Creating a Perfect PowerPoint Presentation

Whether for work or for school, many people need to know how to create an interesting and informative PowerPoint presentation. The problem is that most people have no idea how to do that.

Creating a PowerPoint Presentation that will keep the interest of your audience and make you look good in front of the boss or professor is not as difficult as it sounds. Just follow a few easy rules and your presentation will be a piece of cake.

Research the material

It may sound like a given, but if you want your PowerPoint presentation to knock their socks off, make sure that you know the material. Know more about it than you include in the slides and in your speaker's notes. Make sure you know enough to ask whatever weird questions might come up.

Create enough slides

When you are giving a PowerPoint presentation, it is important to make sure you have the right number of slides. Too many slides will mean that your audience doesn't have enough time to absorb what you are telling them. Too few slides, and they'll get bored.

As a general rule, plan to have one slide for every minute of your presentation. Slides should be filled with graphs and pictures and bullet points, not paragraphs of information that you are reading directly. If you are reading exactly the information on the slide, you probably didn't do enough research.

Brightly colored graphs and pictures are a good way to keep your slides interesting and present a lot of information all at once. For advanced PowerPoint users, using animations between the slides or information that fills in as you go can be another way to keep the presentation interesting.

Write speaker's notes

One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating a PowerPoint presentation is relying on the slides to provide enough information to talk about. While there is a section in PowerPoint for making notes, you are probably better off writing up your notes as an essay or term paper format. Instead of adhering to the typical rules for writing a paper, especially formatting rules, consider using a bigger font and writing in a way that you can easily read. Then, once your slides are finished, sit down at the computer and practice reading the paper out loud while you flip through the slides. This is another way to find out if you have enough slides.

Another thing to remember when creating a PowerPoint presentation is that you need an introduction and a conclusion. Your introduction might accompany your title slide or a slide with a great picture that depicts the topic of the presentation. Your conclusion should feature a slide with bullet points summing up what you have discussed in simple, easy to remember points.

In the end, a PowerPoint presentation is a lot like a five-paragraph essay. You want to tell your audience what you're going to talk about, then talk about it, and then tell them what you said.