powerpoint presentation competition rules

• Get started with computers
• Learn Microsoft Office
• Apply for a job
• Improve my work skills
• Design nice-looking docs
• Getting Started
• Smartphones & Tablets
• Typing Tutorial
• Online Learning
• Basic Internet Skills
• Online Safety
• Social Media
• Zoom Basics
• Google Docs
• Google Sheets
• Career Planning
• Resume Writing
• Cover Letters
• Job Search and Networking
• Business Communication
• Entrepreneurship 101
• Careers without College
• Job Hunt for Today
• 3D Printing
• Freelancing 101
• Personal Finance
• Sharing Economy
• Decision-Making
• Graphic Design
• Photography
• Image Editing
• Learning WordPress
• Language Learning
• Critical Thinking
• For Educators
• Translations
• Staff Picks
• English expand_more expand_less

PowerPoint Tips  - Simple Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations

Powerpoint tips  -, simple rules for better powerpoint presentations, powerpoint tips simple rules for better powerpoint presentations.

PowerPoint Tips: Simple Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations

Lesson 17: simple rules for better powerpoint presentations.

/en/powerpoint-tips/embed-excel-charts-in-a-slide/content/

Simple rules for better PowerPoint presentations

Have you ever given a PowerPoint presentation and noticed that something about it just seemed a little … off? If you’re unfamiliar with basic PowerPoint design principles, it can be difficult to create a slide show that presents your information in the best light.

Poorly designed presentations can leave an audience feeling confused, bored, and even irritated. Review these tips to make your next presentation more engaging.

Don't read your presentation straight from the slides

If your audience can both read and hear, it’s a waste of time for you to simply read your slides aloud. Your audience will zone out and stop listening to what you’re saying, which means they won’t hear any extra information you include.

Instead of typing out your entire presentation, include only main ideas, keywords, and talking points in your slide show text. Engage your audience by sharing the details out loud.

Follow the 5/5/5 rule

To keep your audience from feeling overwhelmed, you should keep the text on each slide short and to the point. Some experts suggest using the 5/5/5 rule : no more than five words per line of text, five lines of text per slide, or five text-heavy slides in a row.

Don't forget your audience

Who will be watching your presentation? The same goofy effects and funny clip art that would entertain a classroom full of middle-school students might make you look unprofessional in front of business colleagues and clients.

Humor can lighten up a presentation, but if you use it inappropriately your audience might think you don’t know what you’re doing. Know your audience, and tailor your presentation to their tastes and expectations.

Choose readable colors and fonts

Your text should be easy to read and pleasant to look at. Large, simple fonts and theme colors are always your best bet. The best fonts and colors can vary depending on your presentation setting. Presenting in a large room? Make your text larger than usual so people in the back can read it. Presenting with the lights on? Dark text on a light background is your best bet for visibility.

Don't overload your presentation with animations

As anyone who’s sat through a presentation while every letter of every paragraph zoomed across the screen can tell you, being inundated with complicated animations and exciting slide transitions can become irritating.

Before including effects like this in your presentation, ask yourself: Would this moment in the presentation be equally strong without an added effect? Does it unnecessarily delay information? If the answer to either question is yes—or even maybe—leave out the effect.

Use animations sparingly to enhance your presentation

Don’t take the last tip to mean you should avoid animations and other effects entirely. When used sparingly, subtle effects and animations can add to your presentation. For example, having bullet points appear as you address them rather than before can help keep your audience’s attention.

Keep these tips in mind the next time you create a presentation—your audience will thank you. For more detailed information on creating a PowerPoint presentation, visit our Office tutorials .

/en/powerpoint-tips/three-tips-for-beautiful-powerpoint-presentations/content/

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• PLoS Comput Biol
• v.17(12); 2021 Dec

Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

Kristen m. naegle.

Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

Funding Statement

The author received no specific funding for this work.

Visit the Health Advisories website for the latest vaccination and mask information and to Report a Case.

Questions about FAFSA and CADAA?

Visit our Financial Aid and Scholarship Office for updated information, workshops and FAQs.

College of Graduate Studies

Rules and Judging Criteria

Competition rules and presentation structure.

A single static PowerPoint slide is permitted (no slide transitions, animations or ‘movement’ of any kind; the slide is to be presented from the beginning of the oration).

• No additional electronic media (e.g. sound and video files) are permitted.
• No props (e.g. costumes, musical instruments, laboratory equipment) are permitted.
• Presentations are limited to three minutes maximum. Competitors exceeding three minutes are disqualified.
• Presentations are to be delivered in traditional presentation style.
• Presentations are considered to have commenced when presenters start their presentation through movement or speech.
• Each presentation will be judged using the criteria below.

Judging Criteria

• Clarity :  Did the speaker provide adequate background knowledge to make the talk and the importance of the project understandable?
• Organization : Did the presentation follow a clear and logical sequence?
• Language matches audience :  Was the topic and its significance communicated in a language appropriate to an interested, but non-specialist audience? (For example, did the speaker avoid or explain discipline-specific jargon?)
• Significance :  Did the presenter explain why the project mattered, addressing the impact and results of the research?
• Delivery :  How was the delivery, including pace, enthusiasm, confidence, body language, and dynamism of vocal delivery?
• Visual :  Did the slide enhance the presentation and help to emphasize the primary points of the talk?  Was the slide well designed, clear, legible and concise?
• Engagement :  To what extent did the talk speak to your intellectual curiosity?  Did it make you want to learn more about the topic?

Apply the 10/20/30 Rule to Your PowerPoint Presentations Now

June 15, 2019 / Blog, PowerPoint Tips 10-20-30 Rules, Guy Kawasaki, powerpoint rule

Guy Kawasaki is a successful venture capitalist who has been writing books about the trade since 1987.

A few years back, he wrote a short blog advocating a simple rule for PowerPoint & pitch deck presentations. He called it the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

According to the 10/20/30 rule:

…a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Kawasaki came up with this quick presentation style due to his line of business, citing how he’d often listen to dozens of pitches in a short period of time.

However, even if you’re not in the venture capital business, the 10/20/30 rule can still be applicable to your goals.

Given people’s increasingly shortening attention spans , keeping your presentation compact can save all of you time while still getting the meat of your message across.

Here we expound on each of Kawasaki’s points. But first, the 10/20/30 Rule in his own words:

Rule #1: 10 Slides

Kawasaki pointed out that it’s challenging to comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting.

Most people assume that you need to be highly detailed in order to be impressive, but this isn’t always the case.

The 10/20/30 rule also suggests that you use the ten slides to tackle all the topics important to your audience. For a venture capitalist, these topics are the following:

• Your solution
• Business model
• Underlying magic/technology
• Marketing and sales
• Competition
• Projections and milestones
• Status and timeline
• Summary and call to action

Use this list as a guide when you’re trying to condense your presentations into neat, salient points.

Depending on the type of presentation you’re giving, you can tweak these to fit your purpose, but try to keep your slides to a minimum, with a visible flow like the one above.

Rule #2: 20 Minutes

You should be done with your ten-slide presentation in twenty minutes.

Kawasaki would often allot an hour to hear an entrepreneurial pitch, but most of the time gets lost in other things. (For instance, your laptop might take a while to sync with the projector.)

Emergencies might also pull your audience away from the meeting. It’s best to keep your presentation short so that you’ll also have time to address questions and other concerns.

Rule #3: 30-pt Font Size

Kawasaki observed that the only reason people used smaller font sizes is to be able to cram huge chunks of text into a slide.

In doing so, your audience may perceive that you’re not familiar with the material and that you’re using the PowerPoint as a teleprompter.

The 10/20/30 rule forces you to use a larger font, so you can cut back on unnecessary details. Remember: you’re the one who has to do the talking, not your PowerPoint presentation.

10 slides in 20 minutes using a font no smaller than 30 points. Easy enough, right?

Are You Looking for a custom-designed PowerPoint Pitch Deck? Schedule a FREE presentation consultation now!

