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How To Make a Good Presentation [A Complete Guide]

By Krystle Wong , Jul 20, 2023

A top-notch presentation possesses the power to drive action. From winning stakeholders over and conveying a powerful message to securing funding — your secret weapon lies within the realm of creating an effective presentation .  

Being an excellent presenter isn’t confined to the boardroom. Whether you’re delivering a presentation at work, pursuing an academic career, involved in a non-profit organization or even a student, nailing the presentation game is a game-changer.

In this article, I’ll cover the top qualities of compelling presentations and walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to give a good presentation. Here’s a little tip to kick things off: for a headstart, check out Venngage’s collection of free presentation templates . They are fully customizable, and the best part is you don’t need professional design skills to make them shine!

These valuable presentation tips cater to individuals from diverse professional backgrounds, encompassing business professionals, sales and marketing teams, educators, trainers, students, researchers, non-profit organizations, public speakers and presenters. 

No matter your field or role, these tips for presenting will equip you with the skills to deliver effective presentations that leave a lasting impression on any audience.

Click to jump ahead:

What are the 10 qualities of a good presentation?

Step-by-step guide on how to prepare an effective presentation, 9 effective techniques to deliver a memorable presentation, faqs on making a good presentation, how to create a presentation with venngage in 5 steps.

When it comes to giving an engaging presentation that leaves a lasting impression, it’s not just about the content — it’s also about how you deliver it. Wondering what makes a good presentation? Well, the best presentations I’ve seen consistently exhibit these 10 qualities:

1. Clear structure

No one likes to get lost in a maze of information. Organize your thoughts into a logical flow, complete with an introduction, main points and a solid conclusion. A structured presentation helps your audience follow along effortlessly, leaving them with a sense of satisfaction at the end.

Regardless of your presentation style , a quality presentation starts with a clear roadmap. Browse through Venngage’s template library and select a presentation template that aligns with your content and presentation goals. Here’s a good presentation example template with a logical layout that includes sections for the introduction, main points, supporting information and a conclusion: 

2. Engaging opening

Hook your audience right from the start with an attention-grabbing statement, a fascinating question or maybe even a captivating anecdote. Set the stage for a killer presentation!

The opening moments of your presentation hold immense power – check out these 15 ways to start a presentation to set the stage and captivate your audience.

3. Relevant content

Make sure your content aligns with their interests and needs. Your audience is there for a reason, and that’s to get valuable insights. Avoid fluff and get straight to the point, your audience will be genuinely excited.

4. Effective visual aids

Picture this: a slide with walls of text and tiny charts, yawn! Visual aids should be just that—aiding your presentation. Opt for clear and visually appealing slides, engaging images and informative charts that add value and help reinforce your message.

With Venngage, visualizing data takes no effort at all. You can import data from CSV or Google Sheets seamlessly and create stunning charts, graphs and icon stories effortlessly to showcase your data in a captivating and impactful way.

5. Clear and concise communication

Keep your language simple, and avoid jargon or complicated terms. Communicate your ideas clearly, so your audience can easily grasp and retain the information being conveyed. This can prevent confusion and enhance the overall effectiveness of the message. 

6. Engaging delivery

Spice up your presentation with a sprinkle of enthusiasm! Maintain eye contact, use expressive gestures and vary your tone of voice to keep your audience glued to the edge of their seats. A touch of charisma goes a long way!

7. Interaction and audience engagement

Turn your presentation into an interactive experience — encourage questions, foster discussions and maybe even throw in a fun activity. Engaged audiences are more likely to remember and embrace your message.

Transform your slides into an interactive presentation with Venngage’s dynamic features like pop-ups, clickable icons and animated elements. Engage your audience with interactive content that lets them explore and interact with your presentation for a truly immersive experience.

8. Effective storytelling

Who doesn’t love a good story? Weaving relevant anecdotes, case studies or even a personal story into your presentation can captivate your audience and create a lasting impact. Stories build connections and make your message memorable.

A great presentation background is also essential as it sets the tone, creates visual interest and reinforces your message. Enhance the overall aesthetics of your presentation with these 15 presentation background examples and captivate your audience’s attention.

9. Well-timed pacing

Pace your presentation thoughtfully with well-designed presentation slides, neither rushing through nor dragging it out. Respect your audience’s time and ensure you cover all the essential points without losing their interest.

10. Strong conclusion

Last impressions linger! Summarize your main points and leave your audience with a clear takeaway. End your presentation with a bang , a call to action or an inspiring thought that resonates long after the conclusion.

In-person presentations aside, acing a virtual presentation is of paramount importance in today’s digital world. Check out this guide to learn how you can adapt your in-person presentations into virtual presentations . 

Preparing an effective presentation starts with laying a strong foundation that goes beyond just creating slides and notes. One of the quickest and best ways to make a presentation would be with the help of a good presentation software . 

Otherwise, let me walk you to how to prepare for a presentation step by step and unlock the secrets of crafting a professional presentation that sets you apart.

1. Understand the audience and their needs

Before you dive into preparing your masterpiece, take a moment to get to know your target audience. Tailor your presentation to meet their needs and expectations , and you’ll have them hooked from the start!

2. Conduct thorough research on the topic

Time to hit the books (or the internet)! Don’t skimp on the research with your presentation materials — dive deep into the subject matter and gather valuable insights . The more you know, the more confident you’ll feel in delivering your presentation.

3. Organize the content with a clear structure

No one wants to stumble through a chaotic mess of information. Outline your presentation with a clear and logical flow. Start with a captivating introduction, follow up with main points that build on each other and wrap it up with a powerful conclusion that leaves a lasting impression.

Delivering an effective business presentation hinges on captivating your audience, and Venngage’s professionally designed business presentation templates are tailor-made for this purpose. With thoughtfully structured layouts, these templates enhance your message’s clarity and coherence, ensuring a memorable and engaging experience for your audience members.

Don’t want to build your presentation layout from scratch? pick from these 5 foolproof presentation layout ideas that won’t go wrong. 

4. Develop visually appealing and supportive visual aids

Spice up your presentation with eye-catching visuals! Create slides that complement your message, not overshadow it. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, but that doesn’t mean you need to overload your slides with text.

Well-chosen designs create a cohesive and professional look, capturing your audience’s attention and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your message. Here’s a list of carefully curated PowerPoint presentation templates and great background graphics that will significantly influence the visual appeal and engagement of your presentation.

5. Practice, practice and practice

Practice makes perfect — rehearse your presentation and arrive early to your presentation to help overcome stage fright. Familiarity with your material will boost your presentation skills and help you handle curveballs with ease.

6. Seek feedback and make necessary adjustments

Don’t be afraid to ask for help and seek feedback from friends and colleagues. Constructive criticism can help you identify blind spots and fine-tune your presentation to perfection.

With Venngage’s real-time collaboration feature , receiving feedback and editing your presentation is a seamless process. Group members can access and work on the presentation simultaneously and edit content side by side in real-time. Changes will be reflected immediately to the entire team, promoting seamless teamwork.

7. Prepare for potential technical or logistical issues

Prepare for the unexpected by checking your equipment, internet connection and any other potential hiccups. If you’re worried that you’ll miss out on any important points, you could always have note cards prepared. Remember to remain focused and rehearse potential answers to anticipated questions.

8. Fine-tune and polish your presentation

As the big day approaches, give your presentation one last shine. Review your talking points, practice how to present a presentation and make any final tweaks. Deep breaths — you’re on the brink of delivering a successful presentation!

In competitive environments, persuasive presentations set individuals and organizations apart. To brush up on your presentation skills, read these guides on how to make a persuasive presentation and tips to presenting effectively . 

Whether you’re an experienced presenter or a novice, the right techniques will let your presentation skills soar to new heights!

From public speaking hacks to interactive elements and storytelling prowess, these 9 effective presentation techniques will empower you to leave a lasting impression on your audience and make your presentations unforgettable.

1. Confidence and positive body language

Positive body language instantly captivates your audience, making them believe in your message as much as you do. Strengthen your stage presence and own that stage like it’s your second home! Stand tall, shoulders back and exude confidence. 

2. Eye contact with the audience

Break down that invisible barrier and connect with your audience through their eyes. Maintaining eye contact when giving a presentation builds trust and shows that you’re present and engaged with them.

3. Effective use of hand gestures and movement

A little movement goes a long way! Emphasize key points with purposeful gestures and don’t be afraid to walk around the stage. Your energy will be contagious!

4. Utilize storytelling techniques

Weave the magic of storytelling into your presentation. Share relatable anecdotes, inspiring success stories or even personal experiences that tug at the heartstrings of your audience. Adjust your pitch, pace and volume to match the emotions and intensity of the story. Varying your speaking voice adds depth and enhances your stage presence.

5. Incorporate multimedia elements

Spice up your presentation with a dash of visual pizzazz! Use slides, images and video clips to add depth and clarity to your message. Just remember, less is more—don’t overwhelm them with information overload. 

Turn your presentations into an interactive party! Involve your audience with questions, polls or group activities. When they actively participate, they become invested in your presentation’s success. Bring your design to life with animated elements. Venngage allows you to apply animations to icons, images and text to create dynamic and engaging visual content.

6. Utilize humor strategically

Laughter is the best medicine—and a fantastic presentation enhancer! A well-placed joke or lighthearted moment can break the ice and create a warm atmosphere , making your audience more receptive to your message.

7. Practice active listening and respond to feedback

Be attentive to your audience’s reactions and feedback. If they have questions or concerns, address them with genuine interest and respect. Your responsiveness builds rapport and shows that you genuinely care about their experience.

8. Apply the 10-20-30 rule

Apply the 10-20-30 presentation rule and keep it short, sweet and impactful! Stick to ten slides, deliver your presentation within 20 minutes and use a 30-point font to ensure clarity and focus. Less is more, and your audience will thank you for it!

9. Implement the 5-5-5 rule

Simplicity is key. Limit each slide to five bullet points, with only five words per bullet point and allow each slide to remain visible for about five seconds. This rule keeps your presentation concise and prevents information overload.

Simple presentations are more engaging because they are easier to follow. Summarize your presentations and keep them simple with Venngage’s gallery of simple presentation templates and ensure that your message is delivered effectively across your audience.

1. How to start a presentation?

To kick off your presentation effectively, begin with an attention-grabbing statement or a powerful quote. Introduce yourself, establish credibility and clearly state the purpose and relevance of your presentation.

2. How to end a presentation?

For a strong conclusion, summarize your talking points and key takeaways. End with a compelling call to action or a thought-provoking question and remember to thank your audience and invite any final questions or interactions.

3. How to make a presentation interactive?

To make your presentation interactive, encourage questions and discussion throughout your talk. Utilize multimedia elements like videos or images and consider including polls, quizzes or group activities to actively involve your audience.

In need of inspiration for your next presentation? I’ve got your back! Pick from these 120+ presentation ideas, topics and examples to get started. 

Creating a stunning presentation with Venngage is a breeze with our user-friendly drag-and-drop editor and professionally designed templates for all your communication needs. 

Here’s how to make a presentation in just 5 simple steps with the help of Venngage:

Step 1: Sign up for Venngage for free using your email, Gmail or Facebook account or simply log in to access your account. 

