer.

	1. Introduction

If you've been presenting for a while, it's probably happened to you. That moment in front of an audience that seems to hang eternally when you click the mouse and nothing happens. You pound the keyboard — first the mouse, then the spacebar, and then in final desperation, the ESC key.

You smile nervously at your audience, make some offhand remark about "this crazy new technology" and continue to pummel your keyboard. "Oh, please, not control-alt-delete," you think to yourself. Your fingers tremble over the odious three-key combination. You instinctively know that a hard reboot now means you've got to come up with about three minutes of meaningful banter.

Business presentations are a vital tool for sales, marketing and education. However, since a presentation is a high-stakes tool, it comes with high stakes risks. Presentation audiences are like people who go to auto races to see some good individual performances, but really they hope for a dramatic pile-up with no injuries.

Learn to look for trouble before trouble comes looking for you. Take this checklist with you next time you're headed off to a big presentation. The following tips should help you evade trouble before your next major presentation.

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Table of Contents

1.	Introduction
2.	Building a Presentation
3.	10 Presentation Rules
4.	Last Minute Checks