Home » Resources » Presentation Skills Resources » PowerPoint Presentations

Building a PowerPoint Presentation:

PowerPoint presentations can be one of the best ways to get your message across to your audience – however don’t concentrate too much on trying to be clever with special effects.

One of the first things your must do in order to start any presentation (whether you use PowerPoint or not) is to collect the data you need to support your message and divide it in to easily digestible chunks – if you’re using a PowerPoint Presentation these chunks can make up the sections of your presentation.

PowerPoint presentations can also help you to plan a good structure:

Early in your presentation you should a slide giving a general overview of the content you will be covering (use bullet points). After this should be your chunked data  in a logical order – related information should be kept together to help it flow well and not confuse your audience. To conclude your powerpoint presentation you should show a summary slide, reviewing all your points and showing the concluding statement of your presentation.

General rules to follow when setting out your PowerPoint presentation:

Avoid garish colours or over-complicated backgrounds. You’re not going to win any design awards for a PowerPoint presentation and your slides should be easy to read. Use a simple colour scheme that will make your text and images easy to see – there’s a lot to be said for black and white!

Don’t put too much information on each slide. 3-6 bullet points should be your maximum for each slide. The slides should support what you are saying, rather than relying on your audience reading everything for themselves. Use charts and pictures to help you only if they help to make a point – don’t include them just because you can. The same can be said of audio and video content – any video longer than 5 minutes will start to bore your audience.

Similar resources you may like

1. Planning Your Presentation
2. Deciding on a Format
3. Writing a Presentation
4. Preparing Your Presentation
5. Types of Presentations

Tags

good presentations, learning, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills, training

Share This Resource

This entry was posted by Faye Binfield on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Presentation Skills Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “PowerPoint Presentations”