Thank you for joining me for this course on PowerPoint. I'm Blair cook. And in this lesson, I'm not even going to open up PowerPoint, and neither should you. This is the first mistake that most people make with PowerPoint. They know they have a body of content to share. And so they start populating slides with that content with either no structure or a loose structure at best in mind.

I'll admit to you that for years, that's what I did, but not anymore. In this course, we're going to walk through the process of developing a presentation. And what presentation you wonder, Well, I'm actually going to use the introduction to this course that you just viewed as our example to illustrate the features of PowerPoint. In doing so you'll be intimately familiar with the content and I'm hoping that this is going to help us hit the ground running so to speak. So how did this course all come about? Well, like you subjected to horrible PowerPoint presentations every single day.

It's been bothering me for years. And so I've had this idea of creating a PowerPoint course for a while, the idea just kept gnawing at me until eventually, I just had to sit down and do it, which quite literally brings me to this point. Now when I go to develop a presentation, the first step to consider is my audience and their needs. This will help you develop the right level of detail as well as how much content to put on a slide. A very important first question to answer is, do I want my presentation to be read by my audience? Or do I want them to listen to me present it?

You may think the answer is obvious after all, PowerPoint is presentation software. However, over the past decade or so, PowerPoint has more often been used to replace what was traditionally circulated as memos and reports. Everyone from consultants to investment bankers now rely on PowerPoint rather than word to report their findings, you'll often hear them refer to these sorts of presentation slides as something like a talking book. And frankly speaking, I find them to be very effective ways of communicating, and much easier to read than your traditional 50 page report. However, there's an important distinction between the so called talking book on the one hand and your traditional presentation on the other. A Talking Book is more often than not circulated to the audience ahead of the meeting, so that the audience has time to read the presentation.

Then during the meeting, smart presenters will typically just walk through the executive summary and then only refer to the more detailed slides to respond to questions or to facilitate specific discussions. When slides are intended to be read, you can get away with a much smaller print and more detail. On the other hand, when our audience's first exposure to content happens at the moment, we stand up at the front of the room, the rules of the game change completely. In this situation, PowerPoint is used as it was originally intended, that is as a visual aid. In this situation, we want the audience to listen to us first and refer to the PowerPoint slides only to enhance or to deepen their level of understanding and engagement with the content. So the very first thing you need to do is determine whether you want your audience to read your slides or to listen to you.

And it makes a huge difference in how you will be using PowerPoint. Keep in mind that your audience can't do both. It's physically impossible to read and listen at the same time. Don't believe Leave me just try watching a football game or a fashion show and listening to your children talk about Minecraft. So back to the matter at hand. In this presentation, I'm targeting anyone in business who really wants to get serious about improving their presentation skills and their management presence.

I'm going to focus less on those of you who want to use PowerPoint as a word processing replacement. Though I'm sure some of the tactical discussions of PowerPoint features will help you in that regard. The next step is to begin planning a presentation. A presentation is in many respects, like a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. The meat of the presentation is in the middle. But this needs to be broken up into key sections or key messages.

And the key messages for my course and the intro that we saw were PowerPoint is a pervasive tool that few people get right and to offer hope that there is a better way that doesn't involve throwing out the tool all together the beginnings in the end wrapper around the content, but are often parts of the presentation that many people ignore. The beginning needs to introduce the purpose of my presentation, it needs to establish my credibility and engage your interest. My conclusion gives you a preview of what's in store, which is intended to whet your appetite for more information. This sets up my call to action, which in this case was to ask you to enroll in this course and click on the first lesson. After I have a rough outline of my presentation, I begin scripting it. This is something that for the first 15 years of my professional career, I never did, and I'm willing to bet that you don't do it either.

I naively thought that I was good enough to win any presentation. However, what I was really good at doing was putting a bulleted version of my script on the PowerPoint slides and you Using the screen as my guide for my speaking points. This defeats the whole notion of a visual aid, and has been identified in the study as a practice that annoys us the most with presenters. Since this epiphany, I now script every one of my presentation, including this one, which is not to say I necessarily memorize or read the script when I go to present. What the script helps you do is organize your thoughts and articulate your key messages. A couple of rule of thumb is to bear in mind, the average speaking speed is somewhere between 150 and 180 words a minute.

Now, you can speak faster than that, and I often do, but it's one of the most common complaints I've gotten from my audiences over the year. So it's something that I'm very conscious and aware of. So if you've got 20 minutes to present, that means you should be thinking of a script that is somewhere between say 3000 and 3600 words long working history. Script is one of the most time consuming aspects of building a presentation. But the better your script is, the easier it is to build the presentation, it probably takes me half the time it would normally take to build a presentation when I have the script done first as opposed to the other way around. Once you have a script, you can literally take each paragraph or group of related paragraphs and copy them into the speaker notes for each PowerPoint slide, which allows you to then consider and build the visually to support each of those ideas.

We'll pick this up in our next lesson. So to summarize the key messages in this lesson. First of all, decide whether you intend your audience to read your slides or listen to you using PowerPoint is a visual aid to entirely different looking presentations that are often confused in practice. Before opening PowerPoint, plan your presentation using it outline and clear Keeping in mind that you need a killer opening three key messages or themes in the middle and a nicely wrapped finish. And finally, script your presentation. I know your first inclination is to ignore this particular piece of advice.

But as someone who does this for a living, the sooner you start doing it, the better you'll get and the easier the rest of this course is going to go and be able to implement in practice. In the lessons that follow. We're going to take a deep dive into all the various tips and traps of using PowerPoint. So until then,