Powerpoint presentations, tips for beginners
There Is Nothing Like Presentations!
It is a powerful tool for business, educational and marketing purposes, whether in a meeting room, classroom or huge conference hall. The presentation plays a key role when it comes to communicating an important massage. Just think, each of us can create with it such powerful documents within reach – amazing!
Good Presentation allows your Audience to Understand you.
In our mind, the message we want to convey is very clear and alive, still, our viewers will not always understand it as we want them to.
Your audience may listen to your words while imagining a completely different idea in their mind, drawn from their private world of imagery.
That’s where your presentation comes in handy, enabling you to communicate complex messages and visualise cumbersome content.
The slides create a flow and constitute a background of added value to your words. The simultaneity between what is said and displayed on screen, makes the presentation an unparalleled tool.
A good presentation engages your audience to your cause
Your pitch deck is meant to reinforce your words with examples and proofs, to give background and to “sell” your idea to the audience in an easy and accessible way, to create a dialogue with the audience, to excite them with your idea, to let them identify with your story and encourage them to take part in the process.
Powerpoint, as the leading and widely used software in creating presentations allows for convenient and intuitive use, in addition it facilitates simple and fast content updates, by different team members, for example, a corporate presentation usually requires regular updating by various employees. Another advantage of Powerpoint is the integration of different mediums into one platform: images, charts, videos, animation, etc.
Despite its ever-growing competitors in the market – when it comes to sharing and distributing slideshows – Powerpoint has the upper hand, it is only getting better with each new version, with new, sparkling features, upgraded user interface and expansion into Mobile and web platforms.
This article will present five easy-to-apply tips for anyone looking to bring their presentation to its full potential. Here, I will also address some basic, helpful software features for creating a good Powerpoint presentation.
1#
A good Presentation Is Concise
A good presentation gives your audience a sense of flow and an easy access to understanding it.
The less content it contains, the easier it is to absorb its information, as a result of summarisation, your presentation will communicate immediately and will be more memorable as a result.
This requires conciseness. How many slides should we create? How do we tell if our presentation contains too many slides? Does our slide contain too much data? Refining is an endless process – it is almost always possible to find an unnecessary slide or content.
This requires conciseness. How many slides should we create? How do we tell if our presentation contains too many slides? Does our slide contain too much data? Refining is an endless process – it is almost always possible to find an unnecessary slide or content.
Zoom out
In the refining process, we need to look at everything from a zoom out and identify the summary of things, which are the most important items within our content.
Hierarchy
Creating an information hierarchy is a great way to abstract, creating a gradual differentiation from most to least important data. This way, slides will not compete for attention.
Reduce and add
Getting to the least important data, we have to ask: is it necessary? A good way to answer is to check whether, after removing this data, the message remains clear.
Key sentence
Text should be as concise as possible, formulate a key phrase to each slide, give it a fixed grid so that the viewer can identify it easily in transition between slides.
What can Powerpoint do for us?
backup slides
A second chance for all those slides we’ve removed, a form of filtering where we save data as a backup in case the potential investor suddenly asks to see that graph that reinforces our statement for example.
Hyperlinks
these slides can be linked to the presentation slides using Hyperlink, so that we could retrieve them easily if necessary.
2#
Sometimes, big masses of content Is a necessity
Sometimes, despite our high volume content, we can not shorten it, not even one word to spare.
What if we have a lot to say in a particular slide? What if that slide has already undergone the processes of summarising, and still there are many important facts to display?
At this point, the best solution is splitting the slide. You can create a general title slide, followed by sub-slides, which in turn adds important data.
Another good solution is portraying the data horizontally, over the same slide, For our viewer, this is a single slide, the subject has not changed, yet We’ve been able to show him all of the important facts in a more streamlined way.
What can Powerpoint do for us?
Transitions and animations
In most cases, except for fade, it is recommended not to use the effects. However, in special cases and with a lot of consideration, it is possible to create spectacular transition animations. When we want to Change data on the same slide it is ideal to use transitions.
3#
Leave bread crumbs for your audience
A good presentation will always allow your audience orientation. You can not expect them to listen to you at any given time throughout the entire presentation, you must provide anchors, even for your most attentive viewers.
One way of creating anchors is using icons. The use of icons makes it possible to convey the idea in a much faster and intuitive way than text, We can use it to correlate slides with the entire presentation.
We can begin our presentation with a list of main topics, each represented by an icon, we could also use color coding. The icon will serve as an anchor, reminding us of the topic at hand.
What can Powerpoint do for us?
Icons as EMF files
Icons created in a graphic software can be converted into editable Powerpoint shapes by exporting the icons from Adobe as EMF files, and importing it into Powerpoint. This will allow control over colors and visibility, we can than use the icons as a Powerpoint component.
4#
The picture superiority effect
A visually powerful image becomes a memory trigger, according to the image superiority effect theory, the human mind prefers to process visual rather than textual data.
An image has an advantage over a word because it is encoded in our minds twice; Both visually and literally, therefore it will increase our ability to absorb it and later pull it out of our memory when needed. A word only generates literal encoding.
We have become accustomed to the old model in which presentations are based on text and pictures. However, the ideal model for memorable, impactful presentations is based on ‘picture first – text later’. Powerful images create an atmosphere, look for images that convey the right emotion for your presentation, photos that will help create an emotional connection between your audience and your idea, Look for images that reflect your brand’s personality.
We have become accustomed to the old model in which presentations are based on text and pictures. However, the ideal model for memorable, impactful presentations is based on ‘picture first – text later’. Powerful images create an atmosphere, look for images that convey the right emotion for your presentation, photos that will help create an emotional connection between your audience and your idea, Look for images that reflect your brand’s personality.
Usage rights
The best way to avoid copyright infringement is to use professional images from legal image stocks. There are many good paid image stocks, such as: Shutterstock, iStock and Storyblocks. In addition, the use of a professional image database guarantees us the use of high quality photographs taken by professionals.
What can Powerpoint do for us?
Creating uniformity
It is important to unify the presentation’s images into a series. Using the software you can perform basic image editing, give them color uniformity by lowering the saturation or changing the temperature. Or by selecting the same color filter for all of them.
5#
Using Infographics
We all love infographics. It grabs our attention every time. We are exposed to it on a daily basis. The web search volume for “infographics”, as seen in Google Trends, continues to climb each year.
In a world full of stimuli and information overload, our range of listening capability is only getting shorter, infographics is the ultimate visual means for dealing with this problem. As stated in Section 4, images has an advantage over words, Since the visual learning capacity of most people exceeds the textual one, our brain mostly processes visual data, however, there is a significant part of the brain dedicated to the textual processing of data. The greatest advantage belongs to the element that combines the two – the infographics. The benefits of using Infographics are clear to us, today, more than ever.
What can Powerpoint do for us?
Smart art
The Smart Art component offers a wide range of templates that can be personally designed. This tool is very easy to use, the templates come in a very basic look but they can very easily be given a new style and design. Using Smart Art we can create infographics to describe process, flowcharts, pyramids and more.
So, What Did We Have Here?
We learned that a good presentation is one of the most powerful business tools available to us.
We Need it to be concise, easy to understand, spiced up with spectacular images (for the benefit of average human memory) and upgraded with infographics – because it’s trendy, but mostly because the combination of text and graphic element, that is infographics, Simply does the trick.
The efforts involved in upgrading your presentation are definitely worth it.
One thing I can assure you – it gets easier from presentation to presentation…
So, get to work!
© all rights reserved to galiainfographics
