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18 presentation mistakes you probably make (and how to avoid them)

July 11, 2017

Almost exactly one year ago I was in Paris with a colleague and his team of presentation coaches. We were gonna hold a presentation workshop for an international company and their senior managers. What unfolded in that workshop was eye-opening. We asked the attendees to reflect on what makes a presentation great versus awful, and the consensus was clear - bad slides can ruin even the most brilliant presenter's performance.

As we delved into the workshop, it became evident that the common pitfalls were "bad slides," "too much text on slides," and "ugly PowerPoint slides." Aha! The attendees understood the significance of clean design in business presentations. This was great news for me who was growing my presentation design agency.

Bad slides can make the greatest presenter fail

One might argue that as long as you're a captivating speaker, the slides are secondary. However, reality struck us during a 5-minute presentation exercise. One of the senior managers, let’s call him John, had great stage presence and his outgoing and fun personality caught my attention straight away. John was not talking about a super exciting topic, but his impressive way of presenting it made me actually want to listen and see if I could learn anything.

The issue was that John's slides kept pulling my attention away from him and what he was saying, and my focus was instead on reading his bullet points. And it didn't take long before I had lost him and what he was talking about. This happened over and over again with several of the other managers. It became clear that the details crammed into his slides were working against him, not for him.

Most of the senior managers were good at communicating their ideas but they didn't need all the content that they had stuffed in their slides. The details in their presentation slides worked against the speaker rather than supporting them. And this is a fact that most speakers neglect: do my slides enhance or detract from my message?

When you are preparing a presentation, try asking yourself these three questions:

Do I really need all these points on my slide? Embrace simplicity and let your speech fill in the gaps.

What can I delete from my slides and convey through my words? Less is often more when it comes to impactful presentations.

Do my slides support me, or are they stealing the spotlight? Ensure your slides complement your narrative, not compete with it.

The 18 most common presentation mistakes people do, and how to avoid them

On the second day of the workshop we worked together with the participants, did some role plays, critiqued their slides and how they gave their presentations. From these exercises we developed a big list of the most common mistakes people make when giving presentations. We also gave suggestions on how to stop making those mistakes. Here are the top 18 from that list.

1. Ignoring the Power of Design

Mistake : Underestimating the impact of presentation design.

Solution : Embrace clean, visually appealing slides that complement your message. Consider color psychology, visual hierarchy, and maintain consistency throughout. It's hard to tell stories with bullet points.

2. Overlooking the Psychology of Colors

Mistake : Neglecting the influence of colors on audience perception.

Solution : Choose colors wisely to evoke the right emotions. Warm tones for passion, cool tones for trust. Align your color palette with the mood and message of your presentation.

3. Neglecting Visual Hierarchy

Mistake : Failing to guide the audience's attention through visual hierarchy.

Solution : Use larger fonts, bold colors, and strategic layouts to highlight key points. Guide your audiences' attention with visual hierarchy.

4. Inconsistency in Design

Mistake : Not maintaining a consistent design throughout the presentation.

Solution : From fonts to color schemes, consistency breeds professionalism. Create a cohesive narrative by ensuring all design elements align with your brand.

5. Underestimating the Power of Storytelling

Mistake : Overlooking the impact of a compelling narrative.

Solution : Tailor your story to resonate with your audience. Craft a narrative arc with a captivating introduction, core content, and a memorable takeaway. Humanize your presentation with real-life anecdotes.

6. Not Knowing Your Audience

Mistake : Failing to tailor your presentation to your audience.

Solution : Understand their needs, challenges, and aspirations. Make your message more relatable by addressing their specific interests.

7. Neglecting Virtual Presentation Skills

Mistake : Ignoring the nuances of virtual presentations.

Solution : Master the art of virtual communication. Leverage tools, optimize visuals for screens, and maintain an engaging tone to keep your audience actively participating.

8. Avoiding Interaction in Presentations

Mistake : Sticking to a one-way communication approach.

Solution : Break away from monotone presentations with interactive elements. Incorporate polls, Q&A sessions, and multimedia to keep your audience engaged and participating actively.

9. Underestimating the Impact of Presentation Design Agencies

Mistake : Overlooking the expertise of presentation design agencies.

Solution : Collaborate with specialized presentation and/or PowerPoint agencies for visually stunning presentations. They understand the nuances of effective design and can transform your ideas into captivating visuals.

10. DIY Design Mistakes

Mistake : Thinking effective design requires a hefty budget.

Solution : Explore user-friendly design tools like Canva. Invest in online courses to enhance your skills and gather feedback from peers to uncover areas for improvement.

11. Ignoring Rehearsals

Mistake : Neglecting the importance of rehearsing your presentation.

Solution : Practice your delivery to enhance confidence and identify areas for improvement. Record yourself and watch it back. Seek feedback from a colleague.

12. Overloading Slides with Information

Mistake : Cramming too much information onto slides.

Solution : Embrace simplicity. Focus on key points and let your speech fill in the details. A clutter-free slide enhances audience understanding.

13. Disregarding Body Language

Mistake : Ignoring the impact of body language during presentations.

Solution : Be mindful of your gestures, posture, and facial expressions. Positive body language enhances your credibility and engages the audience.

14. Neglecting the Opening Hook

Mistake : Starting your presentation with a weak or generic opening.

Solution : Capture your audience's attention from the start. Begin with a compelling question, quote, or anecdote to hook your audience and set the tone.

15. Poor Time Management

Mistake : Overrunning or rushing through your presentation.

Solution : Practice pacing to ensure your presentation fits the allotted time. Be mindful of your audience's attention span and adjust your content accordingly.

16. Ignoring Feedback Loops

Mistake : Disregarding the importance of feedback.

Solution : Seek feedback from peers, mentors, or the audience. Constructive criticism helps refine your presentation skills and address blind spots.

17. Using Overly Complex Jargon

Mistake : Assuming your audience understands complex industry jargon.

Solution : Simplify your language to ensure universal understanding. Clear communication enhances engagement and relatability.

18. Lack of Adaptability

Mistake : Failing to adapt your presentation style to different audiences or settings.

Solution : Understand the context and preferences of your audience. Tailor your delivery to resonate with diverse groups, whether in a boardroom or a virtual setting.

Mastering the art of presentation goes beyond being a captivating speaker. It involves understanding the marriage of design and storytelling, navigating the technological landscape, and adapting to evolving presentation styles. Whether you collaborate with a presentation design agency or take the DIY route, the goal remains the same - to captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression. Embrace the power of design, craft compelling narratives, and watch as your presentations become not just informative sessions but memorable experiences.

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What to do if your presentation sucked.

By Michelle Mazur > July 31, 2013

Filed Under Coaching/Feedback , Communication , Presentations , Public Speaking

Let's face it – you can't hit every presentation out of the ballpark. What do you do if your presentation sucked?

I don't mean in your mind sucked. I mean it unquestionably without a doubt, and you've got the feedback forms to prove it SUCKED.

How do you recover from a bad presentation?

Table of Contents

• 1 Stop beating yourself up
• 2 Realize Your Message Matters Most
• 3 Presentation autopsy
• 4 Bad Presentations Happen To Good People

Stop beating yourself up

A bad presentation traumatizes. My clients tell me stories of bad speaking experiences that happened 1 year, 5 years or even 10 years ago.

From that time, they started avoiding presentations like Adam Sandler movies (which historically traumatize moviegoers everywhere). That's far too long to be hanging on to a bad experience.

Speaking is like falling off a bicycle – you've got to get right back on. When you've screwed up a presentation, it does no good to ruminate about how much you suck.

Get back on that bike and start figuring out how you can rock it out next time.

When you are asked to speak, say a resounding, “YES!” instead of slinking off resolved never to speak again. If Adam Sandler can keep making craptastic movies, surely you can give another speech.

Realize Your Message Matters Most

The vast majority of the time a presentation flops not because of your delivery but because of your message.

While it's easy to say “I'm just not a good speaker,” realize that a mediocre speaker with an amazing message can still make an impact.

As I've been pivoting my business more and more to work with coaches, consultants, and service-based business owners on the way their business communicates, they realize that their message does so much for their business.

Having one core message (or as I like to call it a 3 Word Rebellion) is key for the success of a business or for the success of your presentation.

Ask yourself was the message clear? Did it focus on one core message?

Message clarity = presentation success.

Presentation autopsy

Grim, dark, and time for a bit of brutal honesty. The upside of giving a presentation that sucked is – it's a great learning opportunity.

Now ask yourself, “Did I do everything in my power to prepare for this presentation”? Did the words, “I can totally wing this,” ever fall from your lips? Here are several digging in the dirt questions to ask yourself:

   * Did I really understand my audience? Did I know what they believed about my topic? Did I meet their expectations? Did I answer these three questions about the audience ?

*  Did I know my stuff?

* Did I practice my presentation? If you need help with practicing, download my guide to practicing your presentation – TODAY – I mean right now – immediately!

* Did you know how you were going to close the presentation?

* Was I prepared for the audience's questions?

* How was my delivery? Polished or rough or somewhere in between?

Be honest.  Giving yourself feedback can show you how you can improve your next presentation to ensure success.

Bad Presentations Happen To Good People

Realize that bad presentations do happen to good speakers and amazing people.

Sometimes you can do all your homework, be clear on your message, practice, know your material backward and forwards and the presentation just misses the mark.

Once I was invited to give a presentation on cultural trends. I worked closely with the meeting planner. In fact, she approved every slide I was going to present. This was an executive-level audience and she wanted the content to be perfect. I researched, I prepped, I practiced, I had great examples.

Five minutes into my presentation, one executive raised his hand and asked “Are these trends based on quantitative research?” My reply was, “No, they are qualitative cultural trends.” He and half the room tuned out. The presentation flopped. My mistake was basing my whole speech on information from one person. That question killed me and there was no way to save the presentation at the moment.

Looking back, I now see that I could have reached out to some of the executives as part of my preparation instead of leaning on the meeting planner. Great lesson. Now it's time to move on.

I recovered. You can too when your presentation sucks. The most important point is:  Keep Speaking.  Learn from your mistakes and don't let them hold you back.

Create Your One-of-a-Kind Message

Your 3 Word Rebellion is the Key to Growing Your Business & Impact

Yes! I’m ready to rebel!

26 responses to “What To Do If Your Presentation Sucked”

Michelle, as I’ve said before, your articles are very informative and helpful. Your website is a great pool of resourses that I always refer to. Thank you for the great tips, entertainment and content!

Thank you, John! I really appreciate you saying so! By the way, we all really miss you in Seattle.

Michelle, Your article is so helpful! I gave a presentation 4 weeks ago and it was my first presenting experience! I was anxious, my voice was breaking and In the questions part my brain went dead and I couldn’t even think of the questions!. The audience was understanding and did not show a negative reaction to my performance. Now i lookat it and I realize that I should have controlled my anxiety and calmed down. I am still beating up myself even though it has been 4 weeks since the presentation, but I definitely will be presenting again the next opportunity I’ll have. Thank you for your article

You’re welcome! I’m one of those who beats myself up too for things that don’t live up to my personal standard. I feel your pain. Letting go is so hard, but when you think about what you learned – it helps to get back on the presentation bicycle.

Wonderful article, Michelle! The whole premise of our product is founded precisely on what you hit upon here. Performing an autopsy on your presentation is so important, and we feel asking your audience is simply the purest and most honest way to truly discover what was lacking. As you said, best thing to do is to “keep speaking”.

We’d love your opinion/feedback on our new product (PheedLoop). http://www.pheedloop.com

The only way to improve as a speaker is to get feedback. I think it’s also worth noting that not all feedback is created equally. The key is to be open to feedback, apply it, and if it doesn’t work for you don’t be afraid to discard it.

Hey Michelle. What is your advice on having an open Twitter chart going on while you present. I just did a presentation this week and at the request of the social media savvy audience, I opened a chat room but mistakenly tried to moderate a panel while also moderating the Twitter chat. It was not possible to do both and impacted my moderating the panel. The audience made 2-3 comments about my “not moderating”. So I learned and won’t do that again. But I feel awful. Like it was public humiliation. I presented on a telecon yesterday and I normally am NOT nervous via the phone. I had totally anxiety and almost couldn’t breathe. Is there such a thing as speaker PTSD? I got back on the bike but if I was with a live audience they absolutely would have seen my nervousness. Am considering a Xanax prescription. : )

I’d say that you can never serve two masters. Twitter chats move so fast! There’s no way you can engage your audience (who needs to be your priority) and run the chat. The best thing to do is to use the hashtag for the event and after the fact respond to what was tweeted.

It does sound like you have a bit of Speakers PTSD. First, give yourself credit that you tried something different. You experimented. It didn’t work out and you learned for it. Second, forgive yourself for making a mistake. The audience members probably have forgot by now. Finally, the next time you present and you have anxiety about it because you’re afraid your going to fail. Breathe, say to yourself “this situation is different. I’ve got this.”

We all make mistakes. It’s time to forgive yourself.

I gave a presentation this week. I felt myself literally choking on my words, the ticking seconds feeling like hours passing by. Somehow I got A message across and was able to answer questions to the audience out in the main hallway. When I went back to the hotel and slept that night I felt pretty beat down and drained only to awaken in the middle of the night feeling that I hadn’t presented THE message to the audience.

I know that presentation is over and done with and I’ve forgiven the “self” that was on the stage for what he did and didn’t do. Now how do I give those audience members the message that they deserved to hear?

Hi Carlos – that’s a tough question. Unforutnately, you cannot give them the message they deserved to hear. The time has past.

The only thing you can do is learn from the situation. How did you prepare for the presentation? How did your practice? Were you crystal clear on your message and confident on how it was organized? How did you prepare yourself emotionally and physically the morning of the speech and before you stepped on stage? Go beyond forgiving yourself and get to the bottom of why this happened and be inspired to improve. Hire a coach. Join Toastmasters. Do whatever is in your power to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Throughout my entire highschool career I have been giving bad presentation and for weeks I would be depressed. I just don’t get how other people are so great a presenting! I had this group project a week ago and everyone in my group did their part great but when it came down to me I was horrible. I’m just so scared because I’m getting into college and I know there will be countless presentations .I don’t wont it be a repeat of highschool presentations. Your article is very helpful and informative. Thank you for this and I really hope college would be different for me.

Even as an Adam Sandler fan, I loved this article. Today I had a presentation that was just awful. It was scattered, brief, and just flat out bad. What’s worse is that the instructor of the course is my advisor. I had been overwhelmed with my GAship work that I put this aside thinking I’d be ok. Wrong. Michelle was right. I was unprepared and didn’t know how the presentation would go. I thought I would wing it. As a result I was unconfident and it showed. Ultimately, I cannot stop ruminating. What does my advisor think of me now? How will this affect my letter of rec? My peers must think I’m so stupid. Etc. I am regarded as a notable student otherwise. Faculty seem to give me a lot of praise and I do great things in my program. But after today, I felt like a fraud. I felt my advisor was disappointed. I can still see her face. This sucks. But in any event this article helped me feel better. Bad presentations do happen to good people. I have another presentation for a final tomorrow. I will prepare myself more.

Thanks Michelle.

Hi Paul. First, I’m sending you a big virtual hug because I know how rough it can be. Second, I’m going to give you a piece of advice the my MA advisor came to me. When you’ve done really good work, you’re getting a lot of praise, and the faculty loves you – what happens is that you develop what researchers call a “halo effect.” These people are already primed to like you. If you have an off-performance, they chalk it up to “Oh Paul had a bad day” if they even noticed at all. Go hit the next presentation out of the park, but it takes a lot more for one bad day to ruin your reputation.

I so appreciate this article as I sit and ponder how badly my presentation went tonight. First talk in 10 years. Disastourous. First, I show up with my flash drive only to find out there was no computer! There was a miscommunication between the coordinator and the staff. I had to call someone to bring a laptop at the last minute. Slightly anxiety provoking. Finally get the presentation loaded, and forgot about connecting to the internet prior to the slide where I was going to show a video. Got that working and then we couldn’t get the sound to come on. So, abandoned the video. In fact, 3 short videos that I was using to drive some points home. Talked on a microphone that gave interference the entire time. Then, I idiotically tried to do a “turn and talk” exercise with a group of people that I could not strike up a rapport with to save my life. Instead of turning and talking- they literally just stared at me, stone cold, and said nothing. Next slide.

Oh Crystal! First, breath. Second, do something nice for yourself tomorrow. Take a bath. Treat yourself to a pedicure or a glass of wine. But be gentle with yourself. Finally, after you’ve taken a day or two to process, get back on the horse and start again. And finally, finally these people don’t sound like the right audience for your presentation. Hang in there.

Great advice Michelle. I would be lying if I didn’t say I’ve had a few seminars, workshops & guest speaking gigs that didn’t quite turn out as I hoped… The best thing indeed is as you suggested – be kind to yourself (nobody is perfect), and then after a time of healing, get back at it and evaluate how to be stronger next time. 🙂

Thank you Matt! Speaking is a process of improvement. And bad experiences tell us what we need to focus on to be at our very best every time we speak. But there’s no point in beating yourself up.

Indeed. Keep up the great work!

