BASIC POWERPOINT GUIDELINES

Creating PowerPoint presentations is a great way to engage and communicate your ideas to a wide audience. The use of technological devices with software is always a head-turner not to mention the possibility of using different media such as text, pictures, audio and video in the slides.

However, it is very easy to suffer the “Death by PowerPoint” syndrome which does the exact opposite of why you wanted to use PowerPoint in the first place. Powerpoint is a great tool to display visually all the information you want to present to an audience but - how do you decide what to actually put in a slide? what is important? and, what isn’t? Moreso important, how to best present the selected information?

 Not everybody is successful at answering these simple questions and the result is clearly seen in over-saturated slides. How many times have you seen slides with full paragraphs of text? What about font sizes? Have you struggled to read what is on a slide because the font size is too small? Using images is also another problem area. Easily one would want to add images to improve the visual display. Despite the best intentions, one could not know how to properly place images and instead of complementing the presentation, they end up being a hindrance.

It is important to remember that while all that information is being presented before you eyes, there is also a presenter talking about the information presented, or even about something different. What do you pay attention to: the slide or the presenter? Before you know it, the audience is not listening to the presenter and quickly read the slide. The presenter goes on and on about the information on the slide, which took the audience only a few seconds to read, hence the audience quickly loses interest; Death by Powerpoint!

In this document we will go through some of the most important points in preparing a presentation for an audience. The goal of the presenter should be a clear one: captivate the audience attention with a compelling set of slides and also have them listen to what I have to say: plainly put, the slides complement the speech and the speech compliments the slides.

COVER PAGE

Every good slide presentation must have a cover page. Your cover page is an overall glimpse to what you will be talking about. It should be understandable at a moment’s glance either through text, image or a combination of both.

Title

As with any document, letter and even email, you want to include the title in your cover page. Keep in mind that the title is not a full sentence, but instead a word or short phrase that encompasses the whole of your presentation. For example, if you were to create a presentation about how technology and the Internet affect people’s lives, then a good title could be - “The Internet and You”.

Notice that our example title is short and to the point and, most importantly, it creates an easy to understand association between two subjects, which in turn are the main topics of the presentation. Furthermore, any person could look at this example title - “The Internet and You” - and quickly get an idea of what the speaker will talk about.

Subtitles

Sub-titles are also a powerful way to get people’s attention right up-front. While a good title gives a glimpse about the global topic, a sub-title contributes a certain specific area of the said global concept.

Going back to our example title. “The Internet and You” is indeed covers a very broad spectrum. As mentioned before, there are two subjects in the title and both have many areas to talk about. When talking about the Internet, do you mean news, sports, social sites, games, kids content, videos, audios, tools, applications, movies, music, … ? and the list goes on and on. When talking about You, a person, do you mean your childhood, teenage years, adulthood, parenting, having brothers and sisters, school, work, hobbies, attitudes, emotions, etc . . .? and the list goes on and on.

This is where sub-titles come in very handy because they help us narrow down the broad title. Perhaps in our example presentation, we want to talk about only privacy controls for families. As you can see, this is a very specific area of Internet usage and, thus, we, as presenters, want the attention of a very specific crowd; parents.

A possible sub-title to our example title could be - “THE INTERNET AND YOU - what are your kids watching?”

This is a powerful combination of titles. With the main title we define our subjects and with the sub-title we get specific and draw the attention of a certain crowd (parents) because we might have information that is of interest to them. Best of all, we have kept our title and sub-title short. Just flashing the cover page for a few seconds is enough for the audience to understand what the presenter will talk about.

Cover Image

Images are always a great way to communicate a lot with very little effort, so when deciding on an image for your cover side, choose wisely. Just like the Title and Sub-title complement each other, the image you decide to include in your cover page must reflect, visually, the topic to be presented.

The selection of images for any given topic is countless, so it is really up to the presenter to select one image that he or she believes best portrays the topic.

