Part of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint is often used to accompany oral presentations during business meetings and project proposals. Without clear guidelines and objectives, however, PowerPoint presentations can actually distract or confuse your audience. Each opportunity to present your company or products is vital, so keeping your presentations brief, consistent, simple and focused is key to successfully leveraging PowerPoint and improving the response to your oral presentations.
Your PowerPoint slides should not be a record or even a summary of the contents of your presentation. Instead, each slide should contribute additional information or synthesize what you just said in a different way. Avoid large blocks of text and excessive charts, figures and images -- all of which can make your slides distracting or difficult to read -- instead presenting small and digestible bits of information for your audience such as a single picture or a few bullet points of text. Picture cropping and editing tools on PowerPoint can help you focus on the part of an image that is most relevant to your presentation, and the indenting and bullet point tools on the formatting toolbar can help you organize content into an easy-to-read format.
Each slide is a part of a cohesive presentation, and should therefore reflect that fact both in content and style. If you are citing figures, use the same or at least compatible sources for your facts, and maintain a consistent viewpoint or tone throughout the presentation. In terms of style, ensure that all of your slides have a cohesive look and feel, including consistent formats, fonts and colors. Also make sure that the color contrast between your background and text makes the words easy to read, and that all of your graphics or charts are large enough to be seen and understood. Using one of the preinstalled presentation templates on PowerPoint makes keeping your slides consistent easy, while still allowing you to make format edits to the template that are applied to all slides.
Bells and Whistles
PowerPoint includes a number of multimedia features like video, audio and special slide effects that you can incorporate into your presentation. Although these extras can serve to emphasize a certain part of your presentation, use them carefully and sparingly. For example, instead of using fade-in and -out effects on each slide, consider using them only to introduce a particularly important moment in the presentation. Similarly, audio and video can be used to grab your audience's attention during one slide, but could become distracting if used throughout the presentation.
PowerPoint is also a valuable tool for guiding your audience through your presentation. Although the automatic table of contents creator is no longer available in versions later than 2007, you can copy and paste the titles of each of your sections or slides onto a new slide to create a useful introduction and road map for your audience. You can reproduce this slide at certain points throughout a long presentation to let your audience know where you are, and even make each title a clickable link to easily navigate through your presentation and reference information.
- University of New South Whales: Using PowerPoint in Oral Presentations
- Stanford School of Medicine: Oral Presentations
- PennState: Oral Presentations and PowerPoint
- Microsoft Office: PowerPoint 2010 Features and Benefits
- University of Texas at Austin: Getting Started With PowerPoint
- Microsoft Office: What Happened to the Summary Slide and Table of Contents Options?
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