[…] What to do if your presentation sucked. 3 steps to coping with a presentation that blows.  […]

I completely flopped my first sales presentation today to my senior management. I have always been confident about my speaking skills. However this time i started of stuttering and was completely distracted by an audience asking me incoherent questions and facial expressions of confusion and disbelief. Everything went downhill from there…. I even reported wrong figures ( which i worked hard to research and was feeling mighty about) to my general manager, and he completely busted me. I felt like crying after my turn…. Now i really do not know how to face everyone in the office. I feel like i’ve lost all my credibility.

Hello I had to present my science fair PowerPoint and everything went wrong like all my slides were out order and my data table didn’t show up and graph was messed up and she told me that I did it all wrong front of the class turns out you have to have 9 trials instead of 3 trials and at the end people were asking questions which I couldn’t awnser cause I did wrong I was the only person in the class who got it wrong she let me redo science fair and I got a good grade and a couple weeks later she let me represent my PowerPoint and everything went well but I’m traumatized by my old presentation and still stressed that everyone hated that presentation please help me overcome this btw I’m 12

I’m an interior design student and yesterday was my final presentation, that was the worst presentation I’ve ever done..my presentation board was not too good i can’t answer the question they asked because i was too panic and that made me keep silent, and i heard on of my lecturer says that i failed this presentation she was loud..my class mates looking at me..i felt so embarrassed..after i finished my presentation no one claps no one cares why my presentation sucks even my friend, i cried and cried till now can’t stop crying..ur article really helped me..feel like someone still here to help me..

Hey there, I know how it feels when no one claps after ur presentation gets over while giving it in front of many people, including ur batchmates.. I had faced the same situation while giving presentations for minor project in my final year of graduation. But today again I had given presentation in front of 50 people including officemates. Recieved a huge round of applause from everyone. & That voice of clapping was so overwhelming for me.

I just wanted to say keep hustling, & while giving presentations donot give a fuck what they are thinking or what they will think. Save this formula in ur thought process as I did.

Don’t worry, there are lots of people who come across these situation of embarrassment. But you will only be remembered if you will learn & rise above from situation. We are with you 🙂 Best of luck ahead.

I am a Master’s Medical Science student and I recently had to give a presentation. First my supervisor and I agreed on working early with my slides so I sent them to her a month in advance. She only looked at them on the day of submission with little to no input. When I gave the presentation in front of the faculty of medicine I was calm. I spoke clearly and I looked like a winner. When it got to question time. Non of the questions had anything to do with my research. They were all personal attacks and they tried to make me look stupid to which they succeeded. Funny enough it was orchestrated by one department and all my supervisor could do was hide her face and just walk out. Most students that day had the benefit of having their supervisor jump in but not mine. In fact one doctor said that I was basically doing a PhD defence on my own and confirmed that the questions were attacks.

i had a speech on gender discrimination today and I knew it word to word cause I practiced but I went up on the stage in front of around a hundred people and I completely messed up all my points and missed a very important section because of my nervousness Everyone expected me to do great because when we practised in groups I was excellent But something about all those people staring atb me and all the people that gave their speech before (who by the way most of them rocked) I messed up really bad and i feel like shit

I did a presentation yesterday on Unfair Labour Practices, 5minutes into my presentation the lecturer tells me “your slides are very detailed can you try shortening it because I have other people doing presentations today” I accepted and accommodated her but was flustered trying to remember facts while trying not the read slides, I missed out important information, and agter 10 minutes she tells me “I’m giving you 5minutes to finish”, so basically I had been rushed my whole presentation, I was flustered and already panicking by then an afterwards she tells the class that reading off slides is not a presentation further insulting me. I have another presentation on Monday and I’m already nervous because of this one incident. I doubt I’d ever be able to forget it.

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Bad Presentations: How To Avoid Common Presentation Pitfalls In 2023

Table of contents.

It’s easy to make a presentation, but it’s difficult to make a good presentation.

There are simple mistakes that are made when it comes to the fine art of designing and performing a presentation if you haven’t been doing it for the past 15 years, over and over, like we have!

In this article we explore the common pitfalls most presentation designers/presenters make , and how you can avoid them.

What Impact Can A Bad Presentation Have?

Bad presentations and good presentations have something in common, they’re memorable. Whether it’s a speech at a wedding, or pitching to investors, if it’s bad, it stands out.

The impact a bad presentation can have on your, your business or your brand is profound. It’s more than just the performance on the day. In today’s world, everyone is connected and people talk. It’s difficult to shift your image if you make the wrong impression.

Below are just a few hurdles you can expect to face if your presentation bombs.

Loss Of Confidence In You Or Your Company

When you have or give a bad presentation, it’s easy for your audience to lose confidence in you. After all, at that moment in time, you’re the face of the company and a direct representation of who you represent.

If you drop the ball, that’s what your audience is going to expect you to do if they decide to partner with you. How can they do business or trust in you if they don’t have confidence in you.

Fortunately, we understand how much hard work, time, and dedication it takes just to get the opportunity to deliver a presentation to your audience, your clients, your investors, or your own company. Which is why our presentation design services will help take care of the visual and organizational side of your slides.

We Can Make You Look Goood!

You Can Develop A Negative Reputation

Ineffective presentations are a waste of time, and as we all know, time is valuable. Simple things like unpreparedness, lack of audience engagement, talking too much, a poorly structured or visual presentation design.

These things DO NOT go unnoticed and you will develop a reputation that will most certainly work against you professionally. It takes a lot more work to repair damage that it does to put your best foot forward in the first place.

Slower Business Growth

If your presentation misses out on the key points and the words you’ve chosen for your slides are poor, you will experience slower business growth as there is less information for your audience about your brand. If they are missing out on the key idea because your slides are too simple, they won’t want to buy into your brand.

Here Are The Most Common Mistakes You Can Make With Your Presentation

There’s common mistakes that are both easy to make and easy to avoid if you know what you are looking for. There are common mistakes presenters make because most presentations have too much information, pictures and the information that you as the presenter are trying to communicate gets lost in the jumble of the presentation.

Talking Too Much About Yourself

Presenters who spend too much time speaking about themselves while they present is one example of a common mistake. The audience members want the informative information about your brand, not the informative information about you as the speaker.

Focusing Too Much On Facts And Not Storytelling

You want to engage your audience by using both facts and storytelling to sell them on your brand. If you focus too much on facts, it’s the worst thing you can do for your presentation because you’ll quickly lose your audience’s attention.

Poorly Designed Visual Aids

Visual aids are important to making a great presentation, but not if they are poorly designed. It’s important to have engaging visual aids, dark text on white background is a great way to focus the audience’s attention. Make your presentation your own by choosing well designed visual aids that add to your presentation as a whole.

Disorganized Information (No Logic Or Order)

Are your slides all over the place? Your examples don’t make sense to your brand? The worst presentations are hard to follow, confusing and distracting from the main points. An audience wants to sit through an engaging presentation, and by having order and logic to your slides with words that point back to your idea, you will capture their attention and keep them captivated.

Too Much Information

If you have too many points on your slides, or paragraphs that you’ll be reading off during your presentation, you have too much information. Have less on the slides, keep to the point and spend more time talking directly to your audience rather than reading to them.

No Engagement Or Interaction

A common pitfall that is easy to fall into, is not interacting with the audience members, by making eye contact, allowing time for questions or asking questions to the audience. They are sitting right in front of you (Physically or Virtually) so interact with them right from the beginning so they expect it throughout the presentation. If you need some tips on how to make a presentation interactive , we’ve got you covered.

If you’re looking for a few tips on, this article on being a better presenter can help.

Reading Directly From Your PowerPoint Presentation

When you read directly from the PowerPoint Presentation, your body language is not open to the audience, and it means that you aren’t engaging with either the material or your listeners. If you spend time in preparation and writing out what you will be saying, you can speak directly to the audience and portray confidence in your brand. By purposefully making eye contact, you are connecting with those who are listening to you.

Ending The Presentation Abruptly

When you finish your talk and forget to allow time for questions, you are sending a message that you don’t care about the audience’s understanding of the material you have presented. All it takes is one slide to finish a presentation well and leave space for the audience to ask questions.

Animation Overload

When you overload on animation, you make your presentation look cheap and distracting from your important points. It’s an easy way to make ineffective presentations, as it’s distracting to the main goal of your presentation. Keep animations to a minimum and bullet points on your slides instead to create engaging presentations.

So Is A Bad Presentation Worth The Risk?

Don’t talk too much about yourself, but tell stories about your brand so the audience can connect with you as the presenter and your company. You want to engage with the audience through well chosen visual aids, and keep order to your information both in your slides and your speech. Don’t overload in cheap looking animations and always leave room for your audience to ask questions at the end.

It’s best to be prepared, put our best foot forward and invest the time/money in making sure you’re well rehearsed and have some kick ass slides to back you up. Effort and intent are noticed, as long as they’ve been put it.

Are You In Need Of A Good Presentation To Give The Right Impression?

Your slides are more than just beautiful graphics, they’re opportunities for you to share your stories/ideas. Leave the PowerPoint, Prezi, Google Slides to us and focus on nailing the public speaking part!

Just click the button below and get the conversation started today! We’re here to support you, so connect with a Presentation Geek and take the first step towards a presentation that blows your competition out of the water.

Author:  Content Team

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10 Common Presentation Mistakes – How to Avoid

January 02, 2024

Many of us make common mistakes in our business presentations. Often these presentation mistakes are ways of working that seem efficient (but are not) such as: (1) planning your talk with PowerPoint, (2) writing your talk without planning, (3) skipping practise sessions and (4) narrating dull slides.

So, what makes a bad presentation? And how do you avoid common presentation errors?

Each of these presenting mistakes are ‘false friends’ – where you feel as if you are making progress but in reality you are diverting from the true path and giving yourself more work than necessary.

Study these bad presentation mistakes and identify where you can improve.

• Do you avoid planning your presentation up front?
• Are you too quick to start producing presentation slides?
• Are you reluctant to try out your presentation ideas on others early in the process?
• Do you use boring safe language?
• Do you try and say too much in your presentations?
• Are you unsure how to bring your presentation to life with levity.

These are all simple, natural presenting mistakes that cause thousands of presentations every day to be less effective than they should be.

While avoiding these traps will not make you a brilliant presenter, each trap you identify will take you much nearer to being a confident and convincing presenter.

Top ten ways to avoid common presentation mistakes

• Don’t start with PowerPoint. Leave creating visual aids until the end of the process
• Don’t start writing before planning. Have a clear plan first
• Don’t be the centre of attention. Make your talk about your audience.
• Don’t use written language. Translate everything you write into compelling spoken language.
• Don’t try and say too much. Say less, but say it better.
• Don’t be boring. Say something interesting every 10 words.
• Don’t be subtle. Be big, bold, clear and compelling.
• Don’t speak too fast. Leave a pause every 5-10 words.
• Don’t lead with slides or narrate slides. Speak directly to your audience and only use visual aids when they help your audience
• Don’t avoid practising. Dedicate time perfecting your talk and perfecting your performance.

Presentation Mistakes #1 – Do you waste time with PowerPoint?

Summary: powerpoint is a poor planning tool. only open powerpoint after you have decided what you are saying..

Most people, when they start writing a presentation, they open PowerPoint. They create slides, perhaps use old slides, design new ones and feel as if they are making progress because they can see ‘progress’ – something they can print and share.

BUT: Starting with PowerPoint is the equivalent of creating a movie by filming before you have a story or a script. You end up with a lot of footage, but it is near impossible to turn this into anything usable. You waste time and you waste money.

Instead, Create a powerful talk that barely uses any visual aids. Use the planning and language tools outlined in this blog article to create a talk that can work on its own without slides. You may realise that your presentation does not need slides. If you do want visual aids, only start creating them at the end of the presentation process, not at the start.

And why not rename ‘slides’ as Visual Aids. This change of language will help you think differently. Each Visual Aid must help your audience interpret what you say. Only create Visual Aids where they are absolutely necessary. Make life easier for your audience.

“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail”.  – Benjamin Franklin

Avoid Presentation Mistakes – Top Tips

• Stop using PowerPoint to plan
• Only use PowerPoint to create your visual aids or handouts after you have decided what to say.

Contact us now for a free consultation

Presentation Mistakes #2 – Do you make yourself or your idea the focus of your presentation?

Summary: while your presentation might be about your product or your business, you will be more effective if you make your audience the centre of attention..

A typical bad presentation starts: “In today’s presentation I will talk about how we performed last month, what our plans are for this month and how we are changing the way numbers are reported. I’ll talk about project Pegasus and give an update on the latest company sales figures”

Why is this not good? This presentation opening is more like a table of contents than anything else – and it contains little that is useful for the audience.

The art of communication is translating what you want to say into what it means for your audience. You’ll grab your audience if you talk about them and their interests. If what you say is useful, your audience is more likely to pay attention.

Instead, start like this: “As we all know, this has been a tough month. You’ll hear more about last month’s disappointing performance and learn about our plans for this month and what that means for your departments. I’ll also share with you the changes you can expect to see in how we report our numbers. You’ll also be pleased to know that project Pegasus is on track. We can already see a positive impact on our sales numbers – which I am sure we are all very pleased to hear.”

What has changed?

• Each ‘I will talk about’ has been translated into a ‘you will….’
• By using many more personal pronouns (we/ our/your) the talk is easier to listen to.
• In the revised text you hear much more useful information (is it good news, bad news) and
• The audience is involved in the story (‘we are all very pleased to hear’).

In short, the audience is now the centre of attention of this talk.

“Nobody cares what you think until they think that you care” – Maya Angelou

• Give your audience useful information from the start.
• Talk about them and what your information means for them
• Avoid ‘tables of contents’. Say something interesting in every phrase.

Presentation Mistakes #3 – Is your presentation a data dump?

Summary – a data dump is not a presentation. the real job of a presentation is to analyse and interpret information so it means something for your audience. you must add value..

A typical bad presentation sounds like: “Sales last quarter were 3.6m, this is up 3.2% on last quarter and down 2.8% on the previous year. This is 4.6% behind budget and 4.5% better than forecast. Breaking it down by division we can see that North was 8.2% over budget while South was 1.2% behind budget…….”

What’s wrong with this?  If you compile data then it’s tempting to share your hard work. But talking through raw numbers is a waste of everyone’s time. Instead, you want to look impressive.

That means, you must add value. You should describe what those numbers are saying. For example, you might say:

“As we can see, sales at 3.2m last month were as expected. The important thing to note is that North won the new IBM contract, which was unexpected, while South had three customer delays which pushed their sales back by a month. We are still pretty confident of reaching our end of year numbers.”

By speaking in this way you are giving your audience valuable information throughout (sales: “as expected” …. North: Unexpected IBM contract….South: customer delays,… pushed sales back by a month…’confident of reaching end of year numbers”).

The real art here is doing the hard work for your audience. If you make it easy for the audience you’ll not only have a better presentation, you will also look more impressive in front of your audience.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

• When you report data, add value.
• It’s your job to do the hard work.
• Explain what the data means for your audience.
• Make it easy for your audience.

Presentation Mistakes #4 – Do you use written language in your talk?

Summary – the written word and the spoken word are two different languages. one belongs on the page, the other in the mouth..

A typical bad start: “It is a pleasure to welcome you to this symposium, which is part of our programme to mark the 75th anniversary of the Central Bank of Ireland. I am especially delighted that Francois Villeroy de Galhau is joining us today to give a keynote address. I am looking forward also to learning from the excellent lineup of speakers later in the afternoon. “The topic of financial globalisation is a natural theme for the Central Bank of Ireland. At a macroeconomic level, the global financial cycle is a primary determinant of financial stability conditions in small open economies. This lesson was painfully learned across the advanced economies during the international credit boom that occurred over 2003-2008.” Remarks by Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, to the Financial Globalisation Symposium as part of the programme to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Central Bank of Ireland, Dublin, 2 February 2018

What is wrong with this?  When you preparing words for a talk or presentation, you want to avoid planning through typing. The spoken word and the written word are like different languages.  If you type first, you’ll probably find:

• The sentences are too long,
• The words are too complicated
• The rhythm of spoken language is lost
• You miss powerful rhetorical tools that make spoken language interesting and easy to listen to.

Written language must be translated into spoken language.

So, instead, say it first then write it. Then say it out loud again. Check that you are using plenty of rhetorical tools.  Listen for the rhythm of your speech and whether it’s easy to say (and easy to listen to). For example, this might have been a speech writer’s first draft for the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland.

“Welcome everyone to this great occasion. It’s 75 years since the Central Bank of Ireland was born. In that time we have grown up. – We were born as a new institution in a new country – and we are now standing tall alongside our brothers and sisters in Europe and around the world, a full participant in the global economy. In our busy life we’ve lived through financial cycles, a few near misses and, most recently, an international credit boom. “Financial globalisation is a topic close to our heart. What happens globally determines what happens locally. The global credit boom that ended in 2008 showed us how our financial stability is at the mercy of global forces.”

“Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.” – Herman Hesse

• Always speak words before writing them down
• Use plenty of rhetorical tools
• Use an audience to test that it’s easy to understand

Presentation Mistakes #5 – Are you trying to say too much?

Summary – great talks usually say less, but use more reinforcement, illustration and examples.. the art of presenting is knowing what to take out..

Imagine an over-enthusiastic primary school teacher explaining atoms to her students.