Step 2: Pick a design from our selection of free presentation templates (they’re all created by our expert in-house designers).

Step 3: Make the template your own by customizing it to fit your content and branding. With Venngage’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can easily modify text, change colors and adjust the layout to create a unique and eye-catching design.

Step 4: Elevate your presentation by incorporating captivating visuals. You can upload your images or choose from Venngage’s vast library of high-quality photos, icons and illustrations. 

Step 5: Upgrade to a premium or business account to export your presentation in PDF and print it for in-person presentations or share it digitally for free!

By following these five simple steps, you’ll have a professionally designed and visually engaging presentation ready in no time. With Venngage’s user-friendly platform, your presentation is sure to make a lasting impression. So, let your creativity flow and get ready to shine in your next presentation!

What Makes a Good PowerPoint Presentation? (The Essential Checklist)

We’ve all been there.

Sitting in a meeting or lecture, watching a PowerPoint presentation that seems to go on and on without a clear direction or purpose.

It is essential to know how to create an effective PowerPoint presentation, one that is engaging and informative to your audience.

In this article, we will discuss the essential checklist for creating a good PowerPoint presentation, including structuring your presentation, designing an attractive presentation, providing clear and concise information, and more.

With this checklist, you can create an effective presentation that will leave your audience wanting more.

Table of Contents

Short Answer

A good PowerPoint presentation should have a clear structure, a well-defined purpose, informative and relevant content, and visuals that support the content.

It should also use elements like fonts, colors, and images to create a visually appealing presentation.

Additionally, the presenter should use a variety of presentation techniques and delivery styles to engage the audience and keep them interested in the material.

Structuring your Presentation

Creating a well-structured PowerPoint presentation is key to engaging your audience and delivering the information in an effective manner. A good structure will ensure that the presentation is easy to follow and that the main points are clear. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when structuring your presentation:

Start with a strong introduction.

Make sure to capture the attention of your audience and clearly explain the purpose of the presentation.

Break down the presentation into logical sections.

Use headings and subheadings to clearly communicate the main topics of the presentation.

Use visuals and multimedia to support your points.

Visuals can help the audience better understand the key points of the presentation.

Use transitions between slides to keep the presentation flowing.

Transitions can help maintain the audiences attention and keep them engaged.

End with a strong conclusion.

Make sure to summarize the main points of the presentation and provide a call to action.

By following these tips, you can ensure that your presentation has a strong structure and that the audience is able to easily follow along.

With a well-structured presentation, you can make sure that your message is delivered in an effective and engaging manner.

Attractive Design

When it comes to creating an effective PowerPoint presentation, having an attractive design is key.

The design of a PowerPoint presentation can make or break it, so it is important to ensure that the visuals are aesthetically pleasing and engaging.

The design should be consistent throughout the presentation, with a unified color palette, fonts, and graphics.

It is also important to avoid using too many visuals, as this can be overwhelming for the audience.

Additionally, it is important to use visuals that complement the text and add to the overall message of the presentation.

This can be done by using vibrant colors, relevant images, and illustrations that make the content more accessible.

Finally, including interactive elements, such as polls, quizzes, or videos, can help to keep the audience engaged and create a more interactive experience.

Clear and Concise Information

When it comes to creating a good PowerPoint presentation, it is important to provide clear and concise information.

Presentations should be easy to follow and understand, without being overly wordy or filled with unnecessary jargon.

Proper structure and formatting are also key to making sure that the presentation flows smoothly and is easy to follow.

To ensure that the information is clear and concise, it is important to use simple language and keep sentences short.

Avoid using overly-complicated words or phrases, and focus on providing only the most relevant and important information.

It is also important to use visuals that complement the text, such as charts, graphs, and diagrams.

These visuals can help to better illustrate the point being made and make it easier for the audience to understand the information.

It is also important to make sure that the presentation is organized in a logical manner.

Presentations should have an introduction, body, and conclusion, and the information should be presented in a way that is easy to follow and understand.

By following these tips, you can make sure that your presentation is clear and concise, and that the audience will be able to easily follow and understand the information you are presenting.

Relevant Examples

When it comes to creating a successful PowerPoint presentation, one of the key elements is to ensure that the presentation includes relevant examples that are tailored to the audience.

This means that the examples should be related to the topics discussed in the presentation and should help to illustrate the points being made.

Examples can be used to demonstrate how certain concepts work, provide evidence to back up claims, or even to provide a real-world context to the presentation.

When selecting relevant examples for a PowerPoint presentation, it is important to consider the audience and the topics being discussed.

For example, when giving a presentation on marketing, it would be wise to provide examples of successful marketing campaigns that were successful in a similar demographic.

Additionally, it is important to make sure that the examples are well-suited to the audience for example, an example of a successful marketing campaign that was used by a company in a different industry may not be the best example for a presentation on a different industry.

The use of multimedia can also be a great way to add relevance to a presentation.

For example, videos or animations can be used to illustrate the points being made in the presentation, and can make the presentation more engaging and memorable.

Additionally, interactive elements such as quizzes or polls can be a great way to get the audience involved in the presentation and ensure that the information is being retained.

By including relevant examples, multimedia, and interactive elements in a PowerPoint presentation, it will be more interesting, engaging, and effective for the audience.

This will help to ensure that the presentation is successful and that the audience is making the most of the information being presented.

Effective Use of Multimedia

Using multimedia effectively in a PowerPoint presentation can be a great way to engage your audience and add an extra layer of interest to your presentation.

Multimedia elements such as videos, animations, audio clips, and images can be used to add visual interest and create a more immersive experience for the audience.

When selecting multimedia elements to use in a presentation, it is important to ensure that the content is relevant, appropriate, and engaging.

It is also important to consider how the multimedia elements will be used in the presentation.

For example, if you are using audio clips, make sure that the volume is set to a comfortable level, and that the audio does not distract from the presentation.

If you are using videos, make sure that the video quality is good and that the video plays smoothly.

Additionally, consider how the multimedia elements will be used to support or enhance the message of the presentation.

Finally, when it comes to using multimedia in your PowerPoint presentation, be sure to use visuals that complement the text.

For example, if you are discussing a particular topic, consider using visuals that illustrate the topic, rather than visuals that distract from the main message of the presentation.

This will help ensure that the audience is focusing on the content of the presentation, rather than the multimedia elements.

Complementary Visuals

When it comes to creating an engaging and effective PowerPoint presentation, visuals are key.

While text can provide the audience with the necessary information, visuals can help to bring the presentation to life and provide an engaging and interactive experience.

It is important to select visuals that accurately represent the message you are trying to convey and complement the text without overshadowing it.

This can be done through the use of diagrams, charts, graphs, photographs, and other visuals.

Additionally, the visuals should be designed in a way that is easy to understand and engaging for the audience.

For example, using bright colors, interesting shapes, and creative fonts can help to draw the audience’s attention and keep them interested in your presentation.

Additionally, incorporating interactive elements such as animation, videos, and quizzes can help to keep the audience engaged and give them a more immersive experience.

By taking the time to create visuals that accurately represent the message of your presentation and incorporating interactive elements, you can ensure that your PowerPoint presentation is effective and successful.

Interactive Elements

When creating a good PowerPoint presentation, it is important to include interactive elements.

This can include interactive prompts, slideshows, and other visuals that engage the audience.

Interactive elements can help to keep the audience engaged throughout the presentation as they are invited to participate.

This can be done by including questions during the presentation, having interactive visuals such as polls or surveys, or even providing a live demonstration.

By doing this, the audience is more likely to pay attention as they have the chance to respond and interact with the material.

Interactive elements can also be used to help the presenter emphasize key points or deliver a more dynamic presentation.

When used correctly, interactive elements can help to keep the audience engaged and the presentation lively and interesting.

Give an Engaging and Interactive Experience

Giving an engaging and interactive experience to your audience is essential for a good PowerPoint presentation.

An effective presentation should captivate the audience with visuals, animations, and multimedia that complement the text.

Additionally, interactive elements should be utilized to keep the audience engaged and actively involved in the presentation.

For instance, incorporating interactive elements such as polls, surveys, and quizzes can help make the presentation more interesting and engaging.

Furthermore, you can also include multimedia elements such as videos, images, and audio clips to make the presentation more engaging.

Additionally, you can use animations to draw attention to important points and make the presentation more dynamic.

In addition, it is important to use visuals that are relevant to the content of the presentation.

Making sure that the visuals are relevant will help keep the audiences attention on the content and make the presentation more impactful.

Additionally, using visuals that are visually appealing and easy to understand will also help make the presentation more engaging.

Finally, making sure that the presentation is well-structured and organized will help the audience to understand the content better.

You should also make sure that the presentation is concise and to the point so that the audience can easily follow along.

By following these tips, you can ensure that your PowerPoint presentation is effective and successful.

Final Thoughts

By following the essential checklist outlined in this article, you can create an effective and successful PowerPoint presentation that engages your audience.

Start by structuring your presentation and creating an attractive design.

Make sure that the information is clear and concise, and includes relevant examples.

Add multimedia for an effective presentation, and use visuals that complement the text.

Include interactive elements to provide an engaging and interactive experience.

By taking these steps, you can create a presentation that is sure to impress your audience and make your message memorable.

James Wilson

James Wilson has extensive knowledge in the information technology industry.His second love, besides dealing with computers, is smart home technology. He is continually updating information to better comprehend this problem and has a deep understanding of the apartment’s support system.

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Blog > Tips for good PowerPoint Presentations

Tips for good PowerPoint Presentations

08.14.21   •  #powerpoint #tips.

If you know how to do it, it's actually not that difficult to create and give a good presentation.

That's why we have some examples of good PowerPoint presentations for you and tips that are going to make your next presentation a complete success.

1. Speak freely

One of the most important points in good presentations is to speak freely. Prepare your presentation so well that you can speak freely and rarely, if ever, need to look at your notes. The goal is to connect with your audience and get them excited about your topic. If you speak freely, this is much easier than if you just read your text out. You want your audience to feel engaged in your talk. Involve them and tell your text in a vivid way.

2. Familiarize yourself with the technology

In order to be able to speak freely, it is important to prepare the text well and to engage with the topic in detail.

However, it is at least as important to familiarize yourself with the location’s technology before your presentation and to start your PowerPoint there as well. It is annoying if technical problems suddenly occur during your presentation, as this interrupts your flow of speech and distracts the audience from the topic. Avoid this by checking everything before you start your talk and eliminate any technical problems so that you can give your presentation undisturbed.

• Don't forget the charging cable for your laptop
• Find out beforehand how you can connect your laptop to the beamer. Find out which connection the beamer has and which connection your laptop has. To be on the safe side, take an adapter with you.
• Always have backups of your presentation. Save them on a USB stick and preferably also online in a cloud.
• Take a second laptop and maybe even your own small projector for emergencies. Even if it's not the latest model and the quality is not that good: better bad quality than no presentation at all.

3. Get the attention of your audience

Especially in long presentations it is often difficult to keep the attention of your audience. It is important to make your presentation interesting and to actively involve the audience. Try to make your topic as exciting as possible and captivate your audience.

