Microsoft Power Point Design Template

PowerPoint presentations are pervasive in our business culture. Yet far too often, they are used, to paraphrase advertising legend David Ogilvy, like a drunk uses a lamppost...more for support than for illumination.

Let's take a look at how to use PowerPoint for maximum impact.

Prepare With Your Audience In Mind

Without your audience, there is no need for your presentation. Yet, we typically use our prep time to develop content and slides and put little focus on thinking about the needs of our audience. To start, ask yourself "how can using PowerPoint benefit my audience?"

You'll have the answer if you understand your communications objective and what you want your audience to do as a result of your presentation. Are you simply providing information, perhaps an update on a particular project? Are you calling the audience to action? Do you want them to change their opinion based on what you say? Are you teaching them something new? Do you want to inspire them?

The main purpose of PowerPoint is to augment visually the words you are speaking, allowing the audience to refer to certain key words, pictures or charts on the screen to provide context. But frequently, we use PowerPoint as a teleprompter...filling the slides with the text of our presentation and then reading the slides to the audience.

It's no surprise, then, that research has shown the number one annoyance factor for audiences is a presenter reading his slides. Audiences are perfectly capable of reading for themselves! Your audience is also a key source of feedback for you. Focusing on them, rather than on your slides, allows you to see their important non-verbal clues (such as approval or confusion) so you can address concerns or enlist support on the spot.

Organize Your Presentation For Maximum Audience Impact

The way you organize and display the information on your slides can either obscure or assist your message. Slides should show only key phrases in bullet point form. Yet how many times have you seen slides overflowing with complete sentences? When composing your slides, be lean...leave yourself something to say beyond what appears on the screen.

Create a consistent look across all your slides to make it easier for the audience to follow. Start each bullet point with the same part of speech - all nouns or all verbs - and put verbs in the same tense. Action verbs are preferable; "developed a plan to ..." is stronger than "wrote a plan to..." Capitalize...or not...at the start of each bullet, but be consistent.

Bullet points that "fly" into position on the screen or build, one letter at a time, are distracting. Although these are cool features in PowerPoint, the audience has to wait for all the letters to "land" before they can read the point. Instead, use the "Appear" command so the text appears all at once.

Work Out Operational Details

When preparing, review how to operate the software and what to do if something unexpected happens during your presentation.

A common problem, which distracts the audience's attention from what you are saying, is the appearance of the arrow or pointer on the screen. This is caused by moving the mouse. To prevent this, after the Slide Show view has started, press the Ctrl-H key combination. Now any mouse movement won't show on the screen. To cancel, press Ctrl-A. If the arrow appears while you are presenting, you might be tempted to press the Escape button in a moment of panic. Don't! This will stop the slide show and drop you back into the program.

To temporarily halt your presentation and show a blank screen, press "w" for a white screen or "b" for a black screen. To resume the presentation, press the key again to pick up where you left off.

If you advance past the last slide in your presentation, you will drop back into the program which looks unprofessional. To avoid this, duplicate your last slide 2 or 3 times. Then if you do inadvertently advance past the end, it won't matter as the audience will continue to see your last slide.

Ensure Your Slides Are Easy To Read

Another pet peeve for audiences is text so small it can't be read. I recently attended a presentation where I had to squint and struggle to read the tiny numbers and letters on the presenter's screen. Not only did it prevent me from listening to what the presenter was saying, it also frustrated me, which didn't leave me in a very conducive state of mind for the message!

A simple, clean design with a font size of at least 28-32 for text and 36-44 for headings will ensure your audience can read your slides. Headlines on all slides should be in a consistent font and no more than 2 fonts should be used on any slide (one for head and one for body). Your font choices are typically either a Serif or a Sans Serif font. Serif fonts, which take the eye longer to read, have little lines on the letters. Times Roman, Bookman and Garamond are common Serif fonts. Sans Serif fonts, like Tahoma, Arial and Verdana, are perfectly clean and easier to read.

Bolded type can be used to draw attention, as can italic, but overdoing it can get tiresome and negate the emphasis you were trying to achieve. Upper and lower case is easier to read than all caps. When creating the actual bullets, the heavier and more filled in they are, the easier for your audience to see. For example, blacked-in circles are clearer than a fine-lined arrow.

Choose contrasting colors for text and background. If you use a dark background, such as dark blue or green, use a light text color such as white or yellow. Conversely, a light background color, such as light blue or beige needs a dark text color like navy, black or burgundy.

Simple graphs or charts can forcefully illustrate relationships, mounds of data or startling statistics. Determine what point you want numbers or data to convey and create a graphic way to communicate it.

Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse

No matter how dazzling your PowerPoint slides or how important your message, if you haven't spent adequate time rehearsing your words, polishing your delivery and practicing with your slide show, your presentation won't be as effective as it could be...and it might not even achieve your communication objective.

I can't put enough emphasis on the importance of rehearsal. And yet it is human nature to shortchange this critical presentation component. No other professional...recording artist, astronaut, NFL quarterback, lawyer, jockey, actor...would dream of going "on stage" without hours of rehearsal. And yet we continually arrive on the "business stage" having just finished the last PowerPoint slide!

Adequate rehearsal with your finished presentation ensures a number of things will happen: you'll be calmer and more able to focus on your audience; you'll be less likely to succumb to nerves and stage fright because you know your material; and you will have caught any last minute errors in your material.

Prepare, Organize, Work Out The Details, Ensure Readability and Rehearse - incorporate these 5 critical activities into your next PowerPoint presentation and I guarantee your message will be more POWERful!

Kathy Reiffenstein is the founder and president of And...Now Presenting!, a D.C. area communications consulting and training firm, where she draws on her background in sales, marketing and customer service to create confident, persuasive speakers. She works with business executives, authors, non-profit leaders and the military to help them speak clearly, effectively and engagingly to their audiences. Visit http://andnowpresenting.us for free presentation tips and resources.

Geetesh Bajaj, Microsoft Office PowerPoint MVP and author of the Cutting Edge PowerPoint for Dummies books, gives a fun and comprehensive look at the benefits of using SmartArt graphics in your presentations.

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