Last year in my English class, we had to do a research project on Greek god or goddess, so naturally, being the nerd that I am, I decided to make a Power Point about it. There were a handful of other students who chose the Power Point route as well, and in my opinion all of them did fairly well, except for one young lady. In all of my year of seeing Power Points in school, I have never seen one fail in such a wondrous way. Not only did she clump whole paragraphs onto her slides, making the text so small you could barely read it, but worst of all, she had forgotten to take out the blue, underlined hyper links from when she copied and pasted it from Wikipedia, to her slide. Although I'm not sure if any of you have done something quite that obvious in your Power Points, I'm sure almost all of us have managed to ramble on in one and make our text so small that no one can read it. But to help you out, here is a short list of things NOT to do when you're making a Power Point.
1. Lots of unbroken, small text
This is by far the most popular mistake in the Power Point world of projects. People think that a Power Point is the same thing as a Word document, and that the more they write, the smarter they look, and the more impressed the teacher will be. Please, do not write a whole paragraph about why your business will do well in 2020, or why your favorite animal is Red Panda, and please, by all means, do not copy and paste from Wikipedia. Instead, spread it out over a bunch of slides, add a picture or those pointless clip art things.
2. Lots of bulleted items and lists
Another popular mistake. I think people feel the need to simply list everything they can think of in their Power Points. "Oh what's that? I have to research the 50 states? I know! I'll make a Power Point that has a slide with all 50 state capitols on it! Then it'll look like I did real research!". Big lists and bullets are for notes, not Power Point slides.
3. Stupid backgrounds
I think we've all seen this one. Someone wants to impress us with a Power Point by putting a cool photo of a landscape in the background. The only problem though, is that once they put the text over it, no one can read all of it. My favorite example of this is when, at my church, they made a Power Point with the worship song lyrics on them so the whole congregation could sing along. They fancied up the background with mountains, and sunsets, and eagles, and ocean scenes. But once they put the text over it all, How Great is Our God, became something more like "ow G rt is o r Go" since the white text blended in with everything, but luckily since every Christian knows the lyrics to that song by heart, we didn't have to worry to much.
4. Pointless animations
Out of this whole list, none of these annoy me more than this one. This is the person that wants to really impress his classmates by showing off his "tech skills" in being able to find the animation tool. I really don't see any point in this tool, since it was basically made for kids to make text fly in and out of the page, in circles, and squiggles at hypersonic speeds. Luckily, I think many people lose the interest in this tool as they grow older.
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