Our tip: Include interactive polls or quizzes in your presentation to involve your audience and increase their attention. With the help of SlideLizard, you can ask questions in PowerPoint and your audience can easily vote on their own smartphone. Plus, you can even get anonymous feedback at the end, so you know right away what you can improve next time.

Here we have also summarized further tips for you on how to increase audience engagement.

4. Hold eye contact

You want your audience to feel engaged in your presentation, so it is very important to hold eye contact. Avoid staring only at a part of the wall or at your paper. Speak to your audience, involve them in your presentation and make it more exciting.

But also make sure you don't always look at the same two or three people, but address everyone. If the audience is large, it is often difficult to include everyone, but still try to let your eyes wander a little between your listeners and look into every corner of the room.

5. Speaking coherently

In a good presentation it is important to avoid jumping from one topic to the next and back again shortly afterwards. Otherwise your audience will not be able to follow you after a while and their thoughts will wander. To prevent this, it is important that your presentation has a good structure and that you work through one topic after the other.

Nervousness can cause even the best to mumble or talk too fast in order to get the presentation over with as quickly as possible. Try to avoid this by taking short pauses to collect yourself, to breathe and to remind yourself to speak slowly.

6. Matching colors

An attractive design of your PowerPoint is also an important point for giving good presentations. Make sure that your slides are not too colorful. A PowerPoint in which all kinds of colors are combined with each other does not look professional, but rather suitable for a children's birthday party.

Think about a rough color palette in advance, which you can then use in your presentation. Colors such as orange or neon green do not look so good in your PowerPoint. Use colors specifically to emphasize important information.

To create good PowerPoint slides it is also essential to choose colors that help the text to read well. You should have as much contrast as possible between the font and the background. Black writing on a white background is always easy to read, while yellow writing on a white background is probably hard to read.

7. Slide design should not be too minimalistic

Even though it is often said that "less is more", you should not be too minimalistic in the design of your presentation. A presentation where your slides are blank and only black text on a white background is likely to go down just as badly as if you use too many colors.

Empty presentations are boring and don't really help to capture the attention of your audience. It also looks like you are too lazy to care about the design of your presentation and that you have not put any effort into the preparation. Your PowerPoint doesn't have to be overflowing with colors, animations and images to make it look interesting. Make it simple, but also professional.

8. Write only key points on the slides

If you want to create a good presentation, it is important to remember that your slides should never be overcrowded. Write only the most important key points on your slides and never entire sentences. Your audience should not be able to read the exact text you are speaking in your PowerPoint. This is rather annoying and leads to being bored quickly. Summarize the most important things that your audience should remember and write them down in short bullet points on your presentation. Then go into the key points in more detail in your speech and explain more about them.

9. Do not overdo it with animations

Do never use too many animations. It looks messy, confusing and definitely not professional if every text and image is displayed with a different animation. Just leave out animations at all or if you really want to use them then use them only very rarely when you want to draw attention to something specific. Make sure that if you use animations, they are consistent. If you use transitions between the individual slides, these should also always be kept consistent and simple.

10. Use images

Pictures and graphics in presentations are always a good idea to illustrate something and to add some variety. They help keep your audience's attention and make it easier to remember important information. But don't overdo it with them. Too many pictures can distract from your presentation and look messy. Make sure the graphics also fit the content and, if you have used several images on one slide, ask yourself if you really need all of them.

11. Choose a suitable font

Never combine too many fonts so that your presentation does not look messy. Use at most two: one for headings and one for text. When choosing fonts, you should also make sure that they are still legible at long distances. Script, italic and decorative fonts are very slow to read, which is why they should be avoided in presentations.

It is not so easy to choose the right font. Therefore, we have summarized for you how to find the best font for your PowerPoint presentation.

12. Do not use images as background

In a good presentation it is important to be able to read the text on the slides easily and quickly. Therefore, do not use images as slide backgrounds if there is also text on them. The picture only distracts from the text and it is difficult to read it because there is not much contrast with the background. It is also harder to see the image because the text in the foreground is distracting. The whole thing looks messy and distracting rather than informative and clear.

13. Never read out the text from your slides

Never just read the exact text from your slides. Your audience can read for themselves, so they will only get bored and in the worst case it will lead to "Death by PowerPoint". You may also give them the feeling that you think they are not able to read for themselves. In addition, you should avoid whole sentences on your slides anyway. List key points that your audience can read along. Then go into more detail and explain more about them.

14. Don't turn your back

Never turn around during your presentation to look at your projected PowerPoint. Not to read from your slides, but also not to make sure the next slide is already displayed. It looks unprofessional and only distracts your audience.

In PowerPoint's Speaker View, you can always see which slide is currently being displayed and which one is coming next. Use this to make sure the order fits. You can even take notes in PowerPoint, which are then displayed during your presentation. You can read all about notes in PowerPoint here.

15. Do not forget about the time

In a good presentation, it is important to always be aware of the given time and to stick to it. It is annoying when your presentation takes much longer than actually planned and your audience is just waiting for you to stop talking or you are not able to finish your presentation at all. It is just as awkward if your presentation is too short. You have already told everything about your topic, but you should actually talk for at least another ten minutes.

Practice your presentation often enough at home. Talk through your text and time yourself as you go. Then adjust the length so that you can keep to the time given on the day of your presentation.

16. Avoid a complicated structure

The structure of a good presentation should not be complicated. Your audience should be able to follow you easily and remember the essential information by the end. When you have finished a part, briefly summarize and repeat the main points before moving on to the next topic. Mention important information more than once to make sure it really gets across to your audience.

However, if the whole thing gets too complicated, it can be easy for your audience to disengage after a while and not take away much new information from your presentation.

17. Choose appropriate clothes

On the day of your presentation, be sure to choose appropriate clothing. Your appearance should be formal, so avoid casual clothes and stick to professional dress codes. When choosing your clothes, also make sure that they are rather unobtrusive. Your audience should focus on your presentation, not on your appearance.

18. Adapt your presentation to your audience

Think about who your audience is and adapt your presentation to them. Find out how much they already know about the topic, what they want to learn about it and why they are here in the first place. If you only talk about things your audience already knows, they will get bored pretty soon, but if you throw around a lot of technical terms when your audience has hardly dealt with the topic at all, they will also have a hard time following you. So to give a successful and good presentation, it is important to adapt it to your audience.

You can also ask a few questions at the beginning of your presentation to learn more about your audience and then adapt your presentation. With SlideLizard , you can integrate polls directly into your PowerPoint and participants can then easily answer anonymously from their smartphone.

19. Mention only the most important information

Keep it short and limit yourself to the essentials. The more facts and information you present to your audience, the less they will remember.

Also be sure to leave out information that does not fit the topic or is not relevant. You will only distract from the actual topic and lose the attention of your audience. The time your audience can concentrate and listen with attention is rather short anyway, so don't waste it by telling unimportant information.

20. Talk about your topic in an exciting way

Tell compelling and exciting stories to make your presentation really good. If you speak in a monotone voice all the time, you are likely to lose the attention of your audience. Make your narration lively and exciting. Also, be careful not to speak too quietly, but not too loudly either. People should be able to understand you well throughout the whole room. Even if it is not easy for many people, try to deliver your speech with confidence. If you are enthusiastic about the topic yourself, it is much easier to get your audience excited about it.

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About the author.

Helena Reitinger

Helena supports the SlideLizard team in marketing and design. She loves to express her creativity in texts and graphics.

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The big SlideLizard presentation glossary

A webinar is a seminar that takes place in a specific digital location at a specific time. It's a seminar that combines live and online formats.

.pps file extension

A .pps file is a slide show. They are similiar to .ppt files but they open as a slide show if you double-klick them. They later got replaced by .ppsx files.

Title Slide

The title slide is the first slide of a presentation. It usually contains a title and a subtitle.

.pptm file extension

A .pptm file is a macro-enabled presentation created by MS PowerPoint which contains slides with layout, images, texts and embedded macros.

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How to Create Slides That Suit Your Superiors: 11 Tips

When you’re pitching ideas or budgets to execs in your organization, you need to deliver slides that fit those particular people just right. This checklist identifies the key considerations.

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I recently interviewed 20 of my customers, all in senior roles at Fortune 100 companies, and asked them their biggest pain point in presenting to higher-ups and even colleagues. What I heard consistently was that it can feel like Goldilocks bouncing from one option to the next, testing to figure out what’s “just right.” Does the audience want deep reports? Sparse slides? Something in between? Like … what?

Teams often come to presentation meetings with vast amounts of backup content just in case an exec wants to take a deep dive on any given point. There’s often a struggle to anticipate every direction attendees might want to go. It’s frustrating, and it’s not efficient.

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There are many ways to build slides. I’m not just talking about crafting them well versus poorly. I’m talking about all of the important decisions regarding how to organize them, how much text to use, when to lean into a chart, the best ways to use bullets and color, and whether to include an appendix with additional information. Before you make your next proposal or request of the executive team, use this list of 11 tips for your next set of slides as a guide.

Four Things You Must Have in Every Exec’s Slides

Before we drill down into the harder aspects, the ones where your executives’ tastes may vary widely, let’s quickly cover four aspects that you can consider the building blocks — the basics you should never proceed without.

Start with an executive summary. Begin the slide deck with a tight executive summary that follows a three-act structure. First, start with stating the current realities. Second, clearly state the problem or opportunity your idea addresses and its potential impact. Third, explain how your recommendation solves the problem or exploits the opportunity and the next steps you’re proposing.

Have a logical organization. The arc of the deck — the package from beginning to end — should make sense. If your audience reads only the headline of every slide, the order should be coherent and make most of the case for you. The content below each slide’s headline must support the statement made in the title. Remove everything that doesn’t support your point; as writers will tell you, you sometimes need to “kill your darlings” when you’re editing.

Begin the slide deck with a tight executive summary that follows a three-act structure.

Make it skimmable. Help your audience to quickly grasp the point without getting bogged down in details. Create a clear visual hierarchy. Guide the reader’s eye through the content: Use bold headings, bullet points, and numbered lists to break down information into digestible pieces. Highlight key takeaways or conclusions in a different color or font size to draw attention to these critical points.

Focus on concise insights. Succinct statements with clear insights are everyone’s jam. Every slide should serve a purpose and contribute directly to the decision-making process. Distill complex information. Don’t use 100 words when 20 words will nail it. If you’re having difficulty trimming, consider using company-approved AI tools to help you take out the fluff.

Five Preferences to Confirm With the Person You Want to Reach

Now we’ll delve into what your particular audience does and does not want. If you haven’t yet, start by asking the person you’re presenting to what they generally prefer. They probably know themselves well but have not been asked to articulate how they like to receive information.

Ask how dense is too dense. Some executives prefer detailed slides with comprehensive data. Others favor a more high-level approach. You’re weighing how to balance informative content with readability, ensuring that slides are not overloaded yet are sufficiently detailed to support decision-making.

Confirm the delivery format and timing. Some execs like information presented to them. Others prefer a pre-read of the material followed by a discussion. I always recommend our tool Slidedocs (I’ve written a free e-book on them), which are visual documents using both words and images. The templates help presenters organize their thoughts into a document for a pre-read or a read-along. They are designed to be skimmable and able to travel through your organization without the help of a presenter.

