by Cliff Atkinson, Sociable Media

With only a single shot at engaging your audience, you face a challenge in managing the complex mix of elements in a live presentation. Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint and the Beyond Bullet Points method can help you manage the projected media and your spoken words. Follow these three ground rules to ensure that your presentation is lively and engaging.

Rule 1: Make your media transparent

It's easy to lose your presentation's focus if your slides are filled with too many graphic elements, animations, and special effects. Your slides should follow a simple design that keeps you and your audience from being distracted by too much happening on the screen.

You use PowerPoint well when people don't notice that you use PowerPoint at all. Call attention to your ideas, not to the medium itself. The most important outcome of the presentation is that the audience understands the meaning you intend to communicate. When you finish the presentation, you want the audience to talk about your special ideas, not your special effects.

Rule 2: Create a dialog with your audience

Think of a presentation as a dialog in which the audience grants you permission to speak first. While you deliver the presentation, you're the only one who's speaking. You end the presentation when the audience gets to speak, too.

One way to spark a dialog is to focus and refine the story template so that it addresses the audience's concerns directly. Make sure that the story template anticipates any questions audience members might have about your reasoning. In this way, you shift the primary function of PowerPoint from a tool that supports the presenter to one that supports the audience.

Invite further dialog by asking questions throughout your presentation. Your questions will help you connect with your audience, and your conversational tone will relax your audience and encourage them to participate in your dialog.

Rule 3: Improvise within constraints

If you spend the time to plan your presentation carefully, you develop a deep confidence in your story. You are then free to improvise from the slides instead of being chained to reading bullet points.

Improvising comes in handy if audience members ask you questions during the presentation or offer stories of their own experiences. Handle questions graciously by answering them quickly if you can or by acknowledging questions and deferring them to the question-and-answer session at the end of the presentation. If it's necessary to answer a question about a topic that you will cover later in your presentation, you can always jump ahead to another slide by typing the number of the slide that you want to display, and then pressing ENTER. Or if the slides become a distraction to an unexpected turn of the conversation, you can turn them off during this part of your presentation.

A presentation is not a free-for-all, however. Make sure that you don't stray too far beyond the constraints of your central story. The goal of the Beyond Bullet Points approach is to create a compelling story that's tailored to audience members and anticipates their questions. This method helps you keep your audience completely absorbed to the very end of your presentation.

Follow these ground rules, and you're guaranteed to have a more relaxed and comfortable approach to your presentation that will make the audience feel more relaxed and comfortable, too.

More information

For more tips about delivering PowerPoint presentations, read these related articles by Cliff Atkinson:

• Prevent distractions during your presentation
• Work confidently with your presentation slides
• 10 tips to enhance presentations

About the author   Cliff Atkinson, president of Sociable Media, is a leading authority on how to improve communications across organizations. This article is adapted from Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire, which is available from Microsoft Learning.