PowerPoint is the most popular tool for giving presentations. It's ideal for everything from sales talks to academic lectures.
The program makes compiling and running a presentation easy, but there are still pitfalls that can trip up even the best presenter.
Presenting is about a lot more than displaying slides on a screen. You have a message to deliver and the presentation is a means of getting that message across.
You'll need some presentation skills to engage your audience and persuade them to listen to what you're saying, but the way you set up and use your PowerPoint slides can also help a lot.
Slides are much like printed pages, but with less on them. Many of the design guidelines that apply to word-processed or desktop-published pages also apply to presentation slides. Don't put too much on them, and design your layout for readability as well as aesthetic appeal.
With a presentation, though, there's a degree of urgency. Your audience will only be looking at any one slide for a few minutes, at most.
The information it contains has to be available at a glance. There's not much time for re-reading, so what you write has to come across clearly first time.
The 12 tips in this feature are written specifically for people using PowerPoint, but many of the ideas are equally applicable to other presentation graphics programs.
Most modern applications of this type, such as Lotus Freelance and Wordperfect Presentations, offer the same tools and much the same way of achieving results. The presentation tips described here will be just as useful to devotees of these programs as to users of PowerPoint.
Too many words
One of the most obvious mistakes in a presentation, and one that is most frequently made, is to put too much text on a slide. This does two things: it leads your audience into reading the slide rather than listening to you, and it leads you into reading the slide aloud, rather than using it as a memory aid.
The best presentations are the ones where only the core of your message is on the slide, so the audience has to watch you to get important extra information.
Try and limit any slide to no more than three or four bullet points or a short paragraph of text. Any bullet point should be backed up by only a sentence or two of explanatory text, at most.
If a particular topic requires five or six bullet points, remove the explanatory text and offer this yourself. Also think about animating the text onto the slide, point by point.
If you need more points to cover a topic, restructure the section into two slides, each with a smaller number of bullets. You're aiming for simplicity in every slide, so your audience will concentrate on what you're putting across.
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