rules of creating a powerpoint presentation

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PowerPoint Tips  - Simple Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations

Powerpoint tips  -, simple rules for better powerpoint presentations, powerpoint tips simple rules for better powerpoint presentations.

PowerPoint Tips: Simple Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations

Lesson 17: simple rules for better powerpoint presentations.

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Simple rules for better PowerPoint presentations

Have you ever given a PowerPoint presentation and noticed that something about it just seemed a little … off? If you’re unfamiliar with basic PowerPoint design principles, it can be difficult to create a slide show that presents your information in the best light.

Poorly designed presentations can leave an audience feeling confused, bored, and even irritated. Review these tips to make your next presentation more engaging.

Don't read your presentation straight from the slides

If your audience can both read and hear, it’s a waste of time for you to simply read your slides aloud. Your audience will zone out and stop listening to what you’re saying, which means they won’t hear any extra information you include.

Instead of typing out your entire presentation, include only main ideas, keywords, and talking points in your slide show text. Engage your audience by sharing the details out loud.

Follow the 5/5/5 rule

To keep your audience from feeling overwhelmed, you should keep the text on each slide short and to the point. Some experts suggest using the 5/5/5 rule : no more than five words per line of text, five lines of text per slide, or five text-heavy slides in a row.

Don't forget your audience

Who will be watching your presentation? The same goofy effects and funny clip art that would entertain a classroom full of middle-school students might make you look unprofessional in front of business colleagues and clients.

Humor can lighten up a presentation, but if you use it inappropriately your audience might think you don’t know what you’re doing. Know your audience, and tailor your presentation to their tastes and expectations.

Choose readable colors and fonts

Your text should be easy to read and pleasant to look at. Large, simple fonts and theme colors are always your best bet. The best fonts and colors can vary depending on your presentation setting. Presenting in a large room? Make your text larger than usual so people in the back can read it. Presenting with the lights on? Dark text on a light background is your best bet for visibility.

Don't overload your presentation with animations

As anyone who’s sat through a presentation while every letter of every paragraph zoomed across the screen can tell you, being inundated with complicated animations and exciting slide transitions can become irritating.

Before including effects like this in your presentation, ask yourself: Would this moment in the presentation be equally strong without an added effect? Does it unnecessarily delay information? If the answer to either question is yes—or even maybe—leave out the effect.

Use animations sparingly to enhance your presentation

Don’t take the last tip to mean you should avoid animations and other effects entirely. When used sparingly, subtle effects and animations can add to your presentation. For example, having bullet points appear as you address them rather than before can help keep your audience’s attention.

Keep these tips in mind the next time you create a presentation—your audience will thank you. For more detailed information on creating a PowerPoint presentation, visit our Office tutorials .

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Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

Kristen m. naegle.

Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

Funding Statement

The author received no specific funding for this work.

Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Presentations > Implementing The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint

Implementing The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint

If you’re not used to making a PowerPoint presentation , it can be tough to know how long to make it and how to format the slides. On the other side of the coin: you might overthink your presentation and put too much information on too many slides.

With help from the 10-20-30 rule, you can make a PowerPoint presentation that’s engaging and efficient . The guidelines for this rule are as follows:

• No more than 10 slides.
• No longer than 20 minutes.
• No larger than 30-point font.

Let’s look deeper at the 10-20-30 PowerPoint rule, why it’s a good rule to follow and things to do to follow this guideline.

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Don’t use more than 10 slides. A good presenter shouldn’t have to (or want to) lean heavily on their PowerPoint slides. The slides should be a supplement for your presentation, not the headliner. Limiting to 10 slides will ensure that you’re not going over the top with the length of your presentation and keeps it moving. Your slide count should include both your title and conclusion. A presentation that goes on any longer than 10 slides will distract from what you’re saying and starts to feel like an information overload.

Keep your presentation 20 minutes MAX. During a presentation, people start tuning out after about 10 minutes.Limiting your presentation to this length will ensure that your audience will remember much of what you’re saying. If you’re covering a more complex topic and need more time, stick to the 20-minute MAX rule—it’s much easier to schedule your presentation by timing each slide down to about two minutes. That feels like a much more manageable timeframe, doesn’t it?

Don’t use fonts smaller than size 30. A 30-point font is a great minimum size because it ensures that your text is easy to read from a distance. The recommended guideline to make your presentation accessible to those who might be visually impaired is a 24-point font. Upping the size to 30 is a significant difference, and you can be confident that your audience can see what you’ve written. In addition, choose a font that’s easy to read. For years it was recommended that you stick solely to sans-serif fonts with digital media because serifs could blur together, making certain fonts hard to read. High-resolution screens have nearly eliminated this problem, so some serif fonts can be used and are easy to read in PowerPoint presentations.

Tips for sticking to these guidelines. It’s not always easy to cut down your presentation to fit the 30-20-10 rule if you’re presenting a lot of information. Follow these tips while putting together your presentation to make the entire process easier on yourself:

• Limit text to the 6×6 rule. It can feel like there are a lot of rules for making a PowerPoint presentation, but they’re all there to help you make a well-organized and engaging presentation. The 6×6 rule suggests that you don’t use more than six lines or bullet points on each slide and limit each line or bullet point to six words. Following the 6×6 rule helps to ensure that you’re limiting the amount of information on your slides so you can continue to present it rather than have your audience read it.
• Use visuals instead. Visuals like graphics, animated gifs, and videos can help to keep your audience engaged . Including visuals with your presentation will also help you limit the amount of time and content on each slide. A graph or illustration on the right side of your slide limits the amount of space you have on the left side. This can help to minimize the amount of text you have.
• Practice makes perfect. There’s a very cool, free tool called PowerPoint Speaker Coach , which leverages AI to help you nail your presentation. Speaker coach gives you feedback on your pace, pitch, use of filler words, poor grammar, lack of originality, use of sensitive phrases, and more as you rehearse your presentation. You’ll get a Summary Report at the end—with key pieces of feedback to help you become a confident presenter .

Use the 10-20-30 PowerPoint rule and these other tips to keep your presentation simple. Whether you’re a college student presenting a class project or a teen making the case for a new car, following these guidelines will help.

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Don’t Present Without These 16 PowerPoint Dos and Don’ts

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Have you ever struggled to hold your audience’s interest during a presentation? Painstakingly created slide after slide only to be met with bored, disengaged faces? 

Even the most confident speakers can falter when it comes to crafting compelling PowerPoint decks. Without proper slide design best practices, it’s easy to lose your audience in a sea of dense text, chaotic graphics, and disorganized content.

You don’t have to suffer through presenting lackluster slides anymore. In fact, following simple PowerPoint best practices can totally transform your deck from meh to marvelous.

In this post, we’ll share 16 PowerPoint dos and don’ts to level up your presentations and captivate audiences. These tips will help you create professional, visually striking slides your viewers will remember.

16 Dos And Don’ts Of Powerpoint Presentations

Here are some important 16 presentation dos and don’ts you need to keep in mind while creating slides and presenting them.

PowerPoint Dos

Let’s start with the best practices and strategies to implement when designing PowerPoint presentations . What techniques should you use to create memorable, polished slides?

1. Keep It Simple With Minimalist Design

Let’s start with a common mistake – overcrowded, distracting slide design. We get the temptation to tart up slides with fancy backgrounds. But resist the urge! Fancy templates with complex colored patterns or photos unrelated to your content just make it harder to digest key information.

Instead, embrace the power of simplicity. Stick to minimalist templates and avoid template themes with extra decorations. Use neutral backgrounds and empty negative space to let your content shine. Remember, your audience came for your message, not for clip art kittens. Keep slides clean and attention stays where it should be.

2. Cut the Clutter – Follow the 6×6 Rule

Now for another slide buzzkill – mammoth blocks of dense text. You may be tempted to pack slides with long sentences and paragraphs. Don’t give in! Text-heavy slides are guaranteed to lose audiences fast.

For easy-to-digest nuggets, follow the handy 6×6 rule. Limit slides to just 6 lines of text maximum, with each line containing 6 words max. Anything more turns into an overwhelming wall of words.

Stick to concise phrases, short sentences, and bulleted lists. Use just keywords and supporting stats – leave nonessential info out. With this less is more approach, key points will stick better.

SlidesAI is a text-to-presentation add-on tool that converts walls of text into beautiful slides. It does this automatically generate condensed phrases and bullet points from your text ensuring clutter-free slides throughout your presentation.

3. Boost Engagement With Quality Visuals

Speaking of key points sticking better…you know what helps even more? Quality graphics and visuals!

Research shows we process images 60,000 times faster than text. So reinforce your points with strong visuals. Use high-resolution photos, charts, illustrations, and infographics. But avoid clipart or random stock photos – ensure every graphic clearly supports your narrative.

Well-designed visuals make presentations more memorable and engaging. Just remember to optimize graphics for high-resolution viewing and include alt-text (alternative text) descriptions for accessibility. Then watch those visual aids boost information retention and audience interest.

SlidesAI has a library of 1.5M high-quality premium stock images that you can select and include in your slides.

4. Create Brand Consistency With Formatting

Imagine a presentation where every slide had a totally different layout, colors, and font… no visual consistency at all. It would look sloppy and amateurish, right?

Formatting matters – big time! Brand your presentation by using consistent design elements throughout all your slides.

Pick one professional font combination and stick to it. Limit your color palette to 2-3 colors max. Maintain alignment and space elements consistently.

With unified branding, your deck will feel polished, intentional, and visually pleasing. Bonus – consistent branding also boosts memorability as the audience becomes familiar with your “look”.

SlidesAI ensures complete branding consistency across all presentation slides by applying your color schemes , fonts, etc to designs through artificial intelligence.

5. Check Accessibility Settings

Speaking of memorability, if some audience members can’t actually view your slides, they certainly won’t remember your message.

Ensure your presentation is inclusive and accessible to all by checking key settings. Use color contrast and legible fonts so those with visual impairments can still grasp the content. Optimize images with alt text descriptions. Verify videos are captioned.

It may take a bit more effort up front but making your presentation accessible opens your message to a wider audience. It also demonstrates corporate responsibility.

6. Create Custom Icons and Illustrations

Most PowerPoint templates come with generic icons. However, you can amplify brand personality and memorability by creating custom icons and simple illustrations.

Don’t just use a generic checkmark when you can insert your own branded indicator relevant to your company. Design illustrated characters to represent concepts. Even use emojis strategically to inject fun and improve recall.

Handcrafted visuals, even if basic in style, make presentations stand out and drive home key points better than generic clip art ever could.

7. Use Subtle Animations – But Not Too Many!

Animations, when used well, can help guide the audience’s eye and transition between ideas smoothly. Emphasize key points and important transitions with subtle animations.

Entrance and exit effects can focus attention while builds and motion path animations can demonstrate processes dynamically. Use sparingly and subtly for the best impact.

But avoid going animation crazy with sounds and excessive movement. That becomes more distracting than engaging. Limit animations so they enhance content rather than detract.

8. Pace Your Delivery

Creating stellar slides is an excellent start but don’t stop there. The live delivery is just as crucial. Invest time practicing your presentation with your slides.

Rehearse the flow and pace of your narrative. Refine and memorize transitions between slides . Nail your timing to keep the audience engaged. Get so comfortable delivering your content that the slides become natural visual aids.

With great slides and honed delivery skills, your audience will hang on to your every word from the introduction to a powerful conclusion.

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PowerPoint Donts

Just as important as the dos are the don’ts. What pitfalls should you avoid when designing PowerPoint presentations?

9. Don’t Use Distracting Backgrounds

Remember our tip to embrace minimalism? Well, the opposite is using distracting backgrounds. Avoid loud colors, complex patterns, or images totally unrelated to your content. At best, they are distracting. At worst, they make key info harder to comprehend.

Stick to simple, neutral backgrounds. If using an image, ensure it directly reinforces your narrative. Anything extra risks your message getting visually lost. Keep backgrounds clean so content remains the focal point.

SlidesAI avoids using distracting backgrounds like crowded templates or unrelated images in the presentations. It focuses on simple, clean backgrounds to keep attention on your key content.

10. Don’t Overwhelm With Walls of Text

We covered the 6×6 text limit rule earlier. But even with 6 lines and 6 words, slides can become text walls without good visual breakdown. Big blocks of text are tiring to read and make retainment tough.

Instead, thoughtfully chunk text into concise sections. Use headers, subheaders, and bullet points to organize key bits. Align text left for easier scanning. Supplement with supporting imagery. Breaking up text improves comprehension drastically.