I’m a huge fan of pre-reads and prefer to use my time in meetings to ask questions and build alignment. If your audience didn’t review your material in advance, ask at the top of the meeting whether they would like you to present it or would prefer to read through it and then discuss it.

Find out how much data visualization they prefer. Charts, graphs, photos, and illustrations often communicate complex data more clearly than words alone. When execs can see what you’re saying, they often can better understand the impact of your idea. Does the exec want to understand exact numbers? Bar charts allow them to move their eyes across a series of specifics. Does the exec want to know the shape of a trend over time? Line charts can show the pattern. (See “Classic Charts Communicate Data Quickly.”) Some prefer charts with annotations that draw attention to what you think is the most important point. Others want to make their own conclusions from the data.

One of my clients, the CEO of a massive commercial real estate company, doesn’t want anything visualized. He prefers numbers, only in a table, and only in two colors — black and red. You might think this is archaic. But the fact that he’s clear to his teams about what he wants takes all the mystery out of how to communicate with him.

When the stakes are high, have a conceptual thinker help with diagrams and concepts. If you don’t have one on your team, and when it’s high stakes, find an internal designer to help you or hire one. You can’t afford to have the baby (your idea) thrown out with the bathwater (terrible slides).

Identify which details need spelling out. How well do the people you’re presenting to know the landscape and function of the company and products you’re talking about? For example, if your engineering team threw a slide into a deck about an issue that requires executive approval, do the execs all speak geek? Or do you need to explain the technology so that they will really understand the ask? Either eliminate internal jargon and acronyms or unpack those bits, especially if your proposal deeply involves expertise outside of the executives’ domain.

Ask whether appendices will be useful. When you’re organizing a presentation, you often troll data, read through complicated reports, and even hire external experts to figure out what’s best for the company. Do your execs want access to that supporting data? You can add a document to the end of the presentation as an appendix to show all of the data and source material. This allows the main content of the slides to remain focused and accessible while still providing comprehensive background information for those who want more.

Two Tips to Improve Your Presentation Skills

Getting materials in place is the biggest step. They will be your best tools for selling your ideas. But there are two extra areas to pay attention to as a presenter: how you handle questions and how you use every experience to improve.

Anticipate questions, and practice your answers. Before you have your meeting, gather a small team to challenge every point you make. Invite colleagues you trust to role-play as “a rapidly inquisitive exec” or “the doubting naysayer exec” so you are prepared to present your idea well. They’re gonna grill you, and practicing will help you remain unruffled when it happens.

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Ask for feedback after the presentation. Establish a feedback loop with those you presented to. Ask what worked well and how you can improve. If attendees don’t have the time, find people who have had their ideas funded and talk to them about what they did that worked. Advice and some perspective will help you nail your performance even better next time.

Empathetically understanding your audience members and how they process information, whether it’s executives or peers, sets up your ideas for success. Clarity creates efficiency. When a presentation fits just right, you’ve given your great thinking the best chance of moving through your organization and having maximum impact.

About the Author

Nancy Duarte is CEO of Duarte Inc. , a communication company in the Silicon Valley. She’s the author of six books, including DataStory: Explain Data and Inspire Action Through Story (Ideapress Publishing, 2019).

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

• Carmine Gallo

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

• Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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How can you make a good presentation even more effective?

This page draws on published advice from expert presenters around the world, which will help to take your presentations from merely ‘good’ to ‘great’.

By bringing together advice from a wide range of people, the aim is to cover a whole range of areas.

Whether you are an experienced presenter, or just starting out, there should be ideas here to help you to improve.

1. Show your Passion and Connect with your Audience

It’s hard to be relaxed and be yourself when you’re nervous.

But time and again, the great presenters say that the most important thing is to connect with your audience, and the best way to do that is to let your passion for the subject shine through.

Be honest with the audience about what is important to you and why it matters.

Be enthusiastic and honest, and the audience will respond.

2. Focus on your Audience’s Needs

Your presentation needs to be built around what your audience is going to get out of the presentation.

As you prepare the presentation, you always need to bear in mind what the audience needs and wants to know, not what you can tell them.

While you’re giving the presentation, you also need to remain focused on your audience’s response, and react to that.

You need to make it easy for your audience to understand and respond.

3. Keep it Simple: Concentrate on your Core Message

When planning your presentation, you should always keep in mind the question:

What is the key message (or three key points) for my audience to take away?

You should be able to communicate that key message very briefly.

Some experts recommend a 30-second ‘elevator summary’, others that you can write it on the back of a business card, or say it in no more than 15 words.

Whichever rule you choose, the important thing is to keep your core message focused and brief.

And if what you are planning to say doesn’t contribute to that core message, don’t say it.

4. Smile and Make Eye Contact with your Audience

This sounds very easy, but a surprisingly large number of presenters fail to do it.

If you smile and make eye contact, you are building rapport , which helps the audience to connect with you and your subject. It also helps you to feel less nervous, because you are talking to individuals, not to a great mass of unknown people.

To help you with this, make sure that you don’t turn down all the lights so that only the slide screen is visible. Your audience needs to see you as well as your slides.

5. Start Strongly

The beginning of your presentation is crucial. You need to grab your audience’s attention and hold it.

They will give you a few minutes’ grace in which to entertain them, before they start to switch off if you’re dull. So don’t waste that on explaining who you are. Start by entertaining them.

Try a story (see tip 7 below), or an attention-grabbing (but useful) image on a slide.

6. Remember the 10-20-30 Rule for Slideshows

This is a tip from Guy Kawasaki of Apple. He suggests that slideshows should:

• Contain no more than 10 slides;
• Last no more than 20 minutes; and
• Use a font size of no less than 30 point.

This last is particularly important as it stops you trying to put too much information on any one slide. This whole approach avoids the dreaded ‘Death by PowerPoint’.

As a general rule, slides should be the sideshow to you, the presenter. A good set of slides should be no use without the presenter, and they should definitely contain less, rather than more, information, expressed simply.

If you need to provide more information, create a bespoke handout and give it out after your presentation.

7. Tell Stories

Human beings are programmed to respond to stories.

Stories help us to pay attention, and also to remember things. If you can use stories in your presentation, your audience is more likely to engage and to remember your points afterwards. It is a good idea to start with a story, but there is a wider point too: you need your presentation to act like a story.

Think about what story you are trying to tell your audience, and create your presentation to tell it.

Finding The Story Behind Your Presentation

To effectively tell a story, focus on using at least one of the two most basic storytelling mechanics in your presentation:

Focusing On Characters – People have stories; things, data, and objects do not. So ask yourself “who” is directly involved in your topic that you can use as the focal point of your story.

For example, instead of talking about cars (your company’s products), you could focus on specific characters like:

• The drivers the car is intended for – people looking for speed and adventure
• The engineers who went out of their way to design the most cost-effective car imaginable

A Changing Dynamic – A story needs something to change along the way. So ask yourself “What is not as it should be?” and answer with what you are going to do about it (or what you did about it).

For example…

• Did hazardous road conditions inspire you to build a rugged, all-terrain jeep that any family could afford?
• Did a complicated and confusing food labelling system lead you to establish a colour-coded nutritional index so that anybody could easily understand it?

To see 15 more actionable storytelling tips, see Nuts & Bolts Speed Training’s post on Storytelling Tips .

8. Use your Voice Effectively

The spoken word is actually a pretty inefficient means of communication, because it uses only one of your audience’s five senses. That’s why presenters tend to use visual aids, too. But you can help to make the spoken word better by using your voice effectively.

Varying the speed at which you talk, and emphasising changes in pitch and tone all help to make your voice more interesting and hold your audience’s attention.

For more about this, see our page on Effective Speaking .

9. Use your Body Too

It has been estimated that more than three quarters of communication is non-verbal.

That means that as well as your tone of voice, your body language is crucial to getting your message across. Make sure that you are giving the right messages: body language to avoid includes crossed arms, hands held behind your back or in your pockets, and pacing the stage.

Make your gestures open and confident, and move naturally around the stage, and among the audience too, if possible.

10. Relax, Breathe and Enjoy

If you find presenting difficult, it can be hard to be calm and relaxed about doing it.

One option is to start by concentrating on your breathing. Slow it down, and make sure that you’re breathing fully. Make sure that you continue to pause for breath occasionally during your presentation too.

For more ideas, see our page on Coping with Presentation Nerves .

If you can bring yourself to relax, you will almost certainly present better. If you can actually start to enjoy yourself, your audience will respond to that, and engage better. Your presentations will improve exponentially, and so will your confidence. It’s well worth a try.

Improve your Presentation Skills

Follow our guide to boost your presentation skills learning about preparation, delivery, questions and all other aspects of giving effective presentations.

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Continue to: How to Give a Speech Self Presentation

See also: Five Ways You Can Do Visual Marketing on a Budget Can Presentation Science Improve Your Presentation? Typography – It’s All About the Message in Your Slides

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How to make a good presentation great: 8 pro tips

• 10 Jun 2019

It’s 2am.

You’ve got a huge presentation tomorrow, but you’re afraid to go to bed for fear of having an on-the-stage-in-my-skivvies level nightmare about the big day. We’ve all been there. Learning how to make a presentation (without breaking out into a cold sweat) takes practice.

In our experience, a serious case of the jitters is best fixed by a serious injection of expert wisdom.

We’ve gathered the best advice from experts like Tony Robbins, Steve Jobs, and Guy Kawasaki on how to make a good presentation great, along with insider knowledge on both designing and delivering a presentation.

Plus, as a bonus, we included our best practices for adding video to your next presentation. We also threw in a few of our favorite video presentation templates from Biteable. With Biteable’s online video making software, creating a video presentation is as simple as making a PowerPoint (and far more effective).

Content & Design

How to make a good presentation.

Making a good presentation starts with crafting the content. No matter how compelling your message is, if you don’t get it out of your brain and on to the screen in a simple way, you’ll be met with a sea of blank faces. So, where to begin?

1. Create an easy-to-follow structure

When it comes to what you have to say, break it down into three simple sections: your presentation needs an introduction, body, and conclusion.

A compelling introduction . Your introduction needs to briefly sum up what you’re going to talk about and why it’s useful or relevant to your audience.

Offer a body of evidence . The body of your presentation is where you hit ’em with the facts, quotes, and evidence to back up your main points.

Sum up with key takeaways . The conclusion is where you loop back to your original statement and give the audience some key takeaways on how they can put into practice what they’ve learned.

• No more than 10 slides in total . Who wants to sit through pages and pages of slides? No one, that’s who. By keeping your slide deck to 10 slides, even if your presentation is 30 minutes long, you’ll give the audience a chance to digest the on-screen messages in line with your talk. Using  concept maps  before structuring your slides can help keep to the point.

2. Limit the amount of copy on each slide

Less really is more, especially when it comes to making a good presentation. Too much text and the audience will just be reading the screen instead of looking at you and feeling the emotional impact of your message.

No more than six words per slide . Marketing king Seth Godin says we should have just six words per slide – that’s not a lot of copy. Choose your words carefully and rewrite until you’ve got it just right.

