The following PowerPoint is a class tool that I have wanted to design for a long time but have not had the time. It is for my grade 9 class who DO NOT know how to design proper PowerPoint presentations. Hopefully this will help.
You need to establish and largely maintain eye contact with members of the audience, invariably a challenge for those PowerPoint presenters distracted by the need to create a transition between numerous slides. Once you quickly confirm that the proper slide is in place, face the crowd and make your points. Summarize the slide, or expand upon it, or use it as an entry point to provide an important example, but don't read it.
You need to establish and largely maintain eye contact with members of the audience, invariably a challenge for those PowerPoint presenters distracted by the need to create a transition between numerous slides. Once you quickly confirm that the proper slide is in place, face the crowd and make your points. Summarize the slide, or expand upon it, or use it as an entry point to provide an important example, but don't read it.
With each generation of improved presentation software, the graphical templates become more beautiful: exotic colors, sensuous textures, dazzling effects . . . The problem, of course, is that these gorgeous backdrops frequently jar with the text, and may even render it unreadable. And the matter is exacerbated when the font is ornate and hard to read anyway. For most business and technical presentations, it is best to suppress some of the more spectacular hues and textures. Given so many backgrounds and so many fonts, presenters will frequently make awkward, ugly design choices. Rather, templates and backgrounds should be chosen to reflect the corporate image of the presenter and the topic of the presentation; less is almost always better than more. And in no case should the background design compete for attention with the foreground information.
And if there are more than six or seven items in a bulleted list, there is no reason not to make two or three slides.
No more than five or six words constituting a point. The generally accepted rule-of-thumb is no more than one slide per minute of presentation time, or 20 slides for a standard 20-minute address.
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Overstuffed Charts There is also a sizable number of chart/diagram abusers. Their problems parallel the bullet and text abusers. Chart users will also stuff their images with too much data: finely gradated grids and tic marks, too many symbols or colors in the legend, irrelevant reporting intervals, too many unconsolidated categories of variables, detailed numerical tables to supplement the unclear graphic . . . Business graphics used in slides must make a single clear point, and that point should be evident to the people in the back of the hall. (That's why each chart should have a thematic title that says not only what it's about but what it means. Instead of "Domestic and Foreign Revenues," the title should be "Foreign Revenues Rise to 55% of Total.") But even if the individual charts are well made, there is still the stultifying effect of a long series of bar charts, pie charts, and histograms. I have seen analysts present 50 bar charts in a half hour (each with an unreadable table of numbers at the bottom) and expect their client audience to be impressed and satisfied. Technical experts, especially, must resist the temptation to use the presentation as an information dump.
![The Perils of PowerPoint ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)