Captivate Your Audience: Best Practices for Powerful PowerPoint Presentations

Abstract

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. WORD LIMIT PER SLIDE Limit how much information you include on each slide to make the content easier to see and digest. Try this guideline: each PowerPoint slide should have one main idea, a maximum of six bullet points, and a maximum of six words per bullet point. FONTS San Serif fonts are easier to view on a screen as opposed to serif fonts (which are more formal and viewed more easily in print). Avoid using light text on a dark background unless it is only several words, as it is harder to read. If you are building a presentation on behalf of the [City, State]TAA Brand style‐ guide encourages the use of: Proxima Nova as the primary typeface or Arial as an alternative typeface Adobe Caslon Pro as a primary serif typeface or Georgia as an alternative serif typeface Keep your font size in the range of 28 – 40 pt if possible. SLIDE MASTER If you are not building a presentation from an existing template, use PowerPoint’s Slide Master View to easily establish consistent formatting throughout. On the View tab, click Slide Master (1). Here you can design a template for each type of slide that you’ll need in the presentation. You can still access the other tabs like the Home tab, allowing you to adjust fonts and colors. You can also make formatting changes to the entire presentation by only changing the top master slide (2). When you are finished, click Close Master Slide. When you are creating the actual slides, you’ll be able to select from the templates you build in the master view. COLORS Don’t use more than 5 colors unless you are using them to show categories or sequences (different colors for the months of the year, categorizing goals or action plans) Determine a color scheme ahead of time and adhere to it with every slide. If you are building a presentation on behalf of the Association, try to use one of the palettes determined by MITAA branding: SAVING A COLOR PALETTE IN POWERPOINT To keep your colors consistent and easy to access, save a color palette in PowerPoint. Click the...