• Think ‘bite-size’ information . We called ourselves Biteable a reason: studies show information is retained better when it’s broken down into bite-sized chunks. Video is a great way to do this, and research suggests it’s  95% more compelling than text.  Consider adding video to your presentation strategy. But regardless, break your information up into smaller, palatable pieces.

3. Be savvy with design details

A well-thought-out design can make all the difference between a good presentation and one that falls flat. Consider these design standards as you make your presentation.

Use color sparingly . Bright colors can dazzle, but too many can be off-putting. Use the colors most relevant to your message. We’d recommend sticking with one or two (not counting black and white) for your palette so it has a consistent look and feel.

Be consistent with your font . Consistent design makes you look more professional. Don’t switch between caps and lower case, Times New Roman and Comic Sans, or 8 and 30 point text size. Stick with one font and one size throughout. You can vary the emphasis with your words later, but keep your on-screen text uniform for a more cohesive message.

• Format for perfection . A wonky line on a slide or a badly pixelated graphic will put some people off, as it will look like you haven’t tried very hard (or worse, that you just aren’t very good). Make sure your text is aligned and neat like in the example below.

4. Polish several times

Just like a pair of well-worn shoes, a good presentation often needs a few rounds of dusting before it’s shiny and sparkly.

Start Messy . Don’t be afraid to start messy. Using a non-linear writing tool like  Milanote  allows you to explore and outline your initial ideas in a flexible way before you even open up PowerPoint or Keynote. Arrange your ideas side-by-side and discover new connections that you didn’t see before.

Edit ruthlessly . At first you might have a huge amount of information and will wonder how you’re ever going get it down to six words per slide. That’s OK. Keep editing ruthlessly until you’ve pared your message down to the bare essentials.

• Get someone else to look at it . A fresh pair of eyes can work miracles when it comes to refining your presentation. Get a trusted mentor or colleague to review your work. If you don’t know anyone who can help, an online writing assistant like  ProWritingAid  or  Grammarly  can help you weed out a lot of problems.

How to give a good presentation

How you deliver your slides is as important as their content and design. Here are some quick pointers to help you get your message across with impact.

5. Have a strong opening

How you start and finish your presentation is extremely important. Audiences usually make up their minds about someone in the first seven seconds, so make those first moments count.

Be different . You’re doing a presentation about saving tree frogs in Costa Rica. You open with an amusing story about one that escaped on a  bunch of bananas  to the UK. A story like this is different and unexpected for your audience, so they’ll sit up and take notice.

Ask a question . Rhetorical questions are a great way to frame a topic and introduce ideas. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’”

• Tailor it to your audience . How much do you know about your audience? The more you know, the better. Especially if you know their likes and dislikes. Inserting a relevant metaphor or popular culture reference. Oprah Winfrey’s Stanford commencement address spoke to the graduates about her lessons learned and how they were entering ‘the classroom of life.’

6. Be genuine

Oscar Wilde said “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” A lack of authenticity will be spotted a mile away. Whatever you’re saying, speak from the heart and don’t try to impress – there’s no need to prove yourself, just to get the point across as you see it. After all, that’s why you’re there, and you can’t do more than that.

Use humor . Humor can be great for giving a presentation, but cut it out if it feels like a stretch. Telling a humorous story can break down any barriers, make you more likeable, and make your message more memorable (and people are surprisingly generous with laughter) but the faintest whiff of desperation will kill a funny vibe.

Don’t be afraid to mess up . The fear of making a mistake can make you inordinately nervous. Relax, even the best speakers mess up or have bad luck. Theresa May, ex-Prime Minister of England, once stumbled and  coughed her way through a presentation , with someone even handing her a resignation letter. She battled through like a pro, though, and simply acknowledged it and moved on. No big deal.

• Open up and be vulnerable . Brené Brown,  a researcher whose presentations  have amassed over ten million views, says that “Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.” This means speaking your truth and daring to feel a little uncomfortable as you share a meaningful story. It will connect your audience to you like never before.

7. Have a plan for a smooth delivery

With all the prep you’re doing on the content and design of your presentation, it can be easy to overlook other variables that are within your control for a stress-free delivery.

Have a practice run-through . There’s nothing like reading it out loud to ensure your message makes sense before you actually deliver it. Try recording your presentation on video — this way you’ll be able to review with an accurate eye and notice whether your speech matches up with your slides. It’ll also help you sort out your run time.

Use a remote . A clicker or remote will help you face the audience and not have to keep turning back to your laptop. Sought-after public speaker Garr Reynolds says a remote is essential in order to pause and advance your presentation so you have time to be spontaneous and control the flow of your delivery.

Have backup material . Not everything you say is going to resonate with your audience. It’s best to be flexible enough to change the game as and when needed. Steve Jobs had standby anecdotes prepared to fill time when the technology he was using to give the presentation failed. Preparing for every eventuality will help soothe your nerves and allow you to feel more in control.

• Use a timer . When you get into the flow of your message, it’s easy to go off on a tangent or even spend too long on audience questions. Put your phone on airplane mode and set the stopwatch just as you begin speaking. A quick glance down at the table during a pause will allow you to make sure you’re not going overtime.

8. To conclude, focus on audience value

You’re coming to the end of your presentation. How do you wrap it up in a way that will be everlasting in their memories? The experts recommend you focus on the feeling you want the audience to take home.

Leave your audience with an emotional impression .”They might forget what you said, but they’ll never forget the way they made you feel” said the poet Maya Angelou. By leaving them with an emotional impression, from a piece of video with moving music to a line from a song or poem, you’ll strike that resonant chord and end on a high.

Use a pause for key takeaways . Want the audience to remember something specific? Say it slowly and leave a pause at the end. The silence will emphasize what you said and make it meaningful.

• Make your core message sing . A call-to-action is the best way to wrap up your presentation with strength and impact. What do you want your audience to do next? Tony Robbins tells a great story, moving his audience emotionally towards change.

Make your next presentation shine with one of these video templates

You’ve learned from the pros and you feel much more confident about how to make a presentation that stands out. But to really make your presentation one to remember, consider adding video into the mix.

Create a nice change of pace by  embedding a video in your PowerPoint presentation  or go out on a limb and turn your entire presentation into an engaging, thoughtful video.

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Resource Tips for Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations

Slideshows are quick to produce, easy to update and an effective way to inject visual interest into almost any presentation.

However, slideshows can also spell disaster even for experienced presenters. The key to success is to make certain your slideshow is a visual aid and not a visual distraction.

Tips for Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations

• Use the slide master feature to create a consistent and simple design template. It is fine to vary the content presentation (bulleted list, two-column text, text and image, etc.), but be consistent with other elements such as font, colors and background.
• Simplify and limit the number of words on each screen. Use key phrases and include only essential information.
• Limit punctuation and avoid putting words in all-capital letters. Empty space on the slide will enhance readability.
• Use contrasting colors for text and background. Light text on a dark background is best. Patterned backgrounds can reduce readability.
• Avoid the use of flashy transitions such as text fly-ins. These features may seem impressive at first but are distracting and get old quickly.
• Overuse of special effects such as animation and sounds may make your presentation “cutesy” and could negatively affect your credibility.
• Use good-quality images that reinforce and complement your message. Ensure that your image maintains its impact and resolution when projected on a larger screen.
• If you use builds (lines of text appearing each time you click the mouse), have content appear on the screen in a consistent, simple manner; from the top or left is best. Use the feature only when necessary to make your point, because builds can slow your presentation.
• Limit the number of slides. Presenters who constantly “flip” to the next slide are likely to lose their audience. A good rule of thumb is one slide per minute.
• Learn to navigate your presentation in a nonlinear fashion. PowerPoint allows the presenter to jump ahead or back without having to page through all the interim slides.
• Know how to and practice moving forward  and  backward within your presentation. Audiences often ask to see a previous screen again.
• If possible, view your slides on the screen you’ll be using for your presentation. Make sure the slides are readable from the back row seats. Text and graphic images should be large enough to read but not so large as to appear “loud.”
• Have a Plan B in the event of technical difficulties. Remember that transparencies and handouts will not show animation or other special effects.
• Practice with someone who has never seen your presentation. Ask them for honest feedback about colors, content and any effects or graphic images you’ve included.
• Do not read from your slides. The content of your slides is for the audience, not for the presenter.
• Do not speak to your slides. Many presenters face their presentation onscreen rather than their audience.
• Do not apologize for anything in your presentation. If you believe something will be hard to read or understand, don’t use it.

The Seven Deadly Sins of PowerPoint Presentations

By Joseph Sommerville

It’s not surprising PowerPoint© slideshows have become the norm for visuals in most business presentations. Slideshows are quick to produce, easy to update and effective to inject visual interest into the presentation. However, slideshows can also spell disaster even for experienced presenters. The key to success is to make certain your slide show is a visual aid and not a visual distraction. For the best results, avoid these common “seven deadly sins” of PowerPoint© presentations.

• Slide Transitions And Sound Effects:  Transitions and sound effects can become the focus of attention, which in turn distracts the audience. Worse yet, when a presentation containing several effects and transitions runs on a computer much slower than the one on which it was created, the result is a sluggish, almost comical when viewed. Such gimmicks rarely enhance the message you’re trying to communicate. Unless you are presenting at a science fiction convention, leave out the laser-guided text! Leave the fade-ins, fade-outs, wipes, blinds, dissolves, checkerboards, cuts, covers and splits to Hollywood filmmakers. Even “builds” (lines of text appearing each time you click the mouse) can be distracting. Focus on your message, not the technology..  
• Standard Clipart:  Death to screen beans! PowerPoint© is now so widely used the clipart included with it has become a “visual cliché.” It shows a lack of creativity and a tired adherence to a standard form. First, make certain that you need graphical images to enhance your message. If you do, use your own scanned photographs or better-quality graphics from companies such as PhotoDisc (www.photodisc.com) or Hemera’s Photo Objects (www.hemera.com). Screen captures can add realism when presenting information about a Website or computer program. Two popular screen capture programs are Snagit (www.techsmith.com) for Windows and Snapz Pro (www.ambrosiasw.com) for Macintosh. Both are available as shareware.  
• Presentation Templates:   Another visual cliché. Templates force you to fit your original ideas into someone else’s pre-packaged mold. The templates often contain distracting backgrounds and poor color combinations. Select a good book on Web graphics and apply the same principles to your slides. Create your own distinctive look or use your company logo in a corner of the screen.  
• Text-Heavy Slides:  Projected slides are a good medium for depicting an idea graphically or providing an overview. Slides are a poor medium for detail and reading. Avoid paragraphs, quotations and even complete sentences. Limit your slides to five lines of text and use words and phrases to make your points. The audience will be able to digest and retain key points more easily. Don’t use your slides as speaker’s notes or to simply project an outline of your presentation.  
• The “Me” Paradigm:  Presenters often scan a table or graphical image directly from their existing print corporate material and include it in their slide show presentations. The results are almost always sub-optimal. Print visuals are usually meant to be seen from 8-12 inches rather than viewed from several feet. Typically, these images are too small, too detailed and too textual for an effective visual presentation. The same is true for font size; 12 point font is adequate when the text is in front of you. In a slideshow, aim for a minimum of 40 point font. Remember the audience and move the circle from “me” to “we.” Make certain all elements of any particular slide are large enough to be seen easily. Size really does matter.  
• Reading:  A verbal presentation should focus on interactive speaking and listening, not reading by the speaker or the audience. The demands of spoken and written language differ significantly. Spoken language is shorter, less formal and more direct. Reading text ruins a presentation. A related point has to do with handouts for the audience. One of your goals as a presenter is to capture and hold the audience’s attention. If you distribute materials before your presentation, your audience will be reading the handouts rather than listening to you. Often, parts of an effective presentation depend on creating suspense to engage the audience. If the audience can read everything you’re going to say, that element is lost.  
• Faith in Technology:  You never know when an equipment malfunction or incompatible interfaces will force you to give your presentation on another computer. Be prepared by having a back-up of your presentation on a CD-ROM. Better yet is a compact-flash memory card with an adapter for the PCMCIA slot in your notebook. With it, you can still make last-minute changes. It’s also a good idea to prepare a few color transparencies of your key slides. In the worst-case scenario, none of the technology works and you have no visuals to present. You should still be able to give an excellent presentation if you focus on the message. Always familiarize yourself with the presentation, practice it and be ready to engage the audience regardless of the technology that is available. It’s almost a lost art.

