Right from the very early days of your career in a business organization, you would have been called upon to make presentations on a variety of issues to both external and internal audiences. Usually prepared on Microsoft PowerPoint that is the gold standard for presentation software, even the most veteran business managers have been known to deliver presentations that are dull, meandering and too detailed for the audiences. If you do not want your presentations to fall flat, then take care to follow these simple tips:
Write Down What You Want To Communicate
Even before you put down a single word on a presentation slide, you need to get your thoughts down on paper regarding what it is that you want your target audience to appreciate and what action you need them to take. If you are adept in using MS Word, then you can type out the points, and then edit to your heart’s content till the message is exactly right. Remember that since the audience does not want to read much text, you should keep the points very simple and short. Once you are satisfied with your notes, you can simply copy and paste them into the presentation slides saving you the trouble of retyping everything.
Get the Slide Composition Right
It is essential that you keep your slide composition extremely basic. Never make your slide design flashy as the audience may miss the contents if they are just focusing on the design. To start off, decide on a template as this will help in making your slides look uniform and keep the eyes of the audience from floating all over the place. The other advantage of using a template is that you know exactly where to the place the images and the text. This creates a certain predictability and uniformity that helps the viewers to focus better on the slides. You can refer to the Power Slides website to choose from a wide variety of templates.
Ensure that the template is minimal so that you can have enough space to place your text and images. If you are showing the PPT to an external audience, you may wish to include the company logo so that it is deeply ingrained in the minds of the viewers and helps build your corporate brand.
Choose the Background and Fonts Wisely
Remember to pick a background color that has the right contrast with the color of the font you have selected; otherwise, the slides would not be readable. As a rule, a font size of around 24 is good enough for the body text but you can use a larger size for the headings. Resist the temptation to play around with lots of fonts. Usually, a maximum of two or three should be good enough. Ensure you are consistent in the font usage. Choose fonts that are sans-serif and not too narrow or bold. Since images may be of different colors, you can give a border of an appropriate color that will help them to stand out against the background.
Use Images and Special Effects to Increase the Impact of the Presentation
Using images is a very good way of replacing masses of text. However, since it is not possible to use images only, use the text judiciously without repeating what the image has already made clear. Use images to make your point and never to fill up spaces or decorate your slide. Try to use as many original pictures as possible. If you are using images taken from the Internet make sure that you are not violating any intellectual property rights.
Used properly, animations can emphasize or explain the point you are making, but you should limit animations to only a few slides as the audience gets quickly bored and shifts the attention elsewhere. Similarly, slide transitions should be limited to a minimum.
Author bio: Ken Bialy is a sales trainer who makes a huge number of presentations for training purpose. He makes extensive use of templates from Power Slides.
