Complexity is your enemy when you are creating PowerPoint slides. The problem many of us have is our computers are so good our desktop, our laptops, the graphics are so good that when we're creating a PowerPoint slide, it looks great when we're staring at it 18 inches away. And we can put all sorts of complex graphs, we can have eight color coded bar lines that mean different things, and it's perfectly clear to you looking at it. Here's the problem. When your audience is looking at you delivering your PowerPoint presentation, and then they're looking up to the big screen or even a TV screen eight feet away, it's just not the same experience. There's not the same visual clarity that there was on your computer 18 inches away, so they can no longer make out the 18 different color coded bars.

It's all blurring together. They just don't see it. So you've really got to look at this through the lens of your audience. So you're never prepared to deliver a PowerPoint presentation unless you've seen how it appears to your audience. So it doesn't really matter how good it looks on your computer, when you've created it, you've got to project it on the screen that people are going to see it. Now if it's in your own conference room in your own organization, that's going to be pretty easy.

If you're delivering a keynote conference to a trade association at a convention 1000 miles away and you're never going to be there till the night before. You need to somehow figure out what it's going to look like in that arena. Get there the night before and practice. And also practice just in your own organization on other screens so you can see how it looks because so many people make the mistake of having something looks great. on a screen that's right in front of them, but no one can see it. No one can understand it once the screen is further away or has less clarity