Many people put plenty of work into their presentation. Typically, when someone possesses a lot of valid data it is hard for them to decide what to exclude from their presentation. Especially when it took a lot of time to prepare that data. Some people don’t want to leave anything out. As a result, most presenters end up dumping a lot of data on their audience. The question is, how much is too much?

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The Aim Is To Facilitate in the Decision Making Process

As a presenter, your goal is to make your audience’s life easier by explaining results in a way that helps everyone understand or explaining why a certain solution should be applied.

You may think that the audience needs to know many of the details that you know, but they don’t. If those details took you a while to understand, then how do you expect the audience to understand them in a short presentation. It will most likely overwhelm many people.

How to Make The Presentation Less Complicated to Understand

When giving a presentation full of details, it is easy to lose your audience. If your presentation is full of information, then start with the conclusion. Put the result of your analysis at the beginning and make sure to repeat it thought the presentation.

Include The Audience In The Analysis

Start with the conclusion and show them the assumptions you’ve made. Get an agreement from the audience on the assumptions. Get an agreement from the audience on the sources of the input data, etc. When you discuss the process and how the analysis was done, you’re taking them from point A to point B to point C. Thus keeping their attention and helping them understand the complicated data.

Know Your Audience

The detail you include in your presentation will depend on your audience’s needs and wants. Interact with the audience and understand their expectations in order to deliver a good presentation for them. If they’re only interested in the conclusion, then try to include the least amount of detail possible. If they want to know the process, then give them more details but make sure you’re not overloading them with too much data.

Image Courtesy:

Information overload by Jorge Franganillo [CC BY 2.0] via flickr