PowerPoint is an amazing tool yet many fail to utilize the full potential of the program. Many have the impression that you need to be a designer or have design skills to perfectly design or execute the presentation but in my experience, I’ve learned that you don’t explicitly need the design skills to present your ideas. And addressing the design concerns a big shout out to Microsoft for introducing design ideas a machine learning design suggestions within PowerPoint, as it now allows users with slide design suggestions that users can assign to their presentation slides to make it more elegant.
We have already covered design ideas in our last article, in today’s part 1 of 3 articles we’ll walk you through 3 tips that will help you create an effortless yet effective PowerPoint Presentation.
First Tip: Learn the 10,20, 30 rule by Guy Kawasaki. It’s simple. Have your presentation within 10 slides, make it presentable in 20 minutes, and have the font size no minimum than 30points.
This way if suppose you have an hour-long slot you can complete your presentation in 20 or 25 minutes and you can make the most of the remaining time for Q&A. For inspiration, you can watch TED videos which usually are under 20 minutes.
Second Tip: Know your audience, personify your presentation.
For example, if you are creating a presentation for sales, you need to keep your slides straight to the point such as defining the USP, competition, your market scope, etc. in this way you can make your audience grab the information quickly and easily. If you are presenting to C-level executives make sure you respect their time by keeping your presentation straight to the point. And storytelling is a powerplay when it comes to presenting a presentation to the public.
Third Tip: Choose your backgrounds wisely, Dark ‘or’ Light.
I personally choose dark backgrounds as they enhance the visibility of the elements on the slide. But if your brand colors contain the lighter versions then you can go with the lighter variations of the backgrounds. We do recommend our audience to learn color theory, to have a better knowledge of what colors to use when it comes to a particular subject. We have discussed this in one of our articles you can read it here.
Having too many slides in the presentation might sound good to the presenter but know that users tend to forget information after the first few slides and many start to get bored if the presentations are long and filled with long texts that are hard to read. We will be covering more about this in the next set of articles. So stay tuned, subscribe to our newsletter or website to stay updated.