Complexity is not always the best choice; sometimes simplicity is even more powerful. We could select a wide range of images to visually say something. Going back to our example title and subtitle, a simple image like the following goes a long way.

We could have selected a picture, in full color, to compliment our title which would also work wonders. Still, this simple black outline, colorless image transmit a whole lot of meaning when put together with our example titles.

Always remember that as a presenter you want to transmit meaningful information to your audience, and the way to do that is through direct and to the point slides.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Table of Contents should be the second slide in your presentation. First, you captured the attention of your audience with a compelling cover page, now you preview the structure of your presentation with a clear and easy to read table of contents.

A table of contents is a list of the most important aspects you will talk about. Another way to look at this is that the table of contents is a list of topic titles all relevant to the main title in your cover page. The table of content must list in chronological order the topics you will talk about. Normally, you want to go from the simple, or introductory, topics to the more complex, or concluding/solution, topics. Think of it as a road map in a tour your audience will take, and you are the tour guide. The table of contents is your map and each of the titles is an important site you will visit along the way.

Allowing your audience to see the table of contents will generate even more interest in what you will say. Also, they might be looking ahead for only specific areas of choice, and this allows them to know when you will talk about their preferred topics.

As a presenter avoid talking too much when presenting your table of contents; remember that you already have a collection of slides, and a prepared speech, that explain in full details each of the topics. It could be very easy to get caught up in preview explanations and then end up saying all the important information up front. When this happens, your audience will lose interest at the moment you arrive at the topic slides, since you already said everything up front.

The table of contents is where you spoon feed some important ideas to your audience, but only to reel them in and secure their attention throughout your presentation. If you were at a restaurant, the table of contents is the appetizer and the presentation would be your main meal.

Briefly talk about each of the titles in the table of contents and give some facts that you consider to be of interest. A good strategy is to present some questions which generate thoughtfulness in your audience. Obviously, you will provide the answers when you are presenting the said topic.

Let’s go back to our example presentation. We have now arrived at the table of contents and have the following titles: 1)Communication with your children, 2)Children’s interests, 3)Child Security vs Child Freedom.

As you are talking about the first topic, you could present some questions which cause the audience to think about their personal experience as parents when talking with their kids. Your speech could go something like this:

“Our opening topic is going to be about the communication we have with our kids. Indeed, communication is everything, not only in today’s world, but always. Nowadays, we have so many activities as parents that it is very easy to lose track of the time we dedicate for our kids. I ask you the - How much time is good enough to consolidate good communication channels with our kids? Do we really want to talk about absolutely everything with our kids? These, and many more questions will be discussed in our first topic.”

This is a good opening statement for the first topic. Some initial ideas, context, was mentioned and also the presenter left the audience with some questions of interest that have to do with the most important elements of what will be presented. Now, the audience will pay their full attention to what the presenter will say. Surely, they don’t have the answers and the presenter, you, does.

SCREEN COLORS

You presentation is not what you think it is. It is a common misconception to think that the way the presentation looks on the computer screen is exactly how it will look when it is projected. We are talking about two very different ways or projecting information. One is contained within a screen monitor where no other factors affect lighting, and the other is projected openly through an environment, a room, which might hinder the lighting thus resulting in a difficult to read presentation.

Yes! That presentation that looked so incredible inside your screen now, projected with an LDC projector, looks so poor. What went wrong? Nothing went wrong, everything is actually working perfectly. Your screen and the LDC projector are doing exactly what they were built to do. Unfortunately, some bad choices were made on behalf of the presenter who thought that the screen presentation was the same as the projected presentation.

As a good rule-of-thumb, always consider that your projected presentation will look darker than your screen presentation.

The LCD machine projects content using a system of light, which has to travel through an environment until it reaches the big screen or wall that in turn reflects the light. If the room is to bright, it will take away from the light that is traveling through the room from the projector. If the big screen or wall is not completely white, then it will also take away from the light that is being reflected, hence resulting in a darker presentation. Also, your presentation will be affected if there is light coming from the outside through a window, even if it is a small one. A lot of external elements that you don’t always control could end up complicating the luminosity of the presentation you worked so hard on.

