Captivate Your Audience: Best Practices for Powerful PowerPoint Presentations

Best Practices for Powerpoint Presentations START WITH AN OUTLINE Building an outline helps you keep track of the main point(s) you want to cover in your presentation and plan the timing of each slide. Think of your slides as a visual overview to keep your audience on track or a place to illustrate statistical trends. The meat of the presentation should either be delivered by the presenter or be included in supplementary hand‐outs. Make an outline of your presentation before you start building it using Powerpoint’s Outline View. Click the View tab and select Outline View. You can edit the text on each slide directly from this viewer, while being able to see the entire presentation all at once. SCREEN SIZE AND SLIDE SIZE Is this presentation being viewed on a laptop by a colleague offsite or over webex, on a large projection screen, or a small projection screen? Keep the presentation medium and the audience in mind when making your slides. If possible, try it out on the screen that you’ll be ultimately presenting on. Slide sizes choices of 4:3 and 16:9 look very different, especially if your slides are being combined into a larger presentation. The MITAA recommends using the 4:3 ratio slide size. You can change this by clicking the Design tab and clicking Slide Size on the far right.