Featured Image: Lostium Project via Flickr

Popular Posts

Common Challenges in Tailoring Presentations—and Solutions

Dos and Don’ts of Pre-Seed Pitch Deck Creation

How to Write a Teaser Pitch Deck that Captivates

Tips for a Persuasive How It Works Slide

What Not to Do When Presenting Funding History

Why Raising Funds Without a Pitch Deck Can Backfire

5 golden rules of PowerPoint design

april 30, 2024

by Deb Ashby

Wondering how to design the perfect PowerPoint presentation? It's easier than you think–just follow five simple rules to get started:

1. Consider using templates

When building a slide deck, it’s important to maintain consistency throughout. We want to ensure we are using consistent font styles, colors and themes. This can be tricky when designing from scratch, so why not start from a template?

Microsoft Create contains hundreds of pre-made, customizable PowerPoint templates, which means you don’t have to start from scratch and the fonts and colors are already set for you.

Simply choose a template from the gallery, customize it as needed, and you are done!

2. No walls of text

We’ve all seen PowerPoint presentations where slides contain too much text. The human brain struggles to listen and read at the same time. If you are presenting to an audience, keep the text on slides to a minimum.

Consider employing the “5-5-5" rule. No more than 5 lines, no more than 5 words, no more than 5 minutes. Think short and sharp memory joggers instead of rambling paragraphs.

Where possible, consider replacing text with visuals to represent your point. People remember images more than words.

3. Be mindful of colors and fonts

No one wants their audience to leave with a headache after an hour of straining to read slides. We need to ensure that our presentation is easy to read for everyone – even for those in the nosebleed seats at the back! Think about the font you are using. Is it appropriate for the presentation? What about the font size? Can people at the back easily read? What about people with visual impairment? Ensure all text is at least 24pts.

When it comes to color, ensure all slides have good contrast. Dark backgrounds should have light font and vice versa.

4. Use animation sparingly

Animation can really liven up an otherwise flat presentation. However, it should be used thoughtfully and sparingly. Too much of the wrong type of animation with objects flying in and zooming around the screen, while fun, can look confusing and unprofessional.

Animation should be subtle (especially for pitch decks and other formal presentations). With every animation you add, ask yourself, "Is this going to enhance my presentation or distract from it?"

5. Engage your audience

When presenting to an audience, there is usually an awkward time before the presentation begins while the speaker waits for everyone to arrive. During this time, people may start scrolling on their phones or get distracted with work emails, and it can be hard to pull the audience back.

To avoid this issue, work to grab your audience's attention before the presentation even starts. Instead of just having the title slide on the screen, consider creating "kiosk slides." These are a series of slides that contain a combination of interesting things for the audience to look at or engage with. Maybe you have an interesting image? A funny quote or fun facts? Or maybe there is a question you want them to think about prior to the session?

Create these slides and have them automatically cycle round before the presentation starts.

Related topics

• Presentation Design

PowerPoint Rules You Should Follow

• By: Kelly Allison

If you want your PowerPoint presentation to move, compel, and inspire, then it’s important that you make it unique and creative. That being said, there are a distinct set of rules and guidelines you can (and should) follow that make it much easier to nail your presentation every single time.

The following rules aren’t designed to limit your creativity; they’re designed to make it shine even brighter.

Stick to 5/5/5 Slides full of long blocks of text are exhausting for your audience and more than likely will cause them to tune out. To avoid tiring (and boring) your audience, stick to the 5/5/5 rule. That means allowing no more than five words per text line, having no more than five lines of text per slide, and never having more than five text-heavy slides in a row.

Contrast Your Colors More than anything, you want your slides to be as readable as possible. And a good trick to make certain of that is to always use a high contrast between your text and your background. White font on a black background or dark blue on a yellow background are good examples of high contrasts that make it easy for your audience’s eyes to read what you’re presenting.

Follow 10/20/30 It’s no secret that humans have short attention spans, especially now that most of us are carrying smartphones around all day. Rather than try to force your audience to pay attention for too long, which is always futile, follow the 10/20/30 rule for your next presentation: Present 10 slides in 20 minutes using a 30-point font on each slide. This helps you work with their short attention span rather than against it.

Keep Designs Simple Busy patterns and highly-detailed images might look great up close, but more often than not, they look chaotic and confusing from the perspective of your audience. Using simple flat images and solid colors in lieu of crazy patterns makes it a lot easier for your audience to focus only on you and your message.

Adhere to 1-6-6 Given that bullet points make it harder for your audience to pay attention, we recommend staying away from them as much as possible. When you do use them, though, make sure to do so following the 1-6-6 rule. That means each slide should have one main idea, no more than six bullet points, and a maximum of six words per point. This ensures your content is sharp and concise.

Skip the Fancy Fonts Just as you should keep your patterns and images simple, you should do the same with your fonts. Resist the urge to include anything too stylized, like script or curly-cues, and instead incorporate clean, standard fonts that will be clear and easy for your audience to read from afar.

Add Consistency to Your Simplicity In addition to keeping your fonts and images simple, you’ll also want to make them consistent to achieve a cohesive, professional look. Pick just a handful of colors and fonts, say three or four, and use them throughout your presentation without straying. This ensures your presentation looks clean and cohesive rather than busy and chaotic.

Want more hands-on help designing your next presentation? Then check out Ethos3’s presentation design services .

Kelly Allison

Join our newsletter today.

© 2006-2024 Ethos3 – An Award Winning Presentation Design and Training Company ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Diversity and Inclusion

Tips for creating and delivering an effective presentation

In this article.

Creating an effective presentation

Delivering an effective presentation

Tips for creating an effective presentation

Top of Page

Tips for delivering an effective presentation

Need more help?

Want more options.

Explore subscription benefits, browse training courses, learn how to secure your device, and more.

Microsoft 365 subscription benefits

Microsoft 365 training

Microsoft security

Accessibility center

Communities help you ask and answer questions, give feedback, and hear from experts with rich knowledge.

Ask the Microsoft Community

Microsoft Tech Community

Windows Insiders

Microsoft 365 Insiders

Was this information helpful?

Thank you for your feedback.

Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Presentations > Implementing The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint

Implementing The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint

If you’re not used to making a PowerPoint presentation , it can be tough to know how long to make it and how to format the slides. On the other side of the coin: you might overthink your presentation and put too much information on too many slides.

With help from the 10-20-30 rule, you can make a PowerPoint presentation that’s engaging and efficient . The guidelines for this rule are as follows:

• No more than 10 slides.
• No longer than 20 minutes.
• No larger than 30-point font.

Let’s look deeper at the 10-20-30 PowerPoint rule, why it’s a good rule to follow and things to do to follow this guideline.

Tell your story with captivating presentations

Powerpoint empowers you to develop well-designed content across all your devices

Don’t use more than 10 slides. A good presenter shouldn’t have to (or want to) lean heavily on their PowerPoint slides. The slides should be a supplement for your presentation, not the headliner. Limiting to 10 slides will ensure that you’re not going over the top with the length of your presentation and keeps it moving. Your slide count should include both your title and conclusion. A presentation that goes on any longer than 10 slides will distract from what you’re saying and starts to feel like an information overload.

Keep your presentation 20 minutes MAX. During a presentation, people start tuning out after about 10 minutes.Limiting your presentation to this length will ensure that your audience will remember much of what you’re saying. If you’re covering a more complex topic and need more time, stick to the 20-minute MAX rule—it’s much easier to schedule your presentation by timing each slide down to about two minutes. That feels like a much more manageable timeframe, doesn’t it?

Don’t use fonts smaller than size 30. A 30-point font is a great minimum size because it ensures that your text is easy to read from a distance. The recommended guideline to make your presentation accessible to those who might be visually impaired is a 24-point font. Upping the size to 30 is a significant difference, and you can be confident that your audience can see what you’ve written. In addition, choose a font that’s easy to read. For years it was recommended that you stick solely to sans-serif fonts with digital media because serifs could blur together, making certain fonts hard to read. High-resolution screens have nearly eliminated this problem, so some serif fonts can be used and are easy to read in PowerPoint presentations.

