PowerPoint has become the standarized norm for presenters to use in order to convey their message to an audience. However, most people who use the program have several errors within their slideshow presentation. PowerPoint's purpose is to reinforce a presentation, not reinterate the points that the presentation should expresss verbally. The online article "Top Ten Slide Tips" provides a guideline on how to create an effective powerpoint and emphasizes simplicity, straightforwardness, and quality. Similarly, the "Recommendations for Faculty on Powerpoint" offers information on how to design the presentation textually and verbally while "Really Bad PowerPoint" light-heartedly recommends utilizing slides to convey emotion.
Among the articles all expressed similar viewpoints on slides that qualify as "good" presentations and ones that were "bad." From these sources I think the five following aspects of constructing a powerpoint are most important.
- PowerPoint slides should not function as cue cards, so the information on each slide should be limited. Slides should supplement the speaker's oral presentation and, therefore, should be able to stand alone.
- The pre-designed templates, borders, and sound effects on PowerPoint should be avoided at all costs. Each presentation should have a theme, but the chances that the few already on Microsoft PowerPoint would be perfectly coordinated with the theme is rare, so it is better to create your own personalized templates.
- Transitions and animations should be used in moderation and should definitely not be present on every slide because this could easily become annoying to the audience. The "Wipe Left to Right" transition is a good option for bullet point slides, but "Move" or "Fly" are too slow and distracting for a presentation.
- The recommendation of font being at least size 28 is a good rule-of-thumb to follow. Smaller font is much too difficult to read, and the page could easily become cluttered with too much information.
- Finally, charts are an effective tool to visually communicating information. Pie charts should be used to express percentages, line charts convey trends over time, and bar charts communicate and compare quantities.
I would advise my classmates to follow the information provided in the articles and make PowerPoint presentations both visually aesthetic and to the point. As Henry Wadsworth once said, "in character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence in simplicity."
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