1. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool.

2. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool.
• Write a script.
• A little planning goes a long way. Most presentations are written in
PowerPoint (or some other presentation package) without any sort
of rhyme or reason.
• That’s bass-ackwards. Since the point of your slides is to illustrate
and expand what you are going to say to your audience. You should
know what you intend to say and then figure out how to visualize it.
Unless you are an expert at improvising, make sure you write out or
at least outline your presentation before trying to put together
slides.
• And make sure your script follows good storytelling conventions:
give it a beginning, middle, and end; have a clear arc that builds
towards some sort of climax; make your audience appreciate each
slide but be anxious to find out what’s next; and when possible,
always leave ‘em wanting more.

3. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool.
• One thing at a time, please.
• At any given moment, what should be on the screen is the
thing you’re talking about. Our audience will almost
instantly read every slide as soon as it’s displayed; if you
have the next four points you plan to make up there, they’ll
be three steps ahead of you, waiting for you to catch up
rather than listening with interest to the point you’re
making.
• Plan your presentation so just one new point is displayed at
any given moment. Bullet points can be revealed one at a
time as you reach them. Charts can be put on the next slide
to be referenced when you get to the data the chart
displays. Your job as presenter is to control the flow of
information so that you and your audience stay in sync.

4. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• No paragraphs.
• Where most presentations fail is that their authors, convinced they are
producing some kind of stand-alone document, put everything they want
to say onto their slides, in great big chunky blocks of text.
• Congratulations. You’ve just killed a roomful of people. Cause of death:
terminal boredom poisoning.
• Your slides are the illustrations for your presentation, not the presentation
itself. They should underline and reinforce what you’re saying as you give
your presentation — save the paragraphs of text for your script.
PowerPoint and other presentation software have functions to display
notes onto the presenter’s screen that do not get sent to the projector, or
you can use notecards, a separate word processor document, or your
memory. Just don’t put it on the screen – and for goodness’ sake, if you do
for some reason put it on the screen, don’t stand with your back to your
audience and read it from the screen!

5. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Pay attention to design.
• PowerPoint and other presentation packages offer all sorts of ways to add visual “flash” to your
slides: fades, swipes, flashing text, and other annoyances are all too easy to insert with a few
mouse clicks.
• Avoid the temptation to dress up your pages with cheesy effects and focus instead on simple design
basics:
• Use a sans serif font for body text. Sans serifs like Arial, Helvetica, or Calibri tend to be the easiest
to read on screens.
• Use decorative fonts only for slide headers, and then only if they’re easy to read. Decorative fonts
–calligraphy, German blackface, futuristic, psychotic handwriting, flowers, art nouveau, etc. – are
hard to read and should be reserved only for large headlines at the top of the page. Better yet, stick
to a classy serif font like Georgia or Baskerville.
• Put dark text on a light background. Again, this is easiest to read. If you must use a dark
background – for instance, if your company uses a standard template with a dark background –
make sure your text is quite light (white, cream, light grey, or pastels) and maybe bump the font size
up two or three notches.
• Align text left or right. Centered text is harder to read and looks amateurish. Line up all your text to
a right-hand or left-hand baseline – it will look better and be easier to follow.
• Avoid clutter. A headline, a few bullet points, maybe an image – anything more than that and you
risk losing your audience as they sort it all out.
•

6. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Use images sparingly
• There are two schools of thought about images in presentations.
Some say they add visual interest and keep audiences engaged;
others say images are an unnecessary distraction.
• Both arguments have some merit, so in this case the best option is
to split the difference: use images only when they add important
information or make an abstract point more concrete.
• While we’re on the subject, absolutely do not use PowerPoint’s
built-in clipart. Anything from Office 2003 and earlier has been seen
by everyone in your audience a thousand times – they’ve become
tired, used-up clichés, and I hopefully don’t need to tell you to
avoid tired, used-up clichés in your presentations. Office 2007 and
non-Office programs have some clipart that isn’t so familiar (though
it will be, and soon) but by now, the entire concept of clipart has
about run its course – it just doesn’t feel fresh and new anymore.

7. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Think outside the screen.
• Remember, the slides on the screen are
only part of the presentation – and not the main
part. Even though you’re liable to be presenting
in a darkened room, give some thought to your
own presentation manner – how you hold
yourself, what you wear, how you move around
the room. You are the focus when you’re
presenting, no matter how interesting your slides
are.

8. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Have a hook.
• Like the best writing, the best presentation shook their
audiences early and then reel them in. Open with
something surprising or intriguing, something that will
get your audience to sit up and take notice. The most
powerful hooks are often those that appeal directly to
your audience’s emotions – offer them something
awesome or, if it’s appropriate, scare the pants off of
them. The rest of your presentation, then, will be
effectively your promise to make the awesome thing
happen, or the scary thing nothappen.

9. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Ask questions.
• Questions arouse interest, pique curiosity, and
engage audiences. So ask a lot of them. Build
tension by posing a question and letting your
audience stew a moment before moving to the
next slide with the answer. Quiz their knowledge
and then show them how little they know. If
appropriate, engage in a little question-and-
answer with your audience, with you asking the
questions

10. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Modulate, modulate, modulate.
• Especially when you’ve done a presentation before, it
can be easy to fall into a drone, going on and on and on
and on and on with only minimal changes to your
inflection. Always speak as if you were speaking to a
friend, not as if you are reading off of index cards (even
if you are). If keeping up a lively and personable tone of
voice is difficult for you when presenting, do a couple
of practice run-throughs. If you still can’t get it right
and presentations are a big part of your job, take a
public speaking course or join Toastmasters.

11. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Break the rules.
• As with everything else, there are times when
each of these rules – or any other rule you know
– won’t apply. If you know there’s a good reason
to break a rule, go ahead and do it. Rule breaking
is perfectly acceptable behavior – it’s ignoring the
rules or breaking them because you just don’t
know any better that leads to shoddy boring
presentations that lead to boredom, depression,
psychopathic breaks, and eventually death. And
you don’t want that, do you?

12. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• PowerPoint, when displayed via a projector, is
a useful tool for showing audiences things
that enhance what the speaker is saying. It is a
useful tool for illustrating the content of a
speech, such as by showing photos, graphs,
charts, maps, etc., or by highlighting certain
text from a speech, such as quotations or
major ideas. It should not be used as a slide-
show outline of what the speaker is telling the
audience

13. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Slides used in a presentation should be spare,
in terms of how much information is on each
slide, as well as how many slides are used. A
rule of thumb is to put no more than eight
lines of text on a slide, and with no more than
eight to ten words per line. In most cases, less
is more, so four lines of text is probably better.
Don’t display charts or graphs with a lot of
information—if it’s useful for the audience to
see such things, pass them out as handouts.

14. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Unless you’re an experienced designer, don’t
use the transition and animation “tricks” that
are built into PowerPoint, such as bouncing or
flying text. By now, most people roll their eyes
when they see these things, and these tricks
add nothing of value to a presentation.

15. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Above all, use high-contrast color schemes so
that whatever is on your slides is readable. Unless
you are a talented graphic designer, use the
templates that come with PowerPoint or
Keynote, and keep it simple—high concept design
in a slide presentation doesn’t help in most
circumstances, unless you’re in the fashion or
design fields. If you use graphics or photos, try to
use the highest quality you can find or afford—
clip art and low-resolution graphics blown up on
a screen usually detract from a presentation.

16. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Rehearse your PowerPoint presentation and
not just once. Don’t let PowerPoint get in the
way of your oral presentation, and make sure
you know how it works, what sequence the
slides are in, how to get through it using
someone else’s computer, etc. Make sure that
you can deliver your presentation if
PowerPoint is completely unavailable; in other
words, make sure you can give your speech
without your PowerPoint presentation.

17. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Get used to using black slides. There are few
speeches that need something displayed on
the screen all the time. If you include a black
slide in your presentation, your audience will
refocus on you, rather than on the screen, and
you can direct them back to the screen when
you have something else to show them. Put a
black screen at the end of your presentation,
so that when you’re done, the PowerPoint
presentation is finished and off the screen.

18. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Concentrate on keeping the audience focused on
you, not on the screen. You can do this by using
slides sparingly, standing in front of the audience
in a way that makes them look at you, and, if
possible, going to the screen and using your hand
or arm to point out things on a slide. If you
expect to be using PowerPoint a lot, invest in a
remote “clicker” that lets you get away from the
computer and still drive your presentation. If you
don’t have one of those, it’s better to ask
someone to run the presentation than to be
behind a screen and keyboard while you talk.

19. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• If you show something on a computer that requires moving
the cursor around, or flipping from one screen to another,
or some other technique that requires interaction with the
computer itself, remember that people in the audience will
see things very differently on the projection screen than
you see them on the computer screen. Keep motion on the
screen to a minimum, unless you’re showing a movie or a
video. It’s better to show a static screenshot of a Web page,
embedded on a slide, than to call up the Web page in a
browser on a computer. If you want to point out something
on a Web page, go to the screen and point at it—don’t
jiggle the cursor around what you want people to look at:
their heads will look like bobble-headed dolls.

20. Effective Use of Powerpoint as a
presentation tool
• Don’t “cue” the audience that listening to your
speech means getting through your PowerPoint
presentation. If the audience sees that your
PowerPoint presentation is the structure of your
speech, they’ll start wondering how many slides
are left. Slides should be used asynchronously
within your speech, and only to highlight or
illustrate things. Audiences are bored with oral
presentations that go from one slide to the next
until the end. Engage the audience, and use slides
only when they are useful.