Sunday, February 18, 2007

How to make a winning PowerPoint presentation

Making a PowerPoint presentation can be considered an accessory to be used by one giving a speech. However, the making of a winning PowerPoint presentation needs a few important pointers to be kept in mind, to be implemented.

First and foremost, it is always better to keep your PowerPoint slides as simple as possible. To do this, make it a point to aim for concise and summarized text and graphics in the slides. This is because they are easier for your audience to digest, and also for you to present. This way, you can be sure that your presentation is more memorable to the audience! If you do have to use clipart in your PowerPoint presentation, remember to manipulate and/or recolor it to suite the template you are using. By doing this, you give your clipart a new lease of life by keeping it with the look and feel of your presentation. For better effects, and dimension, you might also consider adding a shadow to the clipart.

The font that is best suited for PowerPoint presentations are a heading of point sizes 40-44 points while maintaining a body text to lie between 20-36 points too. This facilitates better visibility and thus understanding, to the audience. If you intend in using bullets in the PowerPoint slide, limit the size of your bullet list to 6-8 items. If you do find that you need more bullets for your presentation, then it is better to split the bullets to two slides to make the slides look more orderly and disciplined. Adding animations to your PowerPoint presentation gives a better effect to the slide. However, do remember to use animation only if it is vital and has any effect in your presentation. This is because if there is unnecessary animation in the presentation, it may detract you from the important content of the presentation.

Use fonts for your presentation wisely that are easy to read and suited for your subject matter. If you do have a corporate font, you might as well use it! It is always better to aim for sans serif fonts like Arial, Verdant and Tahoma for your PowerPoint presentation as these fonts are easier to read in the presentation. Using serif fonts like Times New Roman is not actually advised as these fonts are not designed for screen legibility and proves to be difficult to read on a computer monitor or projection screen. When using colors for your PowerPoint presentation, use colors that add credibility and legibility to your presentation. Choose your colors wisely so that it suits your subject matter; if you are talking about traffic statistics, it is better to avoid bright reds and greens as in such cases, blacks, grays and yellows are more appropriate. Similarly, dark blue, gray and white are fine colors for a financial presentation, but not suited for a national florist chain!

It is always better if you use high-contrast colors in your PowerPoint presentation as this makes the reading of the text on the slide much easier. High-contrasting colors prevent the losing of slide text into the background. However, while having white backgrounds is beneficial in printing, in a PowerPoint presentation, it tends to give a headache when projected onto a large screen! When making presentations for viewing by the audience, use a light text on a dark background. This is because this combination is a lot easier on the eye, and your audience is sure to thank you for this! It is always better to minimize the number of colors you use in your PowerPoint presentation as though many colors are suitable for a kid’s birthday party, it is of no use on a business PowerPoint presentation! It is always better to stick to your corporate color scheme that may include a maximum of 4-5 colors. If you don’t have a corporate identity, you can use the colors in your logo, with additional one or two complimentary colors!

Nowadays, the level of patience in people is quite low. So keeping this in mind, it is better to speed up your PowerPoint presentation with only having an outline view in it. There are some people who spend hours going through content in their PowerPoint presentation by navigating between full screens and clicking in cumbersome text boxes. This proves to be tiring. So use your PowerPoint presentation only as an outline for your presentation while concentrating on text, without worrying much about graphics, transitions, charts and animations. Using all these tips are sure to make your PowerPoint presentation a winning one, so implement them in your next

About the Author

About Author: Thomson Chemmanoor is an powerpoint expert offering powerpoint templates at his website http://www.powerpointguys.com. For listing please visit http:www.powerpointguys.com/ for a perfect PowerPoint presentation .A place where you can find different types of PowerPoint Presentation according to your needs.