There’s a new political party in Switzerland whose sole intention is to get PowerPoint outlawed. What madness! PowerPoint software, when used correctly is an aide to making presentations with real impact. A good PowerPoint presentation is an important part of the corporate identity of your business, so it needs to be compelling and engaging.
This is quite an art form which Marketing Zone can tailor for you, but here are a few simple steps to get you started.
- Create a theme according to your corporate identity – use the templates available and adapt these using your brand colours and typeface
- Learn about navigation and slide timings – avoid the pitfalls of long, non-interactive presentations and add a navigation so you can move the presentation in a different direction to grab people’s attention
- Use visuals to emphasise key points – an image says a thousand words so be selective
- Bullet points – these work better than long paragraphs of prose, but keep to just a few per slide and don’t over do the amount of slides with lists of bullet points
- Be careful with the animation – yes it’s a nice feature to have, but save it until it’s necessary to avoid distracting your audience
- Consider your off-screen audience – presentations are designed for the screen and might not work as well when they are printed as handouts. It’d be useful to write some notes for your audience to follow
- Keep file sizes manageable – there’s nothing worse than standing at the front of an audience waiting for your file to load. Compress and resize your images before adding them to your presentation, or use the built in PowerPoint tools for charts and graphics.