To PowerPoint and not ‘too’ PowerPoint?

Important considerations Basic design elements Organizing presentation Presenting data

How to avoid PowerPoint “Zone-out” Compatible colors Text usage -- legible -- meaningful Meaningful content Minimize transitions Meaningful graphics

The choice of text and background color must be compatible

Keep text to a minimum! Focus audience attention Use supportive graphics The purpose of a PowerPoint presentations should not be to include all of the text that you intend to say while the slide is being shown. On one hand, if you plan to just read the text off of the slide than there is no reason for putting it on the PowerPoint slide in the first place. Powerpoint slides should not serve as a substitute for knowing your material and making a good oral presentation. Asking the audience to read lots of text is also an ineffective way of presenting an excessive amount of material that you don’t have enough time to present yourself and which will actually will not be understood by the audience. And if the audience is reading lots of text while you are saying other things then they are not paying attention to what you are saying.

Using too many will distract the audience transitions can be extremely annoying and from your key points

Overview and Introduction should be engaging Boring Overview I. Introduction II. Question/Hypothesis III. Procedures IV. Results/Literature summary V. Conclusions More Engaging Overview I. Why I choose to study hypothermia II. Why there is current interest in this subject III. How I selected the literature to include IV. Some key recent findings VI. How recent literature addressed my question

Why study LPS? What is LPS? LPS has anti-tumor properties Evidence from: - Human Cancers - Fibrosarcomas in mice - Bladder cancer in mice LPS molecular structure (ref #1)

Organize Introduction from General to Specific Why should the audience care about this topic? What basic concepts are needed to understand the subject? What specific concepts pertain to your question experiments, and conclusions?

Focus on experimental design not the details Cell Culturing Chromosome Spreads Giemsa Staining & G-Banding Data Analysis *** Handouts are rarely useful*** (image: ref #2 )

Rewrite/Simplify Tables Present only data that you will discuss Discuss all data that you present Table 3. Clinical Characteristics

Figure 6. Amount of IgA in DC Cells Rewrite/Simplify Graphs Be sure to explain units