- You can improve your PowerPoint presentations by both improving your presentation skills and making better use of the program.
- To create a more compelling PowerPoint presentation, you can use tricks like animated charts, a background soundtrack, or embedded fonts.
- Here are 17 tips for making cleaner slides, speaking more effectively, and using little-known PowerPoint tools for smarter presentations.
- Visit Insider’s Tech Reference library for more stories.
Microsoft PowerPoint remains the most common platform to create and deliver presentations.
No matter what your content, you can make a more compelling presentation when you’ve toned some common presentation skills and also mastered some of PowerPoint’s lesser-known features.
How to be a better PowerPoint presenter
PowerPoint is a powerful program for creating and delivering presentations, but to make a better presentation, you need to improve your presentation game. Too many presentations rely like a crutch on common PowerPoint features, leading to meetings that are bland and boring. Before we get to making better use of PowerPoint itself, here are eight ways to become a better presenter.
Outline your presentation. Before you begin creating your PowerPoint deck, outline it. This will help you find the structure of your presentation and ensure that there is some symmetry among the major ideas you want to convey and a logical flow to the delivery.
Don’t spell it all out on the slides. A common mistake is to put everything you want to say on a slide and essentially just read off your own presentation. A good slide deck articulates key ideas in bullet form; you add color and definition to that basic structure when you speak.
Learn to speak extemporaneously. Find a middle ground between reading verbatim off cards or the PowerPoint deck and just winging it. Rehearse your presentation — several times, if needed — and become familiar enough with the material that keywords on the screen can help you speak extemporaneously without referring to notes. The best PowerPoint presenters appear polished, but not memorized.
Speak slowly to avoid verbal pauses. Many people — particularly those who are uncomfortable with presenting — tend to talk too fast, which can be difficult for an audience to follow. When you practice, make a deliberate effort to slow down your speech and build natural pauses into your presentation. An added benefit to speaking more slowly is you can think ahead and avoid inserting verbal pauses, like “umm” and “you know.” It’ll take practice and effort to work those out of your lexicon, but speaking slowly and deliberately makes a big difference and will make you sound much more professional.
Omit punctuation when possible. Punctuation, especially exclamation points, can look amateurish on-screen, and the same is true of excessive formatting (like bold, italic, and underlines). Convey that kind of emphasis while you speak.
Avoid standard clipart. The desire to add visual flair to a presentation is understandable, but PowerPoint’s clipart and freely available stock images are visual cliches. Look for contextually relevant images you can use or skip the visuals entirely.
Minimize transitions. Likewise, be careful when applying transitions to your slide deck. Simple fades are often fine, but wipes, slides, and other dramatic effects tend to look sophomoric. Be tasteful and judicious in your use of any visual effects.
Know where to look. …….
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-give-better-powerpoint-presentation