Using Presentation Map Indictors
By Dave Paradi, MBA, co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint"

A presentation map indicator is a small text or graphic that is on every slide in your presentation and gives the audience member an indication of where you are in the presentation. Most great presentations are broken up into sections that each make a specific point that moves the audience from where they are at the start of the presentation to where you want them to be at the end. Many times you will announce the start of each section, but in the middle of the section, you do not repeat that section heading as each new slide is displayed. If someone arrives late or has to leave for a few minutes, the presentation map indicator allows them to quickly catch up to where you are in the presentation and your message has a better chance of making a positive impact on them.

I now use a presentation map indicator on almost every slide presentation I give. I have had many comments from audience members that they were able to follow my presentation much better due to the indicator. I have even had some people who arrived late say that it allowed them to get up to speed with where I was in the presentation and quickly grasp the message.

There are two main map approaches that I have used effectively. One is if I have the presentation broken up into sections that are numbered, as in a training workshop, I will use the section numbers as the indicator. The other approach is to use the section headings as the map indicator if I am doing a shorter presentation that may have only three or four sections.

There are a number of ways to represent the map indicator on your slides, but here are two that seem to work well for me.

Bottom Linear Map Indicator
In this method, you create a linear map of the sections along the bottom of the slide and then have some indicator such as a box or circle point out the current section. Here is an example of a slide taken from a training workshop with nine sections. The nine sections are indicated in a linear map of numbers in the lower left corner of the slide and a circle shows which section this slide belongs to.

Here is an example of a slide taken from a shorter presentation where there are three sections and the linear map shows the three section titles and a box indicates the current section.

In this method, you create a circle in a lower corner of the screen and divide it into the number of sections that the presentation is divided into. Then you use a contrasting color to point out which section this slide is in. This method is useful only when you have a relatively small number of sections in the presentation. Here is an example from a presentation that has four sections, and the pie-shaped map indicator is located in the lower right corner of the slide.

If you want your message to have the greatest impact on your audience, I suggest you add a presentation map indicator to your slides and watch how a small addition to your presentation slides makes a big difference as people increasingly miss a portion of a presentation in this ever rushed organizational climate.

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© MMIII Dave Paradi

Dave Paradi’s Think Outside the Slide™ approach helps presenters get results by showing them how to quickly create effective PowerPoint presentations. He is the co-author of “Guide to PowerPoint”, part of the Prentice Hall Series in Advanced Business Communication. He offers a free PowerPoint e-course, newsletter and articles on his web site at www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com.