Improving Your Slides
Introduction
Whether or not you’re using PowerPoint to deliver a presentation, some component of your talk likely has visual and textual components or slides. Improving those slides so they communicate information briefly, visibly, and powerfully is critical. Learning how to create knockout slides can bring your presentation to life and help drive home your main points, since those who can make effective slideshows typically give effective talks.
Key steps
1. Communicate one message per slide.
Use each slide to convey a single message from your storyline. Let’s say you want to use your presentation to convince your company to invest in new IT systems. You have three points that communicate how serious the situation is:
- The system is so out of date that your company can’t take advantage of the latest software on the market.
- Last month, the current IT system broke three separate times.
- Replacement components for the aging system are very expensive.
Each of these points should be communicated in a separate slide. You might even summarize the overarching problem (“The IT system is out of date and needs to be replaced”) and these three points on a single introduction slide, then devote one slide to exploring each problem with the IT system more in-depth. Resist the temptation to pack more than one point on each slide. With good transitions and presentation skills, you’ll have no trouble guiding your audience through each individual slide.
2. Summarize in the slide title.
Put the key message of each slide in the title. For the three examples above, you might choose:
- The outdated system is hurting business growth.
- The system failed three times last month, impacting productivity.
- The system is costly to repair.”
3. Support the main message.
The rest of the slide should support the key message as simply and powerfully as possible. Numbers and statistics help achieve this goal. For the above examples, you might list all the well-known software programs your system can’t use, calculate and present how many hours were lost due to broken IT systems last month, or tell your audience how much money repairs cost and how that number compares to other business expenses.
4. Use the “5 x 5 x 20” rule.
No more than five bullet points per slide, no more than five words per bullet point, and no less than 20 point font.
5. Use simple graphs and images whenever possible.
They are very effective ways to communicate data and ideas.
6. Don’t use animation or excessive color unless absolutely necessary.
They are usually distracting and take a long time to create.
7. Don’t create too many slides.
To figure out the right number of slides, work backwards from your allocated time. Leave 5 to 10 minutes at the end for questions, and divide your remaining minutes by 2 to set a maximum number of slides for yourself. A 30-minute time slot should have at most 12 slides.
Having effective slides is good. But knowing how to effectively present those slides is also an important component to giving a winning presentation.
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