How to create a presentation that everyone in your audience will hate

1. How to create a presentation that everyone in your audience will hate (Bonus: You’ll hate giving the presentation more than the audience hates it!)

2. Basic Suggestions to Start • Don’t prepare, just “wing-it”. • Wait till the last minute • Be unfamiliar with the material as possible • Ask someone else to prepare the presentation • Or, if no one else falls for that, just borrow someone else’s presentation at the last possible moment! • Put together the “look” of the presentation first • Concentrate on the details of which font to use in the handouts • Never, ever practice.

3. Advanced suggestions • Use your slides as a crutch • Put so much text on each slide that no one actually needs to hear you speak. • By the time you’re done speaking, they’ll have long ago finished reading and started to daydream about something far more interesting. • You should definitely use complete sentences with punctuation. • Use an “agenda” slide. That’s always a great way to signal a great presentation is coming. • Absolutely never find out who the audience will be and what their interests might be in the topic. • Bonus: Don’t be afraid to assume that the audience is either: totally ignorant, or knows nearly everything you do. • Use multiple levels of bullets. • Because you can’t have enough • They’re useful when you don’t know the material and they’ll keep the audience busier as they try to grasp all the indents.

4. Fonts and Colors are your friends • It’s OK to use colors for the foreground and background that are similar in luminance (brightness). • This works well: • Go ahead and ask, “Can you see this?” at least once during the presentation. • Bonus: Scrunch up your face when you ask the question. • Use small fonts. Smaller than 18pt is exceptional as you can pack on a tremendous amount of text. Maybe by the time the viewers have finished reading, they’ll have forgotten you’re even standing up there anymore! • Use more than 2 fonts on a slide – it will make it exciting! • Routinely mix a serif and sans-serif font (like Times New Roman and Arial for example). Can you read me now?

5. Graphics & Animation • Use lots of clip art – especially clip art that is included with PowerPoint. • Steal images and clip-art from the web that you find. If a search engine found it, there must not be a license, right? • Use a busy background. “Tech” backgrounds with lots of lines, colors, and 3D effects are particularly nice. • Use at least one unique animation per slide. • Bonus: Use the typewriter style animation. They rock! • Use reflections, everywhere! • Select highly animated transitions for slides, not boring dissolves or fades.

6. The final step:“Wowing” your audience • Don’t make eye contact with anyone you don’t know. • Bonus: Better yet, don’t make eye contact at all, with anyone. • Don’t act interested in the topic. • Bonus: Look like everyone else is wasting your valuable time. • Dull topics should be presented as dull as possible. • If it’s a boring topic, make it boring! • Continually look at the presentation screen to verify that no-one has sneakily switched slides on you without knowing. • Bonus: Flip back and forth through slides trying to get to the right place. • Double bonus: Act like you’ve never used presentation software before and be confused by the “up” and “down” arrows on the keyboard or mouse. • Be shocked when the slide changes and you weren’t expecting that slide. • Read the slides to the audience. Read everything just to be considerate. Someone might not be looking up at the slide at all times – so they’ll appreciate you reading them the material. • Struggle to find the presentation to give