Making better PowerPoint Presentations How can I make it better? Making better PowerPoint Presentations Itunuoluwa Isewon Executive Advance 2015

1 Start with the end in mind Outlining your content Have a sound, clear structure The art of story telling An outstanding 1 hour presentation can take 30 hours or more of prep time.

2 AVOID Sliduments Slides are not documents. Break it up! An extra slide costs nothing. Your slides are a visual aid and should not replace you as the presenter. Make your lecture notes into a separate document and use slides to guide the lecture delivery The slides should only contain the main points which the presenter will speak to. Use points or phrases not sentences This approach fosters class interaction, participation and enforce the students to take note.

People should get your message in 3 seconds View every slide as an advertisement that should catch people’s attention

3 KEEP IT Simple

With text less is MORE! Go easy on effects and transitions

4 Infographics USE Infograpics are amazing Use Photos that enhance meaning Not Fine Art Use HD Graphics Use Charts appropriately

Images say more than a thousand words Images tend to capture peoples attention and make the message more powerful

5 Contrast USE Use dark background on matching light colours Default templates, default fonts, default colours are not creative. Sometimes students get bored when our slides look the same all the time. Choose a colour scheme and stick to it Choose colours that reflect the tone of your presentation

6 Big Fonts Use interesting fonts

A good way to approach a presentation is to spend some time thinking about the key messages you want your audience to remember. In other words, if I bumped into a participant outside of the venue and asked them what your talk was about…what would they tell me? If you start planning your presentation by defining your key messages, it’s easy to work backwards and structure your entire presentation to support these. This is a version of the elevator test or elevator pitch, which challenges a person to provide a short and compelling summary of an idea or proposition to another person in the time it would take to complete a short elevator trip, approximately 30 seconds.

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