5 Tips for Effective Power Point Presentations

Help End Death by Power Point!

The biggest mistake we see untrained presenters making is overusing power point slides.  Here are our top 5 tips for effective power point presentations.

1. Limit the number of slides.  Slides are so over used that just seeing a power point presentation can make people fall asleep.  Ask yourself – is this slide for ME as a presenter or for my audience?  If it is for YOU make notes to yourself in the presenter view and leave it off the slide.  A good rule of thumb is one slide for every five minutes of presentation time.

2. Limit the quantity of information on the slide.  We have seen slides full of content.  We call this death by Power Point.  If you want people to read something you can give them a handout to take away.  The presentation is for you to deliver information person to person, not for the audience to read.  A good rule of thumb is no more than four lines of text in bullet points.

3.  Look at the audience, not your slide.  Please don’t turn your back on the audience to read your slides!  You can glance at your computer screen or notes and then up at the audience.

4. Use your slides for graphics and visual information. The best use of Power Point is for visual representations of information that you can elaborate on.  Be careful with animation – less is more!

5.  Use three to four colors on your slides.  Any more is overwhelming and any less isn’t interesting to the eye.  Make sure your background color makes your text color legible and use big enough font so the people in the back don’t have to squint.

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Jeannie works with a wide variety of clients to help them increase their team effectiveness and leadership capacity in their teams. She has worked both nationally and internationally as an organizational consultant, facilitator, speaker and wilderness guide.

With a strong background in group dynamics, over the past 20 years Jeannie has guided hundreds of teams in a wide variety of organizations to successful outcomes in team, personal and professional development.