There are a few things you can do to compensate for those external elements so that your presentation is visually always at its best.

For starters, choose a dark background for your presentation and stick with it throughout. Then, choose bright colors for your text such as white, yellow or any other light color. This way people’s eyes will be attracted to the light (text). Even if the room is somewhat lit, your presentation will still shine because the background of the slides will match the lighting of the room and the light colored text will continue to stand out despite the external elements.

Avoid eye-burning color combinations because you will only end up annoying your audience. The visual experience must be a soothing and relaxing one. Think of it like this, if your audience is visually relaxed, they will surely pay attention to what you have to say. Using hard contrast colors breaks this visual relaxation and, inadvertently, you might be instigating your audience to make aggressive questions to you. To an extent, you control the mood of your audience through the colors of your presentations, so keep it light and dynamic.

When using dark colored backgrounds, play it safe and go for light colored text. With a dark blue background, you may use white or yellow text. At some points you could even use a very light green or red. You would not want to use a regular green or red; their is no contrast here.

Color selection could be a daunting task for a lot of people. How can one guarantee that one is selecting the best contrasting colors? Remember that you are using software that has gone through years of revisions and improvements. The company that invested in this company also took the time to create ready-made presentations for you. Go and explore the templates the software has. If you don’t like any of the available ones, you can always select one and change some of the colors. Just don’t stray away too much from the original concept of the read-made file. Expert in color matching prepared that file for you, all you are doing is personalizing a little.

TEXT INFORMATION AND SIZES

Background and text colors provide the environment for what you really want to put on each of the slides; the text. Text is a very important element in presentations since it is the main form for transmitting your message (we will get into images a little later). Your presentation is normally a visual way of captivating the attention of your audience. However, I think it is a safe bet to say that the information you are presenting through slides is actually coming from a written source, either book, article or Internet page. Written form is the most used medium for transmitting messages.

Because of the importance that text has for all of us, you want to make wise decisions when formatting the text on your slides.

Presentation softwares usually have an ample selection of fonts, font sizes, transitions and effects that can be applied. Easily one can apply a highly dynamic combination of effects to the text in each of the slides thinking that it will engage the audience and keep them on their toes. With a few exceptions, this is not the case. Fancy effects and a lot of visual movement will only distract your audience attention from what really matters.

The reason you, the presenter, are in front of the audience is because you have something to say that will be of interest to them. If you use a lot of effects and animations while trying to transmit your message, it is very likely that the audience will be dazzled by the effects but will not remember your message. This, then, defeats the purpose of you standing in front of the audience and speaking about something.

It is highly clear to any good presenter that the slides are a tool to be used and that what really matters is the message that must be sent across to the audience. The biggest factor to be taken into consideration is the age range of the audience. If you are presenting to kids or young teenagers, then by all means, include animations and a lot of movement. They are at an age where they need to be captivated in this way. Conversely, if your audience is made up of adults, parents, academics, or business people, then your best bet is to play it safe and be conservative with your presentation. They are not interested in your computer skills for preparing presentations; adults want information which will answer pre-stated questions.

Another factor to take into account, when talking about text, is readability. Having a font size that is too small, in relation to the distance of your audience from the projection screen, is the direct cause of stress, uncomfort and lack of interest for your audience. A projection screen is not like paper, so don’t use the same font sizes.

When thinking about projecting text, you have to think accordingly. Think big. But, how big is too big? The trick is to find the balance between the amount of text you plan to include in the slide and how far your audience will be from you. Just consider that the more text you want on each slide, the smaller the font will have to be in order to accommodate all of the text within the projection boundaries. You top priority should always be that the audience can read the text without any problem.

More decisions have to be made when thinking about average text size, title size and also that “in-you-face text” because you’re driving a significative meaning accross. In general terms, you want a standard text size of about 16 to 20 points. Reserve 24 point size for titles. Anything bigger than 24 points falls in the category of “in-your-face” kind of message.

