What is the difference between the Power Point presentations you did at college versus work?

What is the difference between the power point presentations that you did for your classmates and professors in college versus the PPTs you have to present to company executives during meetings? Please explain.

 
Best Response
ssild90:

My school presentations looked like absolute piece of crap compared to my current presentations. I used pre-set designs in school ffs, not to even mention shadowing.

I've found the opposite...(but I should disclose that I am the lone MBA-type in our whole Finance department).

My current group wants a set format that looks like dogshit. I've built my own templates, and everyone knows when the drafts come from me. But everything that goes to the board goes through our marketing department (who, aside from my media relations colleague, is on the whole incompetent. and that's me being nice.)

EDIT: A few things to keep in mind: 1) If your company doesn't use a standard template, develop one. This will keep all of your presentations looking similar and professional (and everyone will know who made them without you having to sign each slide). Learn how to use the slide master and to insert logos. Don't use a standard format from PPT. 2) Use a damn serif font. Those sans serif things scream college student/hipster. (I recognize this is a personal preference, but at least change the font type to something other than Calibri.) 3) Keep it clean. Similar shades of blue/red/green/whatever the organizations branded colors are. Go for something muted. 4) Some places will actively cane you for using callout boxes and progress boxes (mine is one of those places). Be mindful of this. 5) For the love of god, pie is for dessert. Not charts. Anything you want to depict via pie chart you can do with a bar graph (which are much easier to compare side by side). Marketing groups (at least mine) seem to be incapable of grasping this.

Director of Finance and Corporate Development: 2020 - Present Manager of FP&A and Corporate Development: 2019 - 2020 Corporate Finance, Strategy and Development: 2011 - 2019 "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin
 

I've heard people say sans serif is for reading on screen, serif for reading on paper. It's bullshit and there is no evidence for why it should or shouldn't be this way, but I have found some people expect it this way

 

My school presentations were terrible because I didn't know how to do anything in PowerPoint

My work presentations are terrible because we insist on using a horrendous theme, the execs love to see animations and fucking clipart, and everyone skips meetings so they expect everything to be on the slide - not just the bullets/key details.

 

They are the same. The only difference now is that my associate makes me go through 10 iterations of alignment,

The fool thinks himself to be a wise man, while the wise man thinks himself to be a fool.
 

Nobody ever threw my printed-out deck at me and screamed at me to get the fuck out of his office and if I ever brought him another pie chart I'd be fired, when I was in college.

Stakes got higher.

"Son, life is hard. But it's harder if you're stupid." - my dad
 

Some coworkers went to a PowerPoint "training" and the guy told them to put a question for the title of each slide. Naturally everyone took this super literally and began producing the world's shittiest PowerPoints.

I refused when my boss told me to reword every title as a question once. It was the most asinine thing in the world. Just the fact these "professionals" were sent to powerpoint training at the midpoint of their careers says a lot

 

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