11. Don’t Rely On Boring Bullets

Speaking of bulleted lists, bullet overkill is another issue that turns slides into snore fests. Slides crammed with back-to-back bullet points lose audiences fast. The endless text blurs together with minimal memorability.

For memorable content, limit bullets to key takeaways only. Then reinforce each point visually – a photo, icon, chart, etc. Quality visuals boost memorability way more than a slide stuffed with 11 bullet points ever could.

12. Don’t Use Inconsistent Formatting

Remember, formatting matters! Shifting layouts, fonts, and color schemes appear disjointed and sloppy. The mismatched design screams amateur hour.

Establish a visual style and stick to it slide to slide. Use the same fonts, limit your color palette, and space elements consistently. Most importantly – maintain alignment across all slides. With unified branding, your presentation will look polished and professional.

SlidesAI ensures your presentation formatting stays consistent slide to slide by applying your preferred color palette, fonts, etc through its intelligent algorithms.

13. Don’t Include Unnecessary Animations

Animations can be great for guiding the viewer’s eye and demonstrating motion. But avoid going overboard. Excessive animations, sounds, and movement become more distracting than engaging.

Use animations subtly and intentionally . Emphasize only key points and important transitions with simple builds or entrance effects. Anything superfluous, whether flying text or whooshing sounds, pulls attention away rather than enhancing content.

Keep it simple and purposeful. Let smooth, minimal animations work behind the scenes rather than take center stage away from your narrative.

14. Don’t Use Unsupported Graphics

Only include images, photos, charts, etc that directly support the ideas and messaging in your presentation. Don’t insert fluffy visuals that have no clear tie to your content.

Every visual aid you present should clearly reinforce your narrative rather than derail tangents. Unsupported graphics quickly become distractions. They also undermine your credibility if audiences can’t grasp the connection.

Keep it focused. Be intentional about every visual you include. Remove anything superfluous that doesn’t serve a purpose.

15. Don’t Plagiarize Content

While it’s fine to find inspiration from other presentations, copying chunks of text or visuals without proper attribution is unethical. Never pass off someone else’s hard work as your own.

Always credit sources directly within your presentation if incorporating external ideas, quotes, charts, images, etc. Also, avoid violating copyright laws by inserting visuals without licensing them appropriately first.

Your presentation should showcase your unique ideas, voice, and message. Ensure you create original content or properly cite anything derived from others. Your integrity depends on it.

16. Don’t Wing Your Speech

With great slides completed, don’t just wing it on presentation day. The live delivery is just as crucial. Invest time to refine your pacing, transitions, slide timing, and flow.

Practice your speech thoroughly with the deck so your narrative and movements feel natural. Nail down transition phrases between slides. Get 100% comfortable presenting your content.

With stellar slides and a well-rehearsed delivery, your presentation is sure to wow audiences from start to finish.

There you have it – 16 PowerPoint dos and don’ts for creating memorable, professional PowerPoint presentations. Apply the dos to make high-impact slides, and avoid the don’ts for mistake-free presentations.

Put these PowerPoint best practices into play and watch your ordinary slides transform into extraordinary visual stories. Your audiences will be engaged from start to finish.

But even with these tips, crafting stunning presentations can be time-intensive. Instead, let SlidesAI do the work for you using the power of AI.

SlidesAI integrates with Google Slides and PowerPoint (coming soon) to instantly generate professional presentation decks from your content. Simply input your text – SlidesAI will turn them into visually cohesive slides designed for audience engagement.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the dos and don’ts of powerpoint presentations.

Key PowerPoint dos include simple designs, concise text, quality visuals, consistency, accessibility, custom icons, subtle animations, and practice. Don’ts involve distracting backgrounds, walls of text, boring bullets, inconsistent formatting, excessive animations, irrelevant graphics, plagiarism, and winging it.

What is the 5 by 5 Rule in PowerPoint?

The 5 by 5 rule recommends having no more than 5 lines of text per slide and 5 words per line. This keeps each slide focused and text easy to digest. Too much text overwhelms audiences.

What is the 7 Rule on a PowerPoint Presentation?

The 7 rule states that your slides should have no more than 7 bullet points. Like the 5 by 5 rule, this maintains simplicity for the audience. More than 7 bulleted items become hard to retain.

What are the 5 Rules of PowerPoint?

5 key rules are: don’t cram slides with too much text, minimize slides for emphasis, utilize quality visuals, stick to a consistent format, and limit animations. Following these makes presentations professional, clean, and engaging.

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How to Loop a PowerPoint Presentation?

PowerPoint presentations are a go-to for clear and informative content delivery. But what if you want your presentation to run on repeat, like at a kiosk or digital sign? The good news is, that PowerPoint has a built-in feature to loop your slideshow, ensuring your message stays on display without interruption.

How to Add Fonts to PowerPoint?

The font you choose can make a major difference in your PowerPoint presentations. While the default fonts are okay, you might want to add your own for a more specific look. Luckily, adding fonts to PowerPoint is quite easy. This can improve the appearance of your slides and help you get your message across more clearly. In this article, we’ll show you the simple steps to add fonts in PowerPoint, letting you personalize your presentations and keep your audience engaged.

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10 Tips to Make Your PowerPoint Presentation Effective

You may have heard of the famous 10/20/30 rule , devised by Guy Kawasaki , for designing presentations. This rule states that using 10 slides in 20 minutes at a 30 point minimum font size is the most effective presentation strategy—but what does this really mean?

The most important thing to remember, particularly if you’re using PowerPoint to convey your message, is to keep your audience in mind when preparing your presentation. Your audience wants a relevant presentation, not just something that is visually appealing .

A common mistake speakers make when designing PowerPoint presentations is being too passionate about it that they put everything they know into it. In trying to get their point across, presenters tend to use complex jargon and impart too much information, leaving the audience confused about the actual purpose of the presentation.

So how can you simplify your information but still convey a powerful message to your audience?

Here are 10 suggestions:

1) Cut out the wordiness

Ironic as it may seem, an essential part of proving a point is to use a minimal amount of words per slide so that the audience is focused on you, not on the screen. It’s rather difficult for any kind of audience to read texts and listen to you at the same time. If you have longer statements, break them down into multiple slides and highlight the key words. This doesn’t mean you limit your content to dull, boring facts. Feel free to incorporate anecdotes or quotes as long as they’re relevant and support your message.

2) Add pictures

Instead of more words, supplement your ideas with vivid imagery. Again, the key is not overusing photos to the point that it makes your presentations look unprofessional. Photos should only be used if they promote or emphasize the main idea of your slide.

3) Use appropriate animation

Like pictures, use animation only when appropriate and only if you’ve completely rehearsed your presentation with the animation flow. Otherwise, they will be distracting and will make it appear that you’ve designed your presentation in poor taste.

4) Don’t overuse numbers

As with words, minimize the amount of numbers you present in each slide. If you have charts that summarize the total figures toward the end, then you no longer need to fill up your entire chart with the little numbers on the scale.

5) Use large fonts

Aside from the obvious reason that larger fonts are more readable, size dictates the impact of your message and a larger one makes it easier for your audience to clearly grasp what you’re saying or want to highlight. Aside from font size, pay attention to the spacing between paragraphs, rows, and columns; you don’t want your text to appear jumbled.

6) Maintain consistency

The whole objective of your presentation is to drive home a point, not to make your presentation look cheesy. Keep your font sizes and the size and format of a box on one page consistent throughout your slides.

7) Limit bullet points

Keep your bullet points to a maximum of 5-6 per slide. In addition, the words per bullet point should also be limited to 5-6 words. It’s also wise to vary what you present in each slide, such as alternating between bullet points, graphics, and graph slides, in order to sustain the interest and focus of your audience.

8) Choose colors and contrast effectively .

Use bold colors and high contrast. A color may look completely different on your monitor than it will when projected on a large screen.

9) Tell a story

Everyone loves a good story , especially if it’s something that they can easily relate to. A good story begins with a problem and the more irritating the problem is for the audience, the more effective your presentation will be once you’ve provided a possible solution for them.

10) Be flexible

In order to develop a strong connection with your audience, you need to be flexible with your slides. During your speech, you may feel that some slides have become unnecessary; therefore you want to prepare your presentation in such a way that you can easily interchange or eliminate them. Conversely, prepare some optional slides in anticipation of questions or ideas you expect from your audience. This will give your presentation the “wow” factor.

When using PowerPoint to deliver a PowerFUL point, your goal isn’t to design the best presentation but the most effective one. This means creating a presentation that your audience can connect with through interest, participation, memory recall, and ideally, learning something useful.

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A step-by-step guide to captivating PowerPoint presentation design

november 20, 2023

by Corporate PowerPoint Girl

Do you often find yourself stuck with a lackluster PowerPoint presentation, desperately seeking ways to make it more engaging and visually appealing? If your boss has ever told you to "please fix" a presentation and you didn't know where to start, you're not alone. In this article, we'll walk you through a straightforward method to transform your PowerPoint slides into a visually captivating masterpiece. 

Let's dive right in! 

Clean up your slides 

The first step in this journey to presentation excellence is all about decluttering your slides and elevating their impact. Say goodbye to those uninspiring bullet points that often dominate presentations. Instead, focus on what truly matters – the key call-out numbers. By increasing the font size of these numbers, you ensure they take center stage, immediately drawing your audience's attention. 

To make those numbers pop, consider breaking the text after the numbers into the next line and adding a touch of color. The contrast created by pairing a dark color with a lighter shade, like dark teal and light teal or burnt orange with peach, can work wonders. This simple adjustment makes your data more engaging , enhancing the overall impact of your presentation. 

Add dimension with boxes 

Now, let's introduce an element of depth and organization to your slides. By adding boxes, you'll create a visually pleasing structure that guides your audience through the content. In the "Insert" menu, select "Table" and opt for a one-by-one table. Change the table color to a light gray shade, elongate it, and position it neatly to the left of your text. 

To improve readability and aesthetics, increase the spacing between text phrases. A small adjustment in the before spacing setting (setting it to 48) significantly enhances the visual appeal of your slides. 

Insert circles 

To further enhance the visual appeal and engagement of your slides, let's introduce circles. In the Insert menu, navigate to Shapes and choose the circle. Adjust the circle's height and width to 1.2, ensuring it complements your content seamlessly. Match the circle's shape fill color with the corresponding text color for a harmonious look. 

Avoid using colored outlines for the circles, as they may distract from the overall aesthetic. This simple addition of circles adds an element of visual interest to your presentation, making it more captivating. 

Choose icons 

Now, it's time for a touch of creativity. Selecting icons to complement your text can elevate the clarity and appeal of your slides. In the "Insert" menu, you can search for relevant keywords to find the perfect icon from PowerPoint's extensive library . 

For instance, if your text discusses investment portfolio yield, search for "growth" and choose an upward arrow growth icon. These icons add an extra layer of visual appeal and clarity to your content, making it more engaging and informative. 

Final touches 

To wrap up the transformation process, we come to the final touches that give your presentation a polished, professional finish. Align your icons with their corresponding circles and change the shape fill color to white. This simple adjustment creates a crisp, cohesive look that ties everything together seamlessly. 

In conclusion, by following these steps, you've embarked on a journey to enhance your PowerPoint presentation . These initial steps are just the beginning of your exploration into the world of design elements and styles that can cater to your specific presentation needs. The key to a stunning PowerPoint presentation lies in the details. By following these steps, you can turn a lackluster set of slides into a visually engaging and dynamic presentation that will captivate your audience. So, the next time your boss says, "Please fix," you'll know exactly where to start. Happy presenting! 

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The Essential 5 Rules of Effective PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint presentations have become a cornerstone of modern communication, whether in the boardroom, the classroom, or the conference hall. When PowerPoint is used effectively, it can elevate your message, making your message engaging, clear, and memorable. There are 5 simple rules to follow to ensure your presentation doesn’t become a dreaded “death by PowerPoint” experience. In this blog, we’ll quickly explore these five essential rules of creating compelling and impactful PowerPoint presentations.

Rule 1: Keep It Simple

One of the cardinal sins in PowerPoint presentations is overcrowding your slides with text, bullet points, and too many visuals. The first rule is to keep it simple. Each slide should have a single, clear message. Use concise language, bullet points, and minimal text to convey your points. Visuals should be clean and uncluttered. Simplicity enhances comprehension and retention.