Go and use different font sizes to better format your slides. They help us to clearly define what is a title and what is standard reading text.

TEXT FONT AND POSITIONING

Now that we are on the topic of fonts, it is time to move onto the style of the font and how they can help or hinder your presentation.

Nowadays there are all sorts of fonts out there. They can range from a high level of hand-written gestures to straight block text. On the one hand, script text can be too rounded making it very hard to read. On the other hand, block text gets boring very fast because it is just to block. For academic and business presentations you don’t want to go to any of these extremes. A middle point is always preferred - block letters with just a splash of style.

When selecting a font style your first choice should always be a basic block letter. Block letters are very easy to read and cause no visual noise for your presentation. The secure route is always the best route. Still, you might want to spice it up just a bit. Once you have selected a block letter, look for some variations on it. Sometimes just the smallest thing can bring plenty of style to a text. You could possibly find a combination block font with some roman style. This way you have a block letter with some edges for style.

The fonts you definitely want to avoid are the gimmicky ones. These fonts tend to have a lot of long curves and designs or features in key parts of the lines. A letter i, for example, could have bumps along its body or some curvedness which is what might define the style of the font. A capital letter B might have a complex design across its vertical line and complimentary curves which lash on to the top and bottom round parts. These kinds of fonts should be the first ones of your font list for presentations.

Any font style normally comes in 4 versions you want to check before typing in everything. The first one is the normal font. This is the standard look of the font and is how you write normal ideas. The second version is the bold. The only difference is that text with grows using up more space in each line (horizontal, vertical and curves) giving it that heavy look. The third version is the italics. Always check the italics of the text. Sometimes text changes completely when viewed in italics. You could have a block text in normal font and that same one change completely when viewed in italics. Also, you want to avoid using italics in most of your text. Italics tends to be a bit hard to read and letters occasionally overlap with each other, causing confusion. If you do want to use italics, use it only in a word, or to separate a phrase from the rest of the text, but no more than that. The last version of the font is the bold-italics. This is a combination of bold with italics. Just consider that if italics with normal can be hard to read, italics with bold is just catastrophic.

Another factor that is part of the text and font department is relevant to the creator of the presentation, yes you! Presentations must have an aesthetic feature, meaning looks count. Your presentation must be visually pleasing to the eye in color combination, font size and style and appropriate capital size. A lot of people have the personal choice of writing everything in capital letters and others in small capitals. There is really no choice to be made here since writing everything is capital letters is unacceptable as well as having everything in small capitals. I am not saying that you should not use capital letters in your presentations. By all means, use them. Just don’t write everything in the same way.

Capital letters are used to signal that something is important or is a title. Writing everything in capital letters loses its importance for signaling. It just uses up more screen space and is visually noisy.

An alternative is using every first letter of every word in capital letter. It actually looks formal and very nice when text is presented in this way. However, the downside is it is harder to type and usually there are some decisions to be made when one is typing in this manner. Do you apply capital first letter to all words? Do you exclude the monosyllable words such as at, in on? and if what about words like after, later, previously? It gets complicated very fast.

The easiest path to select is writing as we do with any document - the first letter of every sentence in capital letter. Additionally, when using bullet lists, one can use capital letter on all initial words. It is perhaps not as formal looking as writing plenty of first word capital letters, but this way one can type faster and finish the presentation in a shorter amount of time, leaving room for more practice in what is said verbally in front of the audience.

Text Font and Positioning

I started out saying that a presentation, that is projected, is different to being seen on screen, and on paper for that matter. While this is true for most things such as colors, font styles and sizes, there is one area where paper, screen and projection coincide and, thus, you don’t want to change it.

In our culture we read from a far left margin position to a far right margin position. This is a universal standard for not just our culture, but for many others as well. For this reason, you do not want to change the justification of text on your slides. Every Time you include text on a slide, place it to the far left of the screen. When writing multiple lines of text, justify them all to the left - never to the right or centered.

