How to Make Your PowerPoint Presentations More Effective

PowerPoint presentations are great tools to communicate ideas and messages across an audience. They are convenient, easy to learn and use, versatile, and as long as you already have the software and hardware, cheap to make. Here are some tips to make your PowerPoint presentation more effective.

Make a detailed outline of your message and use it to populate your slides. This sounds like a no-brainer, but many people have a tendency to dive straight into the slides and begin creating their presentations from there. Starting with an outline saves you time in organizing your slides and that should make your PowerPoint presentations more effective.

If you do not fancy any of the templates that are available, create and use your own slide template. A slide template is the model that all your other slides follow. It contains information about the background, color, fonts, effects, and positioning. Getting this out of the way early will enable you to focus more on the content and less on aesthetics later on.

Avoid overloading slides with text. Displaying a slide with paragraphs of text is probably the worst mistake any presenter can make. Nobody wants to read your text, and nobody wants to hear you read it to them either. Using pictures or diagrams where possible can make your PowerPoint presentation more effective.

Just as you should avoid creating text-heavy slides, you should also avoid making slides overcrowded with graphics. Break up that segment into several slides. Don't worry. It is unlikely that you will run out of slides in the process. If you are worried about the time allotted to you, simplify. Either you spend less time on less important slides, or you trim your presentation down to a leaner and meaner focus.

Get everyone curious from the first slide. Assume that they are expecting a boring presentation from you and you are out to prove them wrong. How does your topic have an impact on their lives? Intrigue them with your topic. Be imaginative. If your topic is on geology, you may want to start out with the hope diamond and its origin.

End with your audience still interested. If your topic is about a social problem, what can your audience do about it? If it is on ancient Greece, mention one of its living legacies such as the Olympic games.

Avoid printing your slides as handouts. Your slides serve as abbreviated cues for your talk, and a printed version is your guide for use during the presentation. The audience will get little benefit from those as the inner logic of your message is not there. If you are expected to give a handout, give a full-on complete handout.

Keep the animations down to a minimum. The spinning pictures and raining letters, unless really relevant to your message, only serve to distract the audience from what you are trying to say. Use only the simplest of animations, such as quick fade-ins and fade-outs, or consider avoiding animations entirely. Possible exceptions are when you can deliver your talk while the animation illustrates your point, such as when you are saying, "population grew from 1960 to 1980 by 15% and from 1980 to 2010 by 35%" while an arrow on your graph follows your every word.

Go back to your outline and make a script out of it. Take out the jitters extemporaneity can bring by writing what you plan to say. Make it seem like you are telling a story. Have a beginning, middle, a good climax if possible, and an ending.

Practice. Then practice some more. This will take the kinks out of your presentation and keep it flowing smoothly on D-day. Whether you practice in front of a mirror or with a select group of people, repetition is a definite plus in making your PowerPoint presentations more effective.

PowerPoint Educational Software

1. Microsoft Office - Microsoft PowerPoint - Microsoft's official home page.
2. Powerbacks
3. PowerPlugs
4. PowerPoint in the Classroom
5. PowerPoint Tutorial - FunctionX
6. The Presentation Team: Presentations PowerPoint & Multimedia
7. PresentationPro.com
8. Presenters Online
9. WebSiteEstates.com