PowerPoint Presentation Tips

Featured General Tips-And-Tricks

Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation software which uses a collection of slides to demonstrate information for any purpose. It is one of the flagship products of Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft PowerPoint has been around since 1987 and is still the most popular presentation tool in the market.

Let’s come to the point. Here is our list of tips to help you deliver a fantastic presentation.

 

Know Your Audience

The foremost thing you must ponder over is the type of audience before whom you are going to make the presentation. How you talk to the medical professionals should be different from the way you address under-graduates or young entrepreneurs. You must be able to develop the quality and level of intellect in yourself to communicate with the type of audience. Your topic selection, the language you use, the examples you give to illustrate your view point, and the types of questions you have to face – everything has to be worked out. The little bits of humor included should be tailored specifically with your target audience in mind. If possible, take a step forward and try to carry out a little study to get to know what possible questions are likely to come in their minds. This will enable you to respond to them in a more knowledgeable manner.

 

Next Step – Create A Slide With A Summary

Summarize your presentation in a single slide in the beginning in order to give your audience a gist of what you’re going to deliver in the presentation and what they should anticipate to get. It will also help you organize your presentation slides in the correct order and keep you focused during the entire presentation. Remember, if you can’t manage to adequately summarize your presentation then it is probably too long or too vague.

 

Avoid Too Much Text Content

Use of too much content is one of the most common mistakes committed in the preparation of a presentation. Temptation to include almost everything about your topic in the slides often results in plenty of text and media content and hence unnecessarily small font sizes which may be difficult to read by the audience. Remember that the audience is supposed to expect precise and summarized coverage of the topic instead of the nitty-gritty details. Only a handful of sentences or bullet points are enough on a single slide. If your current sub-topic must be elaborated in some details, then consider spreading it in 2 or 3 slides, but still be careful and avoid those details which can be easily removed without damaging the overall theme.

 

Use Images

A picture is worth a thousand words and good images are far better than a myriad of text. Carefully choose or design pictures that directly illustrate what you’re intending to elaborate. As a tip, a little humorous picture can cheer up the environment and keep the audience engaged too. There is a whole lot of great Internet meme graphics available for you to use for this purpose. After all the purpose is to catch the attention of the audience and to keep them engaged. Not to mention here that always use high quality and clean graphics in your presentation.

 

Present Data in a Clear Manner

It can be easy and less cumbersome to use a spreadsheet of data and try to explain it figure-by-figure but using rather a graph or chart will better explain your statistics, comparison or trends whatsoever. Be sure to pick the right sort of chart for your data so that it can be intuitively comprehensible for the audience and they don’t have to spend too much time trying to decipher what your X axis says for instance. Typically you may use a histogram to compare quantities, a pie chart for percentages and a line chart to depict trends or changes over time.

 

Be Well Prepared Through Practice and Rehearsal

You’ve probably put hours or even days into getting your presentation content finalized so don’t spoil it by not making any preparation of the actual presentation beforehand. Ideally you should run through one or more practice sessions so that everything including the software, hardware equipment, their placement and connectivity, and above all your own rehearsal to deliver the presentation goes just fine. You may need to take care of even small details, for instance your computer should not run any extra piece of software or service which may likely to interrupt your presentation in midstream.

 

Follow A Schedule

Presentation that took fairly more time than it was supposed to take, would never exert a good impression on the audience. The best thing again is to practise sufficiently and taking into account the time being elapsed with every slide. The better option is to divide the total time on every slide or group of slides and keeping an eye on the clock while delivering the presentation. Don’t be afraid to skip less critical slides if you are running out of time. There’s nothing wrong with ending rather a little earlier than expected and it can give you an opportunity for the Q&A session, which is sometimes impatiently awaited by the audience.

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