You might think that this way of presenting text is different and will make you stand out. You are correct but not for the right reasons. Centering text will disrupt the natural flow and movement of the eyes we have been doing throughout all of our lives. It will also created sudden breaks on both sides of the text lines, forcing your audience to move their heads a lot and easily lose their reading position. These are also things that lead to your audience not being interested in your presentation. Justifying text to the right is another detriment to audience attention. Again, if goes against how we are accustomed to moving our eyes.

Every time you present text on a slide you want to make it readable and highly accessible, so that your audience can capture its message quickly and focus on the message you are saying verbally. It is key to always remember that the audience is not there to see the colors, text and images of the slide. They are there to see you because human interaction and attachment is the most significative channel to transmit on. What I am saying is that you must use the slides as a tool that compliments your spoken word, so that you can connect with your audience, and if you can successfully do this, they will not only remember what you said but will also recommend and even apply in their own lives, if relevant of course. Isn’t this the goal of any presenter?

In order to position text properly, follow these simple rules:

• Number or bullet lists give visual structure to your text. List are the best way to present text. It forces you to present ideas in a sequential manner and also to avoid writing full sentences.
• Use short words and avoid full sentences. Words and phrases are, visually, very easy to understand and digest while full sentences require more processes because of their grammatical nature.
• Be concise. On your slide only write key words and phrases that are directly expressing something about the topic. It is through the spoken word that you expand on this simplified visual ideas.
• Bullets are focal points. Using a bullet list also promotes attention at different times. Each of the dots clearly signal a starting point to your audience. When they visually want to find a word, it is very easy to do so when you have used bullets or numbers.
• Elaborate on each of the points. Again, it is the presenter who hold the knowledge to be transmitted, not the collection of slides. A good presenter also knows that the slides are in fact a gigantic note card. The presenter does not need to memorize the whole presentation, all that needs to be done is understand the information and follow along the presentation that has been made to recover those ideas and transmit them verbally to the audience.
• Keep font size from medium to large. Remember that small text is only for the printed word. In projected presentations use bigger text, but also be consistent with your usage of text size.
• 6x6 rule. There is a simple rule which is a great guide for deciding how much text is too much. Use the 6x6 rule. This rule states that you should have a maximum of 6 bullet lines each with a maximum of 6 words. Total, you should have no more than 36 words on each slides. This keeps it easy and accessible to read and you get to say all the important stuff.

GRAPHICS

So, you have made a lot of good choices up to now as far as colors and text goes. Your presentation should be looking very decent and ready for prime time. It is just then that you detect that something is missing. Everything is well balanced and visually pleasing, but their is still something missing. It is then that you realize that no matter how well balanced your colors and text might be, pictures give your presentation that extra push in the right direction.

Graphics, images, pictures and drawing have a lot to contribute to any presentation. Since the premise of any presentation is to visually display information, then it is only natural to also talk about and include some sort of visual aid to compliment our message.

Still, and because of the visual nature of images, they can also get in the way of what we want to say to our audience. All that needs to be done is place an image in the wrong place and suddenly the text loses importance, your audience gets confused and then they are not paying attention to you because they are trying to decipher the slide.

Images are fabulous and powerful, but only when used to complement everything else.

Let’s talk about where you should place graphics and images. First, you always want to place images off-center to the slide. Either to the left or to the right. The important thing to conserve is the natural flow of the eyes for reading text (left to right). If the image interrupts the flow of the eyes, then it is not in a good spot. Also, placing the text off to one of the sides will allow for more room when writing text. It doesn’t mean that you want to cram text in the space, but instead have a better font size so your audience can see a balance between the text and the image.

