Power Point Guidelines

1) The most important tip for making a Power Point is keeping it simple. The slides should only serve as a visual supplement to your speech. They should not distract the audience with clutter and long text and should be able to convey an easy flow from one point to the next.

2) Making the presentation look professional yet conversational allows for the audience to remain engaged on what you have to say about each slide. Watching a poorly put together presentation makes it harder for the audience to follow your points easily.

3) Using charts and graphs can be absolutely necessary depending on the presentation's topic. If a chart or graph could be used, it most likely should be used. They are easy to understand and display a quick yet meaningful message. They are very good resources for conveying positive or negative future trends.

4) There are actually some strategies for using different colors and fonts. According to color theory, cool colors, such as blue and green, work well as background colors while warm colors, such as red and orange, work well in the foreground. As far as fonts go, san serif fonts are another way of displaying a professional yet conversational look to your words.

5) The slides should appeal to the right side of our brains, which is responsible for emotions and creativity, while the lecture should appeal to the left side, responsible for facts and hard data. The slide should make the audience wonder what the speaker is going to say about the intriguing image.

In a bad Power Point presentation, it is extremely sleep-inducing to see way too much text on the slides. Also, one of the more prominent signs of a lazy presentation is clashing colors of text and background. If the text is hard to read simply because the colors don't contrast each other the right way, the audience will most likely not try to read it at all. One more annoying thing about a bad presentation is the disruption of flow. If the presentation looks like it was put together last minute and is hard to follow because of bad organization, then the audience will not try to follow it and instead take a nap.