Tuesday, July 8, 2014

How To Make Effective Power-Point Presentations?

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This article is about key points to remember while creating power-point presentations to make them more effective and engaging. You’ll become aware of the key things to remember while delivering power-point presentations to make an indelible impact on the audience and speak easily while you show the slides with ease.


Let’s start with points to remember in terms of the creating effective power-point presentations.

Consider the following points while designing your Power Point Presentation-
#Decide the main theme of your presentation
Deciding the main theme of your presentation is the 1stimportant step towards making effective power-point presentations. This main theme will be the focus of your slides and your speech delivering the relevant knowledge about the same to your audience. It will be your main take-away message or the information you want the audience to remember. This identifiable theme will keep your slides in sync conveying the information through your slides and speech. In this way the audience will know till the end of your presentation that what the focus of your presentation is. For example, if your presentation relates to business then it should convey the product’s or the service’s unique offerings (USP).

#Create slides containing relevant information as per the decided theme
Create your slides and boil the information down. Spread the information (text)across your slides in an equal manner (content density). This will make your slides look presentable and clear. Create a proper structure. You can plan out the structure on a paper first and then inculcate the structure in your slides.All this will prevent your presentation from becoming too long and sound "rambling" to the audience.
For example, structure for an academic or business presentation must follow these 3 steps-
  1. ·      Introducing your key point
  2. ·      Supporting the key point with relevant evidence
  3. ·      A short conclusion

Guy Kawasaki has been the chief evangelist for Google’s Motorola division and Apple and is a notable business personality and marketing guru. He has suggested for the following important points to remember and follow to create effectivepower-point presentations for business presentations-
  • ·      The Problem
  • ·      Your solution
  • ·      Business model
  • ·      Underlying magic/technology
  • ·      Marketing and sales
  • ·      Competition
  • ·      Team
  • ·      Projections and milestones
  • ·      Status and timeline
  • ·      Summary and call to action

#Streamline your slide’s text
Your PowerPoint slides must actually enhance the quality of your presentation. It should not just simply exist alongside. You should not present while reading from the slides. This distracts the audience and they will feel that you’re not confident enough and don’t know the matter well. Your PowerPoint presentation slides should contain minimum text. Having to read longtexts will divert your audience’s attention from what you really want to convey. Hence, streamline the text in a structured manner like in the form of bullets.

#Utilize informative graphics.
Graphics are one of the great ways to create really engaging slides. Graphics like charts, graphs and images creates appealing visual connection with your audience. Therefore, your audience clearly understandsyour presentation when you show them the relevant facts about the central theme using graphics. Also visuals have the potential to lure audience more and preventing them to lose interest. They help to provide information which is difficult to express in words by using graphics like charts & graphs.
However, remember that don’t over use graphics and make it a reason for your audience’s distraction.
#Practice
Only practice will help you to deliver your presentation to make an indelible impact on your audience.Practice helps you to time your speeches with the slides in an efficient manner thus communicating with your audience in an effective way.

#Don’t extend your presentations unnecessarily
Creating long boring presentations stuffed with text and irrelevant graphics just resembling flowery images are a strict no-no. They not only fail to keep the audience engaged but the speaker also may get lost in the array of text and graphics of his slides. This can cause the speaker to lose confidence when he/she sees the audience losing interest and forget his main theme of the presentation. Hence, stay focused on your decided theme and what you want to convey to the audience. Put relevant information in a structured format with relevant graphics. This should be followed by your confident speech conveying what the audiences really want. Remember that in the end it’s not just the engaging slides you create but also the ability to deliver in the form of your speech that will win the audience’s attention!

If you want to see all this live then attend IAM’s seminar on How to Create & Make Effective Power-Point Presentations. Over 2000 executives have greatly benefited from this seminar. You can browse through our website to see a list of all our seminars and a partial list of our clients.

1 comment :

  1. It really is very useful and good advice. From my own experience, which is important to use a good templates and charts for your presentations to make them more understandable, I use these http://charts.poweredtemplate.com/powerpoint-diagrams-charts/ppt-graph-charts/0/index.html

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