PowerPoint for Presenters
PowerPoint is a presentation graphics program. You can use it to create multimedia visual aids when speaking to an audience. The important part to remember here is that it should be an aid, not the entertainment. No matter what your presentation is about, if your audience leaves the room talking about all the cool stuff you did with PowerPoint, then you failed. They should leave discussing all of the wonderful points you made about your topic. PowerPoint should help you sell your point, not eclipse it. Save all the bells and whistles and spiraling text for stand alone, self running presentations (okay, spiraling text never works...).
The ability to show your presentation from the computer means you can do much more than was possible with overhead projectors and 35mm slides, but it also means you need to be more careful about creating your presentation. Consistency in design is much more important now than it was with overhead transparencies. There was no continuity between 'pages', it didn't really matter if the layouts were identical or not. Now it matters a great deal. Something as simple as moving the content placeholders around on your slide can leave your audience with an overall impression that your presentation is sloppy.
- Design considerations:
- Use the same background design for all content slides.
Background is the key word here. Your background is not supposed to
attract the audience’s attention, but to lend emphasis or focus to
your material.
Pick a color scheme and stick with it!!! If you do not like the fill color in one thing, you probably will not like it in anything. Changing the color scheme usually makes more sense than editing individual items. If you do need to tweak an item in your presentation, make it the last thing you do and make sure it is consistent with the rest of your color scheme.
Use layouts whenever possible. They help keep your slide show consistent as far as the placement of text and objects is concerned.
Use the same transition for all slides and the same animation effect for all text! While it may be fun (tempting, even?) to play with these and use a different one on each slide, remember that the presentation should be of interest to your audience, not the slide show. If the back of the room is placing bets on how your next slide is coming in, you can be pretty sure they are not paying very close attention to your material.
Speaking of animations - never, ever, never animate the slide title. If you animate the title, that means the transition is to a blank slide. It only takes a second to lose an audience!-
Remember the masters! Anytime you start to make a format change on a slide, consider whether it might not be better done on the master. If it is a change you would like to have applied to all slides – make the change on the master! If it is not – make sure it is consistent with the overall design of your presentation.
What else can you do to make your presentation perfect? The best thing you can do for your presentation is to never use a recognizable, out of the box, came with PowerPoint, Microsoft design. There are just not that many when you consider the number of people creating PowerPoint presentations today. If you use a Microsoft design, chances are that the design is associated by your audience with a previous presentation. That could have unfortunate consequences for you. Do yourself the biggest favor of all – be original or find someone to be original for you.