“Atoms are the basic building blocks of everything around us. And each atom is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. These atoms are very small – you can fit 10^19 atoms into a grain of sand. The really interesting thing about electrons is that they are both particles and waves – they have a duality. In fact all matter demonstrates duality – but it is most easily seen in electrons. Now let’s look at protons and neutrons. These are made up of more elementary particles call quarks. The Standard Model of particle physics contains 12 flavours of elementary fermions and their antiparticles……”

By now the children are very confused.

What went wrong? When you say too much you give your audience a problem. If your audience has to work hard to interpret what you say, you have failed in your job as a presenter.  Your job as a presenter is to make it easy for your audience. 

Great communication involves simplifying, reinforcing and giving examples.  Imagine this alternative start:

“Atoms are the basic building blocks of everything around us. The air we breathe is made of atoms. The ground we walk on is made of atoms and we are all made of atoms. Atoms are very small. See this grain of sand here? Guess how many atoms are in this grain of sand? It’s a big number: a one followed by nineteen zeros. That’s a lot of atoms. There are roughly as many atoms in this grain of sand as the total number of stars in the observable universe. To look at it another way. If this apple were magnified to the size of the Earth, then each atom in the apple would be approximately the size of the original apple……”

“Simplify, then exaggerate” – Geoffrey Crowther, Editor, Economist Magazi ne

• Say less, but say it better
• Cut out non-essential information from your talk
• Don’t be afraid of reinforcing, illustrating and repeating what’s important

Presentation Mistakes #6 – Are you guilty of Death by PowerPoint?

Summary – death by powerpoint happens when bad presenters let their slides lead. they ‘talk through’ what’s on the screen. instead, you want to talk directly to your audience, using visual aids as support..

Imagine this bad, and typical presentation: “As you can see on this page, we have looked at fifteen initiatives to revitalise the businesses. We examined the pros and cons of each initiative, as outlined in the table below. Following our analysis, it looks like initiatives 3, 7, and 8 are the most interesting. We’ll now look at each of the fifteen initiatives and explain why we came to our conclusions.”

That’s what death by PowerPoint feels like.

Death by PowerPoint has three causes.

• The speaker is narrating slides rather than speaking directly to the audience. i.e. the speaker expects the audience to both read and listen at the same time.
• The speaker talks about HOW they have done the work they have done rather than WHY this work matters and WHAT their work means.
• The speaker adds little value in what they say.

To Avoid Death By PowerPoint, get straight to the point.

Try this alternative start (read it out loud) “As you know, we were asked to find ways to revitalise the business. After speaking to everyone in this room, we identified the three projects that will make a real difference. We’ve chosen these because they deliver the greatest return on effort, they have the lowest risk and they can be implemented fastest. By the end of this meeting, we want all of us to agree that these are the right projects and to get your full support for rolling these out over the next 6 weeks. Is that OK?”

“I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides” – Steve Jobs

• Get to the point immediately.
• Don’t rely on your audience reading. Tell them directly what’s important.
• WHY is more important than WHAT is more important than HOW

Presentation Mistakes #7 – Do you use meta-speak?

Summary – meta-speak is talking about talking. avoid it. speak directly to your audience..

Imagine this bad presentation: “I was asked today to talk about our new factory. In putting together this talk I wanted to tell you how we designed it and went about planning it. I also wanted to cover the process we used to get it delivered on time and on budget.”

What wrong with this? It’s as if the speaker is narrating their thought processes about planning this talk. While that might be interesting to the speaker, it is of little value to the audience. Avoid.

Instead, get right to the point, Speak directly.

“We have just opened our new factory. And we did this in just 12 months from board approval to the cutting of the ribbon in the loading bay. How did we achieve this? And how did we deliver it on time and on budget? Today I’ll share some of the lessons we leaned over the last 12 months. And I’ll reveal some of the mistakes we nearly made. And I’m doing this because it just might help you when you are faced with what seems like an impossible problem…”

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

• If you see meta-speak creeping in, cut it out
• Make your language direct.
• Get right to the point.

Presenting Mistakes #8 – Do you gabble or speak too fast?

Summary – speaking too fast helps nobody. you should learn how to incorporate pauses – many pauses – long pauses – throughout your talk..

Try saying this out loud:  “A-typical-speaker-will-speak-in-long-sentences-and-keep-speaking-linking-phrases-together-so-that-there-is-no-gap-and-no-time-for-the-audience-to-absorb-what-the-speaker-has-said-and-no-time-to-plan-what-to-say-next-this-causes-the-speaker-to-feel-more-nervous-so-they-speed-up-and-it-frustrates-the-audience-because-they-have-no-time-to-process-what-they-have-heard-before-the-speaker-is-onto-their-next-point…”

This typically happens when a speaker is nervous. So they rush. And it is then hard for the audience to listen.

Instead, try speaking this out loud:  “Good speakers use short phrases — They share one thought at a time — — By leaving gaps — it’s easier for the audience. — The good news is — it’s also easier for the speaker. — When a speaker uses pauses — they have time to compose their next sentence. — This helps the speaker look more thoughtful — and more convincing. — It also helps the speaker feel more confident.

“The most precious things in speech are….. the pause.” – Ralph Richardson

• Pausing takes practice. Few people do it instinctively.
• Use shorter phrases – one idea at a time.
• Aim for a pause at least every ten words
• Record yourself, listen to your pauses and hear how they add gravitas
• Keep practising until your pauses feel natural and sound natural.

Presentation Mistakes #9 – Are you too serious?

Summary – levity can help you look more professional and will help your audience pay attention to what you say..

Too many presentations overly serious, dull and un-engaging.

Why? When we have something important to say we want to look ‘professional.’ But professional and serious are not the same. When you are too serious it’s harder for your audience to connect with you.

If you really want to look professional, bring the audience into your world. Levity and humour helps you achieve this. This does not mean you should tell jokes, but you should help the audience smile and feel clever for understanding what you say.

See how you can do it differently.  This is the third paragraph of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s EU Privacy speech . He uses humour followed by flattery to get his audience open and receptive to what he is about to say.

“Now Italy has produced more than its share of great leaders and public servants. Machiavelli taught us how leaders can get away with evil deeds…And Dante showed us what happens when they get caught.

“Giovanni has done something very different. Through his values, his dedication, his thoughtful work, Giovanni, his predecessor Peter Hustinx—and all of you—have set an example for the world. We are deeply grateful.”

“Inform, Educate & Entertain”. – Sir John Reith, BBC

• Have a smile on your face when preparing your talk
• Look for opportunities to introduce humour and lighten the tone
• Play with ideas.

Presenting Mistakes #10 – Do you avoid practising?

Summary – it’s tempting to avoid practise and to wing it on the day. this is the amateur approach..

The best presenters, like great athletes, do all their practising in advance , so that their performance on the day  looks effortless.

People make excuses to avoid essential practise:

• “I’m always better without practice”
• “I don’t want to over-prepare”
• “I sound wooden when I over-rehearse”
• “I’m more natural on the day”
•  “This is an artificial environment. I’m much better in front of a real audience.”

But many people are deluded. They believe themselves to be good speakers.

So, instead, think of yourself as a professional athlete, actor, pilot or dentist. These professionals make their work appear effortless only because of hours of preparation. A great presenter should think the same.

Use your rehearsal to try out every aspect of your talk and to iron out what works. Use a critical audience. Keep changing and improving it until it’s as good as it can be. If you are not a brilliant speaker, then spend time building your skills. This practice includes:

• Cut any waffle or anything boring
• Say something interesting at least every 10 words
• Use more rhetorical tools (see Chapter x)
• Keep reinforcing your key points
• Start strong, end strong

“The more I practise, the luckier I get”. – Gary Player, champion golfer

• Dedicate proper practise time – at least three sessions for an important talk.
• Use a critical audience
• Keep cutting, changing, fixing and tweaking
• Only stop when you are able to pay attention to your audience’s reaction rather than remembering what you want to say.

Summary – key presentation mistakes to avoid

When you understand the common mistakes presenters make, you will find it easier to create and give a compelling, successful presentation.

Reminder: Top ten ways to avoid common presentation mistakes

How to avoid presentation mistakes – for ever, if you really want to improve your presentation skills, then get in touch. our team of expert presentation coaches has been helping business executives polish their presentation skills for over 15 years. we are trusted by some of the world’s largest businesses. click on the link below to discuss your needs., transform your presentation skills with tailored coaching.

We can help you present brilliantly. Thousands of people have benefitted from our tailored in-house coaching and advice – and we can help you too .

“I honestly thought it was the most valuable 3 hours I’ve spent with anyone in a long time.” Mick May, CEO, Blue Sky

For 15+ years we’ve been the trusted choice of leading businesses and executives throughout the UK, Europe and the Middle East to improve corporate presentations through presentation coaching, public speaking training and expert advice on pitching to investors.

Unlock your full potential and take your presentations to the next level with Benjamin Ball Associates.

Speak to Louise on +44 20 7018 0922 or email [email protected] to transform your speeches, pitches and presentations.

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• Business Plans

15 Bad Business Presentation Mistakes (And How to Avoid Poor Results)

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You've got to inform and persuade those around you daily. They need to believe in your vision (and more importantly, believe in you) to get more money, notoriety, or internal resources.

Sometimes you're trying to win new customers. Other times, you're trying to get new investors or land press at a conference. And sometimes you're simply providing the quarterly numbers to your boss. 

One of the best ways to persuade people is through a presentation.

Presenting complex information in an easy-to-digest format isn't easy.  To make matters worse, it's rarely taught in any formal schooling either—which means you're left to fend for yourself (and mess up often).

Sure, having a good presentation design is a nice place to start. The right  PowerPoint presentation template  can give you a tremendous head start.  

However, there are a ton  of other variables that ultimately determine if your presentation will be a success or failure. It's all too easy to put in a lot of effort, only to end up with a bad presentation.

15 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Business Presentations

Here's 15 of the most important presentation ideas to avoid critical mistakes, along with a few tips to improve each issue. Learn how to address proper presentation writing, quality of design, common speech mistakes, audience engagement, and more.

But first, if you want to take these tips further, be sure to download our free eBook: The Complete Guide to Making Great Presentations . It'll help you master the complete presentation process.

The last thing you want to do is deliver a bad presentation, so let's make sure to avoid these poor presentation mistakes: 

Mistake 1. Not Scripting Your Presentation

All good presentations and speeches start with a tight script.

Believe it or not, there’s some method to this madness when writing out a professional presentation.

It’s somewhere between an outline and a full document that helps you lay out the foundation or groundwork, before providing supporting materials and finally transitioning into the conclusion.

Don't make the mistake of not writing out your presentation first. There's a reason why CEOs sound so polished giving keynotes and presidents craft their speeches. Learn more about the presentation writing process: 

Note: That’s especially true when you’re going to be giving a more formal, structured presentation like with a business plan .

Mistake 2. Reading, Not Speaking

The goal of the presentation, whether there’s two people you’re meeting with or 100, is to make a connection. You want each person to feel like you’re speaking directly to them; building the audience’s confidence in both you and the information you’re speaking about.

However, all that connection and credibility disappears when your head drops, your eyes look down, and you begin speaking in a monotone voice, reading directly from paper, your slides, or note cards.

First and foremost, if you've got to read the content on the slide, there’s too many words ( but we’ll come back to this in a second ).

The big sin is the disengagement that happens, as people’s eyes glaze over when they’re hit with a barrage of information. This can lead to a bad presentation that doesn't make an impact.

You should work to avoid that, though, and aim to make a  presentation that persuades . 

That being said, you’re not expected to memorize the entire thing either. Instead, highlight three to five major talking points and get comfortable speaking off the cuff to add in context and examples.

Mistake 3. Not Practicing Enough

Writing out a basic script or outline for your speech is a nice start. But it won’t come off smoothly until you actually sit down and practice it.

A speaker once told me that you should practice or rehearse around one hour for each minute of a speech. Twenty-minute speech? Twenty hours!

While that seems on the high side, running through your speech with notes (at first), and later without notes, from beginning to end, over-and-over-and-over, will drill the information into your memory and make it become second nature.

With repetition, you also start noticing the little details that can make a big difference in a presentation. For example, the transitions between different sections. The pauses to highlight key points. And even the ‘blocking,’ or getting used to how your stance, movement, and gestures will look on a stage. 

If you need more presentation practice and are having some anxiety about public speaking, you should know that's a normal feeling. Lean how to overcome it:

The other benefit of frequent practice is that you should be able to easily spot...

Mistake 4. Going Over (Or Under) Time

...your timing.

Nothing reeks of amateurism more than a speaker who fails to hit their time mark.

In a large setting, being way under time and not having enough material is one of the fastest ways to erode your credibility. And in smaller settings with a client or boss, not respecting their time by trying to hold too them long can be a deal killer.

If you’ve been practicing frequently, you should start using a timer as you get more proficient to see where your material lands.

Sometimes you might have to go in and add a few more examples or stories to illustrate your points (and drag out the time a little). While other times you might have to cut entire slides or sections, and speak a little quicker, to make sure you’ll be under.

The key isn’t to guess. You should know, before you even get to presentation day, exactly how long your presentation will take to deliver ( within a minute or two ).

Mistake 5. Boring, Unprofessional Design

It only takes people about 50 milliseconds to form a first impression, and incredibly about 94% of that comes down to your design. 

In a presentation, that means your slide deck is the obvious starting point. 

Chances are, those investors or savvy conference attendees have already seen that same default PowerPoint template hundreds of times over the past few years.

Fortunately, we’ve got you covered with a few simple, modern PowerPoint presentation templates  with premium-quality designs: 

Case-in-point: look at this creative PowerPoint presentation template, Sparrow . As you can see from the screenshot, the slides have little text and use mostly images and visual elements to illustrate the point.

Using a professionally made PowerPoint template is a great way to ensure you avoid some of the most common presentation mistakes. For example, almost all of the templates on Envato Elements use the best presentation practices and have an attractive design as well as making sure that no slide is overcrowded with text or uses clashing colors.

Another good business presentation template example that'll help you avoid giving a bad presentation is the Oriola template , which uses professional typography that'll enhance the readability of your presentation.

Mistake 6. Not Working Out the Technical Kinks

There are two things you can count on when giving a presentation.

The first, is that you’ll undoubtedly be nervous. That’s only natural, and the good news is that you can harness that nervous energy to help propel your performance.

The second is that there'll be some error or technical miscue.

Professional sports teams will commonly travel a day or two early to a location and take practice on the exact field they’re playing. They’ll even go so far as to use the locker rooms and do a ‘dress rehearsal’ in the location to work out any kinks.

If you're unfamiliar with the venue or location, try to get access to the specific location you’re speaking a day earlier if possible.

That way you can practice a few times in front of all those empty chairs to get a feel for how the audience will be laid out, along with how your positioning a movement should adjust accordingly.

You can also practice with any computer connections, microphones, and other audio/visual equipment.

Ideally, when you show up on the day of the presentation, you should only be thinking about doing a great job (and not stressing over about whether you forgot that HDMI cable).

Mistake 7. Cluttered, Text-Heavy Slides

The best presentation slides are also usually the most simple and straightforward too.

That means no flashy transitions. No overloaded bullet points. And little-to-no extras likes sounds or videos.

One trick is to try and use one slide to deliver only one message or point. That'll keep your delivery streamlined, helping the audience to focus in on your message.

And another added bonus is that it'll help you eliminate using long text paragraphs altogether.

Avoid bad presentation design. Instead, think of each slide as a visual support; aiding or showing an example of what you’re talking about for each point.

A good business presentation example includes relevant graphs or charts that instantly illustrate the key message behind whatever it is you're talking about (like using a green, up-and-to-the-right arrow to equate success).

Discover more professional PowerPoint designs, with numerous slide layout and infographics options:

Mistake 8. Neglecting the Audience’s Background

Jargon can be good or bad.

If you’re speaking to people with technical backgrounds, going on and on about GIT is great. It gives you a common bond, and immediately lets those people know that you understand exactly what they do.

However, if not, mentioning a single piece of technical jargon will make sure you lose the audience within a few minutes of opening your mouth.

In an ideal world, your content should be created (or adapted) with the audience’s background and preferences in mind. If it’s a client, ask your internal champion or whoever introduced the two of you. If it’s a larger event, ask the organizer for some details on who the audience is, what their interests and pain points are, and the type or style of content they’re interested in.

Sometimes that'll be detailed case study information, while others it'll be more surface-level actionable tips. Presenting one, to the other, is a common misstep—even if your content is still good!

Mistake 9. Failing to Hold Your Audience’s Attention

The length of your speech can have a huge bearing on whether the audience is going to pay attention to the entire thing.

Your delivery—which includes everything from your volume, pausing, pacing, body language, and more—can also help captivate or bore your audience.

For example, noticeably raising or lowering the volume of words you're saying can not only make a presentation more interesting to listen to, but also add an emphasis to certain words or phrases. 

The same goes for speeding up, slowing down, and inserting longer-than-usual pauses to give people an extra second to digest what you just said. A key difference between a good and a bad presentation is hitting your timing and delivery.

Beyond those little tricks and dramatic gestures, your content itself should emotionally hook people too. 

For example, don't just launch into the 'solution' or tips. Instead, spend some extra time at the beginning—and throughout—putting this information in a larger context that relates back to the major problems or pain points in your audience's life that can be resolved.

Discover additional techniques on how to deliver an engaging presentation: 

Mistake 10. No Takeaways or ‘Next Steps’

Chances are, your audience will hit information overload.

