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

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes indeed. Remember that the computer will go wrong.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.