Rule 2: Visualize Your Data

Data is a critical element in many presentations, but raw numbers can be overwhelming. Rule number two is to visualize your data. Use charts, graphs, and diagrams to represent your data in a visually engaging way. Choose the right type of visualization for your information, ensuring it’s easy to understand at a glance. Well-crafted visuals make your data more accessible and memorable.

Rule 3: Tell a Story

The most compelling presentations are those that tell a story. Rule three is all about storytelling. Structure your presentation like a narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Start with an attention-grabbing introduction, build your narrative with supporting points, and conclude with a memorable takeaway or call to action. A well-structured story captivates your audience and helps them connect with your message.

Rule 4: Design Matters

Effective design is crucial to a successful PowerPoint presentation. Rule four is all about design. Choose a consistent, visually appealing template. Use fonts, colors, and imagery that align with your message and branding. Ensure that text is legible and that visuals are high-quality and relevant. Good design enhances professionalism and keeps your audience engaged.

Rule 5: Practice and Rehearse

No matter how well your slides are designed, the delivery is equally important. Rule five emphasizes practice and rehearsal. Familiarize yourself with the content, so you can present confidently and naturally. Rehearse your timing, transitions, and any interactive elements. Anticipate questions and prepare for them. Practice helps you connect with your audience and come across as a confident, knowledgeable speaker.

Mastering the art of PowerPoint presentations requires following these five fundamental rules: simplicity, data visualization, storytelling, design, and practice. These rules can transform your presentations from dull and forgettable to compelling and impactful. By keeping your slides clear and uncluttered, visually representing data, weaving a narrative, paying attention to design, and practicing your delivery, you can create presentations that inform, engage, and leave a lasting impression on your audience. The next time you create a PowerPoint presentation, remember these rules to ensure your message shines.

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8 tips to make the best powerpoint presentations.

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Table of contents, start with a goal, less is more, consider your typeface, make bullet points count, limit the use of transitions, skip text where possible, think in color, take a look from the top down, bonus: start with templates.

Slideshows are an intuitive way to share complex ideas with an audience, although they're dull and frustrating when poorly executed. Here are some tips to make your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations sing while avoiding common pitfalls.

It all starts with identifying what we're trying to achieve with the presentation. Is it informative, a showcase of data in an easy-to-understand medium? Or is it more of a pitch, something meant to persuade and convince an audience and lead them to a particular outcome?

It's here where the majority of these presentations go wrong with the inability to identify the talking points that best support our goal. Always start with a goal in mind: to entertain, to inform, or to share data in a way that's easy to understand. Use facts, figures, and images to support your conclusion while keeping structure in mind (Where are we now and where are we going?).

I've found that it's helpful to start with the ending. Once I know how to end a presentation, I know how best to get to that point. I start by identifying the takeaway---that one nugget that I want to implant before thanking everyone for their time---and I work in reverse to figure out how best to get there.

Your mileage, of course, may vary. But it's always going to be a good idea to put in the time in the beginning stages so that you aren't reworking large portions of the presentation later. And that starts with a defined goal.

A slideshow isn't supposed to include everything. It's an introduction to a topic, one that we can elaborate on with speech. Anything unnecessary is a distraction. It makes the presentation less visually appealing and less interesting, and it makes you look bad as a presenter.

This goes for text as well as images. There's nothing worse, in fact, than a series of slides where the presenter just reads them as they appear. Your audience is capable of reading, and chances are they'll be done with the slide, and browsing Reddit, long before you finish. Avoid putting the literal text on the screen, and your audience will thank you.

Related: How to Burn Your PowerPoint to DVD

Right off the bat, we're just going to come out and say that Papyrus and Comic Sans should be banned from all PowerPoint presentations, permanently. Beyond that, it's worth considering the typeface you're using and what it's saying about you, the presenter, and the presentation itself.

Consider choosing readability over aesthetics, and avoid fancy fonts that could prove to be more of a distraction than anything else. A good presentation needs two fonts: a serif and sans-serif. Use one for the headlines and one for body text, lists, and the like. Keep it simple. Veranda, Helvetica, Arial, and even Times New Roman are safe choices. Stick with the classics and it's hard to botch this one too badly.

There reaches a point where bullet points become less of a visual aid and more of a visual examination.

Bullet points should support the speaker, not overwhelm his audience. The best slides have little or no text at all, in fact. As a presenter, it's our job to talk through complex issues, but that doesn't mean that we need to highlight every talking point.

Instead, think about how you can break up large lists into three or four bullet points. Carefully consider whether you need to use more bullet points, or if you can combine multiple topics into a single point instead. And if you can't, remember that there's no one limiting the number of slides you can have in a presentation. It's always possible to break a list of 12 points down into three pages of four points each.

Animation, when used correctly, is a good idea. It breaks up slow-moving parts of a presentation and adds action to elements that require it. But it should be used judiciously.

Adding a transition that wipes left to right between every slide or that animates each bullet point in a list, for example, starts to grow taxing on those forced to endure the presentation. Viewers get bored quickly, and animations that are meant to highlight specific elements quickly become taxing.

That's not to say that you can't use animations and transitions, just that you need to pick your spots. Aim for no more than a handful of these transitions for each presentation. And use them in spots where they'll add to the demonstration, not detract from it.

Sometimes images tell a better story than text can. And as a presenter, your goal is to describe points in detail without making users do a lot of reading. In these cases, a well-designed visual, like a chart, might better convey the information you're trying to share.

The right image adds visual appeal and serves to break up longer, text-heavy sections of the presentation---but only if you're using the right images. A single high-quality image can make all the difference between a success and a dud when you're driving a specific point home.

When considering text, don't think solely in terms of bullet points and paragraphs. Tables, for example, are often unnecessary. Ask yourself whether you could present the same data in a bar or line chart instead.

Color is interesting. It evokes certain feelings and adds visual appeal to your presentation as a whole. Studies show that color also improves interest, comprehension, and retention. It should be a careful consideration, not an afterthought.

You don't have to be a graphic designer to use color well in a presentation. What I do is look for palettes I like, and then find ways to use them in the presentation. There are a number of tools for this, like Adobe Color , Coolors , and ColorHunt , just to name a few. After finding a palette you enjoy, consider how it works with the presentation you're about to give. Pastels, for example, evoke feelings of freedom and light, so they probably aren't the best choice when you're presenting quarterly earnings that missed the mark.

It's also worth mentioning that you don't need to use every color in the palette. Often, you can get by with just two or three, though you should really think through how they all work together and how readable they'll be when layered. A simple rule of thumb here is that contrast is your friend. Dark colors work well on light backgrounds, and light colors work best on dark backgrounds.

Spend some time in the Slide Sorter before you finish your presentation. By clicking the four squares at the bottom left of the presentation, you can take a look at multiple slides at once and consider how each works together. Alternatively, you can click "View" on the ribbon and select "Slide Sorter."

Are you presenting too much text at once? Move an image in. Could a series of slides benefit from a chart or summary before you move on to another point?

It's here that we have the opportunity to view the presentation from beyond the single-slide viewpoint and think in terms of how each slide fits, or if it fits at all. From this view, you can rearrange slides, add additional ones, or delete them entirely if you find that they don't advance the presentation.

The difference between a good presentation and a bad one is really all about preparation and execution. Those that respect the process and plan carefully---not only the presentation as a whole, but each slide within it---are the ones who will succeed.

This brings me to my last (half) point: When in doubt, just buy a template and use it. You can find these all over the web, though Creative Market and GraphicRiver are probably the two most popular marketplaces for this kind of thing. Not all of us are blessed with the skills needed to design and deliver an effective presentation. And while a pre-made PowerPoint template isn't going to make you a better presenter, it will ease the anxiety of creating a visually appealing slide deck.

• Microsoft Office

Basic tasks for creating a PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint presentations work like slide shows. To convey a message or a story, you break it down into slides. Think of each slide as a blank canvas for the pictures and words that help you tell your story.

Choose a theme

When you open PowerPoint, you’ll see some built-in themes and templates . A theme is a slide design that contains matching colors, fonts, and special effects like shadows, reflections, and more.

On the File tab of the Ribbon, select New , and then choose a theme.

PowerPoint shows you a preview of the theme, with four color variations to choose from on the right side.

Click Create , or pick a color variation and then click Create .

Read more: Use or create themes in PowerPoint

Insert a new slide

On the Home tab, click the bottom half of  New Slide , and pick a slide layout.

Read more: Add, rearrange, and delete slides .

Save your presentation

On the File tab, choose Save .

Pick or browse to a folder.

In the File name box, type a name for your presentation, and then choose Save .

Note:  If you frequently save files to a certain folder, you can ‘pin’ the path so that it is always available (as shown below).

Tip:  Save your work as you go. Press Ctrl+S often or save the file to OneDrive and let AutoSave take care of it for you. 

Read more: Save your presentation file

Select a text placeholder, and begin typing.

Format your text

Select the text.

Under Drawing Tools , choose Format .

Do one of the following:

To change the color of your text, choose Text Fill , and then choose a color.

To change the outline color of your text, choose Text Outline , and then choose a color.

To apply a shadow, reflection, glow, bevel, 3-D rotation, a transform, choose Text Effects , and then choose the effect you want.

Change the fonts

Change the color of text on a slide

Add bullets or numbers to text

Format text as superscript or subscript

Add pictures

On the Insert tab, select Pictures , then do one of the following:

To insert a picture that is saved on your local drive or an internal server, choose This Device , browse for the picture, and then choose Insert .

(For Microsoft 365 subscribers) To insert a picture from our library, choose Stock Images , browse for a picture, select it and choose Insert .

To insert a picture from the web, choose Online Pictures , and use the search box to find a picture. Choose a picture, and then click Insert .

You can add shapes to illustrate your slide. 

On the Insert tab, select Shapes , and then select a shape from the menu that appears.

In the slide area, click and drag to draw the shape.

Select the Format or Shape Format tab on the ribbon. Open the Shape Styles gallery to quickly add a color and style (including shading) to the selected shape.

Add speaker notes

Slides are best when you don’t cram in too much information. You can put helpful facts and notes in the speaker notes, and refer to them as you present.

Click inside the Notes pane below the slide, and begin typing your notes.

Add speaker notes to your slides

Print slides with or without speaker notes

Give your presentation

On the Slide Show tab, do one of the following:

To start the presentation at the first slide, in the Start Slide Show group, click From Beginning .

If you’re not at the first slide and want to start from where you are, click From Current Slide .

If you need to present to people who are not where you are, click Present Online to set up a presentation on the web, and then choose one of the following options:

Broadcast your PowerPoint presentation online to a remote audience

View your speaker notes as you deliver your slide show.

Get out of Slide Show view

To get out of Slide Show view at any time, on the keyboard, press Esc .

You can quickly apply a theme when you're starting a new presentation:

On the File tab, click New .

Select a theme.

Read more:  Apply a design theme to your presentation

In the slide thumbnail pane on the left, select the slide that you want your new slide to follow.

On the Home tab, select the lower half of  New Slide .

From the menu, select the layout that you want for your new slide.

Your new slide is inserted, and you can click inside a placeholder to begin adding content.

Learn more about slide layouts

Read more: Add, rearrange, and delete slides

PowerPoint for the web automatically saves your work to your OneDrive, in the cloud.

To change the name of the automatically saved file:

In the title bar, click the file name.

In the File Name box, enter the name you want to apply to the file.

If you want to change the cloud storage location, at the right end of the Location box, click the arrow symbol, then navigate to the folder you want, then select Move here .

On the Home tab, use the Font options:

Select from other formatting options such as Bold , Italic , Underline , Strikethrough , Subscript , and Superscript .

On the  Insert  tab, select  Pictures .

From the menu, select where you want to insert the picture from:

Browse to the image you want, select it, then select Insert . 

After the image is inserted on the slide, you can select it and drag to reposition it, and you can select and drag a corner handle to resize the image. 

On the slide canvas, click and drag to draw the shape.

Select the Shape tab on the ribbon. Open the Shape Styles gallery to quickly add a color and style (including shading) to the selected shape.

A horizontal Notes pane appears at the bottom of the window, below the slide.

Click in the pane, then enter text. 

On the  Slide Show  tab, select  Play From Beginning .

To navigate through the slides, simply click the mouse or press the spacebar.

Tip:  You can also use the forward and back arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate through the slide show.

