Because we all deserve a do-over

If you are a golfer, your favorite word is “mulligan.” That’s when you hit a dreadful shot, usually into a forest or a lake, and you drop a second ball at your feet and essentially proclaim, “that one didn’t count.” You then hit again and go on your merry way, a happier camper for it.

In PowerPoint parlance, our mulligan is the makeover – that fantastic and fantastical opportunity to press Pause and create an alternate reality. That horrible slide with eight long-winded bullets and a postage-stamp photo? No, you didn’t mean to do that. It doesn’t count. You get a do-over. Mulligan!

Makeovers are the most popular of all seminars offered at the Presentation Summit, the annual conference for the industry. But what exactly is a makeover? Is it just the prettying up of a bad slide? In fact, there are many forms of PowerPoint mulligans, and they all might be on display during this hour:

Message: Well-intended content creators often lose sight of the story they mean to tell.

Structure: If the foundation of your presentation is flawed (like trying to crate slides that serve both as visuals and as handouts), you will be swimming upstream the whole time.

Slide design: The classic case of “who created this sludge and how can we fix it?”

PowerPoint technique: Most users of the software are undertrained and rarely go below the surface of PowerPoint’s feature set. That can have a profound effect on how they build their slides and deliver their presentations.

Delivery: A well-designed presentation both relies on and encourages presenters to be at the top of their games.
 
If you have slides that need a mulligan, send them to Rick – he might make them over during this hour. That would be a $1,500 design session that you would get for free.  Upload slides here.

Rick Altman has been hired by hundreds of companies, listened to by tens of thousands of professionals, and read by millions of people, all of whom seek better results with their presentation content and delivery. He covers the whole of the industry, from message crafting, through presentation design, slide creation, software technique, and delivery.

He is the host of the Presentation Summit, now in its 24th season as the most prominent learning event in the world for the presentation community, and he is the author of the newly published "Crush Your Next Virtual Presentation."

When not in front of audiences or in the Zoom studio that used to be his daughter's bedroom, he will invariably be found on some sports field, be it a tennis or pickleball court, a baseball diamond, or a golf course.