Tips for sticking to these guidelines. It’s not always easy to cut down your presentation to fit the 30-20-10 rule if you’re presenting a lot of information. Follow these tips while putting together your presentation to make the entire process easier on yourself:

• Limit text to the 6×6 rule. It can feel like there are a lot of rules for making a PowerPoint presentation, but they’re all there to help you make a well-organized and engaging presentation. The 6×6 rule suggests that you don’t use more than six lines or bullet points on each slide and limit each line or bullet point to six words. Following the 6×6 rule helps to ensure that you’re limiting the amount of information on your slides so you can continue to present it rather than have your audience read it.
• Use visuals instead. Visuals like graphics, animated gifs, and videos can help to keep your audience engaged . Including visuals with your presentation will also help you limit the amount of time and content on each slide. A graph or illustration on the right side of your slide limits the amount of space you have on the left side. This can help to minimize the amount of text you have.
• Practice makes perfect. There’s a very cool, free tool called PowerPoint Speaker Coach , which leverages AI to help you nail your presentation. Speaker coach gives you feedback on your pace, pitch, use of filler words, poor grammar, lack of originality, use of sensitive phrases, and more as you rehearse your presentation. You’ll get a Summary Report at the end—with key pieces of feedback to help you become a confident presenter .

Use the 10-20-30 PowerPoint rule and these other tips to keep your presentation simple. Whether you’re a college student presenting a class project or a teen making the case for a new car, following these guidelines will help.

Get started with Microsoft 365

It’s the Office you know, plus the tools to help you work better together, so you can get more done—anytime, anywhere.

Topics in this article

More articles like this one.

How to create an educational presentation

Use PowerPoint to create dynamic and engaging presentations that foster effective learning.

Five tips for choosing the right PowerPoint template

Choose an appropriate PowerPoint template to elevate your presentation’s storytelling. Consider time length, audience and other presentation elements when selecting a template.

How you can use AI to help you make the perfect presentation handouts

Learn how AI can help you organize and create handouts for your next presentation.

How to use AI to help improve your presentations

Your PowerPoint presentations are about to get a boost when you use AI to improve a PowerPoint presentation.

Everything you need to achieve more in less time

Get powerful productivity and security apps with Microsoft 365

Explore Other Categories

Competition rules

• Presentations are limited to 3 minutes maximum and competitors exceeding 3 minutes are disqualified.
• Presentations are to be spoken word (e.g. no poems, raps or songs).
• Presentations are considered to have commenced when a presenter starts their presentation through either movement or speech.
• A single static PowerPoint slide is permitted. No slide transitions, animations or movement) and is to be presented from the beginning of the oration.
• No additional electronic media (e.g. sound and video files) are permitted.
• No additional props (e.g. costumes, musical instruments, laboratory equipment) are permitted.
• The decision of the adjudicating panel is final.

Loading metrics

Open Access

Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

• Kristen M. Naegle

Published: December 2, 2021

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554
• Reader Comments

Citation: Naegle KM (2021) Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides. PLoS Comput Biol 17(12): e1009554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554

Copyright: © 2021 Kristen M. Naegle. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The author has declared no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554.g001

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

• View Article
• PubMed/NCBI
• Google Scholar
• 3. Teaching VUC for Making Better PowerPoint Presentations. n.d. Available from: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/making-better-powerpoint-presentations/#baddeley .
• 8. Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace. Dyslexia friendly style guide. nd. Available from: https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-workplace/dyslexia-friendly-style-guide .
• 9. Cravit R. How to Use Color Blind Friendly Palettes to Make Your Charts Accessible. 2019. Available from: https://venngage.com/blog/color-blind-friendly-palette/ .
• 10. Making your conference presentation more accessible to blind and partially sighted people. n.d. Available from: https://vocaleyes.co.uk/services/resources/guidelines-for-making-your-conference-presentation-more-accessible-to-blind-and-partially-sighted-people/ .
• 11. Reynolds G. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. 2nd ed. New Riders Pub; 2011.
• 12. Tufte ER. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd ed. Graphics Press; 2001.

Server is not responding try refreshing the page using the button below

PowerPoint Design Contests

Start a powerpoint presentation contest and get the perfect powerpoint presentation at designcrowd, 265 example powerpoint design contests.

I need to re design my current Business Proposal , More professional and beautiful

We currently use a power point template to create our business proposal for construction projects ,we use powerpoint to create the template then we...

Related PowerPoint designs:

10-slide template for ESG report for small businesses in Europe

Presentation goal: for owners of small businesses in Europe to report on their ESG metrics to various internal and external stakeholders, but typical…

Case Study - convert word document to Power point presentation

I would like to convert a Word Document of 8 pages to a Power point document of 6 slides. I would like to make the presentation appealing to the eye …

PowerPoint Template for Green Energy Consulting Company

Please see attached brief. This is what we'd like. Please note that we have also launched a Word template project and we want the two designs to be …

IMAGOnation - Unleash Your True Self

I need PowerPoint presentation for my brand that is matching that attached briefing document. Please read the brief and specially the brand themes .…

Construction Company Tender Submission Template

Build a Template that we can insert Client Tender documents into. The powerpoint template has information about our company such as - A. Form of Ten…

iLEAD Trustee PowerPoint Template

Based on our brand board, we need a PowerPoint template for training public library trustees. The template should be printer-friendly as our learners…

Power Point CI

Creat a Slide Master which we can use and also add new slides with bullets, or other graphic design which we can fill. Power Point Master Format - a…

Sales pitch for "Goods 4 Good"

We need a new sales pitch deck (and company logo) for our new company "Goods 4 Good". We collect surplus foods & goods and resell them at a disco…

Powepoint template for an investment group

Need high end clear clean concise creative luxurious Have royal clients High end/billionaire investors Using ross gold logo can be creative Must …

• You're on page 1
• Page 1 of 27

1 - 10 of 265 PowerPoint design contests

PowerPoint Presentation contests - tonnes of PowerPoint presentations for you to choose from

• Competition Rules
• Popular Categories

Powerpoint Templates

Icon Bundle

Kpi Dashboard

Professional

Business Plans

Swot Analysis

Gantt Chart

Business Proposal

Marketing Plan

Project Management

Business Case

Business Model

Cyber Security

Business PPT

Digital Marketing

Digital Transformation

Human Resources

Product Management

Artificial Intelligence

Company Profile

Acknowledgement PPT

PPT Presentation

Reports Brochures

One Page Pitch

Interview PPT

All Categories

Powerpoint Templates and Google slides for Competition Rules

Save your time and attract your audience with our fully editable ppt templates and slides..

This complete deck covers various topics and highlights important concepts. It has PPT slides which cater to your business needs. This complete deck presentation emphasizes Customer Turnover Analysis In A Business Process Outsourcing Company Case Competition Complete Deck and has templates with professional background images and relevant content. This deck consists of total of fifty one slides. Our designers have created customizable templates, keeping your convenience in mind. You can edit the colour, text and font size with ease. Not just this, you can also add or delete the content if needed. Get access to this fully editable complete presentation by clicking the download button below.

Present the topic in a bit more detail with this Introduction For Corporate Games Competition Proposal Ppt Slides Rules. Use it as a tool for discussion and navigation on Planning, Knowledge, Customize And Execute, Restroom Facility, Premium Catering Services During Event. This template is free to edit as deemed fit for your organization. Therefore download it now.

Increase audience engagement and knowledge by dispensing information using Roadmap For Process Flow For Corporate Games Competition Proposal Ppt Slides Skills. This template helps you present information on five stages. You can also present information on Roadmap For Process Flow, Corporate Games Competition using this PPT design. This layout is completely editable so personaize it now to meet your audiences expectations.

