Guidelines for Effective PowerPoint Presentations Have you ever been bored during a PowerPoint presentation?
It is probably not your fault. PowerPoint is best used as a tool for using visual information to tell your story. The combination of your words, along with the visual images you project, should wake up your viewers, not put them to sleep with bullet point after bullet point.
These guidelines will help you present more compelling, dynamic presentations.
Slide Design People like pictures; they do not like lists. And since PowerPoint is a tool for displaying visual information, not a word processor, you should think of your presentation as images, not just words. Do not display anything that does not help tell your story, convince your audience, or make your point.
The same rules that apply to good, clean writing apply to good, clean design—make every word and every image count. Eliminate the non-essential, and you will increase elegance and the clarity of simplicity. Do not shoot for typical; shoot for great! Remember that great presentations connect with people’s minds and their emotions.
Writing Keep it simple: Do not make the mistake of thinking that your audience will not understand anything if you do not tell them everything. Find the essence of your message and stick to it.
• Present ideas succinctly, with lean prose and short sentences or phrases.
• Always use the active voice rather than the passive.
• Avoid most negative statements and watch out for double negatives.
• Use consistent capitalization rules, remembering that a mix of upper- and lowercase is easiest to read and understand.
• Always check spelling and grammar.
• Include a final references slide and in-text citations when needed.
Tell a story: Remember that you are telling a story. What is that story? Can you reduce it to a few sentences or, better yet, just one sentence? Like filmmakers pitching a concept, you should be able to pitch the purpose of your presentation. Do not begin creating content until you have the pitch down.
Then, lay out your ideas and shuffle, reduce, and shake them up until you are satisfied with the content and order and are ready to begin creating the slides.
Develop a clear, strategic introduction to provide context for the presentation. Present one concept or idea per slide, and organize your ideas logically between and within slides. Do not use more than one conclusion slide to recap main ideas.
You may wish to use a roadmap slide at the beginning of the presentation to give audience members a preview of what they can expect. Make sure the map you design reflects solid logic and structure, and that the presentation that follows does not go off-road. As PowerPoint expert