5 Professional PowerPoint Secrets

If you spent much time building a PowerPoint presentation, then you know how it can be to create an effective presentation. Here are five "insider" secrets of professional PowerPoint designers that help engage and retain the attention of your audience.

1. Consistency means Professional Polish. You want your audience to focus on content, not delivery. The best way to do this is to create a transparent approach to be as consistent as possible using all elements of your presentation, from fonts, colors, layouts, animations and transitions between slides. For example, if you animate a bulleted list using a fade effect, it will work much better if you stick with it, instead deciding to animate the next list animated 'up curve'.

2. Variety is the spice of life, and your presentation. This may seem a direct contradiction to secret # 1, but it is not. You must find a way to visually cue the audience that a new slide appeared, and then has to look different from the previous slide in some obvious way. Furthermore, if each slide is too similar, the public will soon become bored. It 's important to use the variations within the framework of consistency. For example, say you decide to have the title slide always be a white text inside a blue rectangle and automatically animate each new slide. You might decide to animate the title bar from the left on slide 1, slide 2 and then from right, and keep alternating. This presentation will have a clear style, but with considerable variations.

3. Use both images and text. Some people are more verbally (text) oriented, and some are more visual (image) oriented. If your presentation uses both pictures and text, you will communicate to more people not only through one or the other. It may be time to find relevant images, to allow adequate time for this to make your PowerPoint presentation.

4. Be Bold. PowerPoint slides tend to work best when they are simple and bold. The following recommendations are famous designer billboard: "Make something that can be read by a machine zoom to 60 miles per hour, at night, during a rain storm, and through a dirty windshield." It makes everything nice and big on the slide. The text must not be less than 16 points. If the presentation is to support a speaker live, so keep the text as short as possible, so that you can make it big and clear. For example, instead of writing "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," the way PowerPoint Zen ie, "Fox jumped dog." The speaker can then take their place in the center of attention of the public letting them know the dog was brown, and the fox was lazy. If you are creating a stand-alone presentation, then you need to put more information in the slides. For information, see the next secret.

5. The space outside. A common question is: "I have 25 minutes to present, and so the number of slides should I do?" There is no hard and fast rule, but it is useful to consider the following. It 's much more interesting and engaging for the public to have information distributed across multiple slides that advance quickly, some of the slides that are on the screen seems like an eternity that are filled with so much content that are difficult to read. Remember that most people watch TV and movies, images that change every few seconds. If the slides change often, then you will be less likely to hear snoring from the row.

Finally, keep this observation by information design guru Edward Tufte in mind: "The best way to improve your PowerPoint presentation is to improve the content." ......