In 2017 PowerPoint managed to make an epic coming out. Nobody was expecting to see this, but TA-DA! PowerPoint templates have managed to become bestsellers in most digital assets marketplaces.
But how will it affect you? It means that sooner or later your boss will make you prepare some report and present it publicly, and you will have to design some presentation in PowerPoint, and since you are reading this piece, I bet you have no idea how to create a PowerPoint presentation.
My, how the world begins to turn, someday I was just like you, I knew nothing about PowerPoint and they made me prepare a presentation for a topic that I’m good at, and speak publicly on a meetup arranged inside of our company.
All tips I’m going to share with you further I’ve gathered and implemented successfully, thus I’ve created a nice presentation and didn’t mess this up.
Your Presentation Shouldn’t be Boring
There’s nothing worse than a boring presentation. Lucky me I’ve attended few times such presentation and now I can tell you what you mustn’t do, no matter what. Under no circumstances, you shouldn’t read from a sheet of paper!
You’re not a professor at some University who gives a boring lecture about the reproduction of Drosophila flies, you’re speaking publicly, and you need to make your bold statement, and prove your listeners that you’re pretty good at what you do!
Your Slides Shoudln't be Wordy
Don’t try to fit the text of your speech into the slides of your presentation. Some people do it like this they create a text block and just copy and paste the text of their speech into the slides.
Never, never do this. Imagine thу size of the projection screen, it’s about 3 by 4 meters, and what will your slides look when they are filled completely with text? This will look like crap!
You need to take the most important phrases and arrange then as lists in the center of the slide. If there’s a picture in the left part of the slide you can wrap it around from right with your text.Overall the text on each of your slides should occupy no more than 1/5 of the slide square!
Don't Oversuse Memes
Do you like memes? Sure you do, I also love them, and your boss does, and the boss of your boss also loves memes. But trust me, your presentation should contain no more than 1 meme!
If you’re going to use more than one meme you will look like a clown, and these jokes will significantly drop credibility of your speech.
Use only one meme.
Get Prepared
Now let’s turn to the most important thing it’s your presentation. There’s an 80% possibility you’re looking on a blank page and you don’t know what you got to say.
Let’s do it like this, put your laptop aside and take an A4 sheet, write the title of your presentation on top of the page and start sketching all ideas that come up to your mind when you think about the problem depicted by your presentation. Once you make enough sketches you can proceed to the next step.
In case it turns out that you produce quite a lot of ideas for the presentation content but there’s no way you can arrange all those elements into a decent presentation you can opt for PowerPoint templates. They are designed specifically for such cases.
Write your story
Your speech should not be a set of unemotional copy that somehow covers the topic of your presentation. Why do you think everyone got so crazy about storytelling? Because people love listening to stories, give them one. You can divide your speech into three part, just like any other story:
Intro - state the problem.
Middle part - give a solution to your problem.
Final part - give a short summary of what you have said.
If you manage to write a story, even if your presentation is about some boring near technological subject there’s room for making a story.
To see how they do it, you can visit TEDx website, there you can find a presentation practically on any subject.
Write your story
Have you seen a cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants? Do you like the color palette of this cartoon? How do you think, will your listeners like your presentation if it looks like this?
I sincerely doubt that. So what you can do about that, if your presentation is for in-house use, you can use your corporate colors to style it, open your company style guide copy those hexes and you’re done.
The Font
The same goes for the fonts, but there’s a thing you need to know about. There are two types of fonts you can use, serif fonts and sans serif. For onscreen presentation, serif fonts are not recommended because all those tiny elements can disappear or become too blurry due to the brightness and resolution of an image on a projection screen.
Most of the sans serif fonts were designed for display of text on computer screens and such cases as yours, so you can freely take a font like Gill Sans or PT Sans and use it for your presentation.
NB: Never use Comic Sans, never!
The Photos
Here’s another thing that puts most PowerPoint beginners into a dead end - photos. There are two resources where you get free photos on any possible topic: Unsplash and Pexels.
Don't Make Them Seasick
Someday, in when people loved WordArt PowerPoint transition and animation effects were considered to be something cool. But today in 2K17 everyone is sick and tired of those micro animations, blurs, hovers and other things that are supposed to make interfaces awesome. You can omit and get rid of all those nasty animations making your PowerPoint presentation really simple.
Use Charts, Graphs, and Infographics
Have you seen Boredpanda charts, here’s one of their latest? People love it when information is presented in a way of an easily comprehensible graph. If you can’t make your own, steal one :)
The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint
And here comes the last thing you need to know about PowerPoint presentation, it’s a rule invented by Guy Kawasaki, it’s called 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.
Over to You!
Now when you’re armed with these PowerPoint tips you can start building your own successful presentation. Good luck to you, my friend!