Blue writing on a black background is nearly impossible to read at the best of times, so please reserve blue text for highlighting links on a white background…
Also, yellow text on a white background is no fun.
And if you ever use a pink background for anything…
Consider good colour choice when designing a PPT presentation. Check out this site for some hints.
Have you seen any other colours that have hurt your eyes in a presentation?
Have you ever sat in a presentation where they try to show you a video during the presentation, only to move out of the presentation, show you their ugly desktop background and then open a movie file, only to play it in a small window on the screen. Does anyone else find that frustrating or is it just me?
It is really easy these days to embed (put in) a video into your presentation. All you need to do is drag and drop the file and it will open, and when you come to the video in your presentation it will start playing, without any exiting of your presentation.
This will allow for a much more professional presentation and for such a simple trick, it still seems to wow some people.
Your powerpoint is their to visually assist your audience. It is not their to replace you. So don’t read directly from your slides.
You can stop yourself from reading by not putting lots of words on your slides, if you don’t have words on your slide then you can’t read from them. I once had a lecturer who said no more than 6 words per slide, I think that’s quite extreme. In reality, 3-4 bullet points with a line of text in each is more than enough.
Your audience is there to see you present your information, if you are just reading from your slides then you may as well have just handed them an essay and sat down for 20 minutes.
For funny PPT Tips, including the one above, watch this video.
Most people that you present to will not see a lot of presentations, and this means that you can feel free to use default presentation themes without your audience having seen them before.
Some of the beautiful themes in Apple's Keynote
A well designed presentation is hard to make, especially for the 90% who cant really design anything that well. Thankfully, when you bought Powerpoint (or Keynote), the program came with a bunch of standard designs that look pretty good, all you have to do is punch in some text and images and viola, you have a nice looking presentation.
These themes are really well designed (on the whole), and have placeholders for you to insert your own text and images, it is that simple.
So next time your making a presentation, play around with the built in themes and see what you can come up with, your audience will thank you.
I like good presentations.
I dislike bad presentations.
I think that there are some things that presenters can do in order to make their presentations better, and there are some things that presenters can do in order to make their presentations worse. I’m hoping to spotlight some things that fit into these categories in order to help people make better presentations. So here comes tip #1.
When you are presenting with a powerpoint, please make sure that the slide that is showing matches what you are saying. If it isn’t, then black out the screen.
It can be very distracting for an audience to be looking at something that is completely different from what you are saying. A powerpoint is there to enhance what you say, not take away from it.
Blacking out the screen is quite easy and can be done in one of two ways.
A powerpoint is there to enhance, not distract. So please make sure that what is behind you on the screen matches (or at least doesn’t take away from) what you are saying.