If you’re speaking at a conference in the afternoon or it’s day three , they’re most likely already mentally exhausted.

So, make sure your presentation is easy to follow.

Start with a simple outline of the agenda at the very beginning to give people a step-by-step overview of what you’re going to cover.

If you make a key point, repeat it. Multiple times.

When you’re about to transition into a new section, reiterate what they just learned and give them a preview of what they’re going to find out in the next section.

And last, but certainly not least, give them a key takeaway or ‘next step’ to do after you’re done speaking.

The best business presentations are meant to inspire action. And ending after reciting just the facts, without organizing that information into context or explaining how (and why) they should do something with it, will make your speech fall flat.

Learn more creative techniques on how to inspire your audience to action: 

Mistake 11. Avoiding Eye Contact

Feeling nervous before your presentation is normal. However, don’t let that be an excuse for avoiding eye contact with your audience. Avoiding eye contact is one of more common presentation mistakes that happens for a variety of reasons, which include feeling nervous as well as poor preparation.

If you spend most of your time staring at your notes or at the presentation slide, your audience will quickly lose interest not to mention they'll feel like you’re not really familiar with the topic.

Establishing eye contact with your audience, even if it’s just a quick glance, is often enough to keep your audience engaged and creating a personal connection with them.

Take a look at this recording of a presentation about code architecture in WordPress. As you can see, the presenter, Mario Peshev, is not only great at moving around the stage, but also establishes eye contact with the audience ever so often.

If you’re presenting in front of a small audience, try to establish eye contact with each person in the room. If your audience is large, focus on a few key people instead.

Mistake 12. Inappropriate Humor

Using humor is a good way to break the ice and reduce the tension for yourself during a presentation. But if you’re not careful, inappropriate humor could backfire and offend your audience, which then leads to a bad presentation overall.

When it comes to humor, it’s important to remember that humor is very culture-dependent. What's funny in some parts of the world, might be highly offensive in other countries and cultures.

That’s why it’s crucial that you know your audience well before getting on stage and use humor carefully and sparingly. If you’re not that familiar with the audience, using other methods to break the ice is recommended.

Mistake 13. Speaking Incoherently

Another common presentation mistake is speaking incoherently. While you might not have any problems when speaking to your colleagues or friends, keep in mind that speaking to an audience is a whole other ball game. Nerves can get even the best of us, which leads to mumbling or rushing through the presentation to just get it done and over with.

However, neither mumbling nor rushing will help you get more sales. In fact, they'll result in a poor presentation. To avoid this, proper preparation is key as well as remembering to breathe and slow down instead of rushing ahead. If you find yourself rushing, pause for a moment to compose yourself. Take deep breaths, focus on speaking slowly, and don’t forget to enunciate each word for better clarity.

Listen to how Matt Abrahams clearly enunciates each and every word in his presentation Think Fast, Talk Smart:

Mistake 14. Dressing Inappropriately

The star of your presentation should be your topic and your slide deck, not your dress or your suit. The best advice you can apply is to dress conservatively so your audience can focus on what you’re saying.

There's nothing wrong with expressing your individuality through fashion in private. But unless your presentation is in front of a hip, fashionable audience, it’s best to stick to a professional dress code.

Men should avoid wearing flashy shirts and shorts while women should avoid low necklines, flashy jewelry, and short skirts. And no matter what, avoid wacky hairstyles.

Mistake 15. Forgetting to Introduce the Topic

Finally, don’t forget to introduce the topic of your presentation at the beginning. Don’t assume that your audience will know what your presentation is about, even if they know the title. After all, there are so many different ways to present any given topic.

In this presentation example, speech coach and speaker Steve Bustin, clearly explains what the topic of the presentation is:

As such, jumping straight in without explaining who you are, what your presentation is about, and why the topic is important is the best way to confuse your audience. Instead, take time at the beginning to share a few words about your presentation topic. This will not only help you pique your audience’s interest, but it'll also help you have a good business presentation.

Follow These 15 Good Business Presentation Tips - For Better Results

While you may have been taught years ago how to give a basic speech or presentation, an important business presentation with real money on the line is a completely different animal.

The problem is that common mistakes, like reading your cluttered, amateurishly designed slide deck in a boring monotone completely undermines your credibility. You lose the audience the moment you open your mouth.

• Script your presentation beforehand to lay out the foundation for the presentation, which will help come up with supporting materials and decide on the key takeaway and next steps your audience should take.
• Avoid reading directly from the slides. Your presentation will flow more naturally and you'll be able to better connect with your audience.
• Don’t forget that practice makes perfect. So, allow for plenty of time before the presentation. This will help you become super familiar with your topic and your slide deck. It'll also help you be more confident the day of the presentation.
• Be mindful and respectful of your audience’s time. Avoid going over or under the allotted presentation time.
• Consider using a professional PowerPoint template to avoid having to deal with a boring and unprofessional slide design. This common presentation mistake will result in your audience losing interest and having a poor impression of your brand and business.
• Be sure to test your microphone, computer, projector, and any other technical equipment needed for your presentation. Making sure that your equipment works is the best way to avoid any technical issues during your presentation.
• Keep your slides easy to read by keeping the text to a minimum. While you’re at it, use a larger font size and a font that’s easy to read.
• Your content should be created with the audience’s background and preferences in mind. Before the presentation, familiarize yourself with some details on who the audience is, what their interests and pain points are, and the type or style of content they’re interested in.
• On top of making sure your presentation isn't too long or too short, pay attention to your intonation and your body language. Doing so will help you hold your audience’s attention throughout the presentation.
• Once you’re done with the presentation, let your audience know what’s the next logical step. This will help you accomplish the main goals of your presentation and ensure you land that pitch or sell your product.
• Maintain eye contact with your audience throughout the presentation. This will help you establish a personal relationship with the audience.
• Avoid using humor unless you’re very familiar with the audience and their culture. Inappropriate humor can offend your audience, which will have a disastrous effect on your presentation.
• Take deep breaths, pause, and enunciate words carefully and clearly in your presentation.
• Dress appropriately for the venue and the setting of your presentation.
• Always remember to introduce and explain your topic before diving into your presentation.

Fortunately, you can avoid delivering a bad presentation. Start by tackling the tips above ( and add a whole lotta practice ) to make sure your next business presentation goes off without a hitch.

If you're looking for an easy place to start, check out this guide on PowerPoint templates  to make sure you've got the design basics down before progressing on to more advanced presentation techniques.

Here are a few more resources and tutorials to help you master your presentation:

Start Making Great Presentations Today

Take the tips you learned in this article further with our new eBook:  The Complete Guide to Making Great Presentations . Grab it now for FREE, along with a subscription to the Tuts+ Business Newsletter.  

Disorganized content, unclear design, and poor delivery can hinder even the best presentation ideas. Don't design a bad presentation that fails to deliver. 

Instead, learn how to write your presentation, design it like a pro, and prepare it to present powerfully. This 30-page eBook with helpful PDF checklist will walk you through the complete presentation process.

Apply These Tips to Avoid Presentation Mistakes 

Now you know some of the most common presentation mistakes and how to avoid making them. The tips in this article will ensure your presentation goes smoothly and you won’t leave a bad impression on your audience.

However, before you start working your presentation, you need to make a beautiful and engaging slide deck first. Start by checking out our beautiful PowerPoint presentation templates over on Envato Elements .

This tutorial was originally published in September of 2016. It's been comprehensively revised to include new information—with special assistance from  Brenda Barron . 

7 PowerPoint mistakes that are killing your presentation

By Paul Moss

Join 100k+ subscribers on our YouTube channel and enjoy highly engaging lessons packed full of best practices.

A few careless powerpoint mistakes can dramatically impact both the effectiveness and professionalism of your presentation..

Over the course of my career in consulting and strategy (and as a PowerPoint instructor for those industries), I’ve seen a lot of slides – great slides, terrible slides, and everything in-between. And what I’ve come to learn is that there’s a handful of common PowerPoint mistakes that many people don’t realize are hurting their presentation.

In this post I’m going to talk about the mistakes I see most often. I’ll give some basic examples of each mistake, explain why it hurts the presentation, and show you what you should be doing instead.

For the list, I’ll mostly be focusing on corporate style presentations, like what you’re likely to see day to day in the business world, but many of the lessons can be applied to other types of presentations as well.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to build your own high-quality PowerPoint slides, make sure you check our our advanced courses.

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Table of Contents

1. Complicated Visualizations

Your job as a slide creator is to make it as easy as possible for the audience to understand your message, and unnecessarily complicated visuals don’t help you do that. Instead, they just confuse the audience. 

In this slide from Muckerlab there is a simple sales funnel on the left, with various sales channels on the right. With enough time I can figure out the message, but it’s a bit challenging for my brain to map sales channels to the various stages of the funnel.

“Ecommerce & Digital Marketing” Muckerlab, 2014

You might think that your visual is easy enough to understand, but remember that the audience hasn’t had the same amount of time to look at the slide as you have, so it’s much more difficult for them to grasp the key takeaway quickly. 

In the slide below from Edelman there are four different charts, but each one is communicating the same type of information. By mixing up the chart style like this it makes the slide overly complicated. Instead of showing four simple column charts, they’ve forced the audience to understand and interpret each type independently. This just makes it harder for the audience to grasp the key takeaways of the slide.

“Global Deck” Edelman Trust Barometer, 2012

Instead, ask yourself, what’s the key takeaway of the slide, and how does my chart or graphic help support that key takeaway. Avoid trying to make yourself look smart, and instead figure out the simplest way to communicate the idea you’re trying to communicate. 

This slide from Credit Suisse is a great example of keeping the chart simple and clear. It’s just a normal-looking stacked column chart with easy to read data labels, a clear background, and a simple takeaway. The result is an effective and professional looking slide that’s easy for the audience to understand. 

“Analyst and Investor Call” Credit Suisse, 2022

2. Simple Titles

The point of a title on a slide is to get a quick summary of the slide’s main takeaway, so the audience can better read and understand the details.

In this slide from BCG for example, the title says “Rising housing costs may be driving creatives out of the city”. So naturally, the audience is going to skim through the content looking for evidence of rising housing costs and creatives leaving the city, which makes for more effective delivery. (

“Melbourne as a Global Cultural Destination” BCG. For more BCG content be sure to check out our full BCG slide breakdown

But unfortunately, many titles aren’t this descriptive. Instead what I see are titles that tell me the topic of the slide and nothing else . I get an idea of what the slide is about, but I’m forced to come up with my own takeaway.

“Fixed Income Investor presentation” Credit Suisse, 2022

You see this especially on slides with summaries of data, like this slide from Salesforce about its finances. But even on these slides it’s usually a good idea to put a takeaway in the title.

“Finance Update Q4 FY21” Salesforce

In this example from Orsted , they’ve shown some annual financial data, but they’ve also summarized what they want the audience to take away from the slide – that they are in line with expectations. 

“Investor presentation Q4 and full-year 2020” Orsted, 2021

By including a full sentence for your title, ideally one that summarizes the main takeaway of the slide, you make it much easier for the audience to understand what it is you’re trying to tell them.  

3. Default PowerPoint Designs

The third mistake I see more often than I’d like is using default PowerPoint designs. The worst case of this is using old slide themes, like in this example. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in PowerPoint recognizes this design, and aesthetics aside, it just looks like the slide was thrown together last minute. 

“First 30 Days” Markstar, 2017

You certainly don’t want to overdesign your slide, but at the very least try to avoid the out-of-the-box designs PowerPoint provides for you. Many of these designs haven’t changed in years, and usually they’re meant for a different kind of presentation (like a school project). 

And the same goes for PowerPoint shapes, graphics, and even colors. They all come across as unprofessional and overused, so it’s in your best interest to avoid them altogether.  

But where I think this is most easy to mess up is with tables. A table like this for example looks fine enough, but with just a few tweaks it can be made to look significantly better.

In this example, all I did was bold the titles, turn the negative values red, left align the first column and right align the others, make the top line extra thick, then add other lines to separate the regions. The result is a much better looking, and much easier to read table. 

When it comes to design, even just a little bit of extra effort can help you avoid cliche, unprofessional looking slides.

4. Unrelated Content

In corporate style presentations, it’s completely okay to have lots of content, so long as each piece of content has a purpose. What I see way too often is stuff that’s just there to fill space, and doesn’t have an actual purpose. 

In this Starboard Value slide , there are a lot of unnecessary distractions. For example, the box at the bottom is really just a repeat of what’s in the subtitle. Likewise, there’s a lot of text in the bullet points that could be trimmed down or eliminated without changing the message of the slide. It would help the audience focus more on the key takeaways, without getting distracted by all the fluff. 

“Transforming Darden Restaurants” Starboard Value, 2014 See our full breakdown of this slide here .

But what bothers me the most is the picture at the bottom, which really isn’t adding to the slide in any meaningful way. Yes, it’s on topic – the slide is about breadsticks after all – but it’s not giving me any useful information. We all know what breadsticks look like, and this doesn’t help me understand the key takeaway any better. 

Pictures are typically the most common culprit when it comes to unrelated content. It can be really tempting to throw a picture on a slide to fill up the extra space – especially if that picture looks professional and seems to loosely match the topic of the slide. 

Even McKinsey is guilty of this sometimes, as in this example . The picture looks great, but it doesn’t help the audience understand the main message of the slide about digital manufacturing being a high priority for a majority of companies. Instead, it just distracts the audience. 

“Moving Laggards to Early Adopters” McKinsey & Co., 2018 Learn more about how McKinsey designs data heavy PowerPoint slides.

In this example from a different presentation, they kept the slide fairly simple, with only information that supports the main takeaway of the slide, and nothing else. The result is a clear and easy to understand slide with a well-supported takeaway. 

“Capturing the full electricity potential of the U.K.” McKinsey & Co., 2012

So when you’re adding content to your slide, whether that’s a picture, chart, or anything else, make sure it contributes to the message in some way. And if it doesn’t then just leave that part blank and adjust the other parts of the slide accordingly. 

5. Distracting Backgrounds

This is related to the last mistake about unrelated content but is important in and of itself. A bad background can completely ruin a presentation. At best it’s distracting, but at worst it looks horribly unprofessional and makes the content hard to look at. 

Once again this is where PowerPoint is to blame. Some of the default backgrounds make it almost impossible to read the text, especially if that text doesn’t provide any contrast.

But even simple backgrounds can be distracting, as in our previous example from Starboard Value . Shading the background makes it difficult for my eyes to know where to focus my attention. Not to mention it makes some of the text slightly harder to read. 

Even subtle text or images in the background can be distracting, as in this BCG example . 

“Projecting US Mail volumes to 2020” BCG, 2010

The general rule of thumb with backgrounds is if you notice it, you should change it. The idea is you want to reduce the number of distractions on your slide so that the audience can focus on the insights. In that regard, you can almost never go wrong with a plain white background. This keeps the audience focused on your content, and ultimately on your message. 

This slide from Accenture is a great example of a non-distracting background that keeps the emphasis on the content. Nothing is diverting my attention and I can focus on what they’re trying to tell me. 

“Fintech New York: Partnerships, Platforms and Open Innovation” Accenture, 2015

But of course, the background doesn’t always have to be white. Sometimes darker backgrounds work better for longer, live presentations, especially when those presentations are given on a large screen. 

In another example from later in the presentation, Accenture uses a darker blue background that’s simple, clear, and professional. And most importantly, it doesn’t take my attention away from the content on the slide. 

6. Not Guiding the Audience

Most modern business presentations are full of text and data, which can make it difficult for the audience to process the information on a slide and see the key insights . In a live presentation, it is even more difficult – the audience has to simultaneously listen to the speaker, read through the content on the slide, and think critically about the information. 

The easy way to manage this challenge is to guide the audience through your slide with visual cues – things like text, callouts, and boxes. Unfortunately, it is something that many people just don’t think to do.  What this leads to is dense, difficult to read slides , as in these two examples:

“Bridging the Gap Between CIO and CMO” Isobar, 2014

“Transforming Darden Restaurants” Starboard Value, 2014

And the same thing can happen with charts . By just putting up a chart with no real commentary or guidance, you make it hard for the audience to understand what it is you’re trying to tell them. 

“Fifth Assessment Report- Synthesis Report” IPCC, 2014

In many ways, this is the counterpoint to the last mistake. Whereas you don’t want unimportant pieces like your background to be distracting, you do want the important parts of your slide to be distracting, because it helps the audience quickly grasp the key takeaways. 

Returning to our Accenture example, notice how they’ve used bolded text to help call attention to what’s important. Likewise, they’ve also used a line to put emphasis on the title of the slide. 

Check out our full breakdown of this slide here .

This BCG slide has quite a bit of information on it, but they’ve made it easy to work through by drawing the most attention to the title with green font and large text, then the next amount of attention to the subtitles with bold black text and green lines underneath, and then the least amount of attention to the bullet points. It helps the process the information on the slide in the way they want them to – starting with the highest level idea, and working their way through the details. 

“Evaluating NYC media sector development and setting the stage for future growth” BCG, 2012

This chart from McKinsey is another good example of guiding the audience.  Instead of just keeping the chart plain, they’ve added callouts that help emphasize the message in the title. 

“Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation” McKinsey, 2017

Guiding the audience can be as simple as adding an arrow or bolding important text. But even small changes like this can make a big difference in your presentation. 

