Anyone who knows me would know that I generally *hate* using power point presentations (or in my case, Open Office Impress presentations). Personally, I think it fosters a one-way relationship between The Trainer and The Participants, where the former shows what she knows and the latter is expected to simply listen. What usually happens is that the trainer has her go with her presentation, everyone else listens, and then afterwards some time is alloted for questions and feedback (one of my pet peeves is when the trainer takes too long with the presentation and as a result the 'open forum' is tacked on at the end for a few minutes as some kind of cursory exercise).

But I think there are instances where having prepared presentations can actually support effective training, especially when they are used within cotext and with interactivity in mind:

• For training workshops where the participants are non-native speakers of the language of the training (in Asia, in particular, where participants in regional training events have to compromise with English as a common language) having a visual presentation to support speech could be an effective way to narrow the language gaps. Kind of like having sub-titles to allow the learners to read the words that a trainer's accent may be obscuring from their ears.
• For sessions where complex ideas are being tackled, a presentation can accommodate images that will make the complexities more understandable.
• For sessions that do not have adequate time and space for full interactivity, a presentation can be a good way to illustrate topics faster so that there can be more time for interactive learning.
• For training workshops where internet access is slow or simply not present, a presentation of screencaps of the specific application would be very, very useful.

When I am faced with one (or all) of the situations above, these are the personaly guidelines I use to create presentations:

• Limit the number of slides and trainer monologue. I have a 7-slide maximum (not including the title slide). This is based on something I learned as a kid -- that George Miller in 1956 said that the human short-term memory can only store 7 (+/- 2) chunks of data. But more practically, if there are more than 7 slides in a presentation, it means that I'll be talking too much and not leaving enough time for the participants to actually talk back and ask questions.
• Remember the Chinese proverb: "One picture is worth ten thousand words". Before writing up or cutting and pasting text into my slide, I always try to imagine if there is a graphical way of presenting the same idea. This is not just about thinking about ideas metaphorically, this is about making visual connections of words / ideas / concepts.
• Chunk text. A wall of text is not pretty (especially if that wall is directly cut and pasted from a project report). It is good to have one main concept per slide, and to limit the lines of text in a slide (again, for me the magic number 7 [+/- 2] works). It is also a good idea to consider using the formating options that presentation software allow us -- bold, increase the size of, use a different colour for, or underline key words and phrases in the text.
• Build in interactivity. One of the things I like to do is to devote slides to questions that I would post to participants after every two or three slides. This allows me to stop monologue-ing and pass the 'talking stick' to the participants in the middle of a presentation. It's also a good way to know if they're still with me or if they've all tuned out.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. What guidelines do you use to create your presentations?