Read more:  Present your slide show

Stop a slide show

To get out of Slide Show view at any time, on the keyboard, press Esc.

The full-screen slide show will close, and you will be returned to the editing view of the file.

Tips for creating an effective presentation

Consider the following tips to keep your audience interested.

Minimize the number of slides

To maintain a clear message and to keep your audience attentive and interested, keep the number of slides in your presentation to a minimum.

Choose an audience-friendly font size

The audience must be able to read your slides from a distance. Generally speaking, a font size smaller than 30 might be too difficult for the audience to see.

Keep your slide text simple

You want your audience to listen to you present your information, instead of reading the screen. Use bullets or short sentences, and try to keep each item to one line.

Some projectors crop slides at the edges, so that long sentences might be cropped.

Use visuals to help express your message

Pictures, charts, graphs, and SmartArt graphics provide visual cues for your audience to remember. Add meaningful art to complement the text and messaging on your slides.

As with text, however, avoid including too many visual aids on your slide.

Make labels for charts and graphs understandable

Use only enough text to make label elements in a chart or graph comprehensible.

Apply subtle, consistent slide backgrounds

Choose an appealing, consistent template or theme that is not too eye-catching. You don't want the background or design to detract from your message.

However, you also want to provide a contrast between the background color and text color. The built-in themes in PowerPoint set the contrast between a light background with dark colored text or dark background with light colored text.

For more information about how to use themes, see Apply a theme to add color and style to your presentation .

Check the spelling and grammar

To earn and maintain the respect of your audience, always check the spelling and grammar in your presentation .

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7 Simple rules to help you create effective powerpoint presentations

Make effective presentations by following simple but important presentation rules.

Supriya Sarkar

Building presentations

Presentations are powerful tools for conveying information and at the same time engaging the audience so that they retain the information that is shared. However, creating an impactful and engaging PowerPoint presentation requires adherence to certain rules. In this guide, we'll explore key principles to help you craft presentations that captivate your audience. Also, we will discuss some tips and common mistakes in creating an effective presentation.

Implementing effective presentation techniques

To create an effective presentation, you need to know the basic techniques first. Think of these techniques as the building blocks for your presentation. Once you have these basics in place, you can then make improvements to make your presentation even better. This might mean adjusting things as you go based on how your audience is reacting, being open to changing your content on the spot and adding interactive elements to keep everyone engaged.

Rule 1: Engaging and memorable in just one slide

When you present one idea per slide, you allow your audience to focus on a single concept, making it easier for them to comprehend and remember. Complex ideas can be overwhelming, so breaking them down into smaller, digestible pieces helps your audience follow your message more effectively.

Rule 2: Following the 5 rules for creating effective presentation slides

Spend only one minute or less on each slide to keep things lively and avoid overwhelming your audience. The 5/5/5 rule is a simple guide to keep things short and sweet. Stick to five words per line, no more than five lines per slide, and steer clear of having five slides in a row with lots of text. This way, your audience won't feel bombarded with too much information, and you can share details in manageable bits. This helps keep your audience engaged and paying attention.

Rule 3: Avoiding slide overload for clear messages

Putting too much stuff on slides can make it hard for people to read and listen. To follow Rule 1 (about having one idea per slide), limit your elements to six or fewer on each slide. This keeps things focused. Also, use short text, add some space (white space), and include images or graphics smartly. Doing this helps you deliver your message effectively, making it easier for the audience to remember what you're sharing.

Rule 4: Mastering slide design to get your message across efficiently

The title at the top of each slide is like a signpost for your message. A clear and meaningful heading acts as a cue, helping your audience understand what's coming up. Make sure your heading is a short and clear summary of what you'll talk about on that slide. Everything on the slide should support that heading, like a team working together. This makes it easy for your audience to follow your message smoothly. Keep it concise and to the point!

How to create engaging slides?

Visuals are crucial for creating engaging slides. Think of making presentations like crafting art, where colors, fonts, and images play pivotal roles. Let's delve into each of these factors to understand their significance and technique in detail.

Rule 5: Utilizing effective slide design

Picking the correct font and its color is crucial. It doesn't just make things easier to read but also boosts how well your presentation works. To make words clearer, go for colors that stand out, keep backgrounds simple, and use big fonts. This helps everyone see and understand your slides better. Stay away from italics, underlining, or all caps because they might take attention away from your main message. Keep it simple and easy on the eyes!

Rule 6: Using appropriate animation and transitions

Try to steer clear of using too many animations. Studies indicate that people generally don't enjoy a lot of movement in a presentation. While animations can make things interesting, it's important to use them sparingly. Small, subtle animations can help highlight key points and make your audience remember things better. But, if you use too many flashy movements, it might distract people and make your presentation less effective.

Rule 7: Implementing visual presentations such as graphs and images

Visual elements, such as images and graphs, add interest and engagement to your presentation. However, it's essential to strike a balance. Avoid overly complex graphics that may confuse your audience. When you decide to use a graph or chart, make sure to explain what it shows so everyone understands the information you're sharing. Keeping things clear and simple ensures your visuals add to the presentation without making it confusing.

Tips for delivering successful PowerPoint presentations

Adhering to the presentation rules will help you enhance the audience experience, but also ensure the efficient delivery of your PowerPoint presentation. There are a few presentation tips that will not only assist you in following the rules discussed above but will also develop the necessary skills to keep your audience engaged.

Strategies for engaging content:

To make your presentation more engaging try to craft a compelling narrative that resonates with your audience. You can share relatable stories to evoke emotions that can help in making your topic more relatable and interesting. Choose visually appealing slides and break down complex concepts into digestible bits that can be easily understood and retained. Enhance interactivity by incorporating questions, polls, and activities to infuse life into your presentation. This dynamic approach ensures your audience stays not just informed but actively involved throughout your talk.

Know your audience:

Tailor your presentation to the needs, interests, and knowledge level of your audience. Understanding your audience allows you to adjust your content and tone accordingly.

Developing presentation skills:

Refine your presentation skills to captivate your audience. Practice confident body language, maintain consistent eye contact, and modulate your voice for emphasis. These practices not only boost your credibility but also amplify your persuasive impact. Engage with your audience to build a connection, intensifying the impact of your message.

Enhancing understanding with simple rules:

Adhere to straightforward presentation rules to enhance audience comprehension. Utilize clear and concise headings, limit the text on each slide, and incorporate visuals strategically. Ensure that your message is easy to follow and doesn't overwhelm the audience with unnecessary details.

Maximizing slide impact:

Each slide should contribute significantly to your message. Highlight key points, use visually striking elements, and maintain a clean design. Colors and fonts play a very important role. Eliminate unnecessary clutter, ensuring that every component on the slide serves a specific purpose.

Efficient presentation delivery:

Focus on delivering your presentation with efficiency. Practice your timing to ensure a smooth flow, avoid unnecessary technical jargon, and actively encourage audience participation. Keep the presentation dynamic and engaging to sustain interest from the beginning to the end.

Common mistakes to avoid in PowerPoint presentations

Let's take a closer look at the common mistakes we often see and find the best ways to avoid them.

Avoiding overloaded slides and complicated visuals:

Resist the temptation to overload a single slide with excessive information or complex data charts. Keep it simple and focused to ensure your audience easily grasps the key points without feeling overwhelmed. The "Rule of One Slide, One Idea" emphasizes steering clear of overstuffed slides, allowing for a more effective and digestible presentation.

Minimizing the use of text-heavy slides for maximum impact:

Presenters sometimes put too much text on slides to help them remember what to say. However, this can make the audience lose interest and the message isn't as clear.  Don't drown your slides in text. Use short and impactful messages. Use visuals, bullet points, and brief text to convey your message effectively, keeping your audience's attention intact.

Avoiding ineffective presentation design elements:

Every visual and layout choice should enhance your message and not distract or confuse your audience. Therefore, stay clear of design elements that don't contribute meaningfully to your presentation.

Avoiding fonts that are difficult to read or understand:

Choose fonts wisely. Select clear, readable fonts that ensure your audience can easily comprehend your content. Avoid italics or complex fonts that may hinder rather than aid understanding. Consider using a font size of 30 points or larger. This ensures readability for people sitting at a distance and those with vision impairments, enhancing the overall accessibility of your presentation.

Benefits of following the presentation rules

Following these presentation rules results in more engaging, comprehensible, and impactful presentations that effectively convey messages to the audience.

Audience engagement:

Following the rules maintains audience engagement by preventing information overload. Limiting each slide's content ensures details are shared in manageable bits, adding interest with visuals while ensuring clarity. Explaining visuals contributes to better audience understanding.

Impactful delivery:

Basic guidelines, such as limiting elements per slide and employing clear headings, enhance message delivery. These rules facilitate focused communication, progressive build-up on complex topics, and seamless audience guidance, resulting in improved understanding.

Visually appealing:

By following rules to enhance visual appeal in your presentation, such as choosing readable fonts, high-contrast colors, and simple backgrounds, you not only improve the aesthetics but also facilitate better information retention for your audience. This is supported by data indicating that individuals process images at a rate 60,000 times faster than text, with 90% of information transmitted to the brain being visual.

Improves retention:

Emphasizing a single, digestible idea per slide enables focused comprehension and better retention. The use of subtle animations to highlight key points enhances audience retention, avoiding excessive movements that may distract from the presentation's effectiveness.

How Prezent help you make an effective presentation in less time?

Understanding the challenges faced by businesses to adhere to the presentation rules, Prezent brings in features that makes the task easier for presenters.

Hyper-personalized presentation: Prezent’s Fingerprint feature helps you understand your audience's preferences, allowing you to customize your presentation accordingly. This ensures resonance with the audience, enhancing its overall effectiveness.

Slide library for visual appeal: You can access the Slide Library to choose background images, layouts, and graphical charts for your data. Prezent facilitates easy audience engagement with compelling imagery, elevating the visual appeal of your presentation.

Compelling narratives with storyline: You can leverage Prezent's Storyline builder , which offers over 35,000 pre-built narratives. These structured storylines assist in breaking down complex topics into easily understandable information, creating an impactful and engaging presentation experience.

Real-time collaboration: The real-time collaboration feature facilitates seamless teamwork, allowing multiple contributors to work on the presentation simultaneously. This collaborative approach fosters efficiency, ensuring that the collective efforts result in a well-coordinated and polished final product.

Brand compliance: Prezent enables swift alignment with established brand standards, ensuring 100% brand compliance in just a few minutes. Transform your slides seamlessly to achieve a harmonious blend of colors, fonts, and visuals. This ensures a consistent reflection of your brand's standards, guaranteeing a professional presentation every time.

Follow these essential presentation rules to ensure your message has a lasting impact. To enhance efficiency in your business communication and presentation creation process, explore Prezent with a free trial . Schedule a demo to experience all the product features and understand the value it can add to your business.

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How to Design a Professional PowerPoint Presentation

Our series of tips on presentation design outlined some generic rules and ideas that you can live by to create better, more professional presentations. Today we want to follow that up by taking you through the actual process of designing a presentation from start to finish.

We’ll break down every step of the design process, from choosing colors and images to using whitespace properly. After reading through this you should be all set to design your own beautiful presentation slides that will put your coworkers to shame.

Using a pre-built PowerPoint template can be a good starting point for many people (we collected some of the best PowerPoint templates for you!). But if you’re wanting to design your own from start-to-finish, you’re in the right place!

How Does Unlimited PowerPoint Templates Sound?

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A Word About Content

I usually make a big deal about content preceding design, and presentations are no exception. Ideally, you’ll have the topic and much or all of the content outlined before you even think about design. This will in every way shape the appearance of your design, which is why working from pre-built templates isn’t always the best move (though generic templates can and do work great in some circumstances).

The reason that I bring this up is that I don’t really have an actual presentation in mind for this project. I’ll be running with a basic theme, but the textual information will be entirely placeholder copy. Your image, font, color and layout selection shouldn’t necessarily match mine but instead reflect the topic and content you’re working with.

Choosing A Color Scheme

Before I even open Photoshop (yes, I design PowerPoint/Keynote slides in Photoshop and drop them in), I want to find a color scheme on which to base my entire design. When I need to quickly find several colors that go together I usually start with Adobe Color CC . Not only is it a great way to build your own color schemes, it’s an outstanding source to find schemes built by others that you can just grab for your projects.

As luck would have it, I liked the very first color scheme I saw upon opening Color. This scheme was featured on the home page and looked like a great place to start for our presentation design.