7. Too Many Colors

It can be tempting to use a variety of colors on your slide, but doing so just distracts the audience and takes attention away from the important parts. And not only that, it can look really unprofessional. 

On this slide for example they’ve decided to separate each of these sections by color to make it easier to distinguish between them. But instead of making it easier to read, the slide is difficult to understand and hard to look at. The sections are already naturally separated, with lines, titles, and even icons. But by adding bright colors, in addition to the orange and green that’s already on the slide, they’ve reduced the slide’s readability considerably. 

“Harnessing the Power of Entrepreneurs to Open Innovation” Accenture, 2015

The best slides use color strategically, to help highlight key points and ideas.

In this Bain slide for example, they’ve decided to highlight the important columns in red, while keeping the less important columns in grey. It provides a nice contrasting effect that helps emphasize the message. 

“2011 China Luxury Market Study” Bain, 2011

Likewise, this Deloitte slide contains a minimal amount of color, making it easy to sift through the data and focus on only what’s important. Not to mention it keeps the visuals of the slide clean and professional. 

“Consumer privacy in retail” Deloitte, 2019

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but when it comes to color, sometimes less is more.

Final Thoughts

A few simple tweaks to your presentation can really make a difference in both its quality and overall professionalism. Above all, be sure to focus on your main message, and avoid any distractions that might take away from that message. If you can keep an eye out for cliché, unprofessional, and meaningless content, you’ll be well on your way to creating high-quality, insight-rich presentations.

P.S. – If you’re really looking to up your PowerPoint game, be sure to check out our full courses: Advanced PowerPoint for Consultants and Advanced Presentations for Consultants .

You can watch a video version of this article on YouTube .

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

• Carmine Gallo

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

• Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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The seven worst presentations of all time and why they went wrong

There is a multitude of advice out there telling you how to do an excellent presentation. Articles like this one are always telling us what techniques and advice can create a fantastic business pitch or inspiring speech. Public speaking can be daunting, but companies find good presentations essential and often, there is not much patience for unnecessary mistakes. After all, you don’t want anything to distract the audience from your message.

However, sometimes the best way to know to do a good presentation is by looking at a bad one. Know what to do by knowing what not to do! We have collected some real life examples, in order to analyze and learn lessons of how to avoid the bad presentation trap. So, here is our list of the five worst presentations of all time – and why they went wrong.

1. Lung Cancer Surgery PowerPoint

Kshivets O. Lung Cancer Surgery from Oleg Kshivets

Most of us have had to sit through some bad PowerPoints during our lives. They can make or break a presentation. Denying the most basic rules of good one can be detrimental. This PowerPoint on Lung Cancer Surgery does just that, ignoring the fundamental guidelines for a successful presentation. Large blocks of text, overload of graphs, a plan and boring format: it has it all.

Charts are usually an excellent way to visualize a concept. They can captivate the audience and provide a visual aid, which is an key factor of great presentations. However, another core concept is simplicity. This PowerPoint takes the visual aids a step too far, overloading the presentation with mind numbing statistical graphs. Alternatively, they attempt to make it as complex as possible.

One slide even includes 100 charts on a single slide. Stuffing a slide full of information is never a good idea. But that they filled it with so many images side by side so the audience can’t even grasp one singularly? That is definitely what clinches this presentation as one of the worst of all time.

The lesson from this presentation: Use visual aids sparingly and effectively!

2. dragon’s den pitch by gayle blanchflower.

PowerPoints make a huge impact on the value of a presentation, but they are not the only factor. The skills of the speaker can also make a lasting impact, whether that is positive or negative. This episode of Dragon’s Den introduces Gayle Blanchflower and her product of disposable outdoor furniture. Nobody wants to give a bad presentation, and the impact of one is only amplified when shown on television. Due to poor speaking skills and the public nature of the presentation, her pitch is one of the worst of all time.

One of the most important things to remember in any presentation is that you sell yourself as much as you sell your product, concept or proposal. However, Gayle seems to make no attempt to win over her listeners. She gives defensive and unprofessional answers that dismiss her role as a businessperson. We struggle to get a sense of her personality and passion. Ultimately, because they cannot connect with her, they cannot invest in her product.

People like the personal touch; this is why storytelling is a popular way of presenting. There is a thin line between confidence and arrogance. It seems that Gayle’s desire not to be intimidated caused her to become defensive and closed off. Remember: you are not against your audience. Instead, work with them, engage and listen to what they have to say. After all, when you invest in the product, you invest in the person.

The lesson from this presentation: be personal and passionate about your product!

3. the call to learn by clifford stoll.

We all love a good TED Talk. They are inspiring, entertaining, engaging and usually full of an addictive energy from the speaker. But once again, The Call to Learn by Clifford Stoll takes a good thing too far. As he talks about his life as a scientist and passion of always learning something new, his energy on stage is certainly captivating. However, his style is also frantic and distracting, relaying a stream of consciousness that’s hard to follow.

Rather than using a PowerPoint presentation, Stoll prefers to engage with props scattered around the stage. He even performs a live science experiment. Although this is an original and creative technique, by using slides, his audience might have had a better idea of what he is talking about exactly. His full throttle energy is almost wasted on the fact that he has no clear structure and no clear point. Perhaps it would have been better to channel such energy through a more defined format by collecting his ideas and placing them beneath comprehensible headings.

One of the top tips for a great presentation is to focus on the needs of the audience. However, Stoll’s talk is more about his own wacky personality than the content of the presentation. You should be speaking for your audience, not for yourself. By lacking focus, it comes across as quite a self-indulgent talk about his own thoughts and ideas, but without passing on anything useful. The result is that the audience is left slightly baffled by the bizarre experience. His original methods might be great for entertainment, but not for a good presentation.

The lesson from this presentation: Have energy but also have structure!

4. us wireless data market powerpoint.

If there is anything worse than fitting 100 graphs onto one slide, it is fitting hundreds of words onto one slide. Once again, this PowerPoint on US Wireless Data Market fails terribly through an attempt to stuff too much information onto one page. The worst thing is that the overload of text is on the very first slide. Impressions are made within the first minute of a presentation. Without even an introduction or some friendly bullet points to ease you in, you can bet this first impression is not a good one.

Most presentation advice states that you should use no less than size 18 text. In general, the bigger the font, the better. With a whole page full of font size 10 text, this block of text is unengaging and even intimidating. There are only two results from the slide. The audience will attempt to read it and be unable, through sight or boredom. Or, the audience will read the text and the speaker will have nothing to say.

A PowerPoint should only be a guideline for the listeners. It should summarize ideas in visual, engaging ways that simplify the more complex meanings of the speaker. The presentation improves from this point, with graphs and charts that are colorful and simple enough to engage the audience. However, such a bad start is detrimental to a presentation, making this PowerPoint one of the worst of all time.

The lesson from this presentation: Use larger and more concise text to engage the audience!

5. sony presentation for ps4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkf6JsNxFkQ

This is one of the more controversial choices for the worst presentation. Although it isn’t terrible, many people criticized the unnecessarily long length and tedious content of the 2013 Introduction of the PS4. It starts hopeful, with an engaging video that immerses the audience in the product through screens covering the whole room. However, the energy and act of captivating the audience does not extend to its speakers.

When you compare to other technology presentations such as Steve Job’s Introduction of the iPhone in 2007, you can see the huge difference in presentation standard. His presentation is much simpler, much shorter and much more impacting. Jobs makes the most of simplicity, clearly explaining the product and answering the unspoken questions of the audience.

In contrast, the Sony presentation depends upon using vague language and single words like “quick,” “curious” and “connected,” which flash on screen meaninglessly at the beginning. The result is a two-hour long presentation, sometimes impressive but never explaining the product practically. Clever visual features and technological displays can only take you so far; the content is core.

This gamer website article summarizes the flaws of this presentation well: “it leaves gamers with questions, few answers.” Ultimately, the presentation leaves the audience with questions, unanswered even by a two-hours of talking, making it one of the worst of all time.

Lessons from this presentation: Don’t get carried away by visuals, focus on content first!

6. business pitch in the apprentice by lauren riley.

You know your pitch has gone poorly when your boss describes it as “dull, dull, dull.” Those are exactly the words of Alan Sugar in Series 10, Episode 7 of The Apprentice, in which contestant Lauren Riley gives one of the worst presentations of all time. Not only Dragon’s Den stars snap under television pressure. Giving a pitch for a soft drink campaign in New York, the presentation skills of Riley and her team fell to pieces.

From the beginning, the speaker was unprepared and stuttering. With the first 40 seconds as the most important part of any presentation, this stumbling start let her down. This bad presentation highlights the importance of confidence in a presentation – in both the product and yourself. The team’s lack of enthusiasm for their poorly designed soft drink shone through in Riley’s monotone voice. Without the vocal melody that comes with energy and passion, the audience didn’t believe in the product or the people selling it.

Riley was also criticised for her lack of eye contact, which is a small but vital part of a presentation. Psychologists agree that at least 60% of our communication is non-verbal. This means body language says more about us than our words do. Regular eye contact reassures the audience, it helps them stay connected with the speaker and pay attention to what they are saying. It is important in any presentation to use gestures and the space of the room to your advantage. Walk the space and embrace your body language; that’s the key detail missing in this example, which ultimately resulted in a terrible presentation.

The lesson from this presentation: Use engaging body language to be inviting and exciting!

7. us military powerpoint presentation.

It’s not only business people and TED speakers who give terrible presentations; the US government is even guilty of it too. This US Military PowerPoint has faced online criticism for its terrible use of visuals. Ranging from overly simplified statistics to extremely complicated diagrams, the information is lost within a jumble of useless diagrams.

Visuals should be both engaging and informative, used as support for a larger point. Instead, this presentation uses them as a colorful distraction, with so many connecting lines; it is impossible to know the exact core meaning. Although some concepts may be too complex for bullet points, it is still necessary to simplify or divide the idea over multiple slides to aid the audience’s understanding.

Tiny fonts and unclear highlighted sections are similarly detrimental to a good PowerPoint. Text should summarize a concept and prompt further thoughts and discussions. Rather than aggressively telling the audience something, use bullet points minimally in a way that trigger a response from your listeners. This presentation, through its over-analysis and non-captivating style, does the opposite by displaying solid and impenetrable blocks of information.

Lessons from this presentation: Produce thought-provoking slides open for discussion!

Do not join this list!

Finally, use these examples to ensure you stay off your own list of bad presentations. Many small details can quickly transform any presentation into a terrible one. Remembering them all may seem overwhelming at first, but once you learn the ground rules for a bad presentation, they are easy to avoid. Then, along with knowing the basic rules for a good presentation, all you need to focus on is your pitching style and confidence.

If you need even more advice, videos like this one demonstrate the perfect example of a bad presentation. It raises awareness of the speaking pitfalls and unprofessional flaws to avoid. So, learn from it and these five worst presentations of all time; follow the lessons and ensure that every presentation you make is a great one!

You might also like this article: Bad PowerPoint Examples You Should Avoid at All Costs

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Bad Presentation At Work | Best 5 Tips To Avoid Disastrous Experience in 2024

Jane Ng • 08 April, 2024 • 14 min read

I gave a bad presentation at work . I am finding it hard to face people in my office now. How should I get over it? – This is an evergreen topic on popular forums like Quora or Reddit. Most of us working people seem to have problems with presentations and do not know how to overcome this pain. 

Hey! Don’t worry; AhaSlides would be more than happy to help you by giving common mistakes everyone might face & how to fix them.

Table of Contents

• #1 – “Can I refuse to do a presentation at work?”
• #2 – Why Do We Have To Present Despite So Many Embarrassing Experiences?
• #3 – The Most Common Mistakes In A Bad Presentation And How To Fix It?
• #4 – 5 Ways to Recover From Bad Presentation
• #5 – Use an Interactive Presentation Software To Make Your Dream Speech Come True
• #6 – How AhaSlides can help you!
• #7 – Conclusion
• Frequently Asked Questions

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• Ultimate Guide to Interactive Presentation
• Zoom presentation tips
• Icebreaker Games to avoid bad presentation at work!
• What is glossophobia?
• How to conclude presentation?

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‘ Can I Refuse To Do A Presentation At Work? ‘

This question must be on the minds of people who fear public speaking . 

This fear can happen due to fear of failure, audience, high stakes, and being the centre of attention. Thus, when faced with a presentation, many people experience the classic fight-or-flight response such as heart palpitations, tremors, sweating, nausea, shortness of breath, dizziness, and resulting presentation problem that makes the “a sad memory” such as:

• You turn your presentation into a lullaby that makes everyone yawn, roll their eyes, or keep checking their phones to see when you’re done.
• Your mind goes blank. No matter how many times you practice, just being on the stage makes you forget everything that needs to be said. You start standing still or drunk with nonsense. Make the presentation end with shame.
• You are running out of time. This could result from not timing your rehearsal first or technical problems. Whatever the reason, you end up making a bad presentation that makes the audience not understand what you are trying to convey.

Why Do Present Despite So Many Embarrassing Experiences?

The answer is that presentations bring many benefits and are essential for product launching, marketing strategy, company trend reports, and many more.

• Product Presentation: Product presentations are a great opportunity to showcase your newly built or renovated feature products to the world. The purpose of this presentation is built around the introduction/improvement of your product to suit your users best or share about a new product with potential investors. You can take Apple’s iPhone launch as a typical example. 

• Marketing Presentation: No matter how quality your products or services are, they still require a proper marketing strategy to be known and be able to sell to your intended audience. So marketing presentations will come into play to the board of directors or other shareholders. They will decide if those strategies are feasible or not.
• Data Presentation: Once in the business, you will have to familiarize yourself with the numbers and reports that come from every department, like revenue reports, monthly/quarterly data reports, growth reports, etc. Therefore, to present data visually, easy to understand, and to remember with the leadership and related departments, you need to have a data presentation.

So if you don’t improve your presentation skills and still make one or more bad presentations, you will soon be out of business. Watch out!

Common Presentation Mistakes In A Bad Presentation And How To Fix It

What makes a bad presentation? Here are 4 common mistakes that even professional speakers can make & tips to fix:

Mistake 1: No preparation

• Great speakers always prepare. They know the topic to talk about, have an outline of the content, design impressive slides, and carefully study the key issues they want to present. Many people only prepare their presentation material 1-2 days or even hours before the presentation. This bad habit leads to the audience only hearing vaguely and not understanding what is happening. Since then, bad presentations have been born.
• Tips: To optimize audience perception and get the results you want after your presentation, practice speaking out loud at least once before standing on stage.

Mistake 2: Too much content

• Too much information is one of bad presentation examples. With the first presentations, you inevitably get greedy, cram too much content at once and include tons of videos, charts, and images. However, when all these types of content are used up, the presentation will become lengthy, with too many unnecessary slides. As a result, you will have to spend time reading the letters and numbers on the slide and skipping the audience.
• Tips: Outline the highlights you want to convey to your audience. And remember that the fewer words, the better. Because if a slide is too long, you will lose the audience by lacking connection and convincing. You can apply The 10 20 30 Rule . 

Mistake 3: No eye contact

• Have you ever witnessed a presentation where the speaker spends all of his time looking at his notes, the screen, the floor, or even the ceiling? How does this make you feel? That is one of examples of bad presentations. Looking someone in the eye helps establish a personal connection; even one look can draw an audience. If your audience is small, try to make eye contact with each individual at least once.
• Tips: To make a visual connection, eye gestures directed at each person must last at least 2 to 3 seconds or long enough to say a full sentence/paragraph. Effective eye contact is the most important nonverbal skill in a speaker’s “toolbox”.

Mistake 4: Discrete presentation

• Although we spend most of our day talking to each other, speaking to an audience is a difficult skill and one that we need to practice regularly. If anxiety causes you to rush your presentation, your audience may miss important points.
• Tips: Stabilize your mind by taking deep breaths to prevent confusion. If you start talking nonsense, it will take some time for you to settle down. Take a deep breath, and pronounce each word clearly as you focus on slowing down.

Keys Takeaways

It takes a lot of practice and effort to get a good presentation. But your presentation will be much better if you avoid common pitfalls. So here are the keys:

• Joint presentation mistakes include not preparing properly, providing inappropriate content, and speaking poorly.
• Check the location and familiarize yourself with the device first to avoid possible problems.
• Keep your presentation clear and concise, and use appropriate visual aids.
• Make sure you mention terms that are in line with your audience’s understanding so that your presentation avoids confusion.

But this part is just a way to deal with the technical aspects, prepare for a good presentation and help you to avoid “ Death by PowerPoint “. 

As for those who have lived with disaster experiences of a bad presentation, the next section is your mental recovery.

5 Ways To Recover From A Bad Presentation

To help you through the nightmare named a bad presentation, please do the methods given below: 

• Accept disappointment: It’s not always a good idea to “think positively” because feeling uncomfortable is normal . Accepting disappointment will allow you to let it go more quickly and move on. Give yourself time to endure the sadness and get up to the fight.
• Practice self-compassion: Don’t treat yourself in too harsh ways. For example, “I am a loser. No one wants to work with me anymore.” Don’t talk to yourself like that. Don’t let yourself lower your self-worth. Talk to yourself like you would speak to your best friend.
• It doesn’t mean anything about you: A lousy presentation doesn’t mean you’re a disaster or not qualified for the job. There will be factors you can control or not, but whether it’s the presentation’s content or the technical problem, your presentation disaster means nothing about who you are.
• Use failure as a motivation: A lousy presentation is an opportunity to figure out why it went wrong and to improve on the next production. You can learn more about how to avoid common mistakes that cause bad speeches here .