Presenting our Strategic Competitive Advantage Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Outline Rules Cpb PowerPoint template design. This PowerPoint slide showcases five stages. It is useful to share insightful information on Strategic Competitive Advantage This PPT slide can be easily accessed in standard screen and widescreen aspect ratios. It is also available in various formats like PDF, PNG, and JPG. Not only this, the PowerPoint slideshow is completely editable and you can effortlessly modify the font size, font type, and shapes according to your wish. Our PPT layout is compatible with Google Slides as well, so download and edit it as per your knowledge.

This slide showcases the process involved in achieving the market leadership position by companies present within the industry. Key steps include conducting market research, developing strategic plan, building strong brand, focusing on product innovation, implementing marketing strategies and providing customer service. Introducing Process Of Attaining Market Leadership Position Dominating The Competition Strategy SS V to increase your presentation threshold. Encompassed with six stages, this template is a great option to educate and entice your audience. Dispence information on Conducting Market Research, Building A Strong Brand, Customer Service, using this template. Grab it now to reap its full benefits.

Presenting this set of slides with name - Marketing Process Competition Plan Goal Ideas Vision. This is a one stage process. The stages in this process are Marketing Process, Marketing Operation, Marketing Procedure.

This slide illustrates Evervaults competitive advantages, including building cloud based secure processing product, building infrastructure , Building partnerships, etc. Increase audience engagement and knowledge by dispensing information using Evervault Investor Funding Elevator Competitive Advantage Ppt Pictures Rules. This template helps you present information on four stages. You can also present information on Computing Product, Developing, Applications, Sources using this PPT design. This layout is completely editable so personaize it now to meet your audiences expectations.

Presenting Monopolistic Competition Market Situation Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Professional Rules Cpb slide which is completely adaptable. The graphics in this PowerPoint slide showcase three stages that will help you succinctly convey the information. In addition, you can alternate the color, font size, font type, and shapes of this PPT layout according to your content. This PPT presentation can be accessed with Google Slides and is available in both standard screen and widescreen aspect ratios. It is also a useful set to elucidate topics like Monopolistic Competition Market Situation. This well structured design can be downloaded in different formats like PDF, JPG, and PNG. So, without any delay, click on the download button now.

Presenting our Perfectly Competitive Industry Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Styles Rules Cpb PowerPoint template design. This PowerPoint slide showcases six stages. It is useful to share insightful information on Perfectly Competitive Industry This PPT slide can be easily accessed in standard screen and widescreen aspect ratios. It is also available in various formats like PDF, PNG, and JPG. Not only this, the PowerPoint slideshow is completely editable and you can effortlessly modify the font size, font type, and shapes according to your wish. Our PPT layout is compatible with Google Slides as well, so download and edit it as per your knowledge.

This slide showcases a framework of five 5C analysis to analyze business operating environment. It provides information about customers, competitors, company, collaborations and climate. Introducing 5c Analysis To Determine Competition In Strategic Guide To Execute Marketing Process Effectively to increase your presentation threshold. Encompassed with five stages, this template is a great option to educate and entice your audience. Dispence information on Customers, Competitors, Collaborators, using this template. Grab it now to reap its full benefits.

The slide compares the companys primary strengths market position, accolades, distribution network to those of its customers. It also includes the number of branches and AuM dollar MM of Forbes top 10 Investment Banks. Deliver an outstanding presentation on the topic using this How Are We Better Than Our Competition Advanced Buy Side M And A Process For Optimizing Inorganic Growth. Dispense information and present a thorough explanation of Competition, Executives, Financials using the slides given. This template can be altered and personalized to fit your needs. It is also available for immediate download. So grab it now.

This slide showcases a framework of five 5C analysis to analyze business operating environment. It provides information about customers, competitors, company, collaborations and climate. Increase audience engagement and knowledge by dispensing information using 5c Analysis To Determine Competition In Market Sales And Marketing Process Strategic Guide Mkt SS This template helps you present information on five stages. You can also present information on Customers, Competitors, Company, Collaborators using this PPT design. This layout is completely editable so personaize it now to meet your audiences expectations.

Presenting analyze competition marketing strategy process ppt example. This is a analyze competition marketing strategy process ppt example. This is a six stage process. The stages in this process are marketing, process.

Presenting competitive landscape framework powerpoint slide rules. This is a competitive landscape framework powerpoint slide rules. This is a four stage process. The stages in this process are competitive advantage.

Presenting competitive landscape swot analysis powerpoint slide rules. This is a competitive landscape swot analysis powerpoint slide rules. This is a four stage process. The stages in this process are competitive analysis, competitive landscape, competition.

Presenting this set of slides with name - Management Automation Service Process Mapping Competition Analysis Customer Profiling. This is an editable four stages graphic that deals with topics like Management Automation, Service Process Mapping, Competition Analysis, Customer Profiling to help convey your message better graphically. This product is a premium product available for immediate download, and is 100 percent editable in Powerpoint. Download this now and use it in your presentations to impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name - Competitive Cost Advantage Ppt Inspiration Rules. This is a three stage process. The stages in this process are Parameter, Competitor, Remarks, Net Cost Advantage, Comments.

Presenting Marketing Strategy Process Understand Customer Analyze Market Analyze Competition. This professionally designed PPT template is 100% editable. You can customize the font, text, orientation, patterns, shapes, and background as desired. Our easily accessible PowerPoint template is compatible with Google Slides. It also works well with various screen resolutions like standard and widescreen. You can conveniently convert the PPT format into files such as PDF, PNG, and JPG.

Presenting this set of slides with name - Process Strategy Strategic Planning Competition Analysis Competitive Strength Analysis Cpb. This is an editable six graphic that deals with topics like Process Strategy, Strategic Planning, Competition Analysis, Competitive Strength Analysis to help convey your message better graphically. This product is a premium product available for immediate download, and is 100 percent editable in Powerpoint. Download this now and use it in your presentations to impress your audience.

This is an editable four stages graphic that deals with topics like Templates Agendas, Predictive Modelling, Process Strategy, Strategy Competition to help convey your message better graphically. This product is a premium product available for immediate download, and is 100 percent editable in Powerpoint. Download this now and use it in your presentations to impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name - Competitive Strategies Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Rules. This is a three stage process. The stages in this process are Operational Excellence, Customer Intimacy, Product Leadership, Strategies, Planning.

Presenting this set of slides with name Analyses Competition Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Slides Rules Cpb. This is an editable Powerpoint three stages graphic that deals with topics like Analyses Competition to help convey your message better graphically. This product is a premium product available for immediate download and is 100 percent editable in Powerpoint. Download this now and use it in your presentations to impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name Competitive Marketing Intelligence Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Gallery Rules Cpb. This is an editable Powerpoint seven stages graphic that deals with topics like Competitive Marketing Intelligence to help convey your message better graphically. This product is a premium product available for immediate download and is 100 percent editable in Powerpoint. Download this now and use it in your presentations to impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name Competitive Opportunity Financial Review Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Show Rules. This is a seven stage process. The stages in this process are Marketing, Business, Management, Planning, Strategy. This is a completely editable PowerPoint presentation and is available for immediate download. Download now and impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name Allocative Efficiency Perfect Competition Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Slides Rules Cpb. This is an editable Powerpoint five stages graphic that deals with topics like Allocative Efficiency Perfect Competition to help convey your message better graphically. This product is a premium product available for immediate download and is 100 percent editable in Powerpoint. Download this now and use it in your presentations to impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name Dealing Competition Business Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Pictures Rules Cpb. This is an editable Powerpoint five stages graphic that deals with topics like Dealing Competition Business to help convey your message better graphically. This product is a premium product available for immediate download and is 100 percent editable in Powerpoint. Download this now and use it in your presentations to impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name Competition Analysis Marketing Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Icon Rules Cpb. This is an editable Powerpoint two stages graphic that deals with topics like Competition Analysis Marketing to help convey your message better graphically. This product is a premium product available for immediate download and is 100 percent editable in Powerpoint. Download this now and use it in your presentations to impress your audience.

