A well-designed PowerPoint presentation can explain complex concept in visuals, convey a message, tell a story, and support a speech.
The problem is that it’s easy to get the presentation wrong and leave an audience bored – and probably even more irritated. For example, wrong color choice and inappropriate slideshows can distract attention from the main message and cause confusion instead.
In this guide, we give you some PowerPoint presentation tips for creating professional slides fast. Whether you’re ready to show your design skills, personal style, technical knowledge, or a combination of all, you’ll find this guide helpful.
PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Professional Slideshows
You can only do so much if you don’t know your way around Microsoft PowerPoint. So here are some tips to help you create a winning presentation.
1. Get Professional Design Help
You can’t create impressive PowerPoint presentations that communicate your message to your audience if you don’t spare enough time to do the work. So if you don’t have enough time to spend on this assignment, consider getting PowerPoint presentation help from Help for Assessment.
Our team has some of the most experienced experts in Microsoft Office package, including the PowerPoint presentation.
Whether the presentation is speaker notes to submit alongside a research project or it’s something different altogether, our experts will help you get it completed in the shortest time possible.
Forget worrying about tight deadlines and let our team handle your PowerPoint presentation for you.
2. Implement Transitions
Static slides are often sufficient to communicate your message. However, adding some movements can boost engagement to your presentation.
If you’ve spent some time experimenting with PowerPoint, you must have notice that the solution has a number of useful transitions that you can use.
To use one or multiple of these transitions:
- Select Transition from the navigation menu.
- Choose a transition that you would like to apply to your presentation.
- Go to Effects Options to customize the transition you just selected.
That’s it.
The transition will play automatically as you switch from one slide to the next when giving your presentation.
3. Use Animations
Don’t hesitate to combine transitions and animations in your slides, but do so in a way that doesn’t introduce distraction to your audience.
If well implemented, animations can add movements that reveal significant information about project, and therefore can be useful in underscoring the most important points during your speech.
To add animation effects to your PowerPoint presentation:
- Click on a slide and choose an element you would like to animate.
- Select Animation from the navigation menu.
- Choose an animation effect to implement.
You may have to go through a number of animation options before you can find what’s suitable for your project.
- Select Effect Options to customize your animations.
We’ve found that some of the animations that tend to draw in the most attention are duration, after previous, on click, with previous, and delay. Just play around them until you find something you strongly feel would resonate with your audience.
4. Use Custom Slides
You don’t always have to think much about slide sizes because the default size often suits most needs. However, you may have to adjust sizes for some presentations, especially if you expect to present them on bigger displays.
To change sizing:
- Select File on the navigation menu.
- Click Page Setup.
- Adjust the height and width of the slide you’d like to customize.
- Click OK.
- On the dialogue box that appears, click Scale to resize your content or “Don’t Scale” if you don’t want to tweak.
It is best not to scale the content, as it’s easy to fix layout issues manually later, as you edit your slides.
5. Create Your Presentation with Your Audience in Mind
One of the biggest mistakes that many students make is failing to keep the audience in mind when creating PowerPoint presentation.
You want to make your presentation as impressive as it can be. However, you must ensure that the message you want to communicate is indeed for the right audience.
One thing that should be clear from the start is that a large part of your PowerPoint presentation is going to be text. And your copy must resonate with your audience – or it would be more persuasive or appealing.
Your presentation must include the major points that you’d want your audience to know. If by evaluating the presentation yourself makes you feel like some sections don’t add value to the work, remove them.
Also, select the right font for your presentation. Even if you’re just a student trying to get an assignment completed on time, using the right font can demonstrate that you care about consistency and professionalism.
6. Ensure Your Presentation has Proper Alignment
The last thing you want is to submit a PowerPoint presentation that looks out of place. So ensure you align your objects well to make your work look polished and professional.
You can choose to align your objects manually. However, doing is more than likely going to take a lot of time, not to mention the results may not be as impressive.
Fortunately, Microsoft PowerPoint allows you to align multiple objects at once. So you end up spending less time on this task and getting the alignment done right.
- Hold down the Shift key on your computer’s keyboard and use your mouse to select the elements you’d like to align.
- Choose Arrange at the top bar.
- Select Align or Distribute.
- Choose the type of alignment you’d like to apply on the selected elements.
That’s it.
7. Keep Things Simple
PowerPoint presentations are great for conveying your message in visual format, but it can’t contain every piece of information that you wish to present.
Even if you have the most creative and beautiful slides, they can only work as means to supplement your message and present your authority in a subject.
Therefore:
- Don’t clutter your slides. Instead, include only the most important points that your audience would care about.
- Ensure your images and text are clear and precise.
- Refrain from writing long paragraphs and unnecessary quotes, and make sure you limit the number of bullet points and texts.
- Your charts and graphic should be basic yet educational.