How To Create A Powerpoint Presentation
It’s tempting to dive straight into Powerpoint and start typing in an endless list of bullet points, without giving much thought to the purpose of your presentation.
Before you even open up Powerpoint, ask yourself: Why will be audience be there? What do I want to achieve with my presentation? Do I want to convince them to take a certain kind of action or adopt my point of view? What is the best way of doing that?
You may even decide that you don’t actually need a Powerpoint presentation to communicate your message. Don’t automatically use it because you can or because you think it will take the focus off you and your nervousness.
However, there are occasions where Powerpoint CAN be useful or you have no choice BUT to use it because the event organisers request it.
When constructing the actual presentation, stay away from information overkill in the form of bullet points and complex graphs, charts and raw data. Your listeners don’t want to see data presented in its raw form.
They want YOUR interpretation of that data and how it affects them as individuals or as a department as a whole. That is why they are there and that is your job as the speaker. The onus is on you to have a conversation with the audience, deliver a compelling message, take them on a journey with a powerful story and reach a desired outcome. More often than not, the desired outcome is that your audience takes a particular kind of action or changes their beliefs.
When using Powerpoint, less is definitely more. By this I mean, amount of information on each slide and actual number of slides. There is nothing more monotonous than seeing slide after slide after slide in quick succession, packed with words and numbers. If your presentation slot is going to run for 20 minutes, allow yourself 10 - 15 slides at the maximum. This will force you to stick to the salient points and communicate your message much more succinctly.
Do you actually need to use bullets? I’m seeing a strong move away from the conventional wisdom of using them. More and more professional speakers are favouring the use of photos, imagery and graphics to tell a story, rather than bullet points. For example, rather than present dry facts on global warming, how about using images of the effects of global warming on polar bears? That would have much more of an emotional impact on the audience.
If you run a simple search on the internet, you’ll find excellent sources of professional stock photography to really engage your listeners. Don’t use the clipart that comes with Powerpoint, as it doesn’t look very professional and is overused.
Of course, it all depends on the subject matter. There may still be some benefit in bullet points. Just keep them to a minimum. Definitely have no more than five on your slide at any one time. In fact I’ve recently seen a recommendation to have ‘no more than SIX WORDS’ on a slide. Whether you go this far or not is entirely up to you, but there is definitely a backlash against text overload.
What font size to use? It’s best to keep the size to above 30 points. And stick with a sans serif font such as Arial, as that is easier to read on screen. This may sound obvious but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen text that is so small that you cannot even read it sitting at the front of the audience!
Keep the colour scheme and font type consistent throughout your Powerpoint presentation. Stay away from using the ‘exciting’ animation effects available. Avoid sound effects as well. Simplicity is the key.
Allow yourself a few practice runs through your entire Powerpoint presentation. It may sound like an easy task to talk and click through your slides, but it does need some practice so that you’re matching the flow of your spoken material with your visual message.
Finally, you need to see what your slides actually look like when projected, not just on your laptop screen. You need to check this out in the actual room, because the particular lighting used will affect the colours projected.
