Published on May 28th, 2017 | by Guest

Advice on making an interesting PowerPoint presentation

Whether you’re presenting to hundreds of people at a conference or giving a small presentation in a meeting with your colleagues, it’s important to make sure you give a good presentation. If you’ve ever sat through a long PowerPoint presentation, you will probably know how easy it is for your mind to drift and to lose focus. Luckily, this means you might already know what works and what doesn’t work.

If you’re going to give a presentation, you’re more than likely going to be using Microsoft PowerPoint. There are a number of things you can do using PowerPoint to make your presentation interesting and engaging. However, it is important that you are careful not to get carried away. Here is some advice on putting together a good quality PowerPoint presentation, as well as some advice on what not to do:

Don’t overdo it on the text

One of the simplest ways of improving your presentation is to cut back on the amount of text that you include. If you want to keep your audiences’ attention, don’t make them read through slide after slide of nothing but text. Your slides should be like flashcards, with the main bulk of your message coming from what you have to say. Try and summarise what you’re trying to say in a few short bullet points and then work off them during your presentation.

Remember, an overabundance of bullet points can be just as uninteresting as slides full of blocks of text. Use them sparingly to reinforce what you have to say. This is much better than presenting slide after slide of mundane lists.

Include images

Images are a great way of breaking up your presentation, as well as a good way of conveying what you have to say. They can also be a great way of backing up what you’re saying in your presentation, as well as providing something for the audience to look at. Adding images to slides with text can also be a good way of breaking up what’s on the screen and drawing your audience’s attention.

One thing to avoid at all costs is Clip Art. You know what we mean, those little cartoonish images that you can include on PowerPoint. While Clip Art might look fun, it is typically looked down upon and can detract from the seriousness of your presentation. Take some time to find high quality graphics and images that are relevant to what your PowerPoint slideshow is about.

This is a much better way of getting your point across and will be much more impressive than including cheap Clip Art. Try an external website that allows you to download royalty free images such as depositphotos or unsplash. There are a great number of websites where you can download and use high quality images for your presentations, so there is no excuse for using the default Clip Art images included with PowerPoint.

Get the audience involved

If you can include the chance for audience participation in your presentation, then go for it! Including questions or a poll that your audience can take part in is a great way to shake things up. It can also be an excellent way of gathering data and getting your audience’s opinion. There are many ways of getting your audience involved, such as asking questions or running a poll.

If you’re going to include a poll for example, you may need to use outside technology in order for it to work. Take a look at audience response systems from a company such as CLiKAPAD. There are a number of different systems and keypads which you can use to create an interactive poll to collect information from your audience. This also has the added benefit of allowing you to collect anonymous data, providing you with a more accurate result.

As with text and images, audience participation is not something that should be overused. Include it only when appropriate and make sure it adds something to your presentation. Consider the audience and the subject matter of your presentation – if it’s not appropriate for the topic or your presentation, consider leaving it out.

Keep it simple

You’ll notice that throughout this article we keep coming back to one key point – don’t overdo it. If you find something that works in your presentation, that’s great! Just make sure that whatever you include, be in text, images, graphics, polls or anything else, don’t oversaturate your presentation with too many elements. Think about how you would feel if you were watching your presentation. Use different elements to reinforce what you have to say and to make your presentation more interesting.

Tags: advice, interesting, making, PowerPoint, presentation