PowerPoint Design

If you have ever been guilty of inflicting “DEATH BY POWERPOINT” on your audience or been a victim of this heinous crime read on:

PowerPoint is so easy to use badly that it gives rise to many unprofessional and boring presentations that fail to get the presenters message across to its full potential.

We can help you use PowerPoint as an important component amongst other equally powerful and valid techniques in order to achieve your presentation objectives. We will show you how to gain the full attention of your audience and ensure they fully understand and remember your core messages rather than stare at page after page of bullet points.

This assumes you are standing up in front of an audience (or maybe sitting down with a client)

You don’t want your audience reading your presentation off the screen or even worse you read it to them. The best PowerPoint presentations have minimal text and use images, diagrams, graphs, customer quotes and statistics to support a well rehearsed and interestingly delivered spoken presentation.

BUT – will they remember the finer points of what you said – what do they take away with them if there are no bullets?

There are two good ways to solve this:

1) Give your audience handouts of your slides with detailed notes under each slide. Do this after you speak so they look at you and not your notes.

Use the notes pane in normal view to type notes about your slides.

Type and format your notes as you work in normal view This is the best place for your detailed bullets). To see how your notes will print and to see the full effect of your text formatting (such as font colours), switch to print preview. You can also check and change your notes headers and footers in print preview.

You can print the notes as notes pages and use them either as notes to yourself while you give your presentation, or, if they're notes you intend for your audience, hand them out to accompany your slide show presentation. ( Cogent recommend handing them out after your presentation)

2) Before you speak give them handouts with spaces for their own notes

Go File>Print, select handout and select “three-slides-per-page” which includes lined space for note-taking by the audience.

The down side of this is that they can see the next slide and they may not pay full attention to you

 

Your print outs will look like this

 

PowerPoint design tips - Number TWO - Dramatically reduce the size of your PowerPoint files

1) Compress your images and delete cropped areas of your pictures
If you have PowerPoint 2003 this is a very effective way of reducing the size of your presentations.

First of all make a copy of your presentation as this process is irreversible

Then Go View>Toolbars>Picture. Then click the symbol circled in red O
(opposite)

You wail then get another dialog box. We recommend that you do not use the web (72 dpi) option as this reduces quality too much but you can try it.

Also this tip from one of our clients

PowerPoint file sizes can become inexplicably large due to excess data being saved even though you think you have deleted large images for example.

To cure this problem, on the Tools menu, click Options, click the Save tab, and then clear the Allow Fast Saves check box. Doing this forces PowerPoint to remove excess data from your presentation file each time you save.