Presenting Three Months Diversity Inclusion Initiative Competition Process Roadmap PowerPoint Template. This PPT presentation is Google Slides compatible hence it is easily accessible. You can download and save this PowerPoint layout in different formats like PDF, PNG, and JPG. This PPT theme is available in both 4,3 and 16,9 aspect ratios. This PowerPoint template is customizable so you can modify the font size, font type, color, and shapes as per your requirements.

Presenting this set of slides with name Recommendations Competitive Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Rules. This is a one stage process. The stages in this process are Financial, Online Operations Increases, Traditional Offline Banking, Recommendations, Electronic Banking. This is a completely editable PowerPoint presentation and is available for immediate download. Download now and impress your audience.

The slide provides the Competitive landscape of the company on the basis of financial data sales and profit and operational data employee count, locations, year of existence etc. Presenting this set of slides with name Competitive Analysis By Operational And Financial Data Locations Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Rules. The topics discussed in these slides are Profit, Sales, Interest Rate, Quality, Locations. This is a completely editable PowerPoint presentation and is available for immediate download. Download now and impress your audience.

This slide provides the features of construction offered by our company and different competitors in the market. Presenting this set of slides with name Construction Competitive Analysis M2567 Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Outline Rules. The topics discussed in these slides are Construction Competitive Analysis. This is a completely editable PowerPoint presentation and is available for immediate download. Download now and impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name Competition Scorecard Weighted Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Styles Rules. The topics discussed in these slides are Market Share, Advertising, Product Quality, Competition, Customer Service. This is a completely editable PowerPoint presentation and is available for immediate download. Download now and impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name Competition Scorecard M3182 Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Show Rules. The topics discussed in these slides are Market Share, Product Quality, Management, Customer Service, Financial. This is a completely editable PowerPoint presentation and is available for immediate download. Download now and impress your audience.

This slide provides the key unique points of the company which make it more attractive for the investors. Key points include Outstanding Customer experience, Innovative technologies, Sustainable Competitive Advantage etc. Presenting this set of slides with name Pitch Deck To Raise Non Public Offering Why Our Company Is Best Competitive Advantage Ppts Rules. The topics discussed in these slides are Non Public, Offering Company, Best Competitive, Advantage. This is a completely editable PowerPoint presentation and is available for immediate download. Download now and impress your audience.

Presenting this set of slides with name Roadmap For Process Flow For Sport Competition Proposal Ppt Powerpoint Template. This is a six stage process. The stages in this process are Roadmap, 2015 To 2021. This is a completely editable PowerPoint presentation and is available for immediate download. Download now and impress your audience.

Presenting Competition Overview Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Gallery Rules Cpb slide which is completely adaptable. The graphics in this PowerPoint slide showcase three stages that will help you succinctly convey the information. In addition, you can alternate the color, font size, font type, and shapes of this PPT layout according to your content. This PPT presentation can be accessed with Google Slides and is available in both standard screen and widescreen aspect ratios. It is also a useful set to elucidate topics like Competition Overview. This well-structured design can be downloaded in different formats like PDF, JPG, and PNG. So, without any delay, click on the download button now.

Presenting Price Non Price Competition Economics Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Portfolio Rules Cpb slide which is completely adaptable. The graphics in this PowerPoint slide showcase three stages that will help you succinctly convey the information. In addition, you can alternate the color, font size, font type, and shapes of this PPT layout according to your content. This PPT presentation can be accessed with Google Slides and is available in both standard screen and widescreen aspect ratios. It is also a useful set to elucidate topics like Price Non Price Competition Economics. This well structured design can be downloaded in different formats like PDF, JPG, and PNG. So, without any delay, click on the download button now.

This slide cover porters five forces model. It shows increasing and decreasing status of bargaining power of buyers and suppliers, threats of substitutes and new entrants, and competitive rivalry.Introducing Competitive Forces Model Segmentation Approaches Ppt Rules to increase your presentation threshold. Encompassed with five stages, this template is a great option to educate and entice your audience. Dispence information on Bargaining Power Of Buyers, Threat Of New Entrants, Bargaining Power Of Suppliers, using this template. Grab it now to reap its full benefits.

Presenting Competitive Stream Revenue Management Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Model Rules Cpb slide which is completely adaptable. The graphics in this PowerPoint slide showcase eight stages that will help you succinctly convey the information. In addition, you can alternate the color, font size, font type, and shapes of this PPT layout according to your content. This PPT presentation can be accessed with Google Slides and is available in both standard screen and widescreen aspect ratios. It is also a useful set to elucidate topics like Competitive Stream Revenue Management. This well structured design can be downloaded in different formats like PDF, JPG, and PNG. So, without any delay, click on the download button now.

Following slide will help the company to show the investors or audience a complete view of its competitive landscape. It also covers information about competitors market share. Present the topic in a bit more detail with this Competitive Analysis Guy Kawasaki 10 20 30 Rule Ppt Model Graphics Template. Use it as a tool for discussion and navigation on Business Model, Product Life Cycle Stage, Markets Serve, Market Share. This template is free to edit as deemed fit for your organization. Therefore download it now.

This template covers competitors analysis for SaaS industry based on variables such as all in one, store, variety and marketplace etc. Introducing SaaS Company Competitive Landscape SaaS Funding Elevator Ppt Icon Rules to increase your presentation threshold. Encompassed with one stages, this template is a great option to educate and entice your audience. Dispence information on SaaS Company Competitive Landscape, using this template. Grab it now to reap its full benefits.

Introducing Competitive Landscape Strategic Due Diligence Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Rules to increase your presentation threshold. Encompassed with nine stages, this template is a great option to educate and entice your audience. Dispence information on Capital, Sales, Management, Investments, Revenue, using this template. Grab it now to reap its full benefits.

Introducing Circular Process Case Competition Ppt Microsoft to increase your presentation threshold. Encompassed with four stages, this template is a great option to educate and entice your audience. Dispence information on Circular Process, using this template. Grab it now to reap its full benefits.

Present the topic in a bit more detail with this Our Offerings Vs The Competition New Service Initiation Plan Ppt Rules Use it as a tool for discussion and navigation on Our Offerings Vs The Competition. This template is free to edit as deemed fit for your organization. Therefore download it now.

The slide shows the key competitors matrix of the company in different segments luxury vehicle segment, affordable vehicle segment, standalone operations segment, diversified operations segment etc. Increase audience engagement and knowledge by dispensing information using Competitive Analysis Matrix Loss Revenue Financials Decline Automobile Company Ppt Rules. This template helps you present information on four stages. You can also present information on Manufacturing, Competitive Analysis Matrix using this PPT design. This layout is completely editable so personaize it now to meet your audiences expectations.

Presenting our Competitive Advantage Innovation Ppt Powerpoint Presentation Layouts Rules Cpb PowerPoint template design. This PowerPoint slide showcases five stages. It is useful to share insightful information on Competitive Advantage Innovation This PPT slide can be easily accessed in standard screen and widescreen aspect ratios. It is also available in various formats like PDF, PNG, and JPG. Not only this, the PowerPoint slideshow is completely editable and you can effortlessly modify the font size, font type, and shapes according to your wish. Our PPT layout is compatible with Google Slides as well, so download and edit it as per your knowledge.

Presenting Five Yearly Diversity Inclusion Initiative Competition Process Roadmap PowerPoint Template. This PPT presentation is Google Slides compatible hence it is easily accessible. You can download and save this PowerPoint layout in different formats like PDF, PNG, and JPG. This PPT theme is available in both 4,3 and 16,9 aspect ratios. This PowerPoint template is customizable so you can modify the font size, font type, color, and shapes as per your requirements.

Presenting Half Yearly Diversity Inclusion Initiative Competition Process Roadmap PowerPoint Template. This PPT presentation is Google Slides compatible hence it is easily accessible. You can download and save this PowerPoint layout in different formats like PDF, PNG, and JPG. This PPT theme is available in both 4,3 and 16,9 aspect ratios. This PowerPoint template is customizable so you can modify the font size, font type, color, and shapes as per your requirements.

