Tips for Preparing a PowerPoint Deck
Decide on your key points
Ask yourself: What are the three or four things you would like your audience to remember. These are the points to build your deck around.
Determine how much of the subject you can cover in the time you have
Consider the level of detail your listeners need to understand what you are saying. Too much detail is a common error in presentations. Your audience won’t remember the details and will lose interest in the important things you have to say.
Develop your outline, not your slides
Work in Outline View to prepare your slides. It will help you stay focused on the organization of your presentation and will help you avoid the temptation to say too much. As much as possible, force yourself to follow the (often ignored and almost impossible to follow) rule of good PowerPoint slides:
- no more than three points on a slide, and
- no more than five or six words per point
Refine your outline until you know exactly how you will cover all of your key points in the time you have. If in doubt, cut it out.
Make sure your slides make sense
Your slides will provide a focus for your presentation, but should also make sense on their own. A series of words or phrases on a slide doesn't mean much; use short headings or stems to give the points that follow a context. Or start with a question ("Why does this matter?") that the following points answer.
Make sure your slides are simple and legible
The most common problem with decks is TOO MANY WORDS PER SLIDE. This mistake leads to several problems, all of which will reduce the impact of your presentation:
- Too much information can lead both speakers and listeners into a muddle. Limit your presentation to the information you want your listeners to take with them. If you sacrifice that goal in the interests of recounting everything you want to say, you risk losing your audience’s attention all together—not what you want to achieve.
- When your audience is reading, they’re not listening. Let the text on each slide serve as a focus for you and the audience, not as a transcript of your spoken presentation.
- Too much text usually means too-small text; the more you cram onto a slide, the smaller the font you’ll use and the more difficulty your audience (especially those at the back) will have reading your slides.
Watch out for these common problems:
- text is too small to be legible
- not enough contrast between text and background
- overuse of colour or other features
- line detail is too light
- diagrams (or other visuals, especially if they include numbers or symbols) are illegible
Consider turning your deck into a handout
Use "Notes Page View" to print out handouts. Each page can show a slide followed by your comments or blank space where the audience can make their own notes. You can also print three slides per page with room for notes.
Learn more about PowerPoint
The more you know about PowerPoint's features, the more you effectively you can use it. Go through the tutorial in PowerPoint to get a basic idea of how to make a deck. You'll also find lots of tips at the following web sites:
Microsoft's PowerPoint home page
Ten Tips for Creating Effective PowerPoint Presentations
Powerpoint and Presentation Tips
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