2. Match Design to Purpose
 Decide if your presentation is meant to entertain,
inform, persuade, or sell. Is a light-hearted or a
more formal approach most appropriate to the
subject and your audience? Keep colors, clip art,
and templates consistent with your main objective.

3. Keep It Simple
 As with any design, cut the clutter. Two font families
is a good rule of thumb. No more than one graphic
image or chart per slide is another good rule
(excluding any corporate logo or other recurring
element in the design).

4. Keep It Short
 No one ever complained about a PowerPoint
presentation being too short. The second an
audience gets bored and stops paying attention, the
presentation loses its effectiveness. People not only
stop processing new information, in fact, but begin to
resent the presenter for wasting their time.

5. Use Contrasting Colours
 If you want your audience to be able to see what you have
on the slide, there needs to be a lot of contrast between the
text colour and the background colour. I suggest a dark
background with light text – I usually use a medium to dark
blue background and white or yellow letters. Some prefer a
light background and dark letters, which will also work well –
which you choose will depend on personal preference. Don’t
think that just because the text looks fine on your computer
screen that it will look fine when projected.

6. Use a big enough font
 When deciding what font size to use in your presentation,
make sure it is big enough so that the audience can read it. I
usually find that any font size less than 24 point is too small to
be reasonably read in most presentation situations. I would
prefer to see most text at a 28 or 32 point size, with titles
being 36 to 44 point size. The only reason I would use a font
less than 24 point is when adding explanatory text to a graph
or diagram, where you could use a 20 point font size.

7. Draw on the screen during a presentation
 Sometimes it can be valuable to be able to draw on
the screen during your presentation to illustrate a
particular point or item. This can be done in the
following way. Press the Ctrl-P key combination to
display a pen on the screen. Then, using the left
mouse button, draw on the slide as you wish. To
erase what you have drawn, press the E key. To hide
the pen, press the A key or the Ctrl-H key
combination.

8. Use visuals instead of text slides
 Every two years I ask audiences what annoys them about bad
PowerPoint presentations. The latest survey confirms that
audiences are more fed up than ever with the overload of text
on slides (see the latest survey results here). Instead of using
slides that only contain text, use visuals such as graphs,
diagrams, photos and media clips to engage the audience.

9. Turn the pointer off
 During a presentation, it is very annoying to have the pointer
(the little arrow) come on the screen while the presenter is
speaking. It causes movement on the screen and draws the
audience attention from the presenter to the screen. The
pointer comes on when the mouse is moved during the
presentation. To prevent this from happening, after the Slide
Show view has started, press the Ctrl-H key combination. This
prevents mouse movement from showing the pointer.

10. Stop the moving text
 When text comes on the screen, we want the audience to read
the text, then focus back on the presenter to hear the message.
If the text moves onto the screen in any way – such as flying in,
spiral or zooming – it makes it harder for the audience
members to read since they have to wait until the text has
stopped before they can read it.

11. Have Slides at the End of Your Presentation
 The last slide you speak to should not be the last slide in your
presentation file. You should have three identical copies of your
last speaking slide so that if you accidentally advance one too
many times at the end of your presentation, your audience
never knows because you don’t drop into the program, the slide
looks like it has not changed. After these slides, you should
include some slides that answer questions that you expect to be
asked.

12. Be able to Jump to Any Slide
 PowerPoint has a feature that allows you to be able to move
quickly and seamlessly to any slide in your presentation. To do
so, you need to know the slide numbers. The easiest way to
print a list of the slide numbers and associated slide titles is to
go to the Outline View and collapse the details for each slide
(there is a button on the left side of the screen in this view that
will do this). Then print the view. To jump to any slide, just enter
the slide number on the keyboard and press the Enter key.

13. Blank the screen
 Sometimes we want the image on the screen to disappear so
that the audience is focused solely on the presenter. There are
two ways to do this. The first is if you want to blank the screen
with a black image, similar to shutting the projector off (we
used to do this all the time with overhead projectors by just
shutting the projector off). Just press the period key (.) on the
keyboard and the image is replaced with a black image. Press
the period key again and the image is restored.

14. Build an Outline
 Effective E-Learning has to have a natural flow,
especially when you are using PowerPoint. One slide
needs to feed into the next in a way that makes sense to
your audience and builds on your message.
 The best way to achieve this is to create a simple outline
for your presentation before you ever sit down in front of
the computer. Doing so will help you keep your message
targeted and your audience engaged.

15. Stay Focused
 One of the biggest challenges to giving any type of
presentation is staying focused on the topic at hand. Its like a
new thought just “pops” into your head mid-sentence, and
before you know it, you have followed that string right down a
rabbit hole that has nothing to do with the original topic.
Now, while this is bad enough in a classroom setting, in E-
Learning it can be devastating and impossible to recover
from. To combat this reality, build the outline we talked about
earlier….and then stick to it!

16. Use video and audio to convey your message
more effectively.
 Dynamic content, such as a brief video that illustrates an
important point, is a great way to engage your audience.
Using audio that helps convey your message, like recorded
narration (you can add this to slides when sending your
presentation to others to view), can also help keep your
slides clean and approachable.

17. Use graphics to emphasize key points
 A well-chosen chart or diagram can often convey much more
to your audience than can boring bulleted text. Fortunately,
creating charts and graphics has never been easier. In Office
2010 and Office 2007, Office graphics coordinate
automatically with the active theme in your presentation.

18. Use masters and layouts to save time
and help get better results.
 The slide master is one of the most important PowerPoint tools
for creating easy-to-use, great-looking presentations. The
master gives you a central place to add content and
formatting that you want to appear on all (or most) of your
slides. Formatting and layout changes on the slide master
automatically update throughout the slide layouts in your
presentation, saving you a tremendous amount of time and
effort and helping to keep your slides consistent. For example,
place your logo on the slide master, and it will appear on all
slides in the presentation.

19. Know exactly what your viewers will see.
 When you want to be sure that what you send is what
viewers will see, you can save the presentation in the
PowerPoint slide show format so that the show starts for the
recipients as soon as they open the file. But some variables,
such as whether media will play correctly on the recipient's
computer, may still affect what viewers see.

20. Select or create your own theme.
 Themes are the evolution of design templates in PowerPoint,
but they're also much more than that. Themes were introduced
in Microsoft Office 2007 to help you easily create the right
look for your presentations and to coordinate all of your
Microsoft Office documents almost instantly.

21. Use masters and layouts to save time
and help get better results.
 The slide master is one of the most important PowerPoint tools
for creating easy-to-use, great-looking presentations. The
master gives you a central place to add content and
formatting that you want to appear on all (or most) of your
slides. Formatting and layout changes on the slide master
automatically update throughout the slide layouts in your
presentation, saving you a tremendous amount of time and
effort and helping to keep your slides consistent.

22. Keep file size manageable.
 A common cause of stress when you work in PowerPoint is that
the file becomes too large to edit or for the presentation to run
smoothly. Fortunately, this problem is easy to avoid by
compressing the media in your files and using native
PowerPoint features whenever possible (such as tables, charts,
SmartArt graphics, and shapes) instead of importing and
embedding objects from other programs.

23. Respectfully Submitted to:
Prof. Erwin M. Globio, MSIT