I'm going to give you a whole lot of tips in this course and homework assignments. But here's one I want to throw out early in the game. Because if you get this, it's going to solve almost all your problems. You need to apply a two prong test to every single slide you use in a PowerPoint presentation. The first test is does this make your audience understand the point you're trying to communicate more effectively than you just saying? The second point is, does this slide make your audience remember a particular message better than you just saying?

If you can't say yes to both of those concepts, throw the slide in the trashcan now. It's very easy to test. If things these things are true. You just asked. Test your whole presentation on a group of people maybe colleagues from down the hall are different department. When you're done.

Ask them what slides they remember. Ask them what message points they remember. If they don't remember the messages that are most important to you, your slide didn't work. They don't remember literally what's on your slide and the message behind it. It didn't work. Throw it in the trashcan.

If you just follow that one rule. You can eliminate almost all the problems that destroy PowerPoint presentations and make them tedious bores