Assembling a PowerPoint Slideshow: Pitfalls to Avoid
Over the last decade PowerPoint has become one of the most significant presentation tools in both companies and education. At every important meeting you run, you’re expected to make a PowerPoint presentation that will inform each attendee of your idea in a way that is clear,succinct , and to-the-point.
In other kinds of company meetings, they can help to underscore the point being made, or simply impart an outline for the presenter to follow. Putting time into creating a great quality PowerPoint presentation is a great way to show to attendees of a meeting that the knowledge you’re giving is important, right,and in the case of sales presentations, financially valuable to all
There are several hints you can follow to create PowerPoint presentations more quickly and efficiently. One is to speed up the choosing of fonts by previewing fonts in the font toolbar. To do this,just go to Tools/Customize, click the Options tab, then click “List font names in their font.” Another method to speed up creating presentation slides is to put a default text style for your slides. This both helps to make your PowerPoint presentations to look more professional, and it speeds up their making. To set a new default, go to Format, then Font. Apply the changes you need, then click OK.
One way to create greater quality PowerPoint presentations is to use higher quality graphics. Clipart taken directly from Microsoft Office screams “this information wasn’t important enough for me to make an effort.” In particular, avoid using MS Office “screen beans,” which are so usual as to become laughably cliché.
If you have important points to make, specifically if they’re whole paragraphs, include them in handouts. If you’re giving a lively presentation and want to keep your audience’s whole attention, make sure to pass out any handouts at the end, as they can be distracting.
Purchased PowerPoint templates incorporate the kind of pictures, animation, and transitions that you might not be able to create yourself. With well-designed flash animation and sharp pictures, your presentation will really stand out. But be sure not to get anything too fancy. You don’t want to distract from your presentation itself.
Don’t use too many bullet points and specifically don’t use paragraphs to get your meaning across. You should be doing that yourself. Also, don’t overwhelm your presentation with graphics, fancy animated transitions, and graphics. Remember that the talk is about the information. Especially for selling presentations, you don’t want anybody in the room to leave feeling that they’ve wasted their time watching fancy animations. Too many extras on your PowerPoint slides will detract from your presentation rather than add to it.
As a normal human cannot absorb more than ten new ideas in a sitting, each of your ten slides will give you the best effect. It should take you about five minutes to present each slide. Much more than that and you’re talking too much. Much less, and people will question the necessity to have that slide in the first place. A twenty-minute talk leaves plenty of time for set up, and allows questions to be asked later.
PowerPoint is one of the most effective presentation tools you can use for business meetings and sales presentations. A quality PowerPoint presentation helps to underline your idea while giving the audience pieces of information that will stay with them. While a good presentation will help your business and add to your meeting, a bad one can do just the opposite.
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