How to get great ideas for your PowerPoint presentation
A good presentation can change the world by inspiring others to act on your idea. A bad presentation can leave your audience confused, frustrated and bored, killing your idea before it gets off the ground. Great presenters focus on a central theme, and create presentations that drive it home by telling stories. They use lots of images and minimal text to keep their audience engaged and entertained. When it comes to PowerPoint, less is more.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
-
1
Analyze great speeches. According to PowerPoint expert Nancy Duarte, all great speeches have the same basic structure. They start with what is, go back and forth between what is and what could be, then end with what could be. It's the structure Lincoln used for the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King used for his "I Have a Dream" speech and Steve Jobs used to introduce the iPhone in 2007. Find books or sites that have great speeches in them and see how you can apply their use of this structure to your next PowerPoint design.
-
2
Look at magazine covers. Magazine publishers are experts at giving readers what they want and the stories on their covers are carefully chosen based on market research. If your idea or business has a relevant trade magazine, learn the needs and desires of your audience by reading the covers of recent issues.
-
-
3
Read good stories. Great writers are always good story tellers since stories engage the reader and get them emotionally involved in the topic. Look for books and articles with stories that relate to your topic and think of ways you can use a similar approach to connect with your audience.
-
4
View other presentations. Why reinvent the wheel when others have already laid the groundwork? PowerPoint experts like Nancy Duarte and Guy Kawasaki have outstanding presentations you can view online. See reference one for links or find their content with a search engine. YouTube is also loaded with compelling PowerPoint presentations, including Steve Jobs' product launches, that have great ideas you can use.
-
5
Brainstorm. After researching speeches, magazine covers, stories and other presentations, you'll have plenty of fresh ideas for new content. Use mind-mapping software and post-it notes to apply these ideas to your presentation. You can put your core concept in the center of a mind-mapping program with links to supporting ideas and the ideas they relate to. This will give you a birds-eye view of the presentation. You can also write each idea on a post-it note and shuffle the notes around until the flow of information works best for your presentation.
-
1
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Comstock/Comstock/Getty Images
