By: Catheryn
Cheal, Online Institute, Art and Cynthia Desrochers, CELT
Here
are ten suggestions that will help you to improve your PowerPoint presentations.
1.PowerPoint
should organize and enhance your talk, not BE your talk.Its
function is only to summarize your talk or to show images, diagrams, or
charts.Period.
2.Less
is more.Use
key words and simple diagrams.Your
audience has about three minutes per slide to understand both your slide
and your talks, so keep it simple with 3 to 5 bulleted key words under
a heading.Complex diagrams and
charts will take longer, so don’t expose your audience to more than about
15 slides an hour.Edit your final
slide presentation mercilessly.
3.Assume
your audience is literate.You
don’t need to read your slides out loud, but keep the font size at 16 point,
or bigger, with sans serif font like Arial, so everyone can see the text
easily from anywhere in the room.Do
not put tables or exhibits with a lot of numbers in small font that is
hard to read.
4.Special
relationships are crucial.Center
the most important points at the top of your slide with sub-points indented
beneath them in a smaller font.Balance
all elements on the page with equal amounts of empty space surrounding
them for easy reading.
5.Color
fonts.All
color has mood and style, so consider its effect on your theme.Color
can highlight an important point or completely obscure text.Dark
text on a light background is the easiest to read.
6.Graphs
summarize.Bar
graphs provide easy-to-grasp visual data.Think
twice before you use doughnut (circle) or radar charts in a PowerPoint
presentation.
7.A
little animation goes a long way.Flying
phrases spiraling in from the left side of your PowerPoint slide seems
like a lot of fun the first time, but the fact is that they distract viewers
and slow things down.Keep your animation
simple and use it to focus audience attention to your point and not to
distract them.
8.Clip
art is cute but often vacuous.Instead
find a photo that adds useful information to your topic.Digital
photos may be scanned or easily acquired from the Internet by right-clicking
any Web image and choosing Save Image As.
9.Trial
runs save you embarrassment.Be
prepared to make sure all the hardware connections are working before your
talk.Check your font size and color
from the back of the room and turn off your computer’s Sleep or Save Energy
mode so the screen doesn’t suddenly go black during the talk.
10.Give
the audience a copy.PowerPoint
handouts with space provided for note-taking allow your audience to engage
in thinking about what you are saying instead of frantically trying to
copy the text from the PowerPoint screen.Give
PowerPoint handouts to everyone in the audience at the beginning of your
talk.Also, it is a good idea to
handout any tables and charts that are hard to read.