10 Power Point Tips For Preparing A Professional Presentation

10 Powerpoint Tips for Preparing a Professional Presentation
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by Tina on May. 23rd, 2009
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Presentations whether they are made with Powerpoint or other applications, are a great way to support a speech, visualize complicated concepts or focus attention on a subject.
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However, a bad presentation can achieve the opposite. Badly designed slides with too much text or bad graphics can distract or worse, irritate the audience. Heres is a short guide that will help you create presentations with a professional look and concise content, avoiding the most common mistakes.
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Design The first thing that gives a professional touch to any presentation is the design. Presentation Helper has a large selection of free Powerpoint templates for a variety of topics. However, whether you download a free template or create your own, keep the following in mind:
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1. Compose Slides
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Dont copy & paste slides from different sources. Keep the design very basic and simple. It shall not distract. Pick an easy to read font face.
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Carefully select font sizes for headers and text. Leave room for highlights, such as images or take home messages. Decorate scarcely but well. Restrict the room your design takes up and dont ever let the design restrict your message.
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2. Use Consistency
Consistently use the same font face and sizes on all slides. Match colors. You may use your company logo, highlight headers, create a special frame for figures/images or the whole slide but dont overload your slides with these elements. Colors
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A poor choice of colors can shatter a presentation. If youre unsure which colors match best, use ColorBlender to get a set of up to six matching colors, simply by moving a set of RGB sliders back and forth.
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3. Use Contrast
Black text on a white background will always be the best but also the most boring choice. If you want to play with colors, keep it easy on the eyes and always keep good contrast in mind so that your readers do not have to strain to guess what youve typed on your slide.
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4. Apply Brilliance
Carefully use color to highlight your message!
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Dont weaken the color effect by using too many colors at an instance. Make a brilliant choice: match colors for design and good contrast to highlight your message. Text
5. KISS
Keep It Straight and Simple. Keywords only. No sentences! Never read your slides, talk freely. Remember that your slides are only there to support, not to replace your talk! Youll want to tell a story, describe your data or explain circumstances, and only provide keywords through your slides. If you read your slides and if you do it slow and badly, the audience will get bored and stop listening.
6. Take Home Message

Always express a Take Home Message. Its your message, a summary of your data or story. Make it a highlight that stands out. Images Images are key elements of every presentation. Your audience has ears and eyes theyll want to see what youre talking about, and a good visual cue will help them to understand your message much better.
7. Add Images
Have more images in your slides than text. But do not use images to decorate! Images can reinforce or complement your message. Use images to visualize and explain. A picture can say more than a thousand words. If you dont have your own images, you can browse Flickr or Googles image search for material. If this is a very public and official presentation however, you need to keep copyrights in mind. Animations & Media In animations, there is a fine line between a comic or professional impression. However, animations can be rather powerful tools to visualize and explain complicated matters. A good animation can not only improve understanding, but can also make the message stick with your audience.
8. Dont Be Silly
Use animations and media sparingly. Use animations to draw attention, for example to your Take Home Message. Use animations to clarify a model or emphasize an effect. Target & Content Your target i.e. your audience, defines the content of your
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presentation. For example, you wont be able to teach school kids about the complicated matters of economy. However, you may be able to explain what economy is in the first place and why it is important.
9. Keep Your Audience In Mind

What do they know? What do you need to tell them? What do they expect? What will be interesting to them? What can you teach them? What will keep them focused? Answer these questions and boil your slides down to the very essentials. In your talk, describe the essentials colorfully and choose your weapons i.e. text, images and animations wisely (see above). If you lose the attention of your audience, everything will be lost it wont matter how ingenious your design or how brilliantly you picked colors and keywords.
10. Practice
A well-prepared and enthusiastic talk will help you convince your audience and maintain their attention. There are some key points that define a good talk.
Know your slides inside out. Speak freely. Speak with confidence loud and clear. Dont speak too fast. Maintain eye contact with the audience. If youre unsure whether or not youre doing it right, read this article on How NOT to Give a Presentation. Finally, in order to prepare a stunning presentation, you may also be interested in the following articles: Build & Show Presentations Online With 280 Slides by Stefan Create Awesome Excel & PowerPoint Charts with ChartChooser by Matt Liven Up Your PowerPoint Presentations With LiveWeb by Jerry Make Beautiful Online Presentations With Sliderocket by Varun Give Your Presentations A Boost With ZoomIt by Saikat What are your tips for a killer presentation? Present them to us in the comments.
Image credits: JadeGordon, eqphotolog, ba1969, danz o08, svilen001, hisks
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(By) Tina has been with MakeUseOf since late 2007. She has contributed over 300 articles and is also the Editor for MakeUseOf Answers.
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Don't be silly +1
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Don't use small text or fancy fonts. Don't cram too much text. Don't read off your powerpoint slide. Don't use cheesy graphics or sound effects unless it's relevant.
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Don't use animations or video unless relevant and necessary. Edit graphics and photos for presentation slides. Don't just stick a photo with a white background on your slide, add a border or try to make it transparent or edit it up a bit.
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Something to add to #3 Use Contrast Think about limiting the use of reds and greens in case someone in the audience might be colour blind.
That is true. And the same applies for blue and yellow, another type of color blindness.
Many good tips here - but the most important thing of all is content. I think for giving good presentations you need three things, sorted by order of importance: contents, confidence and slides! For building confidence, one should adapt a system of self management such that successes become very visible to one self; laifmanage.blogspot.com.
Many good tips here, but you won't get far without the two most important prerequisites for public speaking; contents and confidence! Building confidence can be done using a systematic approach making you able of delivering stunning presentations, with or without powerpoint. I'm blogging about my system at laifmanage.blogspot.com .
Thanks for the tips.. :)

Very nice! We can only hope that peolpe start sticking to these rules... And you missed one: NEVER EVER USE WORDART!!!
Black text on white is VERY hard to read under anything less than perfect lighting conditions.
Where is run spell cheek? (Its spelled wrong on purpose.)
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Very good point there!
Oh my gosh! So many people I wish would follow these tips! I linked this article on my site.
Thanks John. I'm glad you found this article useful.
Folks, this is all saying things about style and color. What I see missing is Intro-topics-main pointssummary-closing and last but not least don't powerpoint everything! Some things need a written report. Pitches and getting buy in to a new initiative yes. Beyond that, Powerpoint may hurt more than help. Google Tufte Powerpoint for a detailed critique
Excellent advice, especially #8. i do my best to live & die by that one, as in presentations such as this one.
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