What tricks do you use in your powerpoint presentation to make it look good?

[SweetHomeColorado]

The presentation is being given to large money donors for a professional organization. We obviously don't want clip-art as part of the slideshow nor a barrage of animated picture effects.

So, with your presentations in the past, what have youd dont to make them look professional, eyecatching, and overall good?

[duffer]

I realize this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's IMHO, so what the hell.

The best way to use PP when I'm in a meeting? Turn the thing off. Gah, I can't stand PP. One of the overall most useless "tools" in the corporate world. Again, just an opinion.

But good luck with the donations.

[DanBlather]

The presentation is being given to large money donors for a professional organization. We obviously don't want clip-art as part of the slideshow nor a barrage of animated picture effects.

So, with your presentations in the past, what have youd dont to make them look professional, eyecatching, and overall good?Powerpoint should be used as am adjunct to a good speech, not a bunch of text that you read off. Avoid the classic title and left aligned set of bullet points; that is way too boring. Builds can be good if used with restraint; for example, yuo can show a pie chart and bring in each "wedge" separately as you talk about it. High quality photos can be nice. In your case maybe happy pictures of what the donors' donations helped happen and sad pictures of what remains to be done.

Don't exceed 3-5 main points per slide.

Powerpoint is visual - use images where you can. For example show logos of companies or organization rather than just a list of them. Don't just say "Northern Sales District" show an image of the outlines of the state.

Have a remote in your hand so you don't need to say "next".

Avoid complicated slide transition and stick to a single effect.

[freckafree]

My number one complaint about PowerPoint (which, I will state right up front, I dispise as the crutch of bad presenters everywhere) is not the way the slides look, but presenters who stand up and proceed to read every frickin' word on every frickin' slide.

The slides are for bullet points. The narrative and detail needs to be provided by you.

Do a dry run, projecting your slides the way they'll be projected for your presentation, if that's possible. If you come to a slide that, if it were shown in the presentation, you'd say, "Well, this is a little hard to read, but..." get rid of the slide. It's got too much text or a chart that doesn't work or some other flaw. Figure out another way to present that info.

Good luck with the presentation!

[Cunctator]

I keep the slides short and sweet. No more than two or three lines of key words. No pictures or other stupid art clips. The slides are there simply to remind me of what I need to say.

[jjimm]

I agree with keeping them short and sweet. Personally I think a picture or cartoon if it's relevant breaks up the dryness/boredom of being presented to, and does serve as an aide memoir for the audience. The "remind me of what to say" I keep to notes.

[Iamonfire]

break up the words with text boxes etc. Use arrows etc. to show where you are going.

Put the odd build in - but not too many.

[GorillaMan]

The best way to use PP when I'm in a meeting? Turn the thing off.
I go with this. I'm not saying don't use it - but don't have it as a constant drone in the background. Perhaps use it as a tool to help explain what you're doing, what you're going to speak about....and then shut it off, and talk directly to the audience.

[Harriet the Spry]

Having a standard, overall template for all of your organization's presentations is something I like. It prevents every presenter from having to play designer, and a few people inevitably designing monstrosities.

If various people are contributing slides to the presentation, have one person review them all for consistent style (same font, same bullets, put it into screen show and make sure that if any transitions or animations or builds are there, they are consistent and intentional).

I like the guideline of expecting to spend about 5 minutes per slide. This prevents 50-slide monster decks. So think through what you are going to say and put the top points for those 5 minutes on a slide.

If there is something visually relevant to your message (such as # of chapters by state, with their location) that would be a good image to use, if you are spending about 5 minutes talking about growth or chapter activities. This also goes for photos of your projects, completed or in progress.

Consider what, if any, hardcopy materials your audience will have and how/when to reference them. For example, you might want to hand out the detailed budget and have your 5-minute slide of things you want to point out about the budget. Don't put the detailed budget on the slide.

Make sure you can give your presentation without the slides. Then add them as icing on a cake.

[Quartz]

Make sure you can give your presentation without the slides. Then add them as icing on a cake.
Yes indeed. Remember that the computer will go wrong.

[Waverly]

There is a good deal of logic to turning the thing off. Some of my best talks have been without any multimedia support at all. You can also impress by recreating the images you really want with a few markers and a white board.

