Slide
Tips
Just because
it came pre-installed in your computer does not make you a
PowerPoint expert by default. Building a presentation is a
lot of hard work. Don’t expect to become an expert in
one go. It will take time for you to understand how to use
the tool and how a great slide should look. Please find
below a few tips to help you build effective slides. Give
them conscious thought to ensure that your slides are the
best they can be.
Keep it
simple
Simplicity
rules. Don’t let your message and your ability to
tell a story get distracted by slides that are unnecessary
cluttered and complicated. Nothing in your slide should be
superfluous, so trim extensively. Most likely your slides
will require several rounds of ‘trim &
redo’ before you achieve that slide with the absolute
minimal amount of information required to convey your
message. Use plenty of empty space. Just as remaining
silent at times in a conversation is a great quality
improver, so is withstanding the urge to ‘do’
something with empty spaces. The less cluttered, the more
powerful your message will become.
A proper
lay-out matters
Lay-out is
important. Depending on the use, you must fine-tune your
lay-out. Feel free to be creative, but don’t overdo
it! A basic, sure-fire lay-out is as follows. Use the top
row to make the point of your slide. If it needs to be
written down, then use a compact sentence, not just a
single key word. Then, data goes on the left, and an
explanation what that data entails on the right. So, a
chart on the left, explanatory points on the right. This
has to do with the way your eyes are wired to your brain.
The right brain is the creative side, the left brain the
analytical side. However, your optical nerves are crossed:
right eye goes to left brain and vice versa. Hence, the
image on the left, and the analysis on the right.
Consistency,
consistency, consistency
Once you
decide on a lay-out, use it consistently throughout your
slides. It irritates and confuses your audience if your
slides change ‘style’ all the time. Consistency
also goes for the use of fonts, colours and the like. Learn
how to use the master templates in PowerPoint (or Keynote)
and make the required changes there.
Become
pixel-perfect in everything
Learn to use
the snap-to-grid and snap-to-shape and align tools in
PowerPoint (and the guides in Keynote). Make sure that
objects are in a pixel-perfect spot. A line connecting
another but shifted even one pixel will be seen by your
audience. It will be viewed at as sloppy, and so will thus
be viewed you and your arguments. So zoom in and make sure
that everything on your slide (and between slides!) is
pixel-perfectly placed.
Use a
bread-crumb trail
As you will
tell them what you will tell them, and then tell them, it
works wonders if you aid your audience in where they are in
your presentation. More often than not, other important
people will enter your presentation a few minutes late.
They will have missed your explanation of what you will
cover. So help them using a visual guide, a bread-crumb
trail, that depicts in a simple but effective way where the
individual slide sits in your story.
Limit bullet
points and text
Boring an
audience with slides riddled with bullet points is of very
little benefit. Use texts sparingly. But when you use it,
use it in a concise fashion. Depending on the use of your
presentation, the amount of text you use can vary. Again,
simplicity rules here. Some slides will be able to convey
the message with a graphic only. However, they will be
virtual meaningless without your narration. Which brings us
to hand-outs.
Hand-outs are
a vital part
Don’t
just print your slides and hand them over. Use this
opportunity to reinforce your message by adding additional
narrative comment, arguments, opinion etcetera in what is
called the ‘speakers notes’ in PowerPoint (it
should have been called the ‘audience notes’,
really). And, coincidentally, now that you know that you
have a fine opportunity to serve your audience with
additional information through a hand-out, you may feel
less inclined to add all that detail on the slide itself.
Limit
transitions, builds and animations
Just because
this functionality comes with the software does not mean
that you have to use it! It is highly distracting and
irritating for your audience if text or graphics zoom or
twirl in any which way whilst appearing, with a different
style on every new slide. Just refrain from using it. And
if you feel you must (which really is only if there is an
explanatory need to do so), then be consistent in the one
you pick (‘dissolve’ will almost always
suffice). Same goes for transitions between slides. A
simple fade through black or dissolve will be more than
adequate.
Use high
quality graphics
Use
high-quality graphics and photographs. Take your own
picture with your digital camera, or use one of the
excellent stock photography websites available today. Avoid
the usage of PowerPoint ‘clip-art’ at all
times. They will be perceived as cheesy and unprofessional.
Clip-art may have been a big thing 15 years ago, but today
audiences will expect you to come up with professional
looking graphics. If you feel you cannot produce
high-quality imagery yourself, then consider hiring someone
that does.
Avoid
PowerPoint templates
You obviously
will need a visual theme in your presentation. But the same
argument that goes for clip-art goes for the built-in
templates in PowerPoint. Your audience will have seen them
countless times. They expect a unique presentation from
you, and that goes for the visual theme as well.
Use colour
well
Colour is
highly important. Colour invokes emotion, feeling. The
right colour can help persuading and motivating, whereas
the wrong colour can do exactly the opposite. It pays if
you study the usage of colour a bit. Colours can be divided
in a few primary and secondary colours. Some are called
cool colours (like blue), some warm (like orange). Cool
colours work best for backgrounds, as they appear to recede
into the background. Warm colours work best for objects
(like text) in the foreground as they appear to be coming
towards us. So orange text on a blue background works.
However, you must consider the fact whether you are
presenting in a light or a dark room. If it is dark, then
use cool and warm colours as said. But if the lights are on
(and this is highly advisable), use a white background with
dark text as this will hold its intensity much better that
a cool background with warm text, which has a tendency to
wash out in ambient light.
Use fonts
well
Choose your
fonts deliberately. As with colour, it pays to make a bit
of a study of fonts. The font you choose will convey subtle
messages in themselves to your audience. Choose no more
that two complementary fonts in your presentation, and use
them consistently (one for headings, the other for text).
Serif fonts were designed to be readable when using large
amounts of small text. For presentations, a sans-serif font
usually works better. Also remember that many people in the
audience will most likely have glasses, maybe only for
reading. Facilitate the readability of your slides by
choosing a big enough font size, and test whether your
slides are readable by moving to the back of the room
during your trial runs.
Include video
or audio
Use video and
audio when appropriate. People are visual animals and using
high quality video clips stimulates active cognitive
processing, which is the way people learn. Same goes for
audio. But remember to -only- use them when appropriate,
not just to show off. You can import video and audio files
easily into PowerPoint (or Keynote). Using video or audio
will also help in increasing the interest of your audience,
as the change of pace will be a welcome break. Whatever you
do, do not use the sound animations that come with
PowerPoint. As with clip-art and templates, they may have
been fun in 1990 but not anymore. Adding these cheesy sound
bites to slide transitions or animations is a sure way to
make you look unprofessional to your audience.
Use the slide
sorter
Spend time in
the slide sorter. It will help you get a quick overview of
the material that you have and how your presentation is
progressing. It will make you ‘see’ the
structure, the logic of your presentation far better than
going page-up and page-down in your presentation. Thus, you
can see the nature of your presentation from the point of
view of your audience. It will help you notice flaws in the
logic of your arguments and any superfluous bits of data
quickly.