Overall, your slide will have a visual balance when the image is to one side. If consider the left side to be a starting point for the eyes, then we might want to place the images towards the left. and leave the center and right side of the slide for text. This way we know for a fact that every time the audience finished reading one line, their eyes will roll back to the left and the image will be right there to greet them. This is a great technique for placing an image that is described by the text. With each line read, the audience discovers more and more of the image.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words and this is a highly useful premise when creating a presentation. You do not always need to have a lot of pictures to visually express an idea. A lot of pictures could create an over-crowded effect and end up causing visual noise. The good presenter first knows and understand what he or she will be presenting and it is on this strength that choices are made for including and excluding complimentary pictures.

If you are making a ten slide presentation, it doesn’t mean you need ten images. You could be highly successful with five, or even three pictures. The trick is to place them in the right place of the slide and throughout the presentation. Sometimes just a few powerful images say everything there is to say to the point that you might end up deciding not to use text.

So, you have a ten slide presentation and only three picture you are confident express a powerful message which is relevant to the message of your presentation, but where in to put them? If the images touch on specific points of your presentations, you might want to use them as section openers or headers. You show a couple of text slides and then jump over to a power image. This will force every one’s attention to you. Follow with a couple more text slides and then show another power image. The trick is to space out the images evenly and also place them at even levels of hierarchy, meaning if you use one picture as a section opener, use the others in the same way. If you use one picture as a section closer, do the same with the rest. This creates consistency throughout your presentations and, in general, gives more credibility to what you have to say.

THREE COMMON MISTAKES

Despite having all of these recommendations, there are still a few mistakes that can be easily made which can be traced back to wrongly placed beliefs about presentations.

1. Everything is not important. How many times have you seen slides filled with text? If you answered at least once, then that is one too many times. When a slide is full of text it could mean that the presenter does not know how to separate important information from less important information, or that he or she is just plain lazy at doing the brain work. Having too much information distracts your audience from what you say. The moment they say a slide full of text, they will get the urge to read it all, hence they will not pay attention to you. Additionally, if the presenter is using the slides as big notes, then it is very likely that the presenter will end up reading it all to the audience. This would prove that the presenter is not familiar with the information and, possibly, does not know what to do. Also, the back of the head tends to be shown to the audience, which is just bad manners on behalf of the presenter because the audience is there to see the presenter’s face, not the back of his or her head.
2. Graphics and text. Just because you have placed a graphic on one side, doesn’t mean you can write all the text that you want. As mentioned before, when the audience sees a lot of text, they will read it. You will find that people cannot pay attention to the reading while paying attention to listening. They have to make a choice about what to pay attention to, and more times than less they will choose to read and not listen to what you have to say. Moreso if you have placed a captivating image right next to the wad of text. Well, the image will do its job. While the excess in text distracts them from what you are saying, the image will do its job and captivate them. Again leaving no attention room for your verbal message. At all costs, avoid lots of text with weak or powerful images.
3. Graphics, text and colors. Always be aware of the balancing that needs to take place when creating a presentation. Remember that on you computer screen something might look stunning and captivating, but when shown through a projector, it might be heavy on the eyes and cause a great disturbance in your audience. If possible, experiment with your projector before the presentations so you can adjust any color, font and image problems. Ultimately, simple is better. Most of the time, a simple color backdrop with easy to read text and a good image, leaves a longer lasting impression compared to a saturated slide. Think message, not visual.

THE LAST SLIDE

There is no good presentation without a closing slide. You might have put together the best presentation ever, but not included a closing slide. What will happen is that your audience will be engaged throughout your talk and suddenly, the lights will go dark because you did not signal the end of your presentation.

Your closing slide is just that, a slide where you tell your audience that it is the end of the presentation. You might also include that you appreciate their attention. That’s about it. It is really a “The End” and “Thank You Very Much” slide. It’s like watching a movie and not having the closing credits. Of course, who reads those things? Probably very few people, but that does not matter. Everybody knows that when one sees credits, it’s the end of the movie.

In the same way closing credits signal the audience of the movie theater that the movie is over, the closing slide of your presentation tells your audience that you have said everything you had to say, that your table of contents list is now complete, and that you appreciate their attention and patience.

And right about now is the time you receive a big round of applause for a presentation well done.