But let’s assume you really need or want PowerPoint. Unless you have a clever one, it’s risky to open with a joke. My advice: be clever, and open with one. Cartoons or photoshopped images featuring audience members are popular. Keep it simple, and not too esoteric. If your wit is dry, save it for later on.

Clip art is corny. Animation is corny. Invest in some good stock photography. It doesn’t cost that much, and it is worth it. Istockphoto.com is a good source, but there are others. Use these as backgrounds on the main and section titles, or a bit throughout… however, don’t obscure the message with too many images, even if they are good.

Forego any famous quotes. It is overdone. Come up with something thought provoking of your own.

Include your name and contact information. Be responsive if people want to speak to you after the presentation.

Finally, YOU are the presentation. Dress well. Talk well. Engage the audience. Make them ask or answer questions. Have fun!

[ASAKMOTSD]

I would suggest that you make sure you go through and verify that the fonts are consistent in both type and size throughout the entire presentation.

[Rick]

My number one complaint about PowerPoint (which, I will state right up front, I dispise as the crutch of bad presenters everywhere) is not the way the slides look, but presenters who stand up and proceed to read every frickin' word on every frickin' slide.

The slides are for bullet points. The narrative and detail needs to be provided by you.

Do a dry run, projecting your slides the way they'll be projected for your presentation, if that's possible. If you come to a slide that, if it were shown in the presentation, you'd say, "Well, this is a little hard to read, but..." get rid of the slide. It's got too much text or a chart that doesn't work or some other flaw. Figure out another way to present that info.

Good luck with the presentation!
For the dry run, go into a room, close the door and lights, and project the slides while doing your presentation out loud. It always amazes me how much different (worse) it sounds out loud for the first time. You don't want those screw ups to be in front of your audience.

[phouka]

Believe it or not, but California Language Arts Standards require that students give a presentation, and Powerpoint is the standard tool teachers choose.

I was a mean, mean teacher. I limited my students viciously, because I knew I'd have to watch and grade 60+ presentations and would cut my own throat if I let them do it any old way.

My rules were:

- no more than two different fonts per slide
- no more than three different fonts per presentation
- dark text on a light background
- minimum size of text was 18 points. 24 was preferred.
- absolutely NO sound effects.
- absolutely NO animation
- no more than one picture or artwork per slide.

They grumbled, but in the end, their presentations were far more readable and legible than anything they'd ever done before.

Getting them to give the presentation properly was another thing entirely.

[DMark]

Almost without fail, PowerPoint is used as a tedious, overblown version of the notes for a speech that should not be necessary for me to see.

That said, I have worked for lots of people and helped them create PowerPoint presentations. The only one that I thought worked was one I created for a lawyer. It was a funny series of photos (no clip art, no animation and almost no text) that simply gave him a visual background to his topics. The audience laughed almost non-stop, and it was very effective. People remembered the photos, and the topic he was discussing at the time, and could pretty much remember his entire speech.

And that is, after all, supposed to be the point of using the software.

[Sierra Indigo]

My company has taken PP a step further.

In team meetings we get PowerPoint presentations that are printed out onto transparencies and the TL reads through them one transparency at a time. Or better yet, gets one of us to read it.

You think PP's bad when it's dynamic? Try static overheads. Every one with cutesy pictures of animals or the corporate logo du jour on the side.

[Nava]

It doesn't matter if your screen is huge: each slide should still be written as if it was going to be read on a laptop.

If you have a big schematic you need to show and which looks like crap when inserted into the PP, just keep it outside.

Handouts; since you're going to present to people outside the company, there is information which would be better in the handouts. It's better to have a .doc which comes down to one or two pages listing your locations, than to have six slides of addresses. The PP should include only _one_ slide with contact info, at the end.

No slide should have too much information; no slide should have too little.

Don't overdo the freaking logos. Having slides in "company colors" (assuming the company's colors aren't, say, maroon and navy, or bottlegreen and fuchsia) can be a lot better than having a huge logo that shrinks everything else.

[lee]

Most of my powerpoint slides are about a process. I will write a flowchart outlining the process, and go through it briefly in the beginning, and then use a much smaller version of the flowchart in the lower left corner with the part the slide is covering circled. It gives them a visual clue of where this slide belongs in the whole and also hope that the presentation will end sometime in this life. Navigation tricks like that are nice.