Joseph Sommerville has earned the title “The Presentation Expert” for helping professionals design, develop and deliver more effective presentations. He is the principal of Peak Communication Performance, a Houston-based firm working worldwide to help professionals develop skills in strategic communication.

Tips for Effective PowerPoint Presentations

• Select a single sans-serif fonts such as Arial or Helvetica. Avoid serif fonts such as Times New Roman or Palatino because these fonts are sometimes more difficult to read.
• Use no font size smaller than 24 point.
• Use the same font for all your headlines.
• Select a font for body copy and another for headlines.
• Use bold and different sizes of those fonts for captions and subheadings.
• Add a fourth font for page numbers or as a secondary body font for sidebars.
• Don’t use more than four fonts in any one publication.
• Clearly label each screen. Use a larger font (35-45 points) or different color for the title.
• Use larger fonts to indicate importance.
• Use different colors, sizes and styles (e.g., bold) for impact.
• Avoid italicized fonts as these are difficult to read quickly.
• Avoid long sentences.
• Avoid abbreviations and acronyms.
• Limit punctuation marks.
• No more than 6-8 words per line
• For bullet points, use the 6 x 6 Rule. One thought per line with no more than 6 words per line and no more than 6 lines per slide
• Use dark text on light background or light text on dark background. However, dark backgrounds sometimes make it difficult for some people to read the text.
• Do not use all caps except for titles.
• Put repeating elements (like page numbers) in the same location on each page of a multi-page document.
•  To test the font, stand six feet from the monitor and see if you can read the slide.

Design and Graphical Images

• Use design templates.
• Standardize position, colors, and styles.
• Include only necessary information.
• Limit the information to essentials.
• Content should be self-evident
• Use colors that contrast and compliment.
• Too may slides can lose your audience.
• Keep the background consistent and subtle.
• Limit the number of transitions used. It is often better to use only one so the audience knows what to expect.
• Use a single style of dingbat for bullets throughout the page.
• Use the same graphical rule at the top of all pages in a multi-page document.
• Use one or two large images rather than several small images.
• Prioritize images instead of a barrage of images for competing attention.
• Make images all the same size.
• Use the same border.
• Arrange images vertically or horizontally.
• Use only enough text when using charts or graphical images to explain the chart or graph and clearly label the image.
• Keep the design clean and uncluttered. Leave empty space around the text and graphical images.
• Use quality clipart and use it sparingly. A graphical image should relate to and enhance the topic of the slide.
• Try to use the same style graphical image throughout the presentation (e.g., cartoon, photographs)
• Limit the number of graphical images on each slide.
• Repetition of an image reinforces the message. Tie the number of copies of an image to the numbers in your text.
• Resize, recolor, reverse to turn one image into many. Use duplicates of varying sizes, colors, and orientations to multiply the usefulness of a single clip art image.
• Make a single image stand out with dramatic contrast. Use color to make a dramatic change to a single copy of your clip art.
• Check all images on a projection screen before the actual presentation.
• Avoid flashy images and noisy animation effects unless it relates directly to the slide.
• Limit the number of colors on a single screen.
• Bright colors make small objects and thin lines stand out. However, some vibrant colors are difficult to read when projected.
• Use no more than four colors on one chart.
• Check all colors on a projection screen before the actual presentation. Colors may project differently than what appears on the monitor.

General Presentation

• Plan carefully.
• Do your research.
• Know your audience.
• Time your presentation.
• Speak comfortably and clearly.
• Check the spelling and grammar.
• Do not read the presentation. Practice the presentation so you can speak from bullet points. The text should be a cue for the presenter rather than a message for the viewer.
• Give a brief overview at the start. Then present the information. Finally review important points.
• It is often more effective to have bulleted points appear one at a time so the audience listens to the presenter rather than reading the screen.
• Use a wireless mouse or pick up the wired mouse so you can move around as you speak.
• If sound effects are used, wait until the sound has finished to speak.
• If the content is complex, print the slides so the audience can take notes.
• Do not turn your back on the audience. Try to position the monitor so you can speak from it.

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How to design & improve presentation slides.

Written by Arslan Ahmed 

When it comes to presentation, the first two questions which come to mind are “What content to present” and “how to present.” Students are learning to become experts in their own domain of knowledge, but the big questions are “how” to convey that knowledge to others. Students certainly do not want their well-crafted and well-rehearsed script to be presented poorly. The slides should speak for themselves. 

It is not how much a presenter gives, but how they give it that matters the most. The presenter can either make the audience go to sleep with boring slides or keep them engaged throughout the presentation.  

Here are 8 key points to keep in mind when designing your slides which can also be used as a checklist: 

• Template : Choosing the right template is the first key to success of your presentation. A template contains layouts, theme colors, fonts, effects, background styles and many more stylistic options. A template should be consistent throughout the presentation. A company might have a dedicated template to be used. Another source for templates is the  UNT PowerPoint templates  webpage, which can be used for your class presentations. Using these templates, 50% of the presenter’s work is done which allows the presenter to focus on the content for their slides. It is important to know the location of the presentation, taking into consideration a few factors such as lighting, equipment available, and if the presentation is physical or virtual, with each having a potential impact on necessary preparation. 
• Style guide:  The style guide outlines the most significant specifications for making PowerPoint presentations. If one is available, employees given the same template need to follow the same set of rules. As a result, the corporate design is consistent. This allows employees to save time while also improving the quality of your presentations. Let the style of the slides speak to the audience it is aimed at. If creating a PowerPoint independent rather than based on a template, keep consistency in the styling of the theme, font, font size, font color (which may differ for headings and subheadings), picture size, and size of any logos throughout the PowerPoint or simply follow the predefined recommended style guide for that template if available. 
• Layout:  The presentation will look much better and even more professional if the creator uses the proper layout for each slide. Ensure that the design components and content are arranged in a uniform fashion throughout the presentation. The layout of the material and visuals should be balanced and coherent. 
• Consistency:  Consistency is key to a good presentation. The movement from one slide to the next should feel seamless. For a beautiful presentation, the typeface, colors, layout, and style should all be consistent.  
• Visuals:  Images speak more than words coming from the mouth of a presenter. Use relevant and meaningful images where required. Visuals are an excellent method to communicate effectively but do not find just any image from a Google search, as it may be distracting; instead, look for the right one and do not violate the copyrights of the image. Another way to understand if the image is suitable for the topic is to try justifying how this image connects with the content of the slide, and if it conveys the message to the audience without any audio associated with it. 
• Colors:  Have you noticed that anything related to UNT, like the UNT website, is always printed in green? This is because most organizations use a dedicated color palette as part of their identity. Always be consistent in choosing the colors for your presentations. Colors not only enhance your slides but also help to communicate the message between the presenter and the audience more effectively. As such, if you are making an independent presentation for a classroom, add some color to the slides or use a predefined template with colors that match your purpose. Consider a dark background for the slide with a light color for the text if you are giving a presentation in a dark room. Avoid using light text on light background or clashing colors, which will distract the audience. 
• Alignment:  Practice proper alignment of all content in the slides. Some examples of what to look for include the margins, spacing from all sides, and images on the left, right, or middle. If the slide contains a lot of information, proper alignment will make it presentable and will keep the audience from becoming distracted. Proper alignment makes a slide look clean, well-formatted and professional. 
• Typeface:  Choose a good typeface or font family which are easy to read and are also suitable for printing. Keep the font consistent from the first slide to the last. There are several fonts you can use for your presentation. However, you are better off choosing standard fonts, such as Calibri, Tahoma, Gill Sans, and Garamond, or even Times New Roman and Constantia. Stay away from all-caps fonts and Avoid Scripts, Italics and Decorative Fonts. 

Those are the 8 essential characteristics of well-designed PowerPoint slides, along with all the best tips for a great presentation. Please feel free to leave a comment letting us know if this helped you, and as always, contact  Ask Us  with your research and library questions. 

References (APA format):  

  Mount, K. (2017).  Presentation skills: Designing effective visual aids . 

Reynolds, G. (2010).  Presentation zen design: Simple design principles and techniques to enhance your presentations . Berkeley, Calif: New Riders 

Mount, K. (2017).  Presentation skills: Design, structure and content .  

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Top 9 Features of PowerPoint: A Complete Guide for Beginners

Discover the power of effective communication with our blog on the top Features of PowerPoint. Uncover essential tools and functions that make your presentations shine. From dynamic slide transitions to data visualisation, learn how these Features of PowerPoint can elevate your storytelling and captivate your audience.

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According to Glassdoor , a PowerPoint specialist's average salary in the United Kingdom is £36,715 annually. In this blog, you will learn about the top nine Features of PowerPoint and how you can use them to get the most out of your presentation.  

Table of Contents       

1)Top Features of PowerPoint  

    a) Slide design and layout  

    b) Multimedia integration  

    c) Animations and transitions  

    d) SmartArt and charts  

    e) Collaboration and sharing  

    f) Presenter tools and notes  

   g) Customisation options  

   h) Slide master and layouts  

   i) Presenter view and slide show options  

2) Conclusion       

Top Features of PowerPoint  

PowerPoint, a popular presentation software, offers a range of features that enhance the creation and delivery of impactful presentations. Here are some of the Top Features of PowerPoint: 

Slide design and layout    

Slide design and layout are essential for visually appealing and effective presentations. PowerPoint offers customisable design themes and layouts that allow you to create professional-looking slides with ease.   

Choose a design theme that suits your presentation's tone and purpose and customise slide layouts to accommodate different content types. Format text with appropriate fonts, sizes, and styles, keeping it clear and readable. Incorporate visual elements like images and diagrams to enhance your slides.   

Multimedia integration   

Incorporating multimedia elements into your PowerPoint Presentations can enhance engagement and make your content more dynamic. PowerPoint allows seamless integration of images, videos, and audio files to support and enhance your message.   