Use Interactive Presentation Software To Make Your Dream Speech Come True

Using Interactive Presentation Software has excellent benefits and can turn your bad presentation into a great one. It:

• Increase audience engagement, allowing them to connect with you and the purpose of your presentation.
• Improve retention. 68% of people say it’s easier to remember information when the presentation is interactive .

AhaSlides features are cloud-based – interactive presentation software that allows you to organize fun, interactive presentations for all your needs, with quizzes , Q&A app , word clouds , brainstorming slides, etc. 

Audiences can join the presentation from their phones and interact directly with the display with lots of attractive interactive options.

Learn more at AhaSlides’ template library !  

How AhaSlides for Business Works for You

Team meetings.

Create exciting virtual team meetings with AhaSlides. Engage your team with a live survey for instant feedback on how things are going with your business, any concerns the group may have, and any new ideas that colleagues think of. This not only creates opportunities for new ideas but makes your team feel listened to and cared for.

🎊 Host Host Free Live Q&A with AhaSlides

Team Building Sessions

Even virtually, you can create meaningful team building activities to get your team participating and working better with each other. 

An online quiz can be a great way to have everyone involved, or use our spinner wheel feature for an icebreaker game such as Never Have I Ever . These team-building exercises can be used as a social activity or during work hours as a break to get the team re-energised.

Project Kickoff

Get your team prepared with a well-organised kickoff meeting for your next project. Introduce everyone to the project and get them settled with popular ice-breakers. Use live polls and Q&As to efficiently compile everyone’s ideas and opinions, leading to a practical goal-creation strategy. Then, assign all your tasks and get started.

You can also use AhaSlides business to check in periodically to see how everyone is getting on and if you’re all on the same page.

Sales Proposal/Pitch Deck

Create unique and bespoke sales proposals with eye-catching business presentations. Include your branding and edit to suit your audience. Make sure your pitch gets noticed with amazing features such as polling, Q&A and brainstorming, then complete the captivation with highly visual slides.

Brainstorming Ideas

Use good old-fashioned brainstorming , with a modern twist to get ideas flowing. Start with an icebreaker or game to get your team energised and their brains active. The closer the group feels to each other, the more likely they are to share their ideas.

In Conclusion

Remember, public speaking is a performance. So, to avoid bad presentations at work, you must prepare and practice many times to make it perfect. Don’t lose confidence in yourself because of a bad representation for once. Follow AhaSlides articles to learn more about this topic!

Frequently Asked Questions:

What is a bad presentation.

A bad presentation fails to convey effectively its vital message to listeners and leaves an uncomfortable impression. It is confusing, unprofessional, less engaging, and don’t attract audience’s attention.

What are the effects of a bad or poor presentation?

The audience might find it challenging to understand the presenter’s points. Besides, they may feel that it is only a waste of time when listening to a bad presentation, which leads to frustration and disappointment.

A writer who wants to create practical and valuable content for the audience

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10 Bad PowerPoint Slides Examples to Avoid

A presentation serves two purposes: 1) it teaches your audience something new and 2) motivates them to take action. However, achieving these goals is only possible if your audience is engaged in your presentation. Your presentation is your story, whether hosting a webinar, teaching an online course, training a new employee, pitching a business idea, or sharing a project with your team. 

What you say matters; your audience’s attention matters. A successful presentation determines how many people connect with your story, how much they remember, and improvements for next time. Various elements in a presentation can make or break its look. Knowing and avoiding practices that can make your presentation dull and non-engaging is vital. 

We’ll walk through some examples of bad PowerPoint Slides to help you avoid common mistakes while creating a presentation. 

What Makes a Bad PowerPoint Presentation?

Everyone talks about good examples, but even a basic mistake can make your fantastic-looking presentation bad. Learning from really bad PowerPoint examples can be as valuable as following the best practices of good PowerPoint examples . Let’s walk through some of the bad PowerPoint presentation slides that would make your eyes ache and content so dull it could put an insomniac to sleep. 

With these really bad powerpoint examples, you can save your presentation from being a disaster and turn them into engaging slides:

• Too much text on slides
• Too many animations
• Using too many colors on one slide
• Being too minimalistic
• Using only pictures and difficult-to-understand fonts
• Keeping the image behind the text
• Flow charts on the slides do not make sense
• No symmetry in texts and pointers
• Using only bullet points and no paragraphs
• Keeping the size of the font too small

1. Too much text on slides 

PowerPoint is a handy tool, but remember, it’s there to enhance your presentation, not steal the spotlight from you. The key here is to make it a visual assistant that doesn’t simply mimic your words but assists you in giving visual suggestions. Overloading your slides with text is the fastest way to make your presentations dull and monotonous. Those walls of text can instantly overwhelm your audience, and we’ve all been there, irritated by text-heavy slides. 

Going further, scripting your entire speech on the slides can trip up even the smoothest talkers. We all know it seems easy to read word to word while giving presentations, but it kills the natural flow and direct interaction with your audience. Moreover, such text-heavy bad PowerPoint slides will result in a rigid, unengaging presentation and steal your spotlight.

Bad PowerPoint Slide Example with Excessive Text:

2. Too many animations 

There are plenty of PowerPoint animations , and they can be tricky to use. There are more than 150 animations in PowerPoint, and some presentations seem determined to test them all. However, it is vital to note that using a lot of animations and transitions can make your presentations look less polished and outdated. When everything on a slide is animated, it can be distracting and even exhausting for your audience. 

Moreover, excessive animations can be a headache for the presenter, too. If each element requires a click to appear or disappear, it’s not the most efficient approach, and it makes for a bad PowerPoint presentation example. Due to many animations and transitions, presenters inadvertently give away what’s coming next, disrupting their timing and distracting the audience, who start anticipating the next point instead of focusing on your words.

Bad PowerPoint Slide Example with Heavy Animation:

3. using too many colors on one slide.

Do not treat your PowerPoint presentation as a canvas. It is not a color pallet to mix and present different colors. Talking about color might seem like a deep dive, but you can be something other than a color theory guru to nail a good-looking presentation (though it’s a plus). Here’s the golden rule: KEEP IT EASY TO READ! 

Bright and flashy colors like red or neon might not be your best bet for a presentation.

Also, think about contrast to ensure your audience can read effortlessly. Simple combos, like black text on a white background or vice versa, work like a charm. Conversely, white text on a grey background can be a readability nightmare. Having non-contrasting colors can make for bad PPT examples, and nobody wants colors in their presentation to clash, right?

 Example of Worst PowerPoint Slide with Too Many Colors:

READ MORE: Effective Colour Palette Combination for Presentations

4. Being too minimalistic

Adding everything to your presentation is a problem, but not adding the required colors, graphics, and text is a bigger problem. It can make the slide look dull and empty. Sometimes, professionals can get carried away with the “less is more” idea. While using a variety of color palettes in one presentation can make it look unprofessional and strain the eyes, there are better options than going all-white. 

Keeping presentations too minimalistic might give off the impression – that you didn’t put in the effort. Plain slides are an example of a bad PowerPoint presentation and don’t motivate the audience to pay attention. 

Example of Bad PowerPoint Slide with Too Much Minimalism:

EXPLORE: 40,000+ PowerPoint Templates and Google Slides Themes

5. Using only pictures and difficult-to-understand fonts

Another example of bad PPT slides is cluttering the presentation with only graphics and difficult-to-understand fonts. Like with colors and animations, the “less is more” principle holds here. Your primary focus should be making your presentation easy to read and understand for your audience. Take fonts, for instance. Avoid ones like “Impact Typeface,” which have cramped letters. Fancy fonts, especially those that mimic italics, can be problematic too. 

Example of Ugly PowerPoint Slide with Difficult To-Read Font:

READ MORE: Best Presentation Fonts

Now, onto images. Stay moderate; too many images can distract your audience significantly if they overlap. When considering multiple photos, ask yourself if you need them all or if one can represent the others. Slides with an excessive number of pictures can be a visual mess. While images are great for illustrating points and reducing text, an overload makes your presentation look outdated.

6. Keeping the image behind the text

Whoever thought of using an image as a background probably missed the memo. Images and text simply don’t go well together. Overlaying text on an image makes for one of the worst PowerPoint presentation examples. Keeping the image in the background makes reading the text complex, and the main image needs to be clarified. With the mix-up of colors in the background, finding a text color that stands out is nearly impossible, and all those colors just pull your attention away from the words. To save your presentation from this disaster, avoid using images as slide backgrounds when you’ve got text to showcase.

Really Bad PowerPoint Slide Example with Invisible Text:

EXPLORE: Best PowerPoint Backgrounds Collection

7. Flow charts on the slides do not make sense

If you want to use flow charts in your PowerPoint presentation, this one’s for you. The first rule for flowcharts is simple: they should be easy to understand. A flowchart can explain things in a presentation, but a well-crafted PowerPoint should make sense. The flowchart, like the one shown below, will destroy the look of your slide and needs to be clarified. By seeing this bad PowerPoint presentation example below, you need to help understand what’s happening. What is connected to what? Therefore, even if you intend to simplify the information, it will only reach your audience with a clear flowchart. 

Bad PowerPoint Presentation Example with Messed up Flowcharts:

EXPLORE: Customizable Flowchart PowerPoint Templates

8. No symmetry in texts and pointers

The lack of balance or alignment between textual content and accompanying visual elements like arrows , bullets, or other pointers can make your presentations look unprofessional and unappealing. When text and pointers are haphazardly placed, it’s challenging for the audience to follow a logical flow of information, making up for a bad PowerPoint slide example. Without symmetry in your presentation, you’re only distracting your audience; they will be preoccupied with deciphering the relationship between the text and visuals.

Example of Bad PowerPoint Presentation with No Symmetry:

9. Using only bullet points and no paragraphs

Using only bullet points in your slide is one of the worst PowerPoint presentation ideas! In a PowerPoint presentation, simplifying paragraphs into bullet points is a smart move to make it more audience-friendly. However, it’s essential to clarify that this means more than merely slapping only bullet points and not including any paragraphs. 

Here’s a helpful rule of thumb: “Only use 5-8 bullet points”, and if you find yourself shrinking text to 12 or 10 points, you’ve got too much text on your hands, and you can’t put all of it in the bullets. Having overly lengthy bullet points might not be to everyone’s liking, and some even read like full-blown paragraphs.

Ugly PowerPoint Presentation Example with Just Bullets and No Paragraphs:

10. Keeping the size of the font too small 

Last on this list of bad PowerPoint examples is keeping the font size too small, making it look invisible. Font size plays a very crucial role in the presentation. Imagine being served a delicious pizza and handed a magnifying glass to find the toppings. Wouldn’t it kill the mood? The same applies to your PowerPoint presentation. Imagine everything in your slide is on point: the colors, the graphics, the animation, the information, but your audience can’t even read what you are presenting. A quick test is to stand at the back of the room where you’ll present, and if you can still read the font comfortably, then you’re good to go. 

Worst PowerPoint Presentation Example with Small Font:

Tips to Avoid Making the Worst PowerPoint Slides!

Creating a standout PowerPoint presentation boils down to two fundamental principles: 1) it must captivate visually and 2) convey clarity of message. Sometimes, the temptation arises to favor one at the expense of the other. The absence of a delicate balance between engagement and transparency unites all these ugly PowerPoint slides examples. Here are some things you should keep in mind:

• Avoid stuffing slides with too much text in an effort for clarity, which often results in a boring, overwhelming presentation that distracts from the speaker. 
• Refrain from overloading slides with excessive images or animations to boost engagement; it can backfire, resulting in confusion and an unprofessional look.
• Microsoft provides numerous resources to achieve a well-balanced look for your presentation, including colors, graphics, images, embedded videos, and animations. The key is to use them wisely. 
• Before finalizing any presentation, you can ask a few questions from a spectator’s perspective. Can I replace this lengthy sentence with a picture or a keyword? Are the fonts crystal clear? Do the visuals or animations prove distracting? Are the colors harmonious, or do they strain the eyes?

READ MORE: Most Important Presentation Tips

You can craft an exceptional PowerPoint presentation by balancing engagement and clarity perfectly. However, striking this balance requires a lot of practice. The best and worst PowerPoint presentation examples clearly show how to keep this equilibrium.  

As we’ve seen, it’s easy to take a presentation from good to worse by neglecting one side in favor of the other; the next time you’re gearing up to create a presentation, consider getting the help of professional presentation services . 

Presentation service providers like SlideUpLift can help you strike the perfect balance of engagement and clarity, ensuring your audience stays focused while your message shines through. Whether you want to tweak every part of your presentation or adjust the fonts and colors, going for a presentation service provider like SlideUpLift ensures that your unique style is consistently reflected in your slides. You can book a consultation call to learn more about these services.

Explore SlideUpLift presentation design services to create eye-catching PPTs. You can give the custom-slides service a shot.

Why are bad PowerPoint slides a problem?

Bad PowerPoint slides can hinder effective communication, leading to audience disengagement and a failure to convey your message. They can distract, confuse, or even bore your audience, ultimately defeating the purpose of your presentation.

What common mistakes result in a really bad PowerPoint Presentation?

Common mistakes that result in bad PowerPoint slides include overcrowding slides with excessive text or complex graphics, using small fonts, lacking visual consistency, and neglecting the balance between engagement and clarity. You can avoid this by engaging your audience, conveying your message clearly, and creating a visually appealing and well-structured presentation that supports your content effectively.

How can I improve my PowerPoint slides and avoid making bad ones?

You must focus on simplicity, use visuals wisely, maintain consistency in design and fonts, and balance engagement and clarity. In addition to all these points, getting help from professional presentation providers can help you make top-class presentations easily.

. Are there resources or services available to help improve PowerPoint presentations?

Yes, SlideUpLift is one of the most trusted professional presentation service providers. They provide design and content layout expertise, including PowerPoint templates , Google Slides templates , presentation services , custom slide services , etc. You can book a consultation call with us to learn more about these services.

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More From Forbes

Here’s how to avoid 5 tragic presentation mistakes.

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Presentation skills are often critical for career advancement.

This article is part of an ongoing series Presentation Skills: The Secret Weapon of Career Success .

Like it or not, presentation skills can dramatically impact the trajectory of one’s career. Indeed, presentation skills are really leadership skills. National Speakers Association CEO, Mary Lue Peck insists, “When leaders invest in their presentation skills, they become more effective at working and interacting with others. Perfecting presentation skills help ensure that their message is not just being heard but understood.”

Unfortunately, that lack of investment can have dire consequences. A dreadful performance in front of the wrong audience may not just result in immediate negative impact for that particular project or task, but maybe more importantly it can undercut an employee’s confidence and credibility in the organization long term. Let’s face it - organizations are mesmerized by those who seem comfortable speaking to a group, are persuasive in front of the client, or prove themselves to be an effective, charismatic representative of the product or the organization, and once you’ve developed a reputation as someone who isn’t, career advancement options may be limited.

Unfortunately, many professionals make these five very common presentation mistakes that can yield disastrous consequences. Learn the mistakes and how to avoid them!

Mistake #1 – Not Practicing Enough

The best speakers often seem like they just glided on the stage and gave the presentation of their lives without much effort, but the truth is that the best speakers practice, practice, practice! When you try to “wing it,” you’re much more prone to stumble through the material, default to reading slides or get rattled by questions. Also, when you’ve not practiced much, you’re just not as confident and that lack of confidence comes across big time!

Instead, Do This – On a macro level, invest in honing your presentation skills on an ongoing basis by joining Toastmasters International , National Speakers Association or another speaking organization. On a micro level practice your presentation – over and over. Remember that writing the report and presenting the findings are two entirely different things. Practice – for real – stand up, speak to the slides, use a timer, etc. to try to simulate the actual event. Clicking through the slides on your laptop as you just think about what you’ll say isn’t true practice. For a major presentation you probably want to visit the room (even practice there if possible). Keynote Speaker Heather Monahan shares, “Going to the venue or meeting location days or weeks ahead of time helps too. When you run through what it will be like in real time and you envision yourself doing amazing, you will deliver on that.” K.V. Scott, President of Kossen Communications LLC also recommends conducting a dry run because it provides an opportunity to test out videos and slide animations to work out kinks in advance if needed. We’ve all witnessed a presenter being horribly embarrassed by technology failures - don’t be that presenter!

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Mistake #2 – Reading Presentation Slides

There’s nothing worse than watching a speaker stand with their back to the group (mostly) reading slides projected on a screen. Of course, if the speaker is just reading the slides, they’re not really necessary, right? That’s about the time most people start rolling their eyes wondering what they could be getting accomplished if only they hadn’t come to this presentation. Remember that slides should be a point of reference - they’re an accessory, but you’re the main event. If you’ve avoided mistake #1 by practicing, you know the content – don’t read it! It’s there. It’s not going anywhere. Avoid the temptation to talk to the screen and robotically read bullet points.

Instead, Do This – Review the content enough in advance so you know what’s there and don’t need to read it as a crutch. Instead, for each slide focus on answering these two primary questions:

-       What is the big idea on this slide?

-       Why should they care?

