Assembling a PowerPoint Display: Common Mistakes
Over the last decade PowerPoint has become one of the most important presentation tools in both companies and education. At every key meeting you run, you’re expected to assemble a PowerPoint presentation that will educate each attendee of your meaning in a way that is clear,succinct , and to-the-point.
In other kinds of commercial meetings, they can help to underscore the point being made, or simply offer an outline for the presenter to follow. Putting time into creating a great quality PowerPoint presentation is a great way to show to attendees of a meeting that the data you’re giving is important, accurate,and in the case of sales presentations, financially helpful to all
There are several concepts you can follow to create PowerPoint presentations more quickly and efficiently. One is to quicken the choosing of fonts by previewing fonts in the font toolbar. To do this,simply go to Tools/Customize, click the Options tab, then click “List font names in their font.” Another method to speed up creating presentation slides is to put a default text style for your slides. This both helps to make your PowerPoint presentations to seem more professional, and it speeds up their design. To set a new default, go to Format, then Font. Decide the changes you need, then click OK.
One way to create better quality PowerPoint presentations is to use higher quality graphics. Clipart taken precisely from Microsoft Office screams “this information wasn’t important enough for me to try.” In particular, avoid using MS Office “screen beans,” which are so average as to become laughably cliché.
Another good way to improve your PowerPoint presentation is to write a handout to go along with the information. With PowerPoint, you want to underscore the information you’re providing, so be sure to keep the data in the presentation itself to a minimum. Keep slides clean, clear, and impactful.
Costly PowerPoint templates incorporate the kind of photos, animation, and transitions that you might not be able to create yourself. With well-made flash animation and sharp photos, your presentation will really stand out. But be sure not to get anything too fancy. You don’t want to distract from your presentation itself.
Don’t use too many bullet points and especially don’t use paragraphs to get your information across. You should be doing that yourself. Also, don’t overwhelm your presentation with graphics, fancy animated transitions, and graphics. Remember that the lecture is about the information. Especially for soliciting presentations, you don’t want anybody in the room to go feeling that they’ve wasted their time watching fancy graphics. Too many extras on your PowerPoint slides will take away from from your presentation rather than add to it.
As a normal woman cannot absorb more than ten new ideas in a sitting, each of your ten slides will give you the highest effect. It should take you about five minutes to present each slide. Much more than that and you’re talking too much. Much less, and people will question the necessity to have that slide in the first place. A twenty-minute lecture leaves plenty of time for set up, and allows questions to be asked after.
PowerPoint is one of the most helpful presentation tools you can use for business meetings and sales presentations. A great PowerPoint presentation helps to underline your meaning while giving the audience pieces of information that will last. While a good presentation will help your business and add to your meeting, a bad one can do just the opposite.
Last modified January 23, 2008Author 1450 > has blogged 36 times