Now, if you wanted to get everything exactly right, you could make a list of the RGB or Hex values, but I prefer a quicker, more direct route. What I usually do is snap a screenshot of the color scheme, paste it into my document and stretch it across the canvas on its own layer for easy access. This way I can quickly activate the layer, eyedropper the color I want, then hide the layer and get back to work. It’s a bit like having a palette of colors to dip your paintbrush in.

Designing Your Cover Slide

Now that we have a color scheme, the design work is going to be much simpler. One trick that designers often use in presentations is to leverage the color scheme as heavily as possible. If you’re new to design, you’ll likely think that this is too easy, too plain or even that it’s cheating somehow, but trust me, it’ll be much more attractive and professional than that horrid Microsoft clipart library you love so much.

To start, simply grab one of your colors from the scheme you chose and flood the background of your slide with it (I chose #631c25). Good job, there’s your background. Don’t freak out. It’ll look great. Now let’s throw in some typography.

Choosing a Font

Font choice is a major issue for non-designers. The tendency is to think that most fonts are “boring” and to look around for something exciting and fun. This inevitably leads to the use of Comic Sans or some other equally hideous font.

Unless you’re an elementary school teacher, your presentations should never look like this. Instead, why don’t you try one of those “boring” fonts to see if you can come up with something you like.

Combining fonts can be a tricky task and can take a trained eye to pull off. Fortunately, font designers have already created collections that work well together and if you’re not a designer, they make it easy to pull off great typography. The trick is to just stay in a family. Again, I know this sounds lame, but it works really well if you make sure the two styles you choose are very different.

For instance, I chose a Helvetica Bold Condensed and a Helvetica Light for my cover slide. Notice how different the fonts are from each other in terms of thickness. Choosing two styles that are relatively close causes visual confusion and should be avoided as a general rule of thumb. Instead, what you want is contrast and plenty of it.

Alignment and Layout

Notice a few things about the way I set up this slide. First, I used a strong left alignment for the text. As I say in just about every design article I write, center alignment should be a last resort, not a first. It tends to be the weakest text alignment that you can choose, having a hard edge increases readability considerably (notice that book pages aren’t center-aligned).

Also, notice the generous whitespace that I used. Remember that you don’t have to eat up every inch of space. Giving your text room to breathe helps your layout immensely and gives the design a clean look.

Adding an Image

At this point you might be wondering why you wasted your time reading so I could give you such plain advice. The truth is, most people that create presentations could improve them by 100% from following the advice above. However, I realize minimalism may be too extreme for some folks so let’s throw in an image to make it look nice.

Since our text is on the left, I wanted to find something a little heavy on the right. The general theme that I’ll go for is “City photos” assuming I had some sort of architecture or city-centric presentation to give. Again, you’ll have to choose iamges relevant to your own topic.

I grabbed this Flickr Creative Commons image from photographer Ben Spreng .

Now, if we just made this image our background, the text would become unreadable and we would be ditching our color scheme. What we’re going to do instead is set it on top of the colored slide and set our blending mode to Overlay. Then throw your opacity to around 45%.

As you can see, this helps the slide look much more interesting but keeps the text and colors fairly intact. It’s a simple solution that adds a lot of interest to an otherwise plain design.

Adding Content Slides

The cover may seem like it’s only a tiny part of the battle, but you’ve actually already set the tone for the entire presentation. You’ve got your theme, color scheme and fonts already in place. Now you just need to set up a few different layouts for your content.

The thing to keep in mind is to keep everything extremely simple, and that includes the level of content that you include. Apart from design, these are just good presentation tactics that you’ll learn in every public speaking class. Filling your slides with everything you’re going to say makes you unnecessary. You could just email everyone the slides and shut up.

Instead, the slides are merely meant to be a visual aid. Show a slide with your overall topic or main point, then speak the rest, without reading. Nothing is worse than watching a guy read his note cards word-for-word for thirty minutes, except perhaps watching a guy turn his back to the audience so he can actually read his slides out loud to you the whole time! You may laugh, but I’ve seen it happen folks.

For our first content slide, we’ll grab another Flickr photo and set it to the bottom portion of our slide at full bleed. Then we’ll set the top to another color from our scheme and toss in some text using the same exact formatting that we used on the cover.

See how this closely resembles the theme we’ve already established while still looking significantly different? This is they key to good presentation design: cohesiveness without redundancy.

Now for our third slide, we can simply do the inverse of the second slide with a new color and a new image .

Adding Informational Elements

It would be nice if every slide ever presented could work in a full bleed image, but the truth is that this simply isn’t practical. It will often be the case that you’re presenting graphical information or some other item that isn’t necessarily a photo.

My advice here is to try to stick as close to your theme as possible. For the slide below I flooded the entire background with a solid color from our original scheme and made a quick 3D graph with white columns (I drew a few flat boxes in Illustrator and applied a 3D effect).

As you can see, this slide is very information-focused and yet it doesn’t sacrifice the aesthetics and simplicity we’ve already established.

You’re All Set

From here you might come up with one or two more alternate slide designs and then rotate between them for the duration of your speech. The result is a presentation that is beautiful, very readable and highly professional. The bonus is that the simple, straightforward design will probably result in less work than a clip-art-filled horror show.

Most of the time, great design doesn’t mean being particularly artistic or knowing how to create amazing complex layouts. Instead, it’s about presenting information in an attractive and user-friendly way. With this goal in mind you realize that you’re probably trying way too hard if your end result is ugly. Try cutting out half or more of the elements on one of your slides and giving what’s left a strong left or right alignment with plenty of whitespace.

I hope this article has convinced you to abandon that clip art gallery once and for all. The benefits of clean, minimal design in presentations are clear: the information is easier to take in and the end result is more professional than the mess of information you typically see in presentation slides.

Of course, if you’re looking to get started quickly, flick through our collection of the best PowerPoint templates to find a beautiful set of pre-made designs!

• 7 steps to building a compelling PowerPoint presentation
• Content hub

7 min read — by Amos Wong

How many times have you sat through a PowerPoint presentation that raised more questions than it answered? For instance, just look at the image shown above. Or how often have you seen slides so packed with information that you can’t even read them before the presenter has moved onto the next slide? If you have been in such situations, this blog is for you.

Avoiding these problems isn’t as simple as it seems when you’re creating a presentation from scratch and have a lot of information to present. The trick is to break it down into manageable pieces, starting with the broad overview and then circling in on the details. To help you do it, this article examines a 7-step process for building a compelling PowerPoint presentation, including how to structure it, lay out slides and create charts that support your message.

Learn more about how to build a better slide deck with our free eBook on PowerPoint best practices

1. Determine your presentation type

The first step in building your PowerPoint presentation is determining which type of presentation you’re giving. This helps clarify your overarching goal, while also influencing how you structure your slides.

Presentations typically fall under one or more of the following categories representing a continuum from light to heavy content:

• Key message presentations: This type of presentation is usually lighter in content and tells a persuasive story, such as a TED talk or pitch deck.
• Recurring reports: Recurring reports include more repetitive presentations like monthly reports or slide decks for team meetings. They often include more detail to document results, trends or activities.
• Insights and research outcomes: Presentations such as survey data or market trend reports distill information from large datasets into high-level conclusions.
• Documentation: This type of presentation provides detailed summaries of findings, typically with many charts and limited commentary depending on the audience.

2. Build your story

Your next step is to ask what message or story you want the audience to walk away with. With your top-level message in hand, you can then begin to structure your slide deck around it.

This is the essence of the Pyramid Principle , a strategy for creating effective business communications ubiquitous in the consulting world. With the Pyramid Principle, you lead with your most important idea, followed by supporting ideas and facts. If your conclusion is that Acme Company should enter a new market, say it up front. Then go through each supporting argument in order of relative strength.

An important corollary to the above is the MECE Principle , which stands for mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

Compared with presenting a laundry list of ideas, MECE is a way to group them in a way that covers all relevant points without overlap. Using MECE to organize and group your ideas ensures a logically sound argument, while making the information easier for your audience to absorb.

3. Write your action titles

Once you have a defined structure for your PowerPoint presentation, you can get down to creating your slides. One of the most important things to remember as you do this is that each slide should present exactly one idea summarized in a single action title. All information presented on the slide must support the action title, including any charts. It is also important to avoid including any visual or textual elements that may convey or imply a different or conflicting message apart from the one in the action title.

One common strategy is to first write action titles for each slide to ensure they tell a complete story on their own. From there, you can go back to each slide and add details such as bullet points and charts.

4. Use a clean layout and formatting

When creating slides, it is crucial to avoid overcrowding them with excessive information or elements that can create visual confusion. One way to approach this is to visualize your slide as a table, laying out elements in columns and rows. Commonly used slide layouts consist of either two to three or four quadrants, depending on the nature of the content and the desired visual representation. You’ll also want to consider:

• The rule of thirds: Placing elements at one-third or two-thirds from the edge of the slide, and particularly where these gridlines intersect, is a universal rule for building a visually appealing slide.
• White space: Resist the temptation to pack too much into your slides. Leaving sufficient white space is essential for readability and helping the audience take in each slide’s main point.
• Presentation type: Key message presentations will have less content on each slide, compared with documentation presentations that include more detail.
• Fonts: Use the same font color and size for titles and body text throughout your slide deck, ideally in a sans serif font like Arial. Titles should be 20 to 24 point size, with body text 12 to 18 point based on the amount of content on the slides.

5. Organize your bullet points

A long list of bullet points is confusing and hard for audiences to digest. Instead, stick to three or five bullets, with a maximum of seven. Again, avoid packing in too much information, and all text should support the action title.

To improve clarity, write bullet points using parallel structure. In other words, if one bullet is a sentence, all of them should be in sentence form. The same goes for using sentence fragments or individual words. Each bullet should start with the same part of speech (e.g., noun, verb, adjective).

6. Choose the right chart

All chart data should be relevant to the slide’s action title. Say It with charts by Gene Zelazny offers a useful approach to choosing your chart in three steps:

• Identify which aspect of the data your chart will highlight
• Determine what you’re comparing, whether it’s components, change over time or correlation
• Select your chart according to the comparison you’re trying to make

7. Format your chart

Once you create a basic chart, you’ll want to format and annotate it in a way that conveys your message without confusion. This means:

• Including a chart title that summarizes the data and aligns with the slide’s action title
• Labeling both the x-axis and the y-axis with measurement units
• Using color sparingly to highlight the chart’s conclusion, for example using muted tones with one key vertical bar highlighted in a bolder color
• Adding trendlines to charts that can visually indicate patterns or trends in the data, for example, CAGRs
• Displaying legends to help viewers understand the meaning of different colors, symbols, or patterns used in the chart

A PowerPoint add-in like think-cell can help you create better slide decks and charts faster. Dynamic charts, process flows, annotations and text boxes all help organize complex information into visually sophisticated presentations, so you can spend less time struggling with formatting and more time on building a compelling story.

Building a PowerPoint presentation from scratch can seem like a tall order. By breaking it down into manageable steps, however, you can streamline the process while ensuring your audience leaves with a clear understanding of your message.

How to apply the MECE principle to PowerPoint presentations

Learn about the MECE principle and examples of how to apply it, plus how to use it to create stronger PowerPoint presentations faster.

May 17, 2023 | 11 min read

Using the Pyramid Principle to build better PowerPoint presentations

Learn how to use the Pyramid Principle to create more effective PowerPoint presentations, including how to organize ideas, present data and clarify your message.

February 07, 2023 | 6 min read

Why you should change the way you think about PowerPoint

Presentations shape the conversations and decisions that move business forward. And by approaching them this way, you can accelerate your growth.

February 07, 2023 | 3 min read

Role of data visualization in business decision-making

Understanding the rapid processing of visual information by the brain has significant implications in the business world, particularly for decision makers. In this blog, we will delve into the pivotal role data visualization plays in business decision-making.

July 25, 2023 | 8 min read

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10 Top PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Beginners

Written by: Heleana Tiburca

Creating a PowerPoint presentation can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be.

In this list, you’ll find the best practices and tips for creating a powerful PowerPoint presentation for beginners.

You’ll learn how to:

• Create a professional-looking slideshow presentation
• Keep your PowerPoint presentation design cohesive
• Make your slides interactive
• Animate text and graphics

So without further ado, let’s jump right in.

In this video, we've put together our top 13 presentation design tips to help you wow your audience and create the best slide deck they've ever seen.

