Use PowerPoint To Your Advantage

You may have learnt how to use the various tools and features of PowerPoint and then applied them to create a few presentations. And despite designing what you thought were visually great slides, you felt that your presentations did not quite make an impact on the audience. Rather than just being technically proficient in using PowerPoint, you should learn to use it to your advantage and to make a powerful presentation. Here is a quick guide on how you can do so.

• Make use of the Outline feature – Before you start worrying about the visual aspects of your presentation, you should make sure that you have all the content necessary and that it is in a logical order. For this, you should make use of the Outline view. This feature can be accessed by selecting ‘View’ and then clicking on the ‘Outline’ command. This will show you only the text that is contained in each slide. You can change the content and the order of the slides till you are completely happy with the flow of it.
• Since your audience should be able to quickly grasp what is on your slide, you need to use contrasting colors for the background and the text color. For example, a dark blue background with white or yellow letters, or a light blue background with darker text. Before you finalize the colors, check what these colors look like when they are actually projected on to a screen.
• Many of us get so carried away with the many delightful features that PowerPoint has that we do not stop to think of its actual utility. For example, you can make text move in different ways in your slides. However, how does flying, zooming or spiraling text help you convey a point to your audience? On the contrary it may just prove to be very distracting and take away from the professionalism of your presentation. The only special effects feature that you may try considering is the one which allows you to fade in the bulleted points, as you mention them, one by one.
• One of the most annoying things to see in a presentation is the little arrow (mouse pointer) that comes on the screen when the presentation is on. This again can prove to be very distracting and take attention away from your slides. Once you start your Slide Show, just press the Ctrl+H combination to make it disappear.
• The slide containing the last piece of content should never be the last slide in your presentation. If you click on the last slide, you will just drop into the program and make you look unprofessional. Ensure that you have two or three identical copes after this slide so that even if you do click on them by mistake, there is another to protect you from going into the program. This last slide could contain a summary of what you had just presented, contact information or they could contain answers to most frequently asked questions. This will be useful in the typical Q&A sessions one has after a presentation.