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Keys for Creating Effective PowerPoint Presentations

The general perception about presentations is that it is a time-consuming, mundane and boring activity. A presentation is perceived to be nothing more than a necessary evil that we have to sit through while someone else flips through the PowerPoint slides. The reason presentations are perceived with such negativity is due to the manner in which the components of presentations are designed. There are methods which cannot only make presentations more effective, but also make them more appealing to the audience.

The first major component of a presentation session is the PowerPoint presentation itself. The PowerPoint presentation is the set of slides that is projected to convey the information to the audience in a succinct and concise manner. Let’s take a look as to how these PowerPoint presentations can be made more effective.

Maintaining a logical flow

Effective PowerPoint presentations are those that follow a structured flow and sequence. The slides should be neatly arranged and must be in the right chronological manner. The transition from one slide to another should represent a natural flow of the concept or the content of the presentation. The slides must be well scripted and follow the sequential pattern. The flow of the language, information and the message must be consistent and logical and the presentation slides must convey the idea in a coherent manner. The slides must be well connected and should not be disjointed. Check our blog post Preparing and Organizing the Content to get idea how should you organize your content in a logical order.

Precision

A PowerPoint presentation contains several slides and at times you might have to make presentations that need to convey a large amount of the information. While this might require adding a significantly large number of slides, it is essential to ensure that each slide must represent a single idea or message. Human eyes and minds have a tendency to easily lose focus and perceive the peripheral information. If there is more than one type of information in a slide, it hampers the focus of the audience. Keeping the information limited and specific to one topic on a single slide helps maintain the focus of the audience as well as maintaining their interest in the presentation. Precise information helps in making effective presentations.

Pointers

One of the biggest mistakes people make in creating PowerPoint presentations is that they write lengthy paragraphs in the slides. This needs to be strictly avoided since a presentation is only a tool for keeping the audience reminded of the key points. It is the speaker who does the talking and convey the idea. Writing long paragraphs makes the presentation boring and the words spoken by the speaker do not make an impact over the audience since they have already read what is being spoken and the curiosity to listen to the speaker is lost. It is important to use the pointers which convey the ideas in brief and important sentences. The speaker can then build around these pointers and use them as reference points to generate a sense of curiosity among the audience.

Design and images

Depending upon what the subject matter of the presentation is, the design and images need to be selected. A well-designed presentation with relevant graphs and figures can convey more information than mere words. Slide transition, background images, music, colors and slide designs help create an impact and make presentations more attractive to the audience. Similarly, images need to be used in a judicious manner. Images can convey much more information than words and therefore, using the right images is crucial. However, it needs to be ensured that the images are limited, specific and relevant to the content.

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