The Art Of Presenting

I had to attend a stupid and, at least on my part, unnecessary training course last week about Microsoft Powerpoint. This came about because my boss was impressed by a couple of young staff who did a powerpoint presentation at a recent staff briefing session complete with graphs, charts and one slide where the text came in from the side.He was very impressed.

He wanted to know why we weren't all doing the same when we did our presentations to staff

The fact that the young things also stumbled and mumbled their way through the whole thing obviously passed him by. The real art of presenting is building a rapport with your audience not dazzling them with fancy tricks and mind numbing stats.

Anyway there we all were sat in front of PC being given lessons on how to create a Powerpoint presentation by a girl almost young enough to be my grandaughter let alone my daughter..

Anyone who has applied for a job in the last ten years and has had to do presentation as part of the process can use Powerpoint. If you turned up at an interview brandishing your slides and asking for the Overhead Projector it is very likely the normally young admin assistant/pa who greets you would not have a clue what you were talking about.So I already know how to create a presentation and can even set up the projector etc. I'm not an expert but I can get by.

However,judging by the rest of my area management team's reaction to attending this session I am the only one of them who has applied for a job in the last ten years. Despite sitting through many hours of tedious powerpoint presentations in their working lives, none of them had ever created a presentation themselves.

My presentation was a quirky non work related topic, music. Doing it got me thinking about music and me and how I listen to music and what music I listen to. More of that later