PowerPoint Presentation Skills
February 24, 2017
There are a lot of ways to give a good presentation, and most workshops will cover tips such as removing extraneous information, making each slide simple, and keeping the focus on the presenter. But what doesn’t always get covered is how to do that. In this workshop, presentation veteran and Director of Communications for the Office of Research and Graduate Studies Anna McEntire discusses how to make slides faster and more efficiently, how to make them look great, and how to make them in a way that tells your story.
Her tips and tricks for how to do so are broken down into the following four steps.
Gathering Intelligence
Don't rely on slide layouts:
PowerPoint pushes you towards using their layouts, but this is not in your best interest. Before you start, go to Slide Layout and select Blank. This way, you can structure your presentation based on what’s best for your content specifically.
Extract media from other presentations:
Sometimes you want to use an image, embedded data or other media from a previous presentation, but you don’t want the same format. Finding the original image or spreadsheet can be tedious and time-consuming. Solve this by saving a copy of your PowerPoint and changing the file extension from “.pptx” to “.zip.” In the .zip folder, it will create a file for each media element in its original form.
Create a custom color palette:
The default color palettes provided by Microsoft are not always as aesthetically pleasing as you would like. You can create a custom color palette from any image you put into PowerPoint using the eyedropper tool in the “Customize Colors” option under “Colors.” Once you save your colors here, you can apply them to any presentation.
Dodging Bullets
Convert text to SmartArt:
Although PowerPoint is designed in a way that makes bullet points seem like the natural choice, they create a block of text that is difficult to read, they prevent important information from standing out, and they’re an inefficient use of the available space on your slides. SmartArt is a great alternative to bullet points. Choose the “Convert to SmartArt” option on the Home menu and choose any of the available designs. From there, everything that SmartArt uses is completely customizable.
Edit your shapes:
Designing your slide layout with shapes is another great way to avoid bullet points. When you are creating your shapes, be sure to utilize the line, stroke, and fill options to customize your shapes to best fit your need. Once you’ve customized an object once, you can apply its styles to any other shape by double-clicking the paintbrush tool.
Crop, align, distribute, repeat:
This is the easiest trick to learn, but the hardest to do. After converting your bullet points to other forms of text or art, nudge, adjust, resize, or crop to make modular layouts so that everything fits together and there are no unintentional holes or gaps on your slide.
Decoding Data
Own your axes:
Making your data easy to understand is essential for a presentation. Try to feel comfortable manipulating all of the elements in a chart, especially the axes. Think critically about what pieces of a chart are actually important and what can be removed or edited in some way to make your point more clear.
Make table tweaks:
In addition to charts, tables of data can often be overwhelming. You can do the same things with tables that you can with charts. Delete unnecessary information and alter the attributes of the table to make your point clear.
Discover the equation maker:
When you import equations as an image, it can become pixelated or look like it doesn’t belong. The equation maker allows you to easily recreate equations in PowerPoint so that they can be adjusted, resized, recolored, etc. This tool can be found in the Insert menu.
Killing Your Presentation
Use your handout master:
It can be difficult to delete important information off of slides, especially when you want your audience to be able to take the right notes. The Handout Master tool allows you to convert the information you deleted into handouts. Put the information you deleted from your slides into the notes section, and from there, you can use the Handout Master tool to easily format that information into a handout.
Know your presenter mode:
Once you’ve got your slides and any handouts ready to go, make sure you’re properly prepared to present. Don’t forget that you have some very helpful tools available to you in presenter mode. Use this mode to show notes and upcoming slides, use keyboard shortcuts, and even write on slides with a pen tool.
Bring a remote:
Using a remote you haven’t practiced with can be problematic, since many remotes seem counterintuitive. A great alternative you can use is phone apps, which you can connect via bluetooth.