The quality level of PowerPoint presentations is now so high that only true professionals can actually guarantee top results. If you have rather little experience with the software or are not familiar with modern designs, you will have a hard time scoring with your presentation. But even if you are a beginner, there are some means to make your PowerPoint presentation better. We’ll tell you 8 simple PowerPoint slide tips.
Admittedly, no one just shakes good presentations out of their sleeve anymore. It’s not even enough to know the presentation program quite well. You need a great deal of additional knowledge and presentation experience to make a convincing PowerPoint presentation. This makes it very difficult, especially for beginners or users who only design a set of slides every now and then, to succeed. Nevertheless, there are some tricks that will immediately improve your results, and which are sometimes forgotten even by professionals.
Small Steps with a big effect
True, the secret of great slide design also lies in the talent for design and years of training. But even if you don’t have these prerequisites, you can score points with your audience. All you need to do is approach your visual presentation as if you were seeing it through your audience’s eyes, not your own. The slide designer sees the slides as a means to illustrate the data and points they want to show in their presentation. The audience has a much simpler approach. They want to see something interesting. It wants entertaining information.
PowerPoint Slide Tips – NO. 1: Introduce yourself as an audience member
PowerPoint Slide Tips – NO. 2: Put together your key messages
Go through your data to find out what information interests your audience the most and holds their attention. What really matters to your audience? What information should they definitely take away? If your presentation is no longer than half an hour, determine about five main points and three sub-points that speak to those points.
PowerPoint Slide Tips – NO. 3: a prefabricated design is better than no design at all
PowerPoint Slide Tips – NO. 4: Be interesting
Break away from the traditional presentation of pie shapes, bar charts, and bulleted lists. Offer your audience something that is not predictable. Look for interesting photos, comics, cartoons, or quotes that fit your topic and add a little spice to your presentation
PowerPoint Slide Tips – NO. 5: be clear in your representations
Don’t distract your audience with a variety of different fonts, a dizzying array of colors, slides that contain too much text, or other unnecessary frippery. Make a clean, crisp, and simple presentation your goal.
PowerPoint Slide Tips – NO. 6: pay attention to professional transitions in your slide set
Review your entire presentation at the end and make sure your audience will see clean transitions from one slide to the next. The whole presentation should look like it was made in one piece.
PowerPoint Slide Tips – NO. 7: get your messages to the point
Think about your most important messages. How do you want them to be conveyed? Your messages should be quickly grasped without effort. Make sure the audience can completely absorb your message in three seconds or less.
PowerPoint Slide Tips – NO. 8: hands off high-end experiments
I’m sure you’ve seen presentations that really wowed you. Of course, something like that would be nice for your presentation, too. But be sure: there were PowerPoint experts at work. You’d better not try out animation or zoom effects, great film clips and similarly spectacular elements in your presentation without the help of a professional.
Conclusion:
PowerPoint presentations are very sophisticated forms of communication. It takes some practice and some expertise to turn them into truly top-notch presentations. But with these 8 relatively simple tricks, you can significantly improve the quality of your next PowerPoint presentation.