I’ve been avoiding PowerPoint for a long time. It’s not that it intimidates me. I’ve created PowerPoint presentations for clients before, and I never found the program hard to use. But I’ve sat through too many boring PowerPoint presentations to get excited about using it myself.

It was with reluctance, therefore, that I lost my PowerPoint virginity to a crowd of nonprofit employees and volunteers last week. I had a lot of material to cover – stuff like survey results and bulleted lists that lent itself well to the PowerPoint platform. The seminar went great, but I ran into a few snafus that could have been easily avoided.

Why not learn from my mistakes? Here are five tips for a great PowerPoint presentation:

1. Cover all your bases. I emailed the PowerPoint file to the program facilitator before leaving my office, and brought another copy of the file on a USB stick. But formatting issues rendered some slides illegible (see 2) which made me wish I had brought printouts. In retrospect, it’s probably better to be too prepared than not prepared enough.

2. Don’t use weird fonts. I designed a gorgeous PowerPoint presentation with several fonts downloaded from the web, not knowing that these wouldn’t be available on the  computer in the meeting room. When I went to pull up the slides, the text came up in an ugly standard font and was all out of alignment, making it impossible to read. Next time, I’m sticking with Arial.

3. Figure out where you’re going to stand, and make sure your audience can see. I had a difficult time working the projector without standing in front of the screen, so it made for some odd running back and forth from one side of the room to the next. Try to figure this out beforehand.

4. Be OK with silence. I tend to rush, and using PowerPoint made this even worse because I rushed from slide to slide. Get comfortable with silence, and use each slide transition as a reminder to take a slow breath.  Had I done this, I think my audience would have felt more at ease.

5. Put your PowerPoint to work after the event. One thing I enjoyed about using PowerPoint was how easily I could post the entire presentation on the web for other people to see. Check out SlideShare for instructions. It even lets you upload audio of your speech to accompany each PowerPoint slide. I’ve included my own below.

What PowerPoint mistakes have you made in the past – and what tips or lessons have you learned along the way? Let me know in the comments section below.