10 Tips for a Great PowerPoint Presentation

Today it is not enough for a successful performance just to tell about your idea. People certainly want to see accompanying photos, clearly made diagrams, correct pictures, a video clip that will turn a 2D drawing into a 3D object, listen to the video of what you are telling about. Therefore, in our time it is already difficult to demonstrate something or train somebody without using a presentation.

And this is not accidental, because it is known that a person is able to absorb about 10-70% of the material heard, 20-72% of what he saw, and 65-85% of what he saw and heard at the same time. Presentations have become indispensable in various spheres of people’s activities: design, marketing, pedagogy, coaching, economics, engineering, finance. The use of the presentation is, to some extent, the key to success. The creation process gives you new ways to the development of thinking and creativity, and new opportunities for learning and growth. With the help of the PowerPoint presentation, everyone can organize an effective background for their speech if desired. And since usually deadline “was yesterday”, then, definitely, it makes sense to use a ready-made PowerPoint template and spend time only to highlight some aspects of your presentation. Moreover, for this, it isn’t even necessary to have design skills. You just need to look through our vast collection of PowerPoint templates which includes many beautiful presentations to everybody’s taste and decide which one suits you.

Yet, there are some simple principles that will help you make a good PowerPoint presentation and which you need to remember. Today we will talk about them.

1. Engage the audience with the help of content

A successful presentation is primarily an interesting, structured and successfully submitted content. It means that during the presentation a person will take his/her phone only with one purpose – to take photos of the slides, and not to check Facebook or Instagram.

But how to understand whether the audience is ready, interested and involved? Well, first it is necessary to accept the important fact: people want to take it easy without thinking. And, most likely, they don’t care about your presentation. However, the way you introduce it and what they see will be able to change their opinion.

Think over everything to the smallest detail. Develop the concept of the presentation. To do this, try to answer yourself the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the presentation?
• What are the characteristics of a prospective audience?
• What is the duration of the presentation and the planned content?

2. Don’t go “mouseprinting”

48% of people don’t like small fonts in the presentation. You can come up with an ingenious text for each slide, but all your creativity will go wrong if this text is unreadable.

3. Simplify

Some speakers try to fit almost all of their speech into the presentation, and, instead of speaking and improvising, they read the text on the slides. The audience does not like this, it starts to get bored and loses an emotional connection with the speaker. We try to “embellish” the slide with a large number of objects, although we can explain its essence in one word or picture.

“An unnecessarily detailed and elaborate drawing only distracts the audience from the idea that you intend to convey.” (Dan Roehm, author of “Visual Thinking”)

Using illustrations and a minimum of text, we help convey our thoughts to an audience and grab its attention. Less is not boring. The design of a one-dollar banknote is more than 150 years old, and from year to year it is only getting better. It is constantly changed visually – and only the most important things stayed. Today the banknote is beautiful in its simplicity.

4. Use a good colors combination

One of the most common mistakes of people unfamiliar with the latest trends in web design is that they choose the most unfortunate combination of colors: brown, dark blue, burgundy, mustard. If you use these colors with each other, and even with an unsuccessfully chosen font, it seems that the image came to us from the 90’s. Now such colors are not used in web design. More precisely, they are used, but in combination with other, more pleasant and “clean” shades (so-called, flat colors).

5. Use modern fonts

Calibri, Comic Sans, Times New Roman – these fonts can be used, but I would not recommend this to you, because they are rather boring and do not produce the desired effect on the audience. Better make a choice in favor of more modern fonts.

These fonts are simple enough, but they are suitable for almost any project. When choosing a font, be sure to pay attention to how well it is read. Unusual serifs look interesting, but sometimes they are so difficult to read that it is better to abandon them altogether.

6. Dedicate each point a separate slide

If your presentation has bulleted or numbered lists, it’s best to split them into separate slides. So the information will be learned better because each item will be supported by a relevant image and a separate story.

7. Use icons to speed up the perception of information

Icons and all sorts of graphics speed up the understanding of your message. Use them in your presentation, but make sure they are done in the same style, otherwise, slides will look messy. If you take icons that are filled with color, they should all be like that. If contour, then all must be contour. Well, the size, of course, should also be the same.

8.Each slide should attract attention

In order for your presentation to give the audience an emotional response, use relevant images and short catchy phrases.

9. Avoid “overstyling”

As you know, a good font has several options. Thus, you can draw attention to the text in three ways – using italics, boldface or color selection. The eyes always look first at what stands out, so use styling very carefully. Overdoing the text styles can achieve the opposite effect – the audience will not be able to distinguish the main from the secondary and the presentation will turn out to be unsuccessful.

10. Don’t use too many slides

One of the most common mistakes is the creation of dozens of slides, for a worthy demonstration of which you need much more time than for your speech. As a result, the speaker is forced to quickly switch slides to show all the graphical accompaniment of the subject. The audience does not have time to read what is needed, is nervous, and after that will not pay attention to skipping slides at all.

These are the basic tips to make a great presentation in PowerPoint and to impress your audience. Hope, it will be helpful and useful for you:)