The Reflections from the Lake Guide to Making a PowerPoint Presentation at Work

1. Remember the point of making the presentation is to make yourself look smart, not to communicate thoughts and ideas to the audience
2. If you are going to add a joke, make sure that it is appropriate. Topics such as Sex, Religion, Babboon Butts and Wizards should be avoided 96% of the time, safe topics include Mondays, how you traveled to the presentation and Hilary Clinton.
3. Each slide should contain as many words as the font will allow. Bullet points actually synthesize information into easy remember nuggets for your audience, you are much better off with whole paragraphs of text.
4. If you actually decide to use a flowchart (which are really hard to create) the minimum suggested number of points is 60. All that clutter will make you seem really smart and intimidate people from asking questions.
5. Once per slide name drop someone. Often people will make the mistake of only name dropping senior executives or so called Harvard Business School experts, the real master will throw in a made up name to appear to be even more important. One piece of advice make the name very tough to spell or very common so if some 22 year old whipper snapper Googles the name he comes up blank. (E.g. "As the visionary Swedish Industrialist Sven Sborgmosk said...:)
6. Whenever you are asked a question, before responding say "Good Question"