Presenting Quarterly Diversity Inclusion Initiative Competition Process Roadmap PowerPoint Template. This PPT presentation is Google Slides compatible hence it is easily accessible. You can download and save this PowerPoint layout in different formats like PDF, PNG, and JPG. This PPT theme is available in both 4,3 and 16,9 aspect ratios. This PowerPoint template is customizable so you can modify the font size, font type, color, and shapes as per your requirements.

Presenting Six Months Diversity Inclusion Initiative Competition Process Roadmap PowerPoint Template. This PPT presentation is Google Slides compatible hence it is easily accessible. You can download and save this PowerPoint layout in different formats like PDF, PNG, and JPG. This PPT theme is available in both 4,3 and 16,9 aspect ratios. This PowerPoint template is customizable so you can modify the font size, font type, color, and shapes as per your requirements.

Home PowerPoint Templates Shapes Competition Slides Template for PowerPoint

Competition Slides Template for PowerPoint

Working on a presentation that involves competition or the results of competition? The Competition Slides Template for PowerPoint is a great way to present this. It is an alternative presentation template to our Competition PowerPoint Template .

The competition template contains three main categories. The first slide offers a multi-use slide featuring a competition illustration of two people holding up a trophy. There are three slides that show a bar graph of the progress or results of a competition between different parties. Find a 2-component bar graph, a 2-component bar graph, and a 4-component bar graph. Finally, there are two slides that show the winner’s podiums. One version shows three podiums, while the other version shows five.

The competition presentation template features bright colors and energetic illustrations. It is easily used in PPT and Google Slides presentations. Once added to your presentation, you’ll be able to adapt it effortlessly to the theme and style of your presentation.

Business professionals and students alike will enjoy using these slide templates to illustrate a competition, activities or ranking. Use it as a competition introduction, to update audiences on the progress of a competition, or to present competition results. This template will ensure that your presentation stands out with unique visuals. There’s nothing standard about this PPT competition template.

You must be logged in to download this file.

Favorite Add to Collection

Details (6 slides)

Supported Versions:

Subscribe today and get immediate access to download our PowerPoint templates.

Related PowerPoint Templates

2-Options Comparison Table PowerPoint Template

Sales Enablement Battle Cards PowerPoint Template

Hackathon Planning Process PowerPoint Template

5-Step Staircase PowerPoint Template

• Account-based marketing
• Acquisition
• Attribution
• Brand awareness
• Brand utility
• Change management
• Collaboration
• Competition
• Data management
• Data regulations
• Digital asset management
• Digital transformation
• Educating leadership
• Ethical marketing
• Inclusive marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Lead generation
• Marketing budget
• Multichannel
• Omnichannel
• Online advertising
• People and skills
• Performance marketing
• Personalization
• Social media
• Sonic Branding
• Sustainable marketing
• Third-party cookie
• Artificial intelligence
• Augmented reality
• Disruptive MarTech
• Emerging technology
• Machine learning
• Virtual reality
• Voice search
• Actionable analysis
• Brand experience
• Customer behaviour
• Customer experience
• Customer insights
• Customer journey
• Data insights
• Fractional CMO
• Predictive analytics
• Case Studies
• search search
• News & Insights keyboard_arrow_down
• Virtual Events
• Tech Talks (New)
• Subscribe to newsletter
• Promote your business
• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• ClickZ Advisory Board

Stats & Tools

• CPA calculator
• CPM Calculator
• ROI Calculator

8 Simple Rules for Stronger PowerPoint Presentations

Admit it, no one likes PowerPoint, yet it remains the industry standard. Columnist Kristin Kovner shares her 8 simple rules for more engaging, attractive and effective PowerPpoint presentations.

• Media Buying

I spend of lot of my time helping clients improve their PowerPoint presentations. Over the years, I’ve found that many presentations can be improved greatly by following just a few simple rules. Here are eight of my favorites:

1. Use a Maximum of 15 Slides 

The average presentation slot or business meeting lasts an hour. By the time you meet and greet and get through the inevitable A/V issues (the projector isn’t working, you can’t find the right adapter for your Mac, or someone is dialing in but having trouble), you’re down to 45 minutes. Since you’ll always want to encourage discussion and ample time for Q&A, you have about 30 minutes left.

Using the rule of thumb that it takes about two minutes to present a slide, you have just enough time to present 15 slides effectively. Boil down your story to just the key points and move the rest of the slides to the appendix as a leave behind.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Some very skilled presenters, like my friend and former colleague David Shing , can get through 100 slides in 15 minutes. But this verbal and visual choreography takes years of practice and even David wouldn’t use that many slides in a traditional business meeting.

2. Make Your Titles Headlines, Not Descriptions

Each section of your slide is a valuable piece of real estate, adding information or insight to the story you’re trying to tell. When you use a title that simply describes what’s on the slide, you’re wasting valuable real estate. For example:

“2013 Revenue” is a description. “2013 Revenue Grew 44%” is a headline.

The best titles provide context and explain the slide’s content, as well as conclusions — the core point of your slide.

3. Let the Titles Tell the Story

Related to the last point, many clients I work with often find themselves struggling with the order of their slides. A good trick I use is to see if the titles can tell your story. That is to say, you should be able to read just the titles of your slides out loud in order and understand the essence of your presentation. If you can’t, or if the order sounds off, chances are your titles aren’t headlines (they’re descriptions) or you need to reorder your slides.

Similarly, if while you’re presenting, you find yourself saying, “As I’ll explain in just a few slides from now…” move that slide up.

4. Layout Counts  

The most important information on your slide should go in the title, the upper left-hand position, and at the very bottom, since in Western cultures we tend to read left to right, top to bottom. Our eyes tend to jump to these areas. Try putting your slide’s key takeaway in a shaded callout box in the bottom; color helps distinguish the information from the rest of the slide’s content.

5. Give Your Audience a Roadmap 

Just like passengers in a car, your audience will feel more comfortable if you let them know where you’re headed. Agenda slides and divider slides can help, but they merely order your presentation; they don’t organize it.

What I’m really talking about is having a framework to your story. Frameworks structure your narrative and help keep your audience engaged because they will always know where they are within your story. Here are some example frameworks:

• Three pillars of your product’s value • 10 trends in the market • A day in the life of your consumer

Regardless of the framework you choose, it will only be effective if you stick to it. If you show a slide that says your product works in three environments: at home, at work, and on the go, the next slide that follows needs to be a deep dive on how your product works in the home, followed by a slide about your product at work, and finally by a slide about your mobile product. We’re human. We like order. Frameworks provide it.

6. Vary Your Format

Humans like order, but we also crave variety. If you show a slide or two with charts, make the next slide a big, beautiful visual. If you tend to have bulleted lists on the left-hand side, switch it up and place the list on the right. The change in pacing and visual rhythm will keep your audience engaged.

7. Bubbles, Callouts and Takeaways

Think of your slide as an onion – there are layers to the story you’re trying to tell.

Credit goes to Allison Tepley for this one: bubbles, callout boxes, and key takeaways will add dimension to your story. So show the chart, but also point out the interesting data point within it, the implication of the trends behind it, and the takeaway from it.

8. Always Close With an Ask

You’d be surprised, but the majority of presentations I see just, well, end. I even hear speakers conclude with “Well, that’s it.” What a waste! Always close with an ask. The ask can be for commitment to a project, for marketing dollars, or to continue the conversation.

In a speaking engagement setting, the ask could be for the audience to think about the implications of what you’ve shared, or how it will affect the way they approach their jobs. One close I often use is “Three things to do tomorrow,” making your presentation immediately actionable. 

These are just a few of my tried-and-true best practices. What are yours?

This column was originally published November 14, 2013.

Subscribe to get your daily business insights

More about:

Read the next article

Explore Tech Talks

Lucy helps organizations leverage knowledge for in... View Tech Talk

TVSquared is the global leader in cross-platform T... View Tech Talk

Grata is a B2B search engine for discovering small... View Tech Talk

Whitepapers

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing ... Download Now

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups

Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. ... Download Now

Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its people

This report documents the findings of a Fireside c... Download Now

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy

Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touc... Download Now

Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics f...

Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...

Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its peopl...

Learning to win the talent war: how digital market....

This report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Exp...

Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touchpoints – globally! Make sure your brand shines in those critical moments. Read More...

Related Articles

How ad council raised $407m in donated media for their covid-19 campaign, how ad council raised $407m in donated media for t....

Agile research technology helped Ad Council adjust their mask messaging in real-time, reach 70% of Americans, and raise over $400 million in donated m...

How AI is simplifying the complexities of media planning

How ai is simplifying the complexities of media pl....

AI has extended its sphere of influence to many aspects of marketing, but one area where it’s only just realizing its full potential is that of media ...

Understanding COVID-19's effect on media and marketing

Understanding covid-19's effect on media and marke....

With people across the globe sheltering in place, media consumption is skyrocketing—and with an entirely digital community and ecosystem, marketers ne...

AI and automation can make marketers champions again

Ai and automation can make marketers champions aga....

AI and automation is here to help marketers, not replace them. We explore how the technology can help marketers refocus and flourish across their KPIs...

The State of Media Transformation

Advancements in technology have fundamentally changed the way the media industry operates. Consumers and media platforms alike have shifted online, wi...

Verizon acquires Yahoo's operating business for $4.8 billion

Verizon acquires yahoo's operating business for $4....

Verizon has agreed to acquire Yahoo's operating business in a $4.8 billion cash deal, sealing the fate of one of the internet's pioneering giants. Rea...

Report: Facebook dominates social ad spend and this is just the beginning

Report: facebook dominates social ad spend and thi....

Facebook will take the lion's share – more than two thirds – of global ad revenues for social sites this year, according to a report from eMarketer. R...

How news consumption changed with social media

News consumption has changed over the years as more people turn to social media to be updated for the latest news. How does this trend affect the ...

We sent a code to your email.

Enter the 6-digit verification code sent to

Subscribe to the latest news & insights

World Deer Expo Ticket Giveaway Contest Rules

by ABC 33/40

WBMA/WORLD DEER EXPO TICKET GIVEAWAY

OFFICIAL CALL-IN CONTEST RULES

Contest: World Deer Expo Ticket Giveaway

Station: Sinclair Communications, LLC dba WBMA

Station Address: WBMA, 800 Concourse Pkwy #200 Birmingham, AL 35244

Contest Area: Marion, Winston, Cullman, Blount, Etowah, Cherokee, Fayette, Walker, Jefferson, St. Clair, Calhoun, Pickens, Tuscaloosa, Shelby, Talladega, Clay, Greene, Hale, Bibb, Chilton, Coosa

Contest Sponsor(s): World Deer Expo

Prize Provider(s): World Deer Expo

Age of Eligibility: Eighteen (18)

Contest Period: June 3, 2024 to June 28, 2024

Program to Watch: Watch the “Talk of Alabama” program which the Station airs each weekday, Monday through Friday, from 9:00 AM CDT to 10:00 AM CDT on Channel 33.

Criteria to Win: Caller Number One (1)

Number of Winners for Each Cue to Call: One (1)

Total Number of Winners for Contest Period: Twenty (20)

Prize(s) and Value(s): Four (4) tickets to “World Deer Expo” valid for one entry between July 19, 2024 and July 21, 2024 at the Brimingham Jefferson Convention Center. The total value of each Prize is $80.00 ($20.00 per ticket).

In connection with any visit to any Prize Provider location, please be advised that the Prize Provider’s policies, CDC guidelines, and the recommendations of health officials must be followed. Please note that any public location where people are present provides an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19, and the Station and Prize Provider cannot guarantee that any person will not be exposed during a visit.

Station’s Website: abc3340.com/

Station’s Privacy Policy: https://sbgi.net/privacy-policy

Station’s Website Terms and Conditions: https://sbgi.net/terms-conditions

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. This contest is subject to all applicable laws and regulations and is void where prohibited.

Odds of winning depend on the number of valid and correct entries received, and the order in which calls are received.

All capitalized terms shall have the meanings set forth above.

How to Enter and Win

Entrants may attempt to enter as many times as they wish. At the time calls are solicited during the Program to Watch, the Criteria to Win will be announced. Viewers will call in on the designated telephone line announced on-air, in accordance with the Criteria to Win.

Eligibility

1. To be eligible to participate in the Contest, entrants must be U.S. residents who are at least the Age of Eligibility and reside in the Contest Area. Residents and Citizens of the European Union are not eligible to enter or win this Contest.

2. Employees of Sinclair Broadcast Group, LLC, Sinclair Television Group, Inc., Station (collectively, the “Company”), Sponsor(s), Prize Provider(s), contest software providers, social media platforms, each of their parent and affiliated companies, advertising and promotion agencies, any and all local television broadcast and cable stations, local radio and other media companies, and the immediate family members of each are ineligible. The term “immediate family” includes spouses, domestic partners, grandparents, parents, siblings, children, grandchildren, and any other relatives who reside in the same household with employee.

Contest Terms and Conditions

1. Station is not responsible for any telephone system failure or malfunctions or other inability of entrants to reach telephone entry line. All entries received from ineligible entrants will be void. All entries become the property of the Company and will not be acknowledged or returned.

2. The Contest will be judged by Station personnel, and the decision of the judges will be final as to all matters, including (i) the order in which calls were received and (ii) whether any answer required to be given is correct. By calling the designated telephone line, each entrant gives permission to Station to record and/or broadcast contestant’s telephone call. Poorly connected or disconnected cellular phone calls may be disqualified. Calls for entrants are taken in order of receipt. In the event that more than one voice is heard on the phone line, the winner will be the first person to speak. If the judge(s) is not able to determine which caller was first, a random drawing will be held to determine the winner. The use of switching or programming equipment by anyone is in violation of contest rules and is not permitted. Due to any time delay between the Station’s over-the-air signal and the Station’s online webcast or streaming, viewers who watch the Station’s online stream may hear a cue to call later than viewers watching the over-the-air signal. As a result, the odds of an online/mobile viewer being able to enter or become a winner may be diminished.

3. Station cannot be held liable for any lost or stolen entries, prizes or contest information. Station is not responsible for any technological malfunction, or human error relating to the Contest.

4. Prizes are provided “as is” without any express or implied warranty of any kind including warranties of merchantability, non-infringement or intellectual property, or fitness for any particular purpose. Prizes are subject to the Sponsor(s) and/or Prize Provider(s) standard terms and conditions, and expiration dates. For any ticket related prizes, Station, Sponsor(s) and Prize Provider(s) are not responsible if any event or performance is cancelled or postponed.

5. Each winner will be notified at the time of his/her call. Before claiming any prize, each winner must provide his/her correct name, address and telephone number to Station at the time of notification. Each winner must sign and return a release and affidavit of eligibility, which must be received within three (3) days of notification (or less due to prize use time constraints), at the time winner claims his/her prize in person at the Station. Each winner must show picture identification to claim his/her prize. Station reserves the right to examine additional identification and may choose to accept or deny awarding any prize based on the identification presented.

6. If a winner does not timely sign and return the release and affidavit of eligibility, then the prize will be forfeited, an alternate winner will not be selected, and the prize will remain the property of the Station.

7. There will be no substitutions or cash alternatives for any prize except at the sole discretion of Station. The Station has the right to substitute a prize of similar value. No sale, transfer or assignment of any prize is allowed.

8. Each winner is responsible for paying all local, county, state and federal taxes on prizes based on the estimated retail value of the prizes as set forth in these rules. Each winner must sign a W-9 form.

9. Only one prize will be awarded per household if more than one prize is awarded. Entrants are eligible to win only one prize within any 90-day period, regardless of the number of contests entered.

10. The Company is not liable if the provider of any part of a prize fails to satisfy its obligations to furnish its portion of the prize.