It is really best to avoid powerpoint as much as possible. People learn better if you just talk to them and draw ad hoc sketches for illustration. I do powerpoint when I am forced, or need hand outs.

[Mangetout]

Choose a colour scheme that is easy on the eyes and test it in the same kind of lighting conditions as you'll have in the meeting. This ought to be obvious, but it is very often wrong.

Don't use more than two different fonts unless you have a really compelling reason to do so.

You don't have to be backed up by a slide at all times - when you want your audience to focus entirely on you, don't be afraid to blank the screen (either by hitting the 'B' key, or by inserting blank slides in the right places).

[PoorYorick]

Excellent advice so far. Part of my job used to be teaching people, mostly executives, how to use PowerPoint, including all the little gee-whiz features. And, man, once you showed someone how to use them, their presentations just had to include custom animation, background muisc, and so on, whether the presenation demanded them or not. If I had to sit through one more presentation with the cute little bullets whizzing in from off-screen, I'd probably urp.

From giving my share of presentations where I had to present a lot of information in a short time, I agree with the posters who stressed that PowerPoint is an adjunct to your spoken presentation. For instance, if you say that sales have increased this quarter, you might show a graph of quarterly sales. Do NOT, except under rare circumstances, read your slides out loud. Otherwise, you might as well just print out your presentation, submit it as hand outs, and let everyone go home early.

Also, as DMark pointed out, occasional use of funny or unexpected slides in the right context can break up the presentation and make it more memorable. I was giving a presentation to a bunch of cops about forensic anthropology, and talked for a couple of minutes about what exactly an anthropologist was. I made sure I included a slide of one of my mentors taking the measurements of a very cute flight attendant while she was wearing a bikini.

[Spoons]

I'll probably end up supporting what everybody else has said, but to answer the OP...

Consistency.

This cannot be stressed enough. Consistency in font usage (I do one font per presentation, myself), size, and weight, across all slides. Consistency in text placement--my first line of text always begins at the same X and Y coordinates on each slide. Consistency in word usage and grammar, as far as possible: a widget is always a widget (not a "widget" on slide 3 and a "gizmo actuator" on slide 26), "Smith & Jones" is always as you see it (never "Smith & Jones" on slide 8 and "Smith and Jones" on all other slides), and each bullet point begins with the same part of speech (noun, verb, adjective + noun, etc.). There are other ways in which you can ensure consistency, but I'm sure you get the idea.

I like the suggestion given above, where all slides from all sources pass through one person (like an editor) to ensure consistency. We had that process in place at a company I once worked for, and presentations were quite effective. We also got a lot of compliments on them.

I have to say also, that I avoid cutesy stuff like animations and builds and sounds and similar things, unless they are absolutely necessary. When would such things be necessary? Well, I did one presentation once for a hearing aid company, so sounds (in our case, before and after such-and-such a feature was turned on in the hearing aid) were necessary. Similarly, an animation might demonstrate how the widget fits onto the gizmo. But unless use of the animation etc. supports your talk, I suggest avoiding it. I'm a big fan of the KISS principle in this regard, and have said more than once, "Just because PowerPoint can do something, doesn't mean that it has to."

Remember also what was said above: PowerPoint is simply a presenter's tool. Other presentation tools include white boards and flip charts. You are the presenter; it is up to you to use your tools effectively--but no to rely on them so much that you expect them to do the work for you. IMHO, bad presenters rely on PowerPoint to do their job for them, but good presenters use PowerPoint as a tool to help with what they have to convey in the presentation.

[Long Time First Time]

I was giving a presentation to a bunch of cops about forensic anthropology, and talked for a couple of minutes about what exactly an anthropologist was. I made sure I included a slide of one of my mentors taking the measurements of a very cute flight attendant while she was wearing a bikini.


Those types of pictures can backfire BIG TIME if given to a co-ed group unless you are very sure that all the women in the audience are on board.

I find that pictures/photos illustrating the point being covered work better than text, so try to use more pictures than not. But, pictures that are just thrown in to be cute or as filler are nonprofessional, IMHO.

