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Effective PowerPoints

The document provides 10 tips for improving PowerPoint presentations and making them more engaging. The tips include writing a script before creating slides, only displaying one main point per slide, avoiding paragraphs of text on slides, using simple visual design principles, sparingly using images, engaging the audience outside of the slides, opening with a hook, asking questions of the audience, maintaining an engaging tone of voice, and being willing to break rules when it improves the presentation. The overall message is that PowerPoint presentations are often improved by focusing more on an engaging spoken presentation and using slides as a visual aid rather than as the main presentation content.

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Rodolfo Rudy Aguirre
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64 views7 pages

Effective PowerPoints

The document provides 10 tips for improving PowerPoint presentations and making them more engaging. The tips include writing a script before creating slides, only displaying one main point per slide, avoiding paragraphs of text on slides, using simple visual design principles, sparingly using images, engaging the audience outside of the slides, opening with a hook, asking questions of the audience, maintaining an engaging tone of voice, and being willing to break rules when it improves the presentation. The overall message is that PowerPoint presentations are often improved by focusing more on an engaging spoken presentation and using slides as a visual aid rather than as the main presentation content.

Uploaded by

Rodolfo Rudy Aguirre
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Oh no! Not another boring PowerPoint presentation!

My eyes, my
eyes!!!
How much does it suck to be in the audience for yet another drawnout, boring, lifeless slideshow? Worse yet, how much does it such to
be the onegiving it?
The truth is, bad PowerPoint happens to good people, and quite
often the person giving the presentation is just as much a victim as
the poor sods listening to her or him.
Here are ten tips to help you add a little zing! to your next
presentation. They are, of course, far from comprehensive, but
theyre a start. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments.

1. Write a script.
A little planning goes a long way. Most presentations are written in
PowerPoint (or some other presentation package) without any sort of
rhyme or reason.
Thats bass-ackwards. Since the point of your slides is to illustrate
and expand what you are going to say to your audience. You should
know what you intend to say and then figure out how to visualize it.
Unless you are an expert at improvising, make sure you write out or
at least outline your presentation before trying to put together slides.
And make sure your script follows good storytelling conventions:
give it a beginning, middle, and end; have a clear arc that builds

towards some sort of climax; make your audience appreciate each


slide but be anxious to find out whats next; and when possible,
always leave em wanting more.

2. One thing at a time, please.


At any given moment, what should be on the screen is the thing
youre talking about. Our audience will almost instantly read every
slide as soon as its displayed; if you have the next four points you
plan to make up there, theyll be three steps ahead of you, waiting for
you to catch up rather than listening with interest to the point youre
making.
Plan your presentation so just one new point is displayed at any
given moment. Bullet points can be revealed one at a time as you
reach them. Charts can be put on the next slide to be referenced
when you get to the data the chart displays. Your job as presenter is
to control the flow of information so that you and your audience stay
in sync.

3. No paragraphs.
Where most presentations fail is that their authors, convinced they
are producing some kind of stand-alone document, put everything
they want to say onto their slides, in great big chunky blocks of text.
Congratulations. Youve just killed a roomful of people. Cause of
death: terminal boredom poisoning.

Your slides are the illustrations for your presentation, not the
presentation itself. They should underline and reinforce what youre
saying as you give your presentation save the paragraphs of text
for your script. PowerPoint and other presentation software have
functions to display notes onto the presenters screen that do not get
sent to the projector, or you can use notecards, a separate word
processor document, or your memory. Just dont put it on the screen
and for goodness sake, if you do for some reason put it on the
screen, dont stand with your back to your audience and read it from
the screen!

4. Pay attention to design.


PowerPoint and other presentation packages offer all sorts of ways to
add visual flash to your slides: fades, swipes, flashing text, and
other annoyances are all too easy to insert with a few mouse clicks.
Avoid the temptation to dress up your pages with cheesy effects and
focus instead on simple design basics:

Use a sans serif font for body text. Sans serifs like Arial,
Helvetica, or Calibri tend to be the easiest to read on screens.

Use decorative fonts only for slide headers, and


then only if theyre easy to read. Decorative fonts
calligraphy, German blackface, futuristic, psychotic handwriting,
flowers, art nouveau, etc. are hard to read and should be

reserved only for large headlines at the top of the page. Better yet,
stick to a classy serif font like Georgia or Baskerville.

Put dark text on a light background. Again, this is easiest


to read. If you must use a dark background for instance, if your
company uses a standard template with a dark background
make sure your text is quite light (white, cream, light grey, or
pastels) and maybe bump the font size up two or three notches.

Align text left or right. Centered text is harder to read and


looks amateurish. Line up all your text to a right-hand or lefthand baseline it will look better and be easier to follow.

Avoid clutter. A headline, a few bullet points, maybe an


image anything more than that and you risk losing your
audience as they sort it all out.

5. Use images sparingly


There are two schools of thought about images in presentations.
Some say they add visual interest and keep audiences engaged;
others say images are an unnecessary distraction.
Both arguments have some merit, so in this case the best option is to
split the difference: use images only when they add important
information or make an abstract point more concrete.
While were on the subject, absolutely do not use PowerPoints builtin clipart. Anything from Office 2003 and earlier has been seen by

everyone in your audience a thousand times theyve become tired,


used-up clichs, and I hopefully dont need to tell you to avoid tired,
used-up clichs in your presentations. Office 2007 and non-Office
programs have some clipart that isnt so familiar (though it will be,
and soon) but by now, the entire concept of clipart has about run its
course it just doesnt feelfresh and new anymore.

6. Think outside the screen.


Remember, the slides on the screen are only part of the presentation
and not the main part. Even though youre liable to be presenting
in a darkened room, give some thought to your own presentation
manner how you hold yourself, what you wear, how you move
around the room.You are the focus when youre presenting, no
matter how interesting your slides are.

7. Have a hook.
Like the best writing, the best presentation shook their audiences
early and then reel them in. Open with something surprising or
intriguing, something that will get your audience to sit up and take
notice. The most powerful hooks are often those that appeal directly
to your audiences emotions offer them something awesome or, if
its appropriate, scare the pants off of them. The rest of your
presentation, then, will be effectively your promise to make the
awesome thing happen, or the scary thing not happen.

8. Ask questions.
Questions arouse interest, pique curiosity, and engage audiences. So
ask a lot of them. Build tension by posing a question and letting your
audience stew a moment before moving to the next slide with the
answer. Quiz their knowledge and then show them how little they
know. If appropriate, engage in a little question-and-answer with
your audience, with youasking the questions.

9. Modulate, modulate, modulate.


Especially when youve done a presentation before, it can be easy to
fall into a drone, going on and on and on and on and on with only
minimal changes to your inflection. Always speak as if you were
speaking to a friend, not as if you are reading off of index cards (even
if you are). If keeping up a lively and personable tone of voice is
difficult for you when presenting, do a couple of practice runthroughs. If you still cant get it right and presentations are a big part
of your job, take a public speaking course or join Toastmasters.

10. Break the rules.


As with everything else, there are times when each of these rules or
any other rule you know wont apply. If you know theres a good
reason to break a rule, go ahead and do it. Rule breaking is perfectly
acceptable behavior its ignoring the rules or breaking them
because you just dont know any better that leads to shoddy boring

presentations that lead to boredom, depression, psychopathic


breaks, and eventually death. And you dont want that, do you?

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