PowerPoint Presentations

The good news is that there’s an easy way to correct the problem—and you can even work with the crazy content you already have on hand! The first and more important thing you must do with all of your cluttered slides is simplify. Take out any text, images, gratuitous animation, sounds, video, or colors that are not directly related to the message you are trying to convey. When you strip out all the unnecessary noise, your audience will be able to absorb what you’re trying to convey.

Now that you’ve got a cleaner slate, use the following guidelines to further upgrade your streamlined slides:

• Use slidemasters – If you know what a slidemaster is and use it, you are in the PowerPoint elite. A slidemaster is a feature of Power Point that is a essentially a slide level template used to control default layout, fonts, and formats. It is a powerful tool that helps maintain consistency. We’ve all seen too many presentations with titles bouncing around from slide to slide, different style bullet points, etc. – basically a smorgasbord of formats and layouts. Save the smorgasbords for the restaurants; be professional and be consistent.


• Pick a color palette - Your presentation should not represent every color in the spectrum. When it comes to colors, less is definitely more. Ideally, limit your color choices to the ones in your company’s branding set. In some cases, you can use colors to communicate. For instance, if presenting on different groups, products, or business units, assign each one a color. If you maintain that color system throughout your presentation (in graphs, tables, etc.), your audience will have an eaiser time associating the information you present with the products or groups that correspond to each color.


• Use charts to clean up data - Too often, people default to bullet points even when information should not be presented as text. A great example of this is numerical data. Most of the time, data should be presented in either a table – or better a graph. People can much more readily understand and absorb data visually than they can by reading lists of numbers mixed in with text. In PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft finally killed the weak charting tool in PowerPoint so now you have no excuse!


• Limit your fonts - Use no more than two complementary font styles (one for headlines, one for body copy) on your slides. Some say that serif fonts, such as Times New Roman, are easier to read on paper, but for a larger format such as a PowerPoint slide, sans serif fonts like Arial have become the standard.

When you present a cluttered slide deck, you run the risk of your audience remembering the clutter, not the message. Use these rules to keep every slide simple, and let your message shine through!