11. The Company, Sponsor(s), and Prize Provider(s) accept no responsibility or liability in connection with any injuries, losses or damages of any kind directly or indirectly caused by or resulting from the acceptance, possession or use of any prize awarded in the Contest. By entering, entrants agree to release the Company, Sponsor(s), and Prize Provider(s), and each of their respective parent, affiliates, officers, directors, employees and agents, from any and all claims, loss, damage or injury as a result of or incident to his/her participation in the Contest or his/her use of the prize. Entrants further acknowledge and agree that if a winner, the Company has the right to publicize entrant’s name, character, likeness, photograph, voice and the fact that entrant is a winner of the Contest for promotional purposes, without financial remuneration.

12. Complete Official Rules for the Contest are available Monday through Friday during normal business hours at the Station and on the Station’s Website. For a list of prize winners, send a separate, self-addressed, stamped envelope to the Station within thirty (30) days of the end of the Contest Period.

13. The Station has the right to disqualify any entrant it determines has not complied with the Contest Rules. All decisions by the Station shall be final and binding relating to this contest, including the interpretation of the Contest Rules. Station reserves the right to make rules and contest changes and change the contest dates. Station reserves the right to cancel/terminate, modify or suspend the Contest if in Station’s sole determination it believes that the integrity of the Contest has been, or could be, compromised or that the Contest is not capable of running as planned or fairly, including infection by computer virus, bugs, tampering, unauthorized intervention, fraud, technical failures, or force majeure or any other causes beyond the Station’s control.

14. The Contest is subject to the Station’s Privacy Policy and the Station’s Website Terms and Conditions located on the Station’s Website.

• National Security
• Environment
• Special Investigations
• More Ways to Donate
• Impact & Reports
• Join Newsletter
• Become a Source

© THE INTERCEPT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

He Made a PowerPoint on Mothers Starving in Gaza. Then He Lost His Government Job.

A senior USAID adviser said he was pressured to resign days after the agency censored his presentation.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on WhatsApp

Alexander Smith’s PowerPoint presentation doesn’t appear designed to court controversy. The slides, focused on declining maternal health in Gaza, cite public health data from the United Nations and World Health Organization. His employer, the U.S. Agency for International Development, had selected him to share it at the government agency’s Global Gender Equality Conference.

But just before the conference, an issue of contention emerged.

A single slide mentioned international humanitarian law in context of the health crisis in Gaza. USAID staff cited the slide and discussion of international law as potential fodder for leaks, documents and emails Smith shared with The Intercept show. Despite Smith’s willingness to make revisions, his presentation was eventually canceled. On the last day of the conference, he found himself out of a job.

“I thought it is really obscene that misinformation can go out freely out into the world [about Gaza], but I can’t talk about the reality of starving pregnant women,” said Smith, who worked as a contracted senior adviser at USAID on gender and material health. “We can’t even whisper about that in a conference on that topic.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the agency declined to comment on personnel matters but said Smith was not forced out over the presentation. “As an Agency, we value and intentionally seek out a diversity of viewpoints,” said a USAID spokesperson.

Join Our Newsletter

Original reporting. fearless journalism. delivered to you..

Smith, who is both a lawyer and public health expert, had worked for USAID for four years. In February, he submitted an abstract for his presentation — titled “An Intersectional Gender Lens in Gaza: Ethnicity, Religion, Geography, Legal Status, and Maternal/Child Health Outcomes” — which was accepted for the small USAID conference. He was scheduled to present on May 22 in Washington, D.C.

On May 10, two weeks before the conference, the State Department issued a report — dubbed the “NSM-20” report — about Israel’s compliance with international law. As The Intercept reported , USAID officials had urged Secretary of State Antony Blinken to find Israel’s commitments to international law were not credible based on its conduct in Gaza since October.

Blinken’s report hedged considerably, expressing “deep concerns” about “action and inaction” by the Israeli government that resulted in “insufficient” aid delivery to Gaza, while concluding Israel was not “prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

At the conference, Smith wanted to touch on international humanitarian law. His slides on the topic did not mention Israel specifically, the presentation shows.

“I wasn’t planning to stand up and yell ‘Israel is committing genocide,’” Smith said. “I was stating the laws.”

The rest of Smith’s presentation drew on data from the U.N., WHO, and other sources about the decline of maternal health in Gaza, including reports about Israel’s devastating attacks on Gaza’s health infrastructure .

When officials in USAID’s Middle East bureau reviewed Smith’s presentation days before the event, they flagged the slide on international humanitarian law, in particular.

“REMOVE – This framing is unnecessary for the subsequent slides,” wrote Erika Yepsen, a public affairs official for the bureau, in a comment. “This is an inappropriate venue to be commenting on Israel’s compliance with IHL.”

The U.S. government’s “assessment of Israel’s compliance with IHL is a major point of contention across the Hill,” Yepsen wrote in the comment. She recommended that the Middle East bureau “not clear any version of this presentation with this topic included” due to “problematic language.”

In an email with other USAID advisers, Yepsen, who did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiries, noted that “the NSM-20 report has made national news and Israel’s compliance remains an unresolved issue.”

Smith agreed to cut the slide, the email thread shows. In line with administration guidelines, he also agreed to cut references to “Palestine,” including from the title of a chart produced by the United Nations Population Fund Palestine. He also agreed to other changes to comply with agency talking points and messaging, and offered to present without any slides, Smith told The Intercept.

Ultimately, USAID officials nixed the entire presentation. “Please remove this from the conference agenda,” wrote Allison Salyer, a senior adviser in the bureau, in an email. Salyer did not respond to The Intercept.

In a statement, a USAID official declined to discuss “specific personnel matters” but said Smith’s “work responsibilities did not include supporting USAID’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza or the devastating impacts of the conflict on women and children.”

USAID officials did not raise concerns over Smith’s expertise in any of the documents reviewed by The Intercept, focusing instead on his language choices.

“No one ever asked me before the conference if Gaza was outside my scope or used that as a reason not to talk about it,” Smith said. “Certainly the 35 people who reviewed and approved my abstract thought it was appropriate for me to speak on Gaza.”

Smith chose to attend the conference nonetheless. On the final day, he tried to ask the head of USAID , Samantha Power , why his presentation was canceled, but he was not called on, Smith said.

Late last week, Smith said he got a call from the company that contracted his position with USAID. He was told he could either resign or be terminated over “personality differences.”

“What happened to me sends a very clear signal to staff: We don’t talk about Gaza.”

The company would not tell him if the presentation contributed to USAID’s dissatisfaction with his performance, Smith said.

On Monday, Smith joined the growing ranks of Biden administration officials who have resigned over Gaza .

“Actively silencing discussion of Palestinian lives and the ongoing global health disaster is dehumanizing,” Smith wrote in a resignation letter to Power, “not only to the people of Gaza, but to the people of the United States who deserve to know the extent to which we are paying for and supporting crimes against Palestinians.”

“What happened to me sends a very clear signal to staff: We don’t talk about Gaza,” Smith told The Intercept.

Contact the author:

Medical Workers Evacuated From Gaza, but 3 Americans Refuse to Leave

Organizing Aid to Gaza Led Me to a Harsh Truth: Biden Is on Board for Ethnic Cleansing

“It Surpassed Tragedy”: The Horrors of Being Pregnant and Giving Birth in Gaza

Samantha Power Calls on Samantha Power to Resign Over Gaza

Latest stories.

Israel’s War on Gaza

Not Just Coastal Elites: Here’s How Three Rust Belt Colleges Protested Israel’s War in Gaza

P. Nick Curran, Akela Lacy

The narrative that took hold ignored inland campuses, like in the Rust Belt and into Appalachia, where students formed their own encampments.

Ghosts of Guantánamo

Guantánamo Prosecutors Accused of “Outrageous” Misconduct for Trying to Use Torture Testimony

Elise Swain

Government prosecutors claimed they didn’t know a former detainee recanted his testimony in interviews with the government.

Columbia Coincidentally Rewrites Disciplinary Rules Just in Time to Screw Over Student Protesters

Prem Thakker

“It’s hard to see this wildly disproportionate response as anything other than an attempt to chill speech on this issue.”