Sooner or later, everyone gets to make a PowerPoint slide show. Usually, students ask friends "do my powerpoint for me" or visit services like https://www.wiseessays.com/power-point-presentation. But with these tips, you won't have to ask for help.
Although we will focus on the Microsoft Office presentation program, many of the following tips will also help you if you use Apple KeyNote or alternatives to PowerPoint such as Google Slides or Impress, from LibreOffice.
1. Simplify the text
The presentation in PowerPoint (or any other format) complements the presentation that you are going to do in person and therefore you do not need and should not include all the text you are going to say on the slides. No one will have time to read it all, and if they do, they won't be able to pay attention to what you're saying at the same time.
The text of the slides should be strictly necessary and used more as a concept map or main clues of what you are saying than as a coherent story in itself. If you want the presentation to make sense on its own to someone who only has the PPT file, use the notes and comments.
2. Limit yourself to one message per slide
It is as important to keep the text at bay as it is to limit the concepts that are presented at once. A slide, a theme, is a good starting point. Mixing up multiple topics dilutes the message, confuses viewers, and makes it harder for yourself to make a coherent presentation.
Presenting a single topic per slide turns the information into chunks that are easier to digest and therefore easier to remember. Without going over, of course, this does not mean that presentations need to have 400 slides.
3. Summarize your presentation in three points
The presentation can be enormously complex and lengthy, but the most important points should not be more than three and should be clearly defined. In English, these points are called takeaways, something like ideas that you take home.
Attendees may not remember what you talked about on 90% of the slides, but hopefully, they will remember the three most important points. To reinforce them, add them to the end of your presentation, summarized, being a good time for attendees to take photos of the slide or share it on social networks.
4. Sort the content
A presentation is a story, and as such, it needs to have an introduction, a plot, and an ending. And that the plot is coherent, intelligently grouping the topics that are discussed and without jumping from one topic to another or making constant stops to add clarifications.
Before you get down to business in PowerPoint, create a detailed script of everything you are going to cover in your presentation. If you've already started the presentation, don't be afraid to reorder slides to positions that make the most sense, but check later that continuity has not been broken and everything still makes sense.
5. Use numbered lists
We talked before about simplifying the text, and one of the most effective ways to do it is to create lists. Bulleted lists are very powerful, but try replacing them with numbered lists. It will make life easier for you and those who are attending the presentation.
With numbered lists, you know in advance how many elements there are in total and you can follow the natural order. If we are talking about the fourth element, then the fifth will come. It also makes it much easier to refer to its elements, as you can use its number instead of having to describe it with attempts like "second from the bottom", or having to read its text.
6. Don't beat around the bush
Knowing a good story does not mean that you have to tell it, and knowing hundreds of facts does not mean that you should add all of them to the presentation. Get to the point and select the information that you are going to enter in your presentation.
The idea of a presentation is to offer the information already chewed and summarized and not to overwhelm with information, anecdotes, and stories not strictly related. Guy Kawasaki used to say that a presentation should not last more than 20 minutes, and if you beat around the bush, you will most likely exceed that number by far.
7. Don't reinvent the wheel with fonts
A common mistake in presentations is using a font size that is too small, and Guy Kawasaki had another rule on this that has been somewhat burned in the community: don't use a font size smaller than 30 points.
But not only the size of the text is important, but the typography. The default fonts are correct in most cases, and if you need to use another for any reason, don't reinvent the wheel: choose simple, sans-serif fonts, easier to read on a screen.
8. Embed the fonts in the PPT
If you've ignored the advice above and used non-standard fonts in your presentation (perhaps because it's your company's official font), then make sure the PPT will look the same on any PC by embedding the fonts in the file.
To do this, go to PowerPoint Options and enter the Save section. There you will find the option Embed fonts in the file, which you can choose in two flavors: saving only the characters that are used in the presentation -which takes up less- or saving them all -which allows other people to edit the text later even if they do not have the source.
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