PowerPoint Presentations Some Things to Consider

PowerPoint provides a tremendous variety of special effects. Of course, all that power is easily abused.

Areas to Be Covered Really irritating effects Ways to Make Text Hard to Read Now That You’ve Prepared the Presentation, What Else Can You Do to Make it Unbearable?

Really Irritating Effects Sound Effects Cool Noises as Each Slide Changes (avoid by selecting “no sound” )

Really Irritating Effects May be best to avoid sound with Noises as Animated Text Comes In They are particularly bad when the text is relatively long. Typewriter and Laser Text.

Really Irritating Effects Visual Effects “Drop In” is quite annoying with relatively long text segments. Crawling under “Custom Animation” can be excruciating... Especially when sounds are attached:

Custom Animation Custom animation is also good But using too much can be annoying Choosing animations that are slow can be bad Sound effects often aren’t needed

Incidentally... One can easily get away from the usual backgrounds supplied with PowerPoint. You can make your own design templates by selecting “Slide Master” under “View.” Save the results as a Presentation Template in the Presentation Designs folder in Templates

One wouldn’t want to leave out video that is too small and poorly conceived... And ends up leaving the audience in the dark!

Ways to Make Text Hard to Read Poor Choice of Font Mismatch with Background Failure to Plan for Lighting Too Small

Poor Choice of Font PowerPoint offers the opportunity to use There are also a lot of fonts to choose from such as Old English Text, Aero, Stencil, Parchment, and Mesquite. Many are hard to read. Aren’t you glad that text can come in word by word with Custom Animation?

Other Ways to Make Text Difficult to Read The “Font...” choice under “Format” provides several ways to make text harder to read. One can play with colors here as well, which brings us to...

Mismatch with Background The choice of colors can make a big difference. Backgrounds which have both light and dark areas can be particularly troublesome.

Backgrounds and COLORS Make sure the background and color combination are good. You must be able to read the writing. Often times busy backgrounds aren’t good. Changing the background every other slide isn’t good either.

Failure to Plan for Lighting

Size of Text Generally recommended that the primary text go no smaller than 22. Making things any smaller can create problems for some people. 22 point font

Text Make sure you text isn’t jumbled with too much information. It is good to just put the main topics and then talk about them that way you are reading off your presentation. Also Don’t make the text too small that you can’t see it. If you have a lot of info, make more than one slide for it that way all the information doesn’t get lost on the one slide like this slide is turning out. Make sure Text is written in a color that appears well against the background. If it blends in too much people won’t be able to read it. The above text is way too small to read. Make sure this doesn’t happen Also, chack for misspellings that is alwazs bad!!! Don’t let the text run off of the slide. This is very tacky.

Now That You’ve Prepared the Presentation, What Else Can You Do to Make it Unbearable? Even if you have failed to use any really annoying things from PowerPoint, you can still make the presentation an unpleasant experience.

PowerPoint has given us something even worse than doing a presentation by reading a paper. Reading the slides to people can be annoying. People will be unhappy if you have to read the slides (because the text is too small or the projector too dim). People will be really annoyed if the slides are wonderfully legible and you read to them anyway.

Plain Jane isn’t very interesting Don’t just leave everything black and white

Clip Art Clip art or pictures are good, but using something that has nothing to do with your topic isn’t good

Last notes Don’t use blank slides like the previous one.

THE END Thank you for your attention!