Good PowerPoint Tips
PowerPoint slide shows provide a concise, streamlined approach for displaying a presentation. They can also provide visual support to a speech and help the viewers focus their attentions on a subject. However, poorly designed PowerPoint slides only serve to distract the audience and take away from the speech you give. Create strong, professional PowerPoint slide shows to keep your audience engaged and clearly communicate your information.
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Select Themes
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PowerPoint themes range from stark to ornate, making it easy to find one that coordinates with your overall presentation. You can even create your own theme for a look that truly reflects your topic. However, the theme should stay the same throughout the slide show. Though it is visually entertaining to incorporate numerous backgrounds and fonts, doing so is distracting for the audience. Using one theme and a single font style is best, as this gives your presentation a unified, professional appearance.
Add Visual Imagery
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Dynamic content is an effective way of keeping your audience engaged, as it illustrates your points while you speak. Examples of good visual imagery are graphs, pertinent photos and sound bytes. (Do not, for instance, use images to decorate your slides.) Videos, too, can enhance the audience's understanding of the subject, but only show what is necessary. Good visual imagery will illustrate spoken details without being overly obvious, and so aids in making a point resonate.
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Reduce the Amount of Text
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Your presentation is only a support for your speech, so keep the text on your slides to a minimum. A general rule of thumb is no more than six words together and no more than three lines per slide. This keeps you from reading sentences directly off your slides, which grows monotonous for the audience. Therefore, utilize the software's default bullet points and only add the key phrases you wish to mention.
Practice Your Speech
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Using your PowerPoint presentation while you speak requires you to strike a balance between taking your cues from the slides and not reading directly from them; it's not practical to rely on the presentation's information for every word. Therefore, you need to know your slides well before you get up to speak. Learn to speak freely while maintaining eye contact with your audience. Lastly, remember to keep your viewers engaged with targeted information and a "take home" message that will resound long after your presentation ends.
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References
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