One proven path to raise your profile as a credible and expert professional is through presentations to the right audiences.
If your PowerPoint presentations are ho-hum, you risk sending your audience to sleep. Or worse your message and impact is diluted or completely lost, and your profile can be damaged.
Here are some practical pointers for a successful PowerPoint presentation.
Golden rules for slides
- maximum of six lines of text per slide and 6 words per line
- keep text larger than 20 points for on-screen shows
- spread your information over multiple slides rather than crowd onto one
- if you have lots of detailed material to cover consider providing a supplementary handout such as a white paper
- dark backgrounds work best for on-screen shows
- light backgrounds work best for overheads
- keep animations to a minimum - unless you are a skilled presenter with PowerPoint they will distract from your message and make you flustered
- a picture speaks a thousand words suitable images can break the monotony of text heavy slides and provide interesting talking points
- favour using one large picture rather than many small pictures
- keep graphs ultra simple.
Avoid
- gimmicky fonts, stick to one or two known fonts
- crazy and garish backgrounds - hard on the eyes and distracting
- centred bullet points, keep them left aligned
- using all UPPER CASE
- underlining
- and too much “punctuation”
- detailed statistical tables
- visual clutter.
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