Let's talk about slides. Now, whether you're using PowerPoint, or Prezi, or keynote, or whatever the software, there is no excuse for bad slides. And yet, I still see so many examples of them at conferences like this. Oh, this the problem with these slides is they're just full of text. And in many cases, facts and figures and difficult to read tables are so dull. And not only that most people can't read them from the back.

You really have to make your visuals very large and expand out different figures in order for people to be able to read them. So text isn't completely banned from a slide, but from a design point of view, that advice would be five to seven words, Max On each slide, so if you need to show a difficult table, think very hard about how you could maybe illustrate that by using a pie chart, or some other sort of picture, or at least pulling out the different pieces that you want people to look at. Even better, why not try telling a story and just having one image behind you like that. And a good tip is if you want to put text on that slide, then try not to put it at the bottom because it will often be obscured by people's heads, they won't be able to read it.

So on the whole try to have your text at the top like this. Next time I see you please don't let me catch you with terrible slides. I don't want to spend my time with clients working on their visuals that should be a given. I want to get on to working with you on your style on on how you're writing your content. So Let's get those slides sorted out. And remember, don't write your talk by working on the slides, write your talk on a postcard, and then add in any visuals later that you really, really need.