Get your audience’s attention by adding anticipation

A presentation that communicates well uses a slide to help the audience understand and remember your point. If you use the Tell ‘n’ Show^SM Method, you can do this easily.

But, when your topic is a little boring, like a review of 3rd quarter sales, you may need a little help to keep the attention of your audience. Usually, interaction with the audience (asking them a question, for example) will not be appropriate. (It seems silly to ask them to guess what the numbers were.)

Instead, you can get your audience’s attention by adding a little anticipation. So, instead of a slide like this

You could start with a slide like this

Don’t you think that will get their attention? It’ll probably get a laugh, too. This delivery technique requires you to ungroup the graph and animate its pieces to appear as you explain. Finally, you’ll reveal the secret, the increase in 3rd quarter sales.

Here’s a video that shows how you could explain this slide. By keeping the number unknown until near the end of the explanation, you ensure that people will listen!

To bring in a chart piece by piece, you can use PowerPoint’s standard animation, but it may not give you the options you want. Instead, you can ungroup the chart and manually add the animation you need. This is a bit of a chore and you lose the connection between the chart and the data (if any). In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, you can’t actually ungroup a chart, so you need to use a workaround. For more information, see the tip below.

Related tips

Animate a chart or table