10 Tips for Effective PowerPoint Presentations

Tip #1: choose an interesting topic, tip #2: do some deep research, tip #3: use an amazing presentation tool, tip #4: pick out a presentation template, tip #5: keep your audience in mind, tip #6: add eye-catching headings and text, tip #7: keep it engaging with animations, tip #8: make your powerpoint interactive, tip #9: add visuals to your presentation, tip #10: practice presenting your slideshow.

So, you need to create a PowerPoint presentation but don’t know where to start. The very first and most important thing you’ll need to do is to decide on your topic.

You’ll want to make sure that the topic you choose is interesting and engaging for those who will be listening to you present your slideshow.

If you’re not in control of your topic and you’ve been assigned a task to present, don’t worry. There are lots of different ways that you can capture your audience’s attention, and transform a boring topic into an incredibly interactive and engaging presentation.

You can do this by using an effective PowerPoint presentation template that will capture your audience’s attention, no matter how bland the subject.

Learn more about PowerPoint templates and how you can use them to your advantage in tip #4!

Once you’ve chosen your PowerPoint presentation topic, you need to make sure that you get all of your facts straight.

Do a deep dive into your research and come up with useful and interesting information that you can use at your next presentation.

Once you’ve gathered up some information, it’s time to make a bullet point list of topics you want to cover, to make sure you don’t leave anything important out in your presentation.

After you’ve created a bullet point list full of your main points and all the important points that you want to convey, you can then make an outline of your speech.

This can be a rough draft, or you can write out in great detail your entire “script”, so to say. If you’re a spontaneous writer, then you may want to write directly in the slideshow editor of your choice.

If not, you can write it all out on a document, so that you’re ready to copy and paste right onto your slideshow presentation.

The best way to create an amazing slideshow is by using an equally amazing slideshow tool.

A tool like Visme will help you create a professional-looking and exciting PowerPoint presentation efficiently and quickly, even as a beginner.

Visme is a slideshow presentation maker that lets you easily create your entire presentation from start to finish. You can even import existing PowerPoint presentations into Visme and edit them there. When you’ve finished editing, you can export editable PowerPoints to present offline.

Visme is a diverse tool that does so much more than just create PowerPoint presentations. You can create anything design-related there, including videos, social media posts, ebooks, manuals, infographics and more.

Other than hundreds of slide templates and fully designed presentations, you also get access to advanced editing tools to make your presentation unique and creative.

Add and replace backgrounds, tap into free libraries of photos, videos, icons and illustrations, add pre-animated assets or manually animate objects and text, and switch up the color scheme with a single click.

With Visme, creating presentations that stand out is as easy as 1-2-3.

Now, let’s jump into the specifics of how to make an effective presentation.

Ready to create your own presentation in minutes?

• Add your own text, images and more
• Customize colors, fonts and everything else
• Choose from hundreds of slide designs and templates
• Add interactive buttons and animations

Next on our list of PowerPoint tips for beginners is picking out the perfect template.

Visme is an amazing presentation software that has an abundance of slideshow presentation templates that you can choose from and customize.

We have modern PowerPoint templates, data-driven presentation templates, colorful templates and everything in between. Just scroll through all the templates and we’re confident you’ll find the perfect one for you.

If you want, you can even design templates of your own and save them for future slideshows that you want to create in a similar fashion.

You can also browse through our presentation themes, which include hundreds of pre-made slides you can mix and match to create your own presentation deck.

Once you pick out your template, you can edit every single design aspect, from the overlays to images, to the color scheme, clipart and stickers, slide transitions and more.

We recommend finding a template that resembles the presentation that you need so that the design process goes as smoothly and easily for you as possible. Creating a presentation should be enjoyable, and Visme makes that process possible.

If you are feeling confident and you don’t want to use one of our professionally designed slideshow templates, you can start from scratch and create your own. Add and remove as many pages are you want and benefit from our stock images and videos, stickers, text templates and more.

Once you’ve chosen your template, you need to think of your audience. Not every presentation design is going to be appropriate for every audience.

In order to make an effective PowerPoint, you need to get in your audience’s head. Ask yourself, “What do they want to see?” or “What value can I bring to them?”.

The design approach you take will greatly impact the results of your audience’s retention. You want to make sure that you please your audience as much as possible and keep them engaged with what you’re trying to convey to them.

If you need to create a report-based, data-driven presentation, then you need to add lots of charts. But not just any type of boring chart. You can use one of Visme’s beautiful charts and edit the values, axis, legend, colors, appearance and more.

If you already have your data in an Excel sheet or Google sheet, you can import them into Visme’s editor and they will automatically be turned into visual data.

You can also add charts and graphs, diagrams, tables, maps and data widgets. Whatever you need, Visme has it.

You want to make sure that your PowerPoint slideshow’s readability is on point. You can do this by choosing the clear and engaging fonts that go with your presentation topic and theme.

In Visme, you can customize the font, style, size and color of your text. Adjust spacing, borders and even animate the text to make your slides more engaging.

We have tons of typefaces for you to choose from, from Helvetica to Calibri and Arial, to sans-serif and serif fonts, we know you’ll find the perfect one to create a great presentation.

Remember, less is more when it comes to a seamless design. Instead of lines upon lines of text, you should be strategic about your text design.

Make sure not to use more than 3 different typefaces per slide. This will keep your design looking sleek and not overloaded.

You can do also use premade text templates created by our professional designers. Simply scroll through all the different text templates, find one you like, and drag and drop it onto your slide. From there, you can customize it as much as you please.

It’s important to keep all the design elements and text on your slideshow aligned, so take advantage of our grid and keep everything visually pleasing and aligned.

You can drive your main points home with a large heading, and align other, smaller text boxes beneath to make sure you stay on track and don’t deter from your main points.

One way you can make your text stand out is to incorporate shapes. If you want to make your text pop out and come to life, add a shape behind them.

Make sure the shape color you choose is a good contrast to the text color so that you can easily see what is written out without having to squint your eyes and decipher what’s written.

You can also take advantage of negative space in your design. If you feel like there’s an empty spot in your slide that looks a little awkward, it’s the perfect place to add some text.

Using negative space for showcasing text is always visually appealing, so use those blank spaces to your advantage!

Another great way you can keep your audience engaged with your presentation is by animating objects. Instead of just showing them a boring, static slide, why not animate the text and objects to bring everything to life?

In Visme’s editor, you can animate any object with just the click of a button.

Make any element slide in and out, bounce, fade in or fade out, spin, appear from thin air and more. There are so many ways you can animate objects and fit your design style to make your presentation stand out from the rest.

You can even go through our library of professionally designed animated graphics and drop them onto your slide. Choose from animated characters, illustrations, icons, special effects and avatars.

Once you add an animated graphic to your design, you can customize them in many different ways, such as editing the pose, speed, repetitions and colors.

Instead of just having your next slide show up as a static image, use a transition between the two slides in order to make the transition seamless.

Visme has lots of elegant and modern transitions to choose from. Scroll through our transition presets and try them out to see which one suits your style best. You might like the zoom-in transition, slide-in or fade.

There are so many transitions for you to choose from, but we recommend you find the one you like most and use it for all slide transitions for the entire slideshow presentation. This will keep your design cohesive and easy on the eyes.

Don’t forget, you can also use sound effects in your presentation when necessary and you want to grab your audience’s attention!

Throughout the entire presentation, you’ll want to make sure that you keep things interactive and entertaining for your audience.

Even though PowerPoint is widely used for creating slideshows, there are many different presentation softwares you can use.

If you use Visme’s presentation maker, you can make your slideshow interactive. One way you can do that is by adding external links to any graphic in the presentation. This way, you can quickly access different pages and documents without ever needing to leave the slideshow.

Another amazing interactive feature of Visme’s is the interactive maps and data visualizations. You can have your viewers simply scroll and hover over an object and more information will pop up.

For example, if you want to create a map with statistics regarding each state, you could add the information to each state in the chart, and then when someone hovers over the state, the statistic will pop up.

This is very convenient for conveying lots of information in an organized way.

You can’t have a good presentation without adding high-quality images, videos, stickers and clipart to your presentation. Without engaging visuals, you’ll quickly lose your viewer’s attention, and risk having a boring PowerPoint presentation.

Visme makes it incredibly simple to add your own multimedia. If you want to upload your own photos, video or audio, you can do so by clicking on “photos” or “media” and clicking “upload.”

Once you click on the “upload” button, you can upload your multimedia from your computer, then find it in your Visme library.

If by chance you aren’t happy with the media you have, or you don’t have any images to upload at all, there’s no need to worry.

Visme is loaded full of high-quality videos and images that are free for you to use in your presentation designs.

If you want to browse through millions of stock videos and stock images, just click on “photos” in the left menu toolbar. This will take you to all of our stock images. To search for a specific image, type a keyword in the search bar to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Once you find the perfect image or video, you can drag and drop it onto your presentation. You can then add shapes and frames to your image for a modern, geometric look.

If you’d like to edit and enhance your chosen image, you can do so in the Visme editor. You can change the brightness, contrast, colors, shadows and more. You can add and customize filters to your images for a cohesive color scheme.

For a highly effective and great presentation, you need to feel confident when presenting.

Firstly, You can rest assured that after creating a PowerPoint presentation in Visme, your design will be professional and engaging for your crowd, but now it’s up to you.

You need to be as engaging and exciting as your presentation is, so don’t wait until the last minute to practice your public speaking. Rehearsing your slideshow presentation will simplify the public speaking process and things will go much better if you practice.

Having a bulleted list next to you so you stay on track and making eye contact with your audience will help them pay attention, and will make a good presentation an excellent one.

The more you practice, the more comfortable you’ll be with your presentation. So make sure to run through it a few times and you’ll be good to go.

Ready to Level Up Your Presentations?

The best way you can create a powerful Microsoft PowerPoint presentation is by using a tool that isn’t necessarily PowerPoint.

Visme is an all-in-one design tool that will aid you in not only creating slideshows but any other type of visual content that you need, such as infographics, social media posts and documents.

Give Visme a go and create a free account today . You might become addicted to its awesomeness, so use it at your own risk!

We know that after reading all these tips, your presentation skills have gone through the roof. You’re practically a master slide-maker by now.

If want even more information and tips that can help you create modern PowerPoint designs, you can check out some of our tutorials on our YouTube channel .

We hope this article was helpful to you and we wish you the best of luck on your upcoming presentation. We know you’re going to smash it!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

We have received lots of questions regarding PowerPoint presentations and we want to make sure you get the answers you're looking for.

So let’s dive into your questions.

Q1. What is the 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint?

The 10 20 30 Rule of PowerPoint suggests that each presentation should have 10 slides, shouldn’t last any more than 20 minutes in total and all fonts should be at least 30 points or larger.

This is a great rule of thumb to keep in mind when creating a PowerPoint presentation.

Q2. What is the 5 by 5 rule in PowerPoint?

The 5 by 5 rule was put in place to help keep your audience from feeling overwhelmed by text.

The text on each slide should be short and to the point and have no more than five words per line and no more than five lines of text per slide.

Q3. How do you make a good PowerPoint presentation?

A good PowerPoint presentation is created in a great design tool like Visme.

Choose an engaging template, know your main points, use engaging images and animations, and drive home your main points by practicing presenting your presentation before going public with it.

Q4. What makes an effective PowerPoint presentation?

You can create an effective PowerPoint presentation by using no more than 10 slides, not overwhelming your audience with big chunks of text, having all your design elements aligned, using a great template, knowing your main points and driving them points home with a great closing argument.

Q5. What are the advantages of PowerPoint templates?

Some of the advantages to using PowerPoint templates are that you get professionally designed slideshows without having to know how to design and you can quickly copy and paste your text into the text boxes already set up for you.

But you don’t have to use PowerPoint to create PowerPoint presentations. You can use a design tool like Visme to create amazing PowerPoint Presentations.

Q6. How to make a PowerPoint presentation attractive?

One powerful way you can make your PowerPoint presentation attractive is by using high-quality visuals. This includes having high-quality images, videos, stickers, transitions, animations and more.

One easy way you can do this is by using a Visme PowerPoint presentation PowerPoint and customizing it to suit your needs.

Q7. What should a PowerPoint presentation include?

A good PowerPoint presentation should include about 10 slides full of useful information, engaging visuals, interactive elements and high-quality images among other important things.

You text should be clear and easy to read, the images shouldn’t be blurry, your main points need to be easy to spot as soon as you open the slide and you should include seamless transitions.