I hate seeing presentations that have a logo or saying every frikkin slide. They busy up the screen and make the text difficult to see.

Humorous cartoons are a nice way to make points or divide the talk. BUT - nothing blue, nothing that makes fun of dumb blondes, groping bosses, ethnic types, etc. etc. Absolutely G rated. And, if you are tempted to use Far Side Cartoons, I beg you not to fall into that temptation. In my world, Far Side Cartoons outnumber every other humorous visual like 100:1 and they are now beyond cliche.

[gigi]

'Webster's Dictionary defines synergy as..."

Just kidding, but I would echo the thoughts above about have a consistent template across your own slides and maybe even across different presentations. I write mine to be useful in the presentation but also for later reference, and use them only as guidelines of what to talk about.

[RealityChuck]

Use the 6X6 rule: No more than six bullet points per page with no more than six words each.

[nivlac]

What tricks do you use in your powerpoint presentation to make it look good?
One word .... GEOMETRY. I've worked for very senior management in the corporate world and that's what works. In other words, minimize the words (boring!) and try to say it with pictures and diagrams. Avoid any cutesey stuff because it could fall completely flat and make the presentation appear trivial. Custom animation is OK, but don't overdo it because your audience should be paying attention to what you're saying and not focusing on the animation. Keep slide transitions simple. I personally stick with muted colors, nothing that are too stark or bright. One last bit of advice ... have someone (ideally from your intended audience) give you some honest feedback on your slides. From my experience, everyone falls in love with their own slides and can't see any defects!

[stuyguy]

I love PP, but I use it for history talks, not business presentations. I give what are essentially slide shows; very rarely is there any text at all.

This, of course, makes the quality and selection of images key. I know from being an audiencemember that the images in an educational slide talk can make or break the whole production, and I've seen too many presentations that look sloppy, dull and artless.

Fortunately, I have become something of a master at Photoshop and I dote over every image until it is as perfect as possible -- sharp, clean, well-cropped, even sumptuous sometimes. My philosophy is that even if my talk bores some listeners, they will have great pictures to look at.

[PoorYorick]

Those types of pictures can backfire BIG TIME if given to a co-ed group unless you are very sure that all the women in the audience are on board.
Granted, that's why I specified "in context." They were a pretty jaded group.

[Duckster]

The best Powerpoint presentation I ever saw contained no text. It was all images. The presentation was about the rise of civil rights in the USA, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Powerpoint was set up to run automatically, several seconds per image, and loop continuously.

The speaker was so good that you ignored the Powerpoint and just watched and listened to the speaker.

[mrklutz]

Graphs can be your friend if you can point out something relevant and interesting in them. Just showing a graph of customer responses over time is boring and uninformative. Pointing to a specific portion of the graph and saying something that places it in context --like "Notice how this dip in satisfaction corresponds to when we changed vendors" -- will make the image stick in people's minds.

[B. Serum]

Seth Godin wrote the definitive work on PowerPoint. You can find it here. (http://www.edbatista.com/files/ReallyBadPowerpoint.pdf) Learn it. Love it. Live it.

Speaking as an art director, I agree with most everything people have said here, except for the fancy builds -- I only use a simple cut or a fade. Fancy builds call attention to themselves and away from your content. It's like a big, overdone gaudy picture frame.

Here's the deal: you will benefit from creating 3 presentations:

The content that you read (or better yet the notecards that drive your speech. These do not appear on any screen at any time. These are yours and yours alone. There will be no audience reading ahead. For your eyes only.
Your audiovisual (PowerPoint) aspect. Images help people remember things. Take the major points from your presentation and think of visual metaphors that help punctuate your message. istockphoto.com is a great place to get good dirt-cheap photography. I encourage you to keep as much text off these slides as possible.
The leave-behind. People don't remember details (see above). If they try to take notes during your presentation, they may miss important points you're saying when they're jotting down the last thing you said. Make it easy on them and do yourself a favor by preparing a leave-behind booklet that has all the facts, figures, details and contact information you want them to remember. This is typically an adaptation of your notes possibly augmented with your PowerPoint images. A word about these leave-behinds: remove as much industry-speak and business jargon as possible. Write to be understood. Be as brief as possible.


And when all else fails, Simplify.

And good luck.