How 2 Maike Terrable PowerPoint Slidez

(Don’t do any of these things.)

C. M. Ernst

Crime #1: Too Much Text (bullets can’t fix this amount of awful) • This is something you should never, ever do, not in one hundred

thousand million years: present your audience with one giant block of text.

• First of all, the text will probably be too small. • If there is this much text on a slide, everyone will wonder why the

heck you are up there presenting a talk, when they could just be reading a textbook. I mean, giving a talk is supposed to be about talking, not reading. Am I right?

• If you have this much text on a slide you should either split it into several slides, condense it into short bullet points (more to use as cues for yourself than something for your audience to read), or get rid of the text altogether and simply present an image, and talk about it.

• In an ideal world (it’s difficult to achieve but not impossible) a powerpoint presentation would look like a slideshow.

Crime #2 – Color Schemes

• Can you see what I wrote?

• How about now?

• Now?

• No?

• Always use strongly contrasting font & background colours

– Light on dark

– Dark on light

Don’t use obnoxious colours

• Seriously, this is just painful

• I knew a guy who did this

• He thought it was awesome

• It was not

Don’t use distracting backgrounds either

• As a stand-alone picture, this is great

• As a background for text , this is terrible

Er, “terrible”

Crime #3 – What the…

Crime #4: Clip Art. No.

Crime #5 – Animation Overload

• Creativity is good

• You want to grab your audience’s attention

• But this is not the way to do it

– Distracting

– Annoying

• Use simple, consistent animations (if any)

CRIME #6: NO COMMITMENT

•Size colour

font

• Choose one format and stick with it

placement

Presentation Tips

• Know your material

• Don’t read your slides

• Speak loudly and clearly

• Body language

• Enthusiasm!