Also remember that reading slide content often complicates the overall message. Certified Speaking Professional and Founder of MotionFirst, a speaking and consulting company, Meridith Elliott Powell insists, “It’s a mistake to over complicate the message and share too much information. Presentations should be simple and focused.” It’s also important to intersperse a variety of techniques – asking questions, sharing anecdotes, using descriptive examples – to engage the audience and make the presentation more dynamic and interesting. (More on this in a future post in this series.)

Mistake #3 – Talking Too Fast

This is such a common mistake so don’t be surprised to realize that you might be talking 100 mph and leaving your audience in the dust. Remember that the best presentation becomes a train wreck if the speaker speaks too fast. The more familiar the content is for you, the more tempted you will be to speed through it so slow down!

Instead, Do This – First, trim your content so you’re not trying to fit a 30 minute presentation into a 10 minute time slot. A general rule of thumb for pacing is 1-2 minutes per slide so if you’ve got 30 slides for a 30 minute presentation, you may be setting yourself up for failure. Also, remember that reviewing data heavy, dense slides, responding to questions or interjecting stories will take more time so plan for that. If you’re staying on one slide for more than 4-5 minutes, you might want to consider breaking the content into two slides. Also, don’t be too proud to use a post it reminder on your practice podium or your mirror to remind you to slow down! You’ll be glad you did!

Mistake #4 – Relying on Filler Words Unconsciously

Virtually all speakers rely on “filler words” (e.g. um, uh, ok, etc.) unconsciously during their presentations. When I practiced a presentation in high school in front of my dad, he told me I’d said “you know” more than ten times, and I didn’t even remember saying it once. Once I started recording myself, I was horrified to hear myself say it over and over without even realizing I was saying it.

Instead, Do This - Don’t beat yourself up – just try to figure out what your filler word/phrase is so you can begin to remove it. Record yourself so you can identify your fillers, then consciously work to minimize them. Another approach is presenting in front of a friend and asking them ring a bell or hit a buzzer every time you use your filler word/phrase. Speaking more slowly should make it easier for you to remove the filler words so this is yet another reason why speaking slower is usually a smart move.

Mistake #5 – Getting Overwhelmed/Psyched Out

I’ve always heard that the average person is more afraid of public speaking than death. I’m not sure how true that is, but I definitely understand the anxiety created by the thought of speaking in front of a group. Anxiety and nerves can create a career limiting event, and no one wants that.

Public speaking can create anxiety for many professionals.

Instead, Do This – Find a technique that helps reduce your anxiety – taking deep breaths, repeating a reaffirming phrase, etc. Monahan suggests using lavender to kill the nerves right before you speak. I also find that the best defense is a good offense. By that, I mean be prepared! I find that the more rehearsed and confident I am with the content, the less nervous and anxious I feel. In fact, if I’m truly well versed and interested in the content, I’m usually just looking forward to engaging with the group and not as focused on the mechanics of the presentation. Also remember that people are typically more anxious the less comfortable they are with the topic so avoid presenting on topics that aren’t your area of expertise. One of the worst feelings is presenting on a topic where you don’t feel like you have the necessary expertise and competence to speak so just avoid putting yourself in that position and stick to what you know!

Stay tuned for the rest of the series which will explore how professionals can move their presentations from good to great.

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Giving an effective PowerPoint presentation is an art. We've all sat through a dreadful slideshow that we couldn't wait to escape from. Whether due to a drab speaker or lousy slides, there's usually room for improvement.

The good news is you can prevent your audience from hating your next presentation! Let's review the most common mistakes people make when preparing and giving a PowerPoint presentation. Knowing these recurrent blunders gives you a leg up, and helps you nail your next important talk.

1. You Load Up Slides With Text

Perhaps the biggest mistake people make in presentations is overloading every slide with text. This detracts from your talk for several reasons. For one, people are naturally inclined to read everything on the screen. If it takes them half a minute to digest everything, they aren't listening to you during that time.

If you have too much text on a slide and advance the slideshow before someone has a chance to read through everything, they might get upset and stop paying attention to the slideshow at all. Less is more with text. Don't be afraid to use space to add emphasis to what's present, or break a particularly meaty section into two slides.

When in doubt, remember that people are either going to pay attention to your slides, or pay attention to you. If you tend towards wordiness, stick to bullet points and short phrases instead of sentences. For a rule of thumb, limit yourself to five bullet points per slide, with no more than five words per bullet point.

2. You Use Stupid Transitions

Every new version of PowerPoint includes more wacky transitions , but you shouldn't use them. Aside from being resource-intensive on weaker machines , many slide transition effects are distracting and don't add anything to your talk.

You should certainly use a transition to keep the slideshow interesting, but stick with something simple like a wipe or slide. And never, ever select the Random option since it will undoubtedly choose the wildest transition at the worst time. You don't want your audience to worry more about what transition is coming next than what you'll say next.

3. You Mix Fonts and Colors

While you don't want your slideshow to feature black Times New Roman text with a white background, it's easy to overdo it in the other direction, too. If you choose to get colorful , stick to a few colors that blend well and use them for emphasis.

The same goes for fonts. You should choose a font that's easy to read. As fancy as handwritten script looks , it's probably impossible to read if you're not standing right in front of the screen . Try to stick to one font throughout the entire presentation, and definitely don't mix fonts on the same slide!

Few colors and fonts make for solid presentations because they mean consistency. It's childish to cram as many pretty fonts and colors onto one slide as you can. It looks messy, and while Georgia font isn't too exciting, people would prefer to read your text instead of admiring how fancy it looks.

4. You Read Slides Verbatim

This one might take the prize for worst possible trait during a PowerPoint presentation. Reading your slides word for word will bore the audience, and makes you seem rigid instead of dynamic .

Remember two important notes to help with this problem. First, PowerPoint slides don't need to contain every little bit of information you're discussing. Use them as little attention-grabbers so your audience understands the current topic, but wants to listen to you explain more.

Second, your PowerPoint slides are not for your use! Your slideshow is not the presentation -- the presentation is your talk. PowerPoint slides are simply a tool you use to better communicate. You shouldn't need your slides to stay on topic. Practicing will help with this.

If you have trouble remembering what you want to say, use the notes section of each PowerPoint slide. Then when you display the slideshow, your monitor will display a snapshot of the current and next slide, along with any notes you've jotted for that slide. Stopping to turn around and look at your slides, or reading them aloud, will not effectively bring your message to the audience. Anyone in the audience could stand up and read the slide, but you know the material.

5. Your Charts Are Complex and Useless

Adding media other than text (in moderation) to a slide makes it more interesting and grabs the audience's attention. When you're representing data in the presentation, charts are an easy way to show the relevant information in one image.

Charts are great , but it's important that you don't go overboard with them. The audience won't have the patience to decipher all sorts of colors, trend lines, keys, and text. If the chart isn't self-explanatory for the average audience member, or if you can't explain it in a sentence, you need to make it less complicated .

6. Your Template Is Boring

Take the extra few minutes to find a template that fits your presentation, or even make your own if you're so inclined. While some of the built-in PowerPoint templates might seem a little generic, you'll likely find one that's sharp without being overbearing. Don't choose anything that's too wacky with all sorts of colors, but feel free to find something unique.

Black text on a white background is ugly, but white text on a black background is passable if you don't have any other options. If you need some help, check out awesome free PowerPoint templates for everyone.

7. You Minimize PowerPoint for Other Media

As great as PowerPoint is, often you have to leave the slideshow to put some other content on the screen. Maybe you want to show a relevant YouTube video or visit the company's website. While this is sometimes unavoidable, it's jarring to jump back and forth between windows, even with slick keyboard shortcuts .

That's why you should embed everything you can inside your presentation. We've shown how to embed YouTube videos inside PowerPoint and it's easy to take a screenshot of any website to paste into your slides. If you can avoid leaving the slideshow, do so for a smoother experience.

8. You Don't Remove White Space From Images

Here's a common error that only takes a few seconds to correct. Often seen in college lecture slides and the like, many folks tend to copy and paste images from a Google search into their slides. The trouble is that most of these images include an ugly white border around them, which looks amateurish.

You can remove this white border easily using a free image editor like Paint.NET . Just open the image, and use the magic wand tool to select the white space around the image. Press Delete to remove the white space, then hit File > Save As and make sure you save the image as a PNG . A PNG file makes that deleted space transparent, while JPEGs don't support transparency .

Paste the fixed image into your slideshow and it will look so much better!

9. You Don't Ensure Everyone Can See the Material

Preparation is an essential part of every presentation, but you should do more than just practice your talk. Failing to ensure that people will be able to see everything you've put together could torpedo all your work.

If you have the chance, test your slideshow in the room where you'll be speaking, on the equipment you'll use. Make sure that no graphics or text appear cut off on the projector, and test out various seats in the room to confirm that the text isn't too small from far away. This might sound excessive, but it goes a long way in producing a professional presentation.

What Presentation Mistakes Do You Hate?

PowerPoint is a relatively simple tool , but it's clearly difficult to master. From mistakes in slide creation to blunders during your talk, there's a lot that could go wrong when you're responsible for a presentation. You can improve many of these with practice, which will improve your confidence, too.

In the end, a prepared presentation can salvage poor slides. However, a lousy slideshow damages the audience's impression of you, so it's best to nail everything if you can. Using these tips, your slideshows will be cleaner, flow better, and further engage the audience! You can't ask for much more than that.

What do speakers do with PowerPoint that makes you cringe? Let us know your most hated slideshow mistakes down in the comments!

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Blog > Common mistakes in PowerPoint and what makes a bad presentation

Common mistakes in PowerPoint and what makes a bad presentation

08.09.21   •  #powerpoint #tips.

Creating and giving a good presentation is actually not that difficult. If you know how to do it. Otherwise, no matter how much effort you put into it, it can quickly turn out to be a bad presentation.

Here we show you some examples of bad PowerPoint slides and common mistakes that are often made in presentations so that you won’t make them in your next presentation and avoid "Death by PowerPoint".

1. Reading aloud instead of speaking freely

One aspect in bad presentations is often that the text is simply read out. Prepare your presentation so well that you can speak freely. The goal is to build a connection with your audience and get them excited about your topic. However, this will hardly be possible if you only read from a piece of paper or your computer the whole time. Your audience should feel addressed, if you just read off, they will be bored and perceive your presentation as bad, even if your content and your PowerPoint are actually good.

2. Technical Problems

The sound of the video you inserted on a slide is not on, your laptop does not connect to the beamer, or your microphone does not work. These are just some of the problems that could occur during your presentation.

But nothing is more annoying than when technical problems suddenly occur during a presentation or even before, when everyone is waiting for it to start. It interrupts your flow of speech, only distracts the audience from the topic and breaks concentration. So before you get started with your presentation, it is important to first start your PowerPoint in the place where you will give it later, practice there and familiarize yourself with the technology.

• Don't forget the charging cable for your laptop
• Find out beforehand how you can connect your laptop to the beamer. Find out which connection the beamer has and which connection your laptop has. To be on the safe side, take an adapter with you.
• Always have backups of your presentation. Save them on a USB stick and preferably also online in a cloud.
• Take a second laptop and maybe even your own small projector for emergencies. Even if it's not the latest model and the quality is not that good: better bad quality than no presentation at all.

3. Losing the attention of your audience

One of the most common mistakes in presentations is to lose the attention of your audience. Especially in long presentations it is often difficult to keep your audience’s attention and to avoid “Death by PowerPoint”. Anyone who has had this experience knows how uncomfortable it is to give a presentation where you notice that no one is actually really listening to you. Especially if your presentation is an eternally long monologue, it is difficult to get the topic across in an exciting way and to captivate the audience.

Our tip: Include interactive polls or quizzes in your presentation to involve your audience and increase their attention. With the help of SlideLizard, you can ask questions in PowerPoint and your audience can easily vote on their own smartphone. Plus, you can even get anonymous feedback at the end, so you know right away what you can improve next time.

Here we have also summarized further tips for you on how to increase audience engagement.

4. Avoid eye contact

You want your audience to feel engaged in your presentation, but if you avoid eye contact the whole time, they certainly won't. Avoid staring at just one part of the wall, at your paper or your computer. If the participants have the feeling that you are just talking to the wall, it is a bad presentation. Speak to your audience, involve them in your presentation and make it more exciting for them.

But also make sure you don't always look at the same two or three people, but address everyone. If the audience is large, it is often difficult to include everyone, but still try to let your eyes wander a little between your listeners and look into every corner of the room.

5. Speaking incoherently

Avoid jumping from one topic to the next and back again shortly afterwards. Otherwise your audience will not be able to follow you after a while and their thoughts will wander. To prevent this, it is important that your presentation has a good structure and that you work through one topic after the other.

Nervousness can cause even the best to mumble or talk too fast in order to get the presentation over with as quickly as possible. Try to avoid this by taking short pauses to collect yourself, to breathe and to remind yourself to speak slowly.

6. Many colors mixed with each other

Make sure that your presentation is not too colorful. If you mix too many colours, bad presentation slides will result very quickly. A PowerPoint in which all kinds of colors are combined with each other does not look professional, but rather suitable for a children's birthday party.

Think about a rough color palette in advance, which you can then use in your presentation. Colors such as orange or neon green do not look so good in your PowerPoint. Use colors specifically to emphasize important information.

It is also essential to choose colors that help the text to read well. You should have as much contrast as possible between the font and the background. Black writing on a white background is always easy to read, while yellow writing on a white background is probably hard to read.

7. Too minimalistic design

Even though it is often said that "less is more", you should not be too minimalistic in the design of your presentation. A presentation where your slides are blank and only black text on a white background is likely to go down just as badly as if you use too many colors.

Empty presentations are boring and don't really help to capture the attention of your audience. It also looks like you are too lazy to care about the design of your presentation and that you have not put any effort into the preparation. Your PowerPoint doesn't have to be overflowing with colors, animations and images to make it look interesting. Make it simple, but also professional.

8. Too much text

The slides of your presentation should never be overcrowded. Write only the most important key points on your slides and never entire sentences. Your audience should not be able to read exactly the text you are speaking in your PowerPoint. This is rather annoying and leads to being bored quickly. Summarize the most important points that your audience should remember and write them down in short bullet points on your presentation.

9. Many different animations

To avoid bad presentations it is important to never use too many animations. It looks messy and confusing if every text and image is displayed with a different animation. Just leave out animations at all or if you really want to use them then use them only very rarely when you want to draw attention to something specific. Make sure that if you use animations, they are consistent. If you use transitions between the individual slides, these should also always be kept consistent and simple.

10. Too many images

Bad presentation slides often occur when their design ist unclear and unorganised. Images and graphics in presentations are always a good idea to illustrate something and to add some variety. But don't overdo it with them. Too many images can distract from your presentation and look messy. Make sure that the graphics also fit the content and, if you have used several pictures on one slide, ask yourself whether you really need all of them.

11. Too many or unreadable fonts

Never combine too many fonts so that your presentation does not look messy. Use at most two: one for headings and one for text. When choosing fonts, you should also make sure that they are still legible at long distances. Script, italic and decorative fonts are very slow to read, which is why they should be avoided in presentations.

It is not so easy to choose the right font. Therefore, we have summarized for you how to find the best font for your PowerPoint presentation.

12. Images as background

To avoid bad presentations, do not use images as slide backgrounds if there should be also text on them. The picture only distracts from the text and it is difficult to read it because there is not much contrast with the background. It is also harder to see the image because the text in the foreground is distracting. The whole thing looks messy and distracting rather than informative and clear.

13. Reading from the slides

Never just read the exact text from your slides. Your audience can read for themselves, so they will only get bored and in the worst case it will lead to "Death by PowerPoint". You may also give them the feeling that you think they are not able to read for themselves. In addition, you should avoid whole sentences on your slides anyway and only have listed key points that you go into more detail then.

14. Turn your back

Never turn around during your presentation to look at your projected PowerPoint. Not to read from your slides, but also not to make sure the next slide is already displayed. It looks unprofessional and only distracts your audience. In PowerPoint's Speaker View, you can always see which slide is currently being displayed and which one is coming next. Use this to make sure the order fits. You can even take notes in PowerPoint, which are then displayed during your presentation. You can read all about notes in PowerPoint here.

15. Forgetting the time

Always pay attention to the time given. It is annoying when your presentation takes much longer than actually planned and your audience is just waiting for you to stop talking or you are not able to finish your presentation at all. It is just as awkward if your presentation is too short. You have already told everything about your topic, but you should actually talk for at least another ten minutes.

Practice your presentation often enough at home. Talk through your text and time yourself as you go. Then adjust the length so that you can keep to the time given on the day of your presentation.

16. Complicated Structure

The structure of your presentation should not be complicated. Your audience should be able to follow you easily and remember the essential information by the end. When you have finished a part, briefly summarize and repeat the main points before moving on to the next topic. Mention important information more than once to make sure it really gets across to your audience.

However, if the whole thing gets too complicated, it can be easy for your audience to disengage after a while and not take away much new information from your presentation. So a complicated structure can lead to bad presentations and "Death by PowerPoint" pretty quickly.

17. Inappropriate clothes

On the day of your presentation, be sure to choose appropriate clothing. Your appearance should be formal, so avoid casual clothes and stick to professional dress codes. When choosing your clothes, also make sure that they are rather unobtrusive. Your audience should focus on your presentation, not on your appearance.