You can easily insert relevant visuals to illustrate your points, embed videos for demonstrations or storytelling, and add background music or narration to create a richer presentation experience.   

By leveraging multimedia integration in PowerPoint, you can captivate your audience and make your presentations more interactive and impactful. Here's how you can achieve that:  

1) Remember to choose multimedia elements that are relevant to your content and align with your message.  

2) Use visuals sparingly and purposefully to avoid overwhelming your audience.   

3) Also, ensure that any multimedia files you include are customised in terms of file size and format to maintain smooth playback and compatibility.  

Animations and transitions   

Animations and transitions in PowerPoint can bring your slides to life and make your presentation more dynamic and engaging. Let's explore how these features can enhance your delivery:  

1) Highlight key points and draw attention to important information 

2) Guide the audience's focus and create a visual hierarchy on your slides 

3) Make text appear or transition smoothly to enhance readability 

4) Add entrance or motion effects to bring visuals into view 

5) Animate chart elements to showcase data in a more dynamic way 

6) Set the animation timing to align with your presentation flow 

7) Adjust the duration of animations to maintain a balanced pace 

8) Avoid overwhelming the audience with excessive animations 

9) Ensure animations are purposeful and enhance the overall message 

By leveraging animations effectively, you can create a visually engaging and dynamic presentation that captures and maintains audience attention.  

2) Transitions : Transitions are effects that occur when moving from one slide to another. PowerPoint provides a variety of transition options, such as fades, slides, or flips. Transitions add smooth visual effects, creating seamless transitions between slides and keeping your audience engaged. By choosing appropriate transitions that complement your content, you can ensure a cohesive and polished presentation flow.  

When using animations and transitions, it's important to strike a balance. Avoid overusing or using overly complex effects, as they can be distracting. Instead, use animations and transitions purposefully to enhance your message and maintain audience attention.  

SmartArt and charts   

PowerPoint offers powerful tools for visually presenting complex concepts and data through SmartArt and charts. Let's explore how these features can enhance your presentations:  

1) SmartArt : SmartArt allows you to create visually stunning diagrams and organisational charts with just a few clicks. It offers a wide variety of pre-designed graphics, such as process diagrams, hierarchy charts, and cycle diagrams. By selecting the appropriate SmartArt graphic and entering your content, you can effectively convey relationships, structures, and concepts in an engaging and easily understandable way.  

2) Charts : Charts are invaluable for presenting data and statistics in a visual format. PowerPoint provides various chart types, including bar charts, pie charts, line charts, and more. You can input your data into the chart and customise its appearance to suit your needs. With the ability to label axes, add titles, and format data points, you can create clear and impactful visuals that effectively communicate your data-driven insights.  

Incorporating SmartArt and charts in your PowerPoint Presentations adds visual interest and clarity, making it easier for your audience to grasp complex information. Whether you're showcasing processes, organisational structures, or data analysis, these features provide a dynamic and engaging way to present your content.  

Unleash your presentation prowess with our exclusive Microsoft PowerPoint Masterclass. Sign up now!   

Collaboration and sharing   

PowerPoint provides robust collaboration and sharing features, making it easy to work with others and share your presentations. You can collaborate in real-time with colleagues or teammates, allowing multiple people to work on the same presentation simultaneously. Co-authoring enables seamless teamwork, as you can see changes made by others in real-time and leave comments or suggestions.   

Additionally, PowerPoint offers convenient sharing options, allowing you to send your presentation via email or share it through cloud storage platforms. This ensures that your audience can access and view your presentation easily.  

When collaborating and sharing, ensure that you have a reliable internet connection to sync changes effectively. It's also essential to maintain version control and communicate with your collaborators to avoid conflicts or duplication of work. Embracing collaboration and sharing features in PowerPoint enhances teamwork and simplifies the process of creating and delivering presentations.  

1) Presenter tools and notes : PowerPoint offers valuable tools and features to assist presenters during their presentations. Let's explore two of these tools: Speaker notes and cue cards.  

2) Speaker notes : Speaker notes are a helpful feature that allows you to add additional information, key points, or reminders for each slide. These notes are visible only to you, providing a handy reference during your presentation.  Speaker notes enable you to stay on track, elaborate on important details, and ensure you cover all key points effectively. They serve as a personal guide, helping you maintain a smooth and well-organised delivery.  

3) Cue cards : Cue cards are compact notes that can be printed or displayed separately from your slides. They serve as prompts or reminders for your presentation content, allowing you to glance at key points or transitions. Cue cards provide a convenient way to keep important information easily accessible, ensuring you deliver your presentation confidently and seamlessly.   

Whether it's a quick reference for important statistics or a reminder for a specific slide, cue cards are a valuable tool to support your presentation delivery.  

You can enhance your presentation preparation and delivery by utilising speaker notes and cue cards, ensuring a polished and engaging performance.   

Customisation options   

1) Slide size and orientation : PowerPoint allows you to adjust the size and orientation of your slides. You can select from standard dimensions or create a customised size to fit your specific requirements. This flexibility ensures that your presentation is perfectly tailored to your intended output.  

2) Layout selection: Selecting the right slide layout is crucial for effective content presentation. PowerPoint offers a variety of layout options, including title slides, content slides, and section headers. By choosing appropriate layouts for each slide, you can ensure a logical flow and visual organisation.  

3) Formatting consistency: Consistency in formatting plays a vital role in creating a polished presentation. PowerPoint enables you to apply consistent formatting to your text, such as font type, size, and colour. By maintaining uniformity, you enhance readability and ensure visual coherence throughout your slides.  

4) Visual customisation: PowerPoint provides numerous options for visual customisation. You can adjust the formatting of images, shapes, and other visual elements to align with your design preferences. This customisation allows you to create a visually engaging and cohesive presentation.  

5) Slide reordering : Rearranging slides is a breeze in PowerPoint. You can easily change the order of your slides, helping you structure your presentation and present your content in the most effective way possible.  

By leveraging these customisation options, you can create a visually captivating and personalised PowerPoint Presentation that effectively communicates your message.  

Slide master and layouts   

PowerPoint's Slide Master feature and slide layouts offer powerful customisation options for your presentations. The Slide Master allows you to define the overall design and formatting for your slides, ensuring consistency throughout your presentation. By modifying the Slide Master, you can apply changes to all slides, such as fonts, colours, backgrounds, and placeholders.  

1) Choosing and customising slide layouts :  

Slide layouts in PowerPoint provide pre-designed templates for different types of content. You can choose from various layout options, such as title slides, content slides, and section headers. Customise the layout by adding text, images, charts, or multimedia elements.  

2) Ensuring consistency and efficiency : 

By utilising the Slide Master and slide layouts effectively, you can ensure a consistent design and save time when creating and maintaining your presentation. The Slide Master allows you to apply changes to all slides at once, while the layouts provide structure and organisation for your content. Incorporating the Slide master and layouts in your PowerPoint Presentations enhances the overall visual appeal and professionalism. It ensures a cohesive look and streamlines the design process.  

Presenter view and slide show options   

In order to assist presenters in delivering effective presentations, PowerPoint provides useful features such as Presenter View and Slide Show options. Let's explore how these features enhance your presentation experience:  

1) Presenter view : Presenter View is a powerful PowerPoint feature that allows you to have a private view of your slides, speaker notes, and upcoming slides while presenting. With Presenter View, you can easily navigate through slides, view your speaking notes, and monitor the timing of your presentation. This feature ensures a seamless and professional delivery while keeping you prepared and focused.  

2) Slide show options : PowerPoint offers various slide show options that allow you to customise the display of your presentation. You can set up automatic timings for each slide, control slide transitions, and even include narrations or laser pointer functionality. These options give you flexibility in delivering your content, ensuring smooth transitions and engaging visuals. By leveraging Slide Show options, you can tailor the presentation experience to your specific needs and captivate your audience effectively.  

By utilising these Features of PowerPoint, you can elevate your PowerPoint Presentation delivery, maintain control, and engage your audience with impactful visuals and seamless transitions.  

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Conclusion       

We hope you read this blog and understand the Features of PowerPoint. PowerPoint provides powerful features for creating visually appealing and engaging presentations. Customisation options, SmartArt, animations, transitions, presenter tools, and collaboration features enhance the overall delivery, making your presentations impactful and effective.  

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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.

How-To Geek

7 powerpoint features you should use during presentations.

Are you using the right features to engage your audience?

Quick Links

Presenter coach for practicing, cameo for a live camera feed, subtitles for showing spoken words, presenter view for tools during the show, pen, highlighter, and laser pointer for visual emphasis, zoom for a closer view, speaker notes for talking points.

As you may already know, Microsoft PowerPoint offers a robust feature set for creating presentations. But what kind of tools are useful for actually presenting a slideshow? We'll walk you through several features that can help you engage your audience.

Before it's time for your presentation, you can practice with help from PowerPoint itself. Using Presenter Coach , you can receive feedback as you walk through your slideshow.

Related: How to Practice Your Presentations with PowerPoint's Presenter Coach

To use Presenter Coach, head to the Slide Show tab and select "Rehearse with Coach." When your slideshow opens in full screen mode, click "Start Rehearsing" to begin.

You'll see feedback in real-time as you speak and move through your presentation. You can also view a rehearsal report after you finish that summarizes your time spent practicing, filler words you use, your pace, and more.

Plan ahead for your presentation by practicing with this handy built-in tool.

For a personal touch or a way to communicate visually, consider using a live camera feed. With the Cameo feature, you can put your face and voice front and center during your slideshow.

To add the Cameo object, go to the slide, open the Insert tab, and select "Cameo" in the Camera section.

You can then move or resize the object, see a preview using the camera icon, and customize the object using the Camera Format tab that appears when you select it.

If you add the Cameo element to additional slides, your camera feed continues seamlessly through your presentation.

For complete details on this feature, take a look at our how-to for using a live camera feed in PowerPoint .

Related: The Best Webcams of 2023

You may have audience members viewing your PowerPoint presentation who have a hearing impairment or speak a different dialect. With subtitles, you can display every word you say during a presentation in the language of your choice.

Related: How to Set Up and Use Subtitles in Microsoft PowerPoint

To set up the subtitles , go to the Slide Show tab and select the Subtitle Settings drop-down menu. You can then adjust the spoken and subtitle languages, the microphone you want to use, and the placement of the captions.

You can check the box above the menu to Always Use Subtitles or use the Toggle Subtitles icon (Windows) or Closed Caption button (Mac) to turn them on and off during your presentation.

For an excellent way to accommodate your audience during your slideshow, give the subtitles feature a try.

When you present your slideshow, you probably want every tool available to you, and PowerPoint has many. To access those tools like a laser pointer or your presenter notes, check out Presenter View .

To use the feature on Windows, go to the Slide Show tab and check the box for Use Presenter View in the Monitors section of the ribbon. Then, start your presentation as normal. On Mac, simply click "Presenter View" on the Slide Show tab.

To start Presenter View during the slideshow, click the three dots on the bottom left and pick "Show Presenter View."

Next, you'll see a dashboard-like screen with everything you need. On the top left is the current slide, to the right is the next slide, and below that you have your notes.

On the left, you can open additional tools, turn subtitles on or off, black or unblack the show, toggle the camera, and end the show.