Q8. What’s the best alternative to PowerPoint?

The best alternative to PowerPoint in our opinion is Visme.

Visme is a presentation maker, but it's also much more than that. You can create animated slideshows, documents, infographics, social media posts, videos, and more quickly and easily.

Unlike other tools, Visme gives you the most value for your money. You can also tap into features like data visualization, brand management, team collaboration, customizable animated assets like illustrations, icons and characters, and much more.

Ready to get started? Sign up for a free Visme account today and take it for a test drive for as long as you like.

Create beautiful presentations faster with Visme.

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About the Author

I’m Heleana and I’m a content creator here at Visme. My passion is to help people find the information they’re looking for in the most fun and enjoyable way possible. Let’s make information beautiful.

Home Blog Presentation Ideas 23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging and Interactive Presentations

23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging and Interactive Presentations

PowerPoint presentations are not usually known for being engaging or interactive. That’s often because most people treat their slides as if they are notes to read off  and not a tool to help empower their message.

Your presentation slides are there to help bring to life the story you are telling. They are there to provide visuals and empower your speech.

So how do you go about avoiding a presentation “snoozefest” and instead ensure you have an engaging and interactive presentation?  By making sure that you use your slides to help YOU tell your story, instead of using them as note cards to read off of.

The key thing to remember is that your presentation is there to compliment your speech, not be its focus.

In this article, we will review several presentation tips and tricks on how to become a storytelling powerhouse by building a powerful and engaging PowerPoint presentation.

Start with writing your speech outline, not with putting together slides

Use more images and less text, use high-quality images, keep the focus on you and your presentation, not the powerpoint, your presentation should be legible from anywhere in the room, use a consistent presentation design, one topic per slide, avoid information overwhelm by using the “rule of three”.

• Display one bullet at a time

Avoid unnecessary animations

• Only add content that supports your main points
• Do not use PowerPoint as a teleprompter
• Never Give Out Copies of the Presentation

Re-focus the attention on you by fading into blackness

Change the tone of your voice when presenting, host an expert discussion panel, ask questions, embed videos, use live polling to get instant feedback and engage the audience.

• He kept his slides uncluttered and always strived for simplicity
• He was known to use large font size, the bigger, the better.
• He found made the complex sound simple.

He was known to practice, practice, and keep on practicing.

Summary – how to make your presentation engaging & interactive, fundamental rules to build powerful & engaging presentation slides.

Before we go into tips and tricks on how to add flair to your presentations and create effective presentations, it’s essential to get the fundamentals of your presentation right.

Your PowerPoint presentation is there to compliment your message, and the story you are telling. Before you can even put together slides, you need to identify the goal of your speech, and the key takeaways you want your audience to remember.

YOU and your speech are the focus of this presentation, not the slides – use your PowerPoint to complement your story.

Keep in mind that your slides are there to add to your speech, not distract from it.  Using too much text in your slides can be distracting and confusing to your audience. Instead, use a relevant picture with minimal text, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

This slide is not unusual, but is not a visual aid, it is more like an “eye chart”.

Aim for something simpler, easy to remember and concise, like the slides below.

Keep in mind your audience when designing your presentation, their background and aesthetics sense. You will want to avoid the default clip art and cheesy graphics on your slides.

While presenting make sure to control the presentation and the room by walking around, drawing attention to you and what you are saying.  You should occasionally stand still when referencing a slide, but never turn your back to your audience to read your slide.

You and your speech are the presentations; the slides are just there to aid you.

Most season presenters don’t use anything less than twenty-eight point font size, and even Steve Jobs was known to use nothing smaller than forty-point text fonts.

If you can’t comfortably fit all the text on your slide using 28 font size than you’re trying to say and cram too much into the slide, remember tip #1.4 – Use relevant images instead and accompany it with bullets.

Best Practice PowerPoint Presentation Tips

The job of your presentation is to help convey information as efficiently and clearly as possible. By keeping the theme and design consistent, you’re allowing the information and pictures to stand out.

However, by varying the design from slide to slide, you will be causing confusion and distraction from the focus, which is you and the information to be conveyed on the slide.

Technology can also help us in creating a consistent presentation design just by picking a topic and selecting a sample template style. This is possible thanks to the SlideModel’s AI slideshow maker .

Each slide should try to represent one topic or talking point. The goal is to keep the attention focused on your speech, and by using one slide per talking point, you make it easy for you to prepare, as well as easy for your audience to follow along with your speech.

Sometimes when creating our presentation, we can often get in our heads and try to over-explain. A simple way to avoid this is to follow the “Rule of Three,” a concept coined by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

The idea is to stick to only 3 main ideas that will help deliver your point.  Each of the ideas can be further broken into 3 parts to explain further. The best modern example of this “Rule of Three” can be derived from the great Apple presentations given by Steve Jobs – they were always structured around the “Rule of Three.”

Display one sentence at a time

If you are planning to include text in your slides, try to avoid bullet lists, and use one slide per sentence. Be short and concise. This best practice focuses on the idea that simple messages are easy to retain in memory. Also, each slide can follow your storytelling path, introducing the audience to each concept while you speak, instead of listing everything beforehand.

Presentation Blunders To Avoid

In reality, there is no need for animations or transitions in your slides.

It’s great to know how to turn your text into fires or how to create a transition with sparkle effects, but the reality is the focus should be on the message. Using basic or no transitions lets the content of your presentation stand out, rather than the graphics.

If you plan to use animations, make sure to use modern and professional animations that helps the audience follow the story you are telling, for example when explaining time series or changing events over time.

Only add engaging content that supports your main points

You might have a great chart, picture or even phrase you want to add, but when creating every slide, it’s crucial to ask yourself the following question.

“Does this slide help support my main point?”

If the answer is no, then remove it.  Remember, less is more.

Do not use PowerPoint as a Teleprompter

A common crutch for rookie presenters is to use slides as their teleprompter.

First of all, you shouldn’t have that much text on your slides. If you have to read off something, prepare some index cards that fit in your hand but at all costs do not turn your back on your audience and read off of your PowerPoint.  The moment you do that, you make the presentation the focus, and lose the audience as the presenter.

Avoid Giving Out Copies of the Presentation

At least not before you deliver a killer presentation; providing copies of your presentation gives your audience a possible distraction where they can flip through the copy and ignore what you are saying.

It’s also easy for them to take your slides out of context without understanding the meaning behind each slide.  It’s OK to give a copy of the presentation, but generally it is better to give the copies AFTER you have delivered your speech. If you decide to share a copy of your presentation, the best way to do it is by  generating a QR code  for it and placing it at the end of your presentation. Those who want a copy can simply scan and download it onto their phones.

Tips To Making Your Presentation More Engaging

The point of your presentation is to help deliver a message.

When expanding on a particularly important topic that requires a lengthy explanation it’s best to fade the slide into black.  This removes any distraction from the screen and re-focuses it on you, the present speaker. Some presentation devices have a built-in black screen button, but if they don’t, you can always prepare for this by adding a black side to your presentation at the right moment.

“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”

Part of making your presentation engaging is to use all the tools at your disposal to get your point across. Changing the inflection and tone of your voice as you present helps make the content and the points more memorable and engaging.

One easy and powerful way to make your presentation interactive is experts to discuss a particular topic during your presentation. This helps create a more engaging presentation and gives you the ability to facilitate and lead a discussion around your topic.

It’s best to prepare some questions for your panel but to also field questions from the audience in a question and answer format.

How To Make Your Presentation More Interactive

What happens if I ask you to think about a pink elephant?  You probably briefly think about a pink elephant, right?

Asking questions when presenting helps engage the audience, and arouse interest and curiosity.  It also has the added benefit of making people pay closer attention, in case they get called on.

So don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if rhetorical; asking a question engages a different part of our brain. It causes us to reflect rather than merely take in the information one way. So ask many of them.

Asking questions can also be an excellent way to build suspense for the next slide.

(Steve Jobs was known to ask questions during his presentations, in this slide he built suspense by asking the audience “Is there space for a device between a cell phone and a laptop?” before revealing the iPad) Source: MacWorld SF 2018

Remember the point of your presentation is to get a message across and although you are the presenter, it is completely fine to use video in your PowerPoint to enhance your presentation.  A relevant video can give you some breathing time to prepare the next slides while equally informing the audience on a particular point.

CAUTION: Be sure to test the video beforehand, and that your audience can hear it in the room.

A trending engagement tool among presenters is to use a live polling tool to allow the audience to participate and collect immediate feedback.

Using a live polling tool is a fun and interactive way to engage your audience in real-time and allow them to participate in part of your presentation.

Google Slides has a built-in Q&A feature that allows presenters to make the slide deck more interactive by providing answers to the audience’s questions. By using the Q&A feature in Google Slides, presenters can start a live Q&A session and people can ask questions directly from their devices including mobile and smartphones.

Key Takeaways from one of the best presenters, Steve Jobs

He kept his slides uncluttered and always strove for simplicity.

In this slide, you can easily see he is talking about the battery life, and it uses a simple image and a few words. Learning from Jobs, you can also make a great presentation too. Focus on the core benefit of your product and incorporate great visuals.

Source: Macworld 2008

SlideModel.com can help to reproduce high-impact slides like these, keeping your audience engagement.

He was known to use large font sizes, the bigger, the better

A big font makes it hard to miss the message on the slide, and allows the audience to focus on the presenter while clearing the understanding what the point of the slide is.

He found made the complex sound simple

When explaining a list of features, he used a simple image and lines or simple tables to provide visual cues to his talking points.

What made Steve Jobs the master of presentation, was the ritual of practicing with his team, and this is simple yet often overlooked by many presenters.  It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking you don’t need to practice because you know the material so well.

While all these tips will help you create a truly powerful presentation , it can only achieve if applied correctly.

It’s important to remember when trying to deliver an amazing experience, you should be thoroughly prepared. This way, you can elevate your content presentation, convey your message effectively and captivate your audience.

This includes having your research cited, your presentation rehearsed.  Don’t just rehearse your slides, also take time to practice your delivery, and your tone.  The more you rehearse, the more relaxed you will be when delivering. The more confident you will feel.

While we can’t help you with the practice of your next presentation, we can help you by making sure you look good, and that you have a great design and cohesiveness.

You focus on the message and content; we’ll focus on making you look good.

Have a tip you would like to include?  Be sure to mention it in the comments!

Like this article? Please share

Audience, Engaging, Feedback, Interactive, Poll, Rule of Three, Steve Jobs Filed under Presentation Ideas

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Very great advices!

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30 PowerPoint Presentation Tips to Make Good PPT Slides in 2024 (+ 6 Expert Tips)

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Here are 30 quick PowerPoint presentation tips to help you improve your presentations. 

Plus, get PowerPoint tips on changing your slide design to make your content shine. We've even called on six presentation experts for their best tips.

How to Make a Good PowerPoint Presentation (Watch & Learn)

This screencast is a speed round of my very favorite PowerPoint tricks. It's a great resource to learn how to make a presentable PowerPoint. I'll walk you through ten of my favorite PowerPoint tips and tricks to create a better presentation.

Keep reading for an illustrated version of these good PPT tips (and more) that you can use to improve your PowerPoint presentations. You'll see 30 of our favorite PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, including techniques to update slide master PowerPoint 2024 designs.

Jump to content in this section:

• How Do You Give a Memorable PPT Presentation?
• Practice Makes Perfect
• Adapt Your Presentation to the Audience
• Use a Custom Font
• Use Contrast
• Avoid Too Many Animations
• Use the Rule of Three
• Use a Custom PPT Theme Design
• Make Use of Charts and Graphs
• Use the Built-in Slide Layouts
• Align Text Consistently
• Make Your Exports User-Friendly
• Try a Different Color Scheme
• Edit Slide Masters for Consistency
• Use the Alignment Feature
• Use Stock Assets
• Reduce Your Content
• Rethink Your Slide Order
• Use PowerPoint Animations
• Invite Collaborators
• Add Supporting Video Clips
• Use Infographic Templates
• Use Impactful Closing Techniques
• Include Data in the Appendix
• Alternate Between Solid Color and White Slides
• Present Information With Maps
• Keep the Design Best Practices in Mind
• Set a Time Limit
• Test Your Content Everywhere

30 Tips: How to Make Good PowerPoint Presentation Designs Fast in 2024

A few tried and true tips can help you speed up your PowerPoint presentation design. Check out 30 of my favorite PowerPoint tips to do just that. Each of these give you PowerPoint slideshow help to create good PowerPoint slides:

1. How Do You Give a Memorable PPT Presentation?

If you're learning the top PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, you're probably asking yourself: how do I give a presentation that won't be forgotten?