18. Inappropriate content

Think about who your audience is and adapt your presentation to them. Find out how much they already know about the topic, what they want to learn about it and why they are here in the first place. If you only talk about things your audience already knows, they will get bored pretty soon, but if you throw around a lot of technical terms when your audience has hardly dealt with the topic at all, they will also have a hard time following you. So to avoid "Death by PowerPoint" in this case, it is important to adapt your presentation to your audience.

You can also ask a few questions at the beginning of your presentation to learn more about your audience and then adapt your presentation. With SlideLizard , you can integrate polls directly into your PowerPoint and participants can then easily answer anonymously from their smartphone.

19. Too much or unimportant information

Keep it short and limit yourself to the essentials. The more facts and information you present to your audience, the less they will remember.

Also be sure to leave out information that does not fit the topic or is not relevant. You will only distract from the actual topic and lose the attention of your audience.

20. Monotone voice

If you speak in a monotone voice all the time, you are likely to lose the attention of your audience. Make your narration lively and exciting. Also, be careful not to speak too quietly, but not too loudly either. People should be able to understand you well throughout the whole room. Even if it is not easy for many people, try to deliver your speech with confidence. If you are not enthusiastic about the topic or do not seem enthusiastic, you will not be able to get your audience excited about it.

Examples of bad presentations to download

We have created a PowerPoint with examples of bad presentation slides and how to do it right. You can download it here for free.

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Helena Reitinger

Helena supports the SlideLizard team in marketing and design. She loves to express her creativity in texts and graphics.

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7 Types of Bad Presenters: Tips for Better Presentations

Delivery is key in presentations. Learn about 7 bad presenters and how you can avoid becoming one!

You can probably relate to this all too familiar scenario:  You’re attending a presentation and the presenter is almost unbearable to watch. Whether they’re stumbling through slides or speaking rapidly, you find yourself unable to process any of the information presented. But what contributes to the failures of bad presenters? First, we should define what contributes to great presentations.

What Makes a Great Presentation?

When it comes to any type of presentation, its delivery is key to success. Take it from the masters at TED Talks . Speech and body language are important to delivering your message. These affect an audience’s perception. Chris Anderson, owner of TED, summarizes what all great presentations have in common:

“And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient. And it’s this: Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listeners’ minds an extraordinary gift — a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea.”

Telling a story is one way to help tap into audience members’ minds. Storytelling is scientifically proven to stimulate the entire human brain. Whereas the use of bullet points only stimulate 2 parts of the brain. Many impactful speakers choose to use images instead of words on slides — opting to use their voice to deliver their ideas.

Additionally, no matter how many slides your presentation ends up being, make sure it carries a consistent visual theme from start to finish. This helps to guide the audience along.

What Makes a Bad Presentation?

There are many factors that contribute to bad presentations. Geoffrey James, contributing editor at Inc.com, identifies 8 bad habits that ruin presentations . Whether it’s asking for extra time or fidgeting, there are numerous ways for a project to go south.

Most bad presenters are either unprepared or unaware of their habits. Or, they’re aware of their shortcomings but don’t know how to develop better presentation skills. 

Prep for Your Next Presentation

When you’re creating your next set of slides, be sure to abide by presentation best practices . If you don’t have access to (or are worn out from) Microsoft PowerPoint, don’t fret. You have options.  Here are 3 excellent alternatives to using Microsoft PowerPoint:

• Piktochart — Piktochart is home to themed templates for infographics, reports, and presentations. Use free graphics, fonts, charts, and pictures.
• Prezi — Prezi’s navigation is more of a journey, and less of slides. Check out their premade templates for lively transitions. Plus, access your Prezi from anywhere.
• Google Slides — Similar to PowerPoint, Google Slides has free templates and simple slide transitions. Access your slides from anywhere and integrate it with other information in your Google account.

Don’t forget Mimeo when it comes to preparing your next presentation! Sign up for a free account . Then build, proof, and ship your presentation in minutes!

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Top 12 Most Annoying PowerPoint Presentation Mistakes

PowerPoint has gotten a bad rap over the years. In fact, during graduate school, my program director actually told us at one point that we couldn’t use PowerPoint for our comprehensive exams (which is an oral presentation in front of all the faculty and students required for graduation) because PowerPoint slides were too cliche, too dull, too obnoxious, too outdated, or whatever other undesirable quality you might slap onto a digital presentation platform.

So what was the reaction? Students in my program latched onto Prezi or SlideRocket or even Wix—which is actually a web design program. And the result? Just as bad, if not worse visual presentations in many cases (trust me, Prezi doesn’t solve the world’s problems; the zoom-in, zoom-out feature has lost it’s novelty; it’s obnoxious).

The truth is, whether you use PowerPoint or Prezi or anything else, you can’t blame the software for the presentation. PowerPoint is a tool; it isn’t content. Microsoft word doesn’t tell beautiful (or awful) stories, the author does. And so it goes with PowerPoint presentations: if you fill them with bad content and design, your presentation flies right out the window. How you mesh the digital slides and design with the content you deliver makes all the difference. Take the time to design a PowerPoint well and people won’t even realize it’s PowerPoint (which, by the way, became my challenge in graduate school; I ended up using PowerPoint for my exams and felt complimented when several asked me afterwards what program I used).

If you want to know a few tricks for designing good PowerPoint presentations, check out my Five Quick Tricks to Design Your PowerPoint Presentation . But if you just want to know what to avoid when giving a PowerPoint presentation, here’s a list of my top twelve most annoying   PowerPoint presentation mistakes . If these 12 tips aren’t enough, see my infographic on 40 Ways to Screw Up a PowerPoint Slide

#2: Bad Contrast Unless your goal is to give your audience a serious headache (which, don’t get me wrong, might occasionally be your goal), don’t use dark colored text on dark backgrounds or vice versa. The more visual contrast, the more enjoyable your slides will be to look at. Light blue on white? No. Blue on purple? No. White on yellow? You’ve got to be kidding! (But I’ve seen it, sadly, done.) Truthfully, the best contrast is black on white or white on black. If you do white on black, you’ll need to increase your font size a bit. Use color elsewhere. After all, pretty every book you’ve ever read uses white paper and black ink, correct? PowerPoints should be no different. Use color for headings, titles, and images. Not for bulk text (but you really shouldn’t have very many bulk amounts of text….) And do you want to know the biggest contrast faux pas? Don’t EVER use blue text on a red background or vice versa. Research has shown that those two colors on top of each other on a digital screen actually clashes so much, to many people the colors appear to vibrate. Now that’s a serious headache in the making!

#3: Staring at the Screen Your PowerPoint slides should be used to  supplement your presentation, not serve as a crutch. Don’t assume that having all your content on the slides means you don’t have to practice. One of the most annoying, unprofessional, and overt demonstrations of presentation slacker-ness is staring at the screen, reading your content to your audience. Even if you don’t have much text, avoid the pitfall of talking to the screen (it happens more often than you would believe). If you are shy and hate being in front of people, practice standing forward and moving your eyes to different parts of the room, but all in the vicinity of where your audience is. Look at audience members’ hands, hair, shirts. This isn’t as good as eye contact, but it is a whole lot better than putting your back to them and relying on the screen to do the talking. 

#6: Using the Pre-Installed Templates and Fonts Templates and default fonts aren’t all bad—if you’re in a real hurry, if you’re lazy, if you’re uncreative, or if you have a hard time coming up with new ideas on your own. Using templates and defaults, I suppose, is better than creating a horribly ugly design, but just know that you won’t impress anybody. Just a tip: a solid white background with a really nice font (like Coolvetica, for instance) can look amazingly clean, simple, and sexy. You don’t have to be a design wizard to move away from the defaults.

#10: Using Weird Fonts Even if they’re calling your name, avoid them. PowerPoint presentations are not the place to use crazy fonts, no matter how appealing they seem. When you use text, it should be immediately legible. Century Gothic is nice. So is Coolvetica or Arial or any other simple sans serif font. But don’t be using Chiller, Curlz MT, or Rage Italic. They’re not cool; they’re weird. And they’ll make you look weird for using them.

#11: Putting Important Stuff by the Edges The funny thing about giving a presentation is that you often don’t know what the room will look like until you get there. What if you put some really important text at the bottom of each slide only to discover that there is a non-removable table in front of the scree where you are presenting and the audience can’t see it? Or, what if the screen is slightly smaller than the projector projects your image (and you can’t reach the projector)? I’ve seen both of these happen. If you want to plan ahead, keep all your important information in from the edges. Then, if something gets cut off, it’s no skin off your back.

#12: Don’t Use a Bad Color Scheme If you’re not good with colors, just use black and white. There’s no shame in that. Your presentation ought to be full of images and diagrams anyway, not a lot of text and fancy stuff, so black and white is fine. If you want to use color (it does have a nice touch sometimes), then keep your color scheme to about three or four colors and two might even be better. Keep it simple and avoid clashing colors. Oh, and don’t use holiday color schemes—green and red; orange and black; purple and yellow; red, white, and blue—unless you change their saturation and add in a third/fourth color that isn’t part of the holiday. 

Related Articles

Five Quick Tricks to Design Your Powerpoint Presentation

PowerPoint Isn’t the Problem: You Are

Giving Effective Presentations: 50 Things to Consider

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6 thoughts on “ Top 12 Most Annoying PowerPoint Presentation Mistakes ”

Pingback: Presentation Approaches 2.0 | Tyler Ed Tech 541 Fall 2013

This is very informative and stresses all the valid points of why some things aren’t meant to be a part of a presentation. Instead of using clipart, you can create your own custom images in PowerPoint with the geometric shapes provided. This can put your own creativity to work! http://presentationpanda.com/uncategorized/how-to-create-your-own-images-in-powerpoint-or-keynote/

For a ‘visual communication guy’ you certainly have made a very bland, wordy article. I got bored just scrolling down the page!

On the contrary – it delivered just what I needed. If you didn’t want an informative article then go find a Powerpoint filled with animations and written in Comic Sans.

this was too helpful thank u very much lol 🙂

i was probably going to do half of these but thx for the info

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Discussion forum for current, past, and future students of any discipline completing post-graduate studies - taught or research.

Do you think a person who hates doing presentations can survive Graduate School?

I am an introvert. I always hate presentations. I am not good in doing them and most of the time, I end up being mentally blocked. Thank you for your opinions.

Possible Date & Location for WWE Bad Blood Premium Live Event Revealed

Last week, rumors emerged indicating WWE’s strong deliberation on reviving the Bad Blood pay-per-view event for a special presentation soon. Initially launched during the Attitude Era, Bad Blood gained popularity and was notably revived in 2003 and 2004, featuring iconic Hell in a Cell matches with top WWE stars such as Triple H, Kevin Nash, Shawn Michaels, and Mick Foley.

Recent reports indicated that there have been creative discussions to resurrect the Bad Blood brand, potentially timed for October. This timing would commemorate the anniversary of WWE’s first-ever Hell in a Cell match on October 5, 1997, between The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels, an event that also marked the chilling debut of the Kane character.

In an update, PWInsider suggests that WWE is exploring The State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia as a potential venue choice, with no conflicting events scheduled for that day.

With WWE focusing on nostalgic themes and capitalizing on memorable moments from its rich history, the revival of Bad Blood promises to be a nostalgic delight for fans. It would evoke memories of fierce rivalries and legendary matches held within the brutal confines of Hell in a Cell.

Are you looking forward to the potential return of Bad Blood? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Steve is the Founder of RingsideNews. He has been writing about professional wrestling since 1996. He first got into website development at the time and has been focusing on bringing his readers the best professional wrestling news at it's highest quality.

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‘Intent on Trying to Humiliate Him’: Fans Shut Down Larsa Pippen for Sliding Into Scottie’s IG Comments Amid Marcus Jordan Breakup

Just in time for Father’s Day, Scottie Pippen and his son Justin shared a little bit of their relationship with Slam High School magazine, however, Larsa’s appearance in the comments derailed the heartwarming video.

The six-time NBA champion is seen in a video clip kicking it with his 19-year-old son, who is also a baller. At the core of the narrative is the O.G. grooming his son for professional sports, akin to his legendary career with the Chicago Bulls.

It opens up with the teen saying: “My name is Justin Pippen. I’m here with my dad, the great one. Today is going to be a little day in the life. We’re going to get some breakfast, play some p-i-g, play some Connect Four, and then hit the gym.”

The video continues by capturing a few heartwarming moments between father and son, starting with breakfast featuring the former small forward showing off his chef skills.

“Let’s get this breakfast popping,” Scottie says. “Today we going to eat some banana pancakes and some eggs, because I’m trying to bulk him up like a big boy. I’ve always been cooking, especially breakfast. It’s kind of the easiest thing.”

The pair then engaged in a lively game of Connect Four and a playful basketball showdown of “p-i-g.”  

“You can’t beat me in anything,” Justin says to his father before they start, but by the end of the battle on the court Scottie swats off the trash talk and adds that he won two of the three games that day.

“I think ever since he took on the game he felt like he could beat me,” the legend said. “As you can see, he’s still feeling that way today.”

The clip ends with Scottie jabbing at his son while he lifts weights, “You wanna be me, keep doing it.”

Most people responded positively to the Father’s Day tribute. However, a few reacted to his claim that he was the “greatest” in the sport despite having played second to Michael Jordan when they were teammates.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by SLAM HIGH SCHOOL (@slam_hs)

Larsa Pippen, Justin’s mother and Scottie’s ex, who has been romantically involved with Jordan’s son Marcus, hopped into the comments, dropping three fire emojis.

The comment sparked several fans to respond .

One person said, “@larsapippen don’t need to comment on anything.”

Some were livid about her audacity to date her ex’s former teammate’s son, with one scolding, “@larsapippen making your family look bad. wat u doing w mj son.”

Others had issues with her keeping the Pippen last name while living her life as a single woman.

“It’s crazy you still running round wit my Unc last name but I’ll digress,” a comment stated.

A few fans were just through with the messiness of it all.

“We don’t know what Scottie did to her during their marriage,” another said, adding, “She seems intent on trying to humiliate him at every opportunity. She ain’t ever changing the name unless she remarries.”

“idc what Scottie allowed she’s a goofy Yu wanna run around like a toss around at least do it with your maiden name like wtf,” said another fan.

Larsa dated Marcus dated for nearly two years. News outlets had a field day with the couple rumors, not only because of the Pippen/Jordan connection but because she is 16 years his senior.

The controversial romance between Scottie Pippen’s ex-wife, Larsa, and the son of Michael Jordan was further unraveled during a recent episode of Tamron Hall. Thoughts??? #LarsaPippen #MichaelJordan #MarcusJordan #TamronHall #Lovelytitv pic.twitter.com/JF3qb15DV3 — lovelyti (@lovelyti) March 1, 2023

The two met in 2019. Rumors of their romance first started to swirl in late 2022, and they officially confirmed their relationship in early 2023. The couple became public with their relationship on Instagram in January 2023.

While the two were in love, many did not believe that they should be together, namely Marcus’ billionaire father.

According to Finurah, When asked last July by paparazzi in Paris whether he approved of his son dating the 49-year-old woman who was previously married to a teammate, the billionaire behind Brand Jordan replied with a firm “No!”

They eventually broke up in March 2024 , citing differing life goals​. Rumors had it that Larsa wanted to get married, and Marcus refused to give her an engagement ring. The 32-year-old did give her a promise ring , but that’s really not the same.

The two have since unfollowed each other on social media , giving her plenty of time to reinvest in her family.

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Multi-Stain Multi-Level Convolutional Network for Multi-Tissue Breast Cancer Image Segmentation

• Modi, Akash
• Jha, Sumit Kumar
• Mishra, Purnendu
• Kumar, Rajiv
• Aatre, Kiran
• Singh, Gursewak
• Mathur, Shubham

Digital pathology and microscopy image analysis are widely employed in the segmentation of digitally scanned IHC slides, primarily to identify cancer and pinpoint regions of interest (ROI) indicative of tumor presence. However, current ROI segmentation models are either stain-specific or suffer from the issues of stain and scanner variance due to different staining protocols or modalities across multiple labs. Also, tissues like Ductal Carcinoma in Situ (DCIS), acini, etc. are often classified as Tumors due to their structural similarities and color compositions. In this paper, we proposed a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) based Multi-class Tissue Segmentation model for histopathology whole-slide Breast slides which classify tumors and segments other tissue regions such as Ducts, acini, DCIS, Squamous epithelium, Blood Vessels, Necrosis, etc. as a separate class. Our unique pixel-aligned non-linear merge across spatial resolutions empowers models with both local and global fields of view for accurate detection of various classes. Our proposed model is also able to separate bad regions such as folds, artifacts, blurry regions, bubbles, etc. from tissue regions using multi-level context from different resolutions of WSI. Multi-phase iterative training with context-aware augmentation and increasing noise was used to efficiently train a multi-stain generic model with partial and noisy annotations from 513 slides. Our training pipeline used 12 million patches generated using context-aware augmentations which made our model stain and scanner invariant across data sources. To extrapolate stain and scanner invariance, our model was evaluated on 23000 patches which were for a completely new stain (Hematoxylin and Eosin) from a completely new scanner (Motic) from a different lab. The mean IOU was 0.72 which is on par with model performance on other data sources and scanners.

• Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;
• Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence;
• Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Image and Video Processing