Are you sick and tired of boring and lifeless PowerPoint presentations?
Do you want to create an effective one?
If your answer is “YES” on both questions, you’re in the right place.
Here are five simple tips to help you to add a little energy to your next PowerPoint presentation.
Here’s what you need:
- Planning
A little planning goes a long way, since the point of your slides is to illustrate what you intend to say to your audience. You should write out or, at least, outline your presentation before trying to put together slides, unless you are an expert at improvising.
And last but not least, make sure your script follows good storytelling convention (beginning, middle, and end) and builds towards some sort of climax. The point is to make your audience truly appreciate each slide but be curious to find out what’s next.
- One thing at a time
At any given moment, only the thing you’re talking about should be on the screen. The audience reads almost instantly every slide as soon as it’s displayed. For example, if you have five points you plan to talk about, split it into 5 different slides. Otherwise your audience will be four steps ahead of you, and instead of listening with interest to the bullet point you’re talking about at the moment will be distracted for reading the rest of the information from the slide. Just reveal one new point at a time as you reach it.
If you want to be a great presenter, you should control the flow of information so you and your audience can stay in sync.
- Don’t use paragraphs
If you don’t want to kill your audience with boredom poisoning, you should avoid putting whole paragraphs into the slides. The slides represent just the illustrations of your presentation, not the presentation itself. So, use them to underline and reinforce what you’re saying during your presentation and save the paragraphs of text for your script. PowerPoint has an awesome function that allows you to display notes on the presenter’s screen that don’t get sent to the projector so only you can see them. How cool is that?
- Pay attention to design
With PowerPoint, you can add visual “flash” to your slides in many ways, by using fades, swipes, flashing text, and other stuff – just with a few mouse clicks. Our advice is to avoid using cheesy effects and focus on simple design basics:
- Use sans serif fonts (Arial, Helvetica, or Calibri) for body text because they are the easiest to read on screen.
- Use “fancy” and decorative fonts only for slide headers, but make sure they’re easy to read. If you like decorative fonts (handwriting, art nouveau, etc.) so much, you may use them but only for large headlines at the top of the page. However, it’s the best to stick to a classy serif font like Georgia or Baskerville.
- Use light background and put dark text on it because slides are easy to read that way. However, if you must use a dark background (your school or university uses a standard template with a dark background, etc.) make sure to use quite a light text like white, cream, light grey. You can also use pastels colors and maybe bump the font size up for a bit.
- Use left or right text alignment for all your text because centered text is harder to read and looks incompetent.
- Use images moderately
You should use images, but only when they add important information to the text or make an abstract point more concrete. Avoid using PowerPoint’s built-in clipart because people had them on their slides a thousand times before you. Instead, you should consider putting images from different sources or the charts you created yourself.
The bottom line: Try to avoid clutter in your presentation. Just putt a headline, a few bullet points, maybe an image on your slides and that is all you need. Anything more than that runs the risk of losing your audience as they sort it all out. If you happen to find the task challenging, use FreelanceHouse services to create your perfect Power Point Presentation.