Presenter View puts everything you need at your fingertips during your presentation.

These may seem like super basic tools, but they can be quite handy while presenting a slideshow. You can use a pen to circle an image or draw an arrow, a highlighter to call out certain text, or a laser pointer to emphasize parts of a slide.

Related: Turn Your Mouse into a Laser Pointer in PowerPoint

To access the tools in Presenter View, select the Pen and Laser Pointer Tools icon (pen) below the current slide.

To access the tools without Presenter View, select the Pen and Laser Pointer Tools icon on the bottom left of the slide.

Choose a tool and then use your cursor to control it. For the pen and highlighter, you can also pick a color in the pop-up window.

To "put away" the tool you're using, access it using the steps above and deselect it.

Along with using the tools above for making parts of your presentation stand out, you can take advantage of the Zoom feature. With it, you can zoom in on part of a slide , move around if you like, and then zoom back out.

As of November 2022, this feature is not available in PowerPoint on Mac.

In regular slide show view or Presenter View, select the zoom icon (magnifying glass) on the bottom left.

You'll then see a rectangle on your screen indicating the zoom area. Move that rectangle to the spot you want to enlarge and click.

You can then drag to move around the slide while it's zoomed in. Right-click or use your Escape key to zoom back out to the original view.

Just like giving a speech with index cards for your talking points, notes in PowerPoint are just as beneficial. You can include information you want to highlight or further details for text or images you use.

Related: How to Insert a Check Mark or Checkbox in PowerPoint

To add presenter notes to your slideshow, open the notes panel. Either select "Notes" in the status bar or drag up from the bottom of the slide in the PowerPoint window.

Then when it's time to present, use Presenter View to display your notes during the show.

With an update to PowerPoint in 2022, you can also edit your notes while you present. This is a good way to capture additional points you think of while presenting or if an audience question pops up.

Place your cursor in the notes area on the right side and add or remove text. You can also use the buttons at the bottom to increase or decrease the font size.

Having your speaker notes with you during a slideshow is a key element in a successful presentation.

When you finish creating your PowerPoint slideshow , prepare to present it by trying out these features ahead of time. Then, incorporate them into your slideshow where it makes sense. Your audience will be glad you did!

20 Great Examples of PowerPoint Presentation Design [+ Templates]

Published: January 17, 2024

When it comes to PowerPoint presentation design, there's no shortage of avenues you can take.

While all that choice — colors, formats, visuals, fonts — can feel liberating, it‘s important that you’re careful in your selection as not all design combinations add up to success.

In this blog post, I’m sharing some of my favorite PowerPoint tips and templates to help you nail your next presentation.

Table of Contents

What makes a good PowerPoint presentation?

Powerpoint design ideas, best powerpoint presentation slides, good examples of powerpoint presentation design.

In my opinion, a great PowerPoint presentation gets the point across succinctly while using a design that doesn't detract from it.

Here are some of the elements I like to keep in mind when I’m building my own.

1. Minimal Animations and Transitions

Believe it or not, animations and transitions can take away from your PowerPoint presentation. Why? Well, they distract from the content you worked so hard on.

A good PowerPoint presentation keeps the focus on your argument by keeping animations and transitions to a minimum. I suggest using them tastefully and sparingly to emphasize a point or bring attention to a certain part of an image.

2. Cohesive Color Palette

I like to refresh my memory on color theory when creating a new PowerPoint presentation.

A cohesive color palette uses complementary and analogous colors to draw the audience’s attention and help emphasize certain aspects at the right time.

10 Free PowerPoint Templates

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It‘s impossible for me to tell you the specific design ideas you should go after in your next PowerPoint, because, well, I don’t know what the goal of your presentation is.

Luckily, new versions of PowerPoint actually suggest ideas for you based on the content you're presenting. This can help you keep up with the latest trends in presentation design .

PowerPoint is filled with interesting boilerplate designs you can start with. To find these suggestions, open PowerPoint and click the “Design” tab in your top navigation bar. Then, on the far right side, you'll see the following choices:

This simplistic presentation example employs several different colors and font weights, but instead of coming off as disconnected, the varied colors work with one another to create contrast and call out specific concepts.

What I like: The big, bold numbers help set the reader's expectations, as they clearly signify how far along the viewer is in the list of tips.

10. “Pixar's 22 Rules to Phenomenal Storytelling,” Gavin McMahon

This presentation by Gavin McMahon features color in all the right places. While each of the background images boasts a bright, spotlight-like design, all the characters are intentionally blacked out.

What I like: This helps keep the focus on the tips, while still incorporating visuals. Not to mention, it's still easy for me to identify each character without the details. (I found you on slide eight, Nemo.)

11. “Facebook Engagement and Activity Report,” We Are Social

Here's another great example of data visualization in the wild.

What I like: Rather than displaying numbers and statistics straight up, this presentation calls upon interesting, colorful graphs, and charts to present the information in a way that just makes sense.

12. “The GaryVee Content Model,” Gary Vaynerchuk

This wouldn‘t be a true Gary Vaynerchuk presentation if it wasn’t a little loud, am I right?

What I like: Aside from the fact that I love the eye-catching, bright yellow background, Vaynerchuk does a great job of incorporating screenshots on each slide to create a visual tutorial that coincides with the tips. He also does a great job including a visual table of contents that shows your progress as you go .

13. “20 Tweetable Quotes to Inspire Marketing & Design Creative Genius,” IMPACT Branding & Design

We‘ve all seen our fair share of quote-chronicling presentations but that isn’t to say they were all done well. Often the background images are poor quality, the text is too small, or there isn't enough contrast.

Well, this professional presentation from IMPACT Branding & Design suffers from none of said challenges.

What I like: The colorful filters over each background image create just enough contrast for the quotes to stand out.

14. “The Great State of Design,” Stacy Kvernmo

This presentation offers up a lot of information in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming.

What I like: The contrasting colors create visual interest and “pop,” and the comic images (slides 6 through 12) are used to make the information seem less buttoned-up and overwhelming.

15. “Clickbait: A Guide To Writing Un-Ignorable Headlines,” Ethos3

Not going to lie, it was the title that convinced me to click through to this presentation but the awesome design kept me there once I arrived.

What I like: This simple design adheres to a consistent color pattern and leverages bullet points and varied fonts to break up the text nicely.

16. “Digital Transformation in 50 Soundbites,” Julie Dodd

This design highlights a great alternative to the “text-over-image” display we've grown used to seeing.

What I like: By leveraging a split-screen approach to each presentation slide, Julie Dodd was able to serve up a clean, legible quote without sacrificing the power of a strong visual.

17. “Fix Your Really Bad PowerPoint,” Slide Comet

When you‘re creating a PowerPoint about how everyone’s PowerPoints stink, yours had better be terrific. The one above, based on the ebook by Seth Godin, keeps it simple without boring its audience.

What I like: Its clever combinations of fonts, together with consistent color across each slide, ensure you're neither overwhelmed nor unengaged.

18. “How Google Works,” Eric Schmidt

Simple, clever doodles tell the story of Google in a fun and creative way. This presentation reads almost like a storybook, making it easy to move from one slide to the next.

What I like: This uncluttered approach provides viewers with an easy-to-understand explanation of a complicated topic.

19. “What Really Differentiates the Best Content Marketers From The Rest,” Ross Simmonds

Let‘s be honest: These graphics are hard not to love. I especially appreciate the author’s cartoonified self-portrait that closes out the presentation. Well played, Ross Simmonds.

What I like: Rather than employing the same old stock photos, this unique design serves as a refreshing way to present information that's both valuable and fun.

20. “Be A Great Product Leader,” Adam Nash

This presentation by Adam Nash immediately draws attention by putting the company's logo first — a great move if your company is well known.

What I like: He uses popular images, such as ones of Megatron and Pinocchio, to drive his points home. In the same way, you can take advantage of popular images and media to keep your audience engaged.

PowerPoint Presentation Examples for the Best Slide Presentation

Mastering a PowerPoint presentation begins with the design itself.

Get inspired by my ideas above to create a presentation that engages your audience, builds upon your point, and helps you generate leads for your brand.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness. This article was written by a human, but our team uses AI in our editorial process. Check out our full disclosure to learn more about how we use AI.

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Important Characteristics Of Effective PowerPoint Slides

PowerPoint presentations can be very easy and very hard to make. For someone new to this can get a real headache if they don’t know what to do. PowerPoint presentations are more than pictures and words on slides. Everywhere power point presentations are made and presented. In colleges, in seminars, in business events, in functions, etc.  If you have a well-designed presentation it can directly give your message without boring your audience. If you have tried and failed then do not worry as you can always take the aid of  PowerPoint Presentation Design Services . Here are a few tips that will help you in getting an idea of creating an effective PowerPoint presentation.

Free PowerPoint Presentation Template

Keep Your Presentation To The Point

Well, the thing that people will never like is long presentations. Just imagine one man continuously speaking and others just listening. It is going to take a worse turn if that man is not stopping.  You will need a story and a few words and pictures to support it. Text all around the slide is going to scare your audiences. Use bullet points in your presentation and speak. Writing down the entire story on a slide is not a good idea.

Use Mockups

If you are thinking of adding screenshots, schemes and diagrams, then think again because it is not beneficial for your presentation. All this will portray that your presentation is boring because of the too many details in them. We all know that information is vital but it should not be present on slides. If you need to use them blend them with images.

There are so many options available when it comes to font then why not take a bit of pain and choose the right font?  Be creative and pick creative fonts. Your audiences will be hardly able to read the font so at least make the words presentable. Helvetica, Roman, Calibri, etc. are some of the safe choices you can always go for. You cannot ignore the font part.

Data Presentation

In business, presentation data is very important and it needs to be there on the slides. If you have data then use visuals instead of pictures. When it comes to data, use graphs because it will look better in your slides and for you, it will get easy to explain. There is a wide variety of graphs available in PowerPoint presentations that you can use. Using graphs also helps you tell your point and is easy for viewers to understand.

Use A Basic Color Scheme

Yeah, the colors are pretty and they will look very good in your slides, but are they all good to go with? NO, color holds a purpose in PowerPoint presentations and you cannot just pick any color. In a school, even vibrant colors will look very attractive but in a business presentation, it can lower your impression. So the choice of colors will depend upon the targeted audience.

Simplified Tables

At least can confuse anyone even the one who is presenting it. There is lots of information in tables as well as numbers. All this in one slide can look chaotic and cluttered. So keep your tables as simple as possible. Keep the table simple by using fewer colors, outlines, and borders. When it comes to tables there is always less is more.

Quality Is The Key

Quality is the key so from font selection to images everything should be perfect. Use high-quality images and text that is clear. If you will not pay attention to it, then your presentation is going to look childish and unprofessional. Select images that support what you are trying to present.

Minimize The Transition

There are different transitions that you can use but you have to pay attention. If you will not pay attention then it can be distracting.  There is a fade effect which looks nice on slides. When you use transitions you have many options and this is also going to breathe life into your transitions.

These are the few tips that will help you create an effective presentation .  Outsource PowerPoint Presentation Service  from Visual Spiders is for those who need the best presentations.

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