Building Effective Presentations - Your Presentation

There are many things to consider when developing your PowerPoint presentation, besides the written material.  Your presentation should be clear, concise, and emphasize what it is you are trying to say.  Following are some tips for creating your presentations effectively.  This page will also contain some links to sample PowerPoint presentations:  good, bad, and ugly.

• Be as concise as possible when writing down your ideas.  Each slide should be about one major concept.  If the slide contains bulleted text, limit yourself to 3-5 bullet points, restricting each bullet to one line of text, if possible
• If you need to emphasize one bullet point at a time, you may wish to animate the bulleted list so each point comes in one-by-one.  The section on Text Animation in these pages will give you more help in setting it up.
• Minimize how much you put into the presentation.  Besides the fact that you might overwhelm your audience, minimizing the amount of information on the slides can also draw more attention to you.  The PowerPoint slides should be used to enhance your presentation, not replace it.
• Be sure that your text is readable.  Use sans serif fonts when possible.   These are fonts without the little "feet" at the bottom, like fonts used in a headline.  Also, make certain that text is large enough.  Titles should be between 36 and 44 point size.  List text should be somewhere between 24 and 32 point.   The absolute minimum size of text on a screen should be 18 point.
• Make sure the color scheme is not altered from slide to slide.  Consistency is key.   Also, don't use large amounts of color, as it can detract from the material.
• Do not attempt to dazzle your audience with a large amount of animations, sound, or video.  This can also detract people from the material that you are presenting.

Click on the following links to see demonstrations of PowerPoint presentations.

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly