How To Make a Powerpoint Presentation
Presenting your work effectively is essential in many study and work situations: PCTO courses, thematic cores for state exams, university projects. However, many underestimate some key aspects that must be taken into account when creating a multimedia presentation using various software such as PowerPoint, Impress, or Prezi.
Creating a Multimedia Presentation
When creating a multimedia presentation, before creating the first slide, you must always keep in mind a fundamental guideline: The presentation is for others, not for yourself.
Taking into account this golden rule just stated, we can list some general rules:
- The presentation must emphasize what you want to say; it is not used to remember what you have already said. What should be said?
- The presentation must emphasize concepts to be expressed verbally.
- You must use language that is appropriate and targeted to the audience you are addressing.
- You must always consider that the listener has a limited attention span.
At this point, we can deduce what things should absolutely be avoided when creating the various slides for a presentation:
- Never reuse the same presentation twice. Every time you have to give a talk, you must adapt the presentation to the context.
- Never speak for more than one minute. For two-minute presentations on the same slide, changing slides helps maintain the listener's attention.
- Never use slides with a wall of text. Blocks of text filling the slide do not emphasize any concept.
Characteristics of a Slide
Each slide in a presentation should emphasize concepts to be expressed verbally. Each slide should be complete, expressing one or at most two concepts clearly and completely. When complex concepts need to be expressed across multiple slides, the listener should be adequately supported by indicating where they are located (for example, you can write slide 1/3). At this point, we can outline some characteristics, both typographical and conceptual, that a slide should have:
- The slide should contain a few short sentences (try to avoid adverbs and limit adjectives)
- The slide should almost always contain an image that symbolically indicates its content
- The font of a slide should never be less than 14pt
- The concepts must be easily readable, using tall, linear fonts such as Arial
- Whenever you start a line break, you must be careful not to separate the phrases (e.g., "electronic payment" cannot be separated by just starting a line break with the word "electronic").
At this point, once you know the rules for To create an effective presentation, you need to structure your speech. If you're creating a presentation to present your PCTO, you can refer to the suggestions in this post.
