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Organizing Your Power Point Content |
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PowerPoint is a wonderful presentation tool, but presenters often take too much time making “pretty” slides and not enough time organizing their content. Before creating your PowerPoint slides, make sure the content is thoroughly researched and organized into a logical sequence that will make sense to your audience. Think about who your audience is going to be and what it is they need to know. What information is going to be new to them? What information would need an extended explanation? Are there any points that would need additional visuals (such as a 3-D model or a follow-along handout)? Each audience is different. Even if you were presenting the same information to multiple groups within your company, you would still need to tweak your presentation to meet the needs of your different audiences. Next, take a look at how your material is organized. What are your most important points? What are your sub-points? What proof do you have to support all your points? What is the order you want to present your points? Here are some basic patterns for organizing information: comparison/contrast, problem-solution, elimination of alternatives, general to particular or particular to general, geographic and chronological. Comparison/Contrast Suppose your company was trying to decide where to open its next store. It could locate the store downtown, in the mall, or on a college campus. Some of the criterion used to make this decision include: cost of renting space, proximity to target market and competition from similar stores. With the comparison/contrast method you could organize the information in two different ways. With a divided pattern, each main point would be: Alternative A – Opening a new store on campus, Alternative B – Opening a new store downtown and Alternative C – Opening a new store in the mall. Below each one of these alternatives would be the same criterion sub-points: (1) cost of renting space, (2) proximity to target market and (3) competition from similar stores. The alternating pattern uses each one of the criterion as the main points: Criterion 1 - Cost of renting space for the new store, Criterion 2 – Proximity to target market and Criterion 3 – Competition from similar stores. Below each of the criterion would be the A, B, and C alternatives. This is what an alternating pattern outline would look like:
Use the divided pattern when one alternative is clearly superior, the criteria are hard to separate, or if you believe the audience would intuitively understand the concepts better with this pattern. (Pro and con is a variation of the divided pattern.) Use the alternating pattern when the superiority of one alternative over the other depends on the weight assigned to the criteria. An example of this would be alternative A is best if you are most concerned about criterion 1, cost. Also use the alternating pattern if the criteria are easy to separate or if the audience wants to compare and contrast the options independently of your recommendation. Problem/Solution Use problem/solution pattern with a neutral audience. The six steps for this pattern are: (1) identify the problem, (2) explain its background or history, (3) discuss the factors that affect the decision, (4) analyze the advantages and disadvantages of possible solutions, (5) conclusions and (6) recommendations. Elimination of Alternatives The elimination of alternatives pattern is most useful in situations where you know your audience is going to favor solutions that will not work. For example, you know the managers in your division want to start using the XYZ accounting software for the company’s accounting system. However, you have researched this idea and for various reasons, the company cannot use XYZ accounting software. Start by discussing the problem; discuss the impractical solutions showing why they would not work and then end with the practical solution. General to Particular or Particular to General With the general to particular pattern, start discussing how the problem affects the organization or how the problem is manifesting itself. Then you would move to discuss each of the parts of the problem and the solutions to each of these parts. The particular to general pattern starts with the problem as the audience defines it and then moves to larger issues of which the problem is a part. For example, you may have an employee issue regarding the lack of employee parking. While that may be the employees’ issue, parking is actually part of a bigger problem that has to be addressed before the parking issue can be addressed. Geographic Problems or solutions are discussed based on a geographic location. For instance, a sales report for 2003 would be organized by the different regions of the company: California, Texas, North Carolina and New York. Under each geographic location, all the various issues of the 2003 sales report would be discussed. Chronological When using the chronological pattern, all ideas or issues are presented in the order in which they happened.
This article reprinted from the Riverside Business Journal |
