Create Your meaning Concise with PowerPoint
Over the last decade PowerPoint has become one of the most key presentation tools in both commerce and education. At every main meeting you run, you’re expected to make a PowerPoint presentation that will inform each attendee of your point in a way that is clear,succinct , and to-the-point.
PowerPoint presentations can be employed for several purposes. In education and in informative meetings, they use illustrations and easy-to-read text to help attendees to understand the information being given.
But working on a high quality PowerPoint presentation takes time. And while it is at times tempting to simply pass this work on to somebody with more time, it is often a good thought to do this work yourself, or at least create and set up the information for each slide.
One way to create higher 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 attempt.” In particular, avoid using MS Office “screen beans,” which are so average as to become laughably cliché.
If you have important points to make, particularly if they’re whole paragraphs, include them in handouts. If you’re giving a active presentation and want to keep your audience’s entire attention, make sure to pass out any handouts at the end, as they can be distracting.
If you want to put together truly striking PowerPoint presentations but don’t have either the time or the expertise to do it yourself, PowerPoint templates can be a good option. There are many free PowerPoint templates available for download on the internet, but if you want really great quality and professional looking templates, you might want to think about paid templates.
Don’t use too many bullet points and particularly don’t use paragraphs to get your meaning across. You should be doing that yourself. Also, don’t overload your presentation with graphics, involved animated transitions, and graphics. Remember that the talk is about the information. Especially for selling presentations, you don’t want anybody in the room to exit feeling that they’ve wasted their time watching fancy cliparts. 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 rambling. Much less, and people will question the necessity to have that slide in the first place. A twenty-minute talk leaves plenty of time for set up, and allows questions to be asked after.
PowerPoint is one of the most effective presentation tools you can use for business meetings and sales presentations. A great PowerPoint presentation helps to underline your point while giving the audience pieces of information that will stay with them. While a good presentation will help your business and add to your meeting, a poor one can do just the opposite.
Last modified January 14, 2008Author 1450 > has blogged 36 times