We all want to be remembered. The best PowerPoint slideshow help to make a mark on the audience. There are tried-and-true ways to do just that, and expert Neil Tomlinson shares expertise on being remembered:

Get your main point into the presentation as early as possible (this avoids any risk of audience fatigue or attention span waning), then substantiate your point with facts, figures etc and then reiterate your point at the end in a ‘Summary’.

2. Practice Makes Perfect

Also, don’t forget to practice your presentation. Go through your slide deck a few times to make sure you know it like the back of your hand when the big day arrives. Doing so helps you feel more confident. It'll reduce any anxiety and nervousness you might feel as the presentation day approaches.

What's the best way to rehears for a good PowerPoint? Here's one of the top PowerPoint presentation tips from expert presenter Sandra Zimmer :

Once slides are ready, practice one slide at a time aloud until you feel like you know it and like the flow of speech. Be willing to change anything that does not feel in flow. At the end of learning all your slides, practice the whole talk.

If you want even more great PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, check out the following post:

3. Adapt Your Presentation to the Audience

Let's say that you're a seasoned presenter with a pretty standard set of presentation topics. Maybe you're an expert in your field, and you're asked to give a PPT presentation frequently on similar topics.

That's the value of being an expert. You might have a standard spiel that you give your audiences, and your content won't totally change from one presentation to another. That's why it helps to make only slight tweaks to adapt your presentation to each audience.

Leading presentation expert Suzannah Baum offered up this advice:

Different audiences will have different needs and different challenges, which requires me to re-sequence the slides, or create new ones. I tend to do a lot of research on my audiences – via surveys, interviews, and conversations with the hiring manager – to help me better understand what information would be most relevant to them.

How do you adapt to your audience? Here are a few more tips:

• Learn about them. If you're asked to speak, talk to the curator of the presentation to learn more about the audience and their background.
• Ask about them! With contact details, send out a survey or a response link to ask for feedback and preparation info. Ask leading questions like "what do you want to learn?"
• Consider the environment.  If you're presenting via Zoom, your style will differ from presenting in person. The key is to acknowledge the difference and adapt to your environment.

Learn everything you can about your audience. Learning how to make a presentable PowerPoint is all about thinking of the recipient, not the presenter!

4. Use a Custom Font

A PowerPoint presentation tip that'll make your slideshow more interesting and more engaging is to use a custom font.

Fonts set the tone for your presentation. So, when you use a premium font, you’re opting for a high-quality font while also adding a personal or creative touch. 

When choosing a font, remember that you want everyone to read your text easily. 

5. Use Contrast

One PowerPoint trick is to use contrast to make some of your text stand out or make it easier to read.

If you’re putting text over an image on our PowerPoint slide, you may need to use a white box with black text in it to make your text easier to read. You can also use contrasting colors to highlight important text.

6. Avoid Too Many Animations

Another PowerPoint tip is to avoid having too many animations or transitions.

When you've got too many animations, it can be distracting to the audience. It’s not only distracting, but it's unprofessional.

It’s best to stick to one or two animations throughout your presentation. Also, if you've got any animations in your presentation, make sure to test them to see if they work before presenting.

7. Add Audio

Include audio on a slide on PowerPoint to increase audience engagement. Audio can be anything from fun sound effects to interview clips. You can even add an audio clip of your voice.

Audio gives you a break from speaking while also engaging the audience. Envato Elements has hundreds of premium audio clips if you want to add some.

8. Use the Rule of Three

One PowerPoint tip and trick is to follow the rules of PowerPoint.

One of those rules is the rule of three. It's where you start by dividing your presentation into thirds. Everything should come in thirds, so if you use bullet points, you should only have three. If you use icons, you should only have three.

When things come in threes, it's easier to remember them. For more information, read this informative article:

9. Use a Custom PPT Theme Design

Above all, consistently use custom PowerPoint themes. Microsoft has built-in themes that you can use for free, sure. But the premium themes that are on Envato Elements   are a major step-up from PowerPoint's built-in themes. 

When you subscribe to Envato Elements, you'll have access to unlimited downloads of all the PowerPoint themes. Right now, Envato Elements has almost 4,000 PowerPoint themes and that number is always growing. You'll learn tips for a good PowerPoint presentation by using the best templates.

10. Make Use of Charts and Graphs

Illustrate your data with the use of charts and graphs. Not only will you be able to make your presentation more visually appealing, but you'll also help your audience remember the information better.

Many PowerPoint templates already include chart and graph elements. Easily customize them to make your data and stats more interesting and easier to understand.

Want to learn more about how to use data? Turn to expert Adrienne J ohnston , a presentation professional:

When it comes to visualizing data in presentations, we have to remember that our audience does not need all the fine details of the data - they need the main takeaway and we need to make sure that's evident to them when looking at the slide.

11. Use the Built-in Slide Layouts

Inside of PowerPoint themes, you'll find layouts , which are custom slide designs.

Most themes include a selection of content layouts that you can use as a starting point for your own slide designs. You can leverage slide master PowerPoint 2024 designs with the help of layouts.

Layouts are like a starting point for your PowerPoint presentation slides. They contain combinations of placeholders for text boxes, images, and more.

Instead of clicking and drawing individual objects onto the slide, use one of these layouts to start your slide off. It's one of the top PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks to save time.

12. Align Text Consistently

When you're working with text on your slide, it helps to ensure that it aligns consistently. Keeping your text aligned in the same orientation really makes a slide look clean. 

In the example below, I've basically got three text boxes:

• list of bulleted points

Notice that all this text is aligned left. 

Aligning text was the " aha " moment that I learned when I started studying slide design. It's one of those steps that makes a slide look much neater and professional, so keep it in mind when designing.

13. Make Your Exports User-Friendly

No matter how great your PowerPoint presentation slides look, you need to think about how your user will use the presentation file. 

Any of these are likely scenarios if you're regularly sending presentations to other users:

• The viewer may not have PowerPoint installed on their computer.
• The recipient may be using a version of PowerPoint that renders the presentation differently.
• Maybe you don't want the user to be able to make any edits or see your notes in the presentation file.

In this case, my favorite tip is to export the presentation as a PDF. To do that, go to File > Export > Create PDF , and then save your presentation as a PDF.

This is sure to help most of your users see the presentation just the way you intended.

14. Try a Different Color Scheme

Many PowerPoint themes have more than one color scheme that you can apply to your presentation. On the Design  tab, click on the drop-down next to Themes to try out a different color scheme.

Typically, these will restyle your entire presentation. Premium themes that you might get from Envato Elements, for example, may have many versions inside the original presentation zip file.

15. Edit Slide Masters for Consistency

The slide master controls the design for your PowerPoint slide. Instead of making the same change to each slide, apply a change to a slide master. It'll affect all the PowerPoint presentation slides that use the same master.

It's ideal to apply a logo to the slide master itself, for example. This keeps the logo the same size and in the same position on each slide.

To do that, go to View > Slide Master.  On the right side, you're likely to see a variety of slide masters that control designs for many slides. Drop the elements that you want to remain consistent onto one of the slide masters.

16. Use the Alignment Feature

PowerPoint presentation slides look better when the objects on them are in line with one another. There's a certain visual rhythm that occurs when objects line up in the center or along certain boundary lines.

When you start dragging objects on your slide, you'll see guiding lines that pop up. These are very intuitive, and you'll likely notice that they help you line up your objects. You might seem them pop up when you've got a box that's equidistant between two other objects on the slide, for example.

This is one of the best tricks for improving the look of your PowerPoint slide. Spend some time making sure that your key elements line up cohesively.

17. Use Stock Assets

Earlier, I mentioned using Envato Elements to grab PowerPoint themes. But there's more that comes with an Envato Elements subscription for presentations.

That includes a wide variety of stock photos, graphics,  and custom designed fonts  that you can use in your presentation. Instead of reusing the same stock photo or clip art, Envato Elements has everything you need to supplement a presentation. 

Again, Envato Elements is the perfect subscription if you build presentations. It's a one-stop-shop that you can use to fill content.

18. Reduce Your Content

There's nothing that makes an audience tune out faster than being overloaded with slide content. Sometimes we try to make so many points that the audience misses all of them due to information overload.

Less is truly more. When you cut the weaker points of your presentation, the audience's attention will follow your key points accordingly.

It seems like cheating, but one of the best steps that you can take for your slide is to simply reduce the number of items that are on it. Convert some of your typed points to things you'll speak verbally.

19. Rethink Your Slide Order

Sometimes, I find that my presentations are out of order. I might spend too much time explaining my decision before I get to the conclusion.

In these cases, I like to use Slide Sorter View  to re-sequence the slides in my presentation. To access this view, go to View > Slide Sorter  on PowerPoint's ribbon.

From Slide Sorter view, you've got a top-down view of all the slides in your presentation deck. It sometimes becomes obvious that the slides can be reordered into a better sequence from this view.

20. Use PowerPoint Animations 

One of my favorite PowerPoint presentation tips is to complement your major points with a bit of animation. Using animation can bring a key point onto your slide with style!

Check out ten of the best PowerPoint tips for how to use animation from expert Sven Lenaerts below:

21. Invite Collaborators

Building a presentation often benefits from a second set of eyes. That's why it helps so much to invite a collaborator to work with you side-by-side in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Pushing your presentation up to OneDrive and inviting collaborators is easy. Thanks to the cloud-based approach, more than one user can edit a slide deck in real time. Learn how to do that in the tutorial below:

22. Add Supporting Video Clips

Building impactful presentations is all about adding other perspectives and angles to the content. One of my favorite ways to do that is to add a video clip. Maybe that's a production that you built on your own or found on sites like YouTube.

Either way, learn how to add and auto play a video clip in the quick tip below:

23. Use Infographic Templates

More presentations than ever will feature visuals that tell stories with data. But it's easy for an audience become overwhelmed with data. 

That's where infographics come into play. Learn to use them in PowerPoint in the tutorial below:

24. Use Impactful Closing Techniques

I've sat through many presentations in my life. I can only remember a few that really stick out, thanks to techniques that highlighted key points. You need PowerPoint tips and tricks that help leave your audience with an impact.

To do just that, make sure you use some of the techniques highlighted in the article below:

To do that, just drag and drop the thumbnails into the order you want. When you return to Normal view, the PowerPoint presentation slides will be in the resequenced order you set here.

25. Include Data in the Appendix

Many PowerPoint presentations include data in the form of charts and graphs. That means that you'll condense specifics into a few easy-to-follow charts.

But what if your audience wants more of the backing details? Maybe they want to validate and review the detail for themselves. In that case, a   set of  appendix slides  with extra data is sure to help.

Appendix slides are included at the end of a presentation deck for backup purposes. You might not present them, but your audience is certain to appreciate that you included them. That helps your presentation continue to be useful even after you leave the room.

Here's a great tip from: pro presenter  Graeme Thomas of Johnny F Designs:

If (my clients) are sending the deck straight to clients however, I would then put all the information on the slides but will often use more slides so that they aren't too cluttered. In cases where there is a lot of content, like financial statements, I would use  appendix slides.

Including an appendix helps your audience understand data  without  overwhelming them with that data. Follow these tips so that you get the best of both worlds.

26. Alternate Between Solid Color and White Slides

Alternating between solid color and slides with a white background can produce an interesting visual effect and engage your audience. You can use the solid-colored slides to signify a new section in your presentation.

Not to mention, solid-colored slides are the perfect way to re-enforce your brand colors and build your brand recognition.

27. Present Information With Maps

If you’re trying to make a case for a global expansion or need to report on how other branches are performing, consider using a map to help your audience visualize the data.

There's no shortage of quality PowerPoint templates with maps built in so be sure to take advantage of them.

28. Keep the Design Best Practices in Mind

The design of your presentation matters just as much as the content of your presentation. That’s why you need to devote an equal amount of time to making sure the design of your presentation is on point as you do to the actual content.

Familiarize yourself with best design practices and keep them in mind as you go about customizing your template.

29. Set a Time Limit

How many slides is the right number for you? Well, it all depends on the time limit you set for your presentation.

Believe it or not, setting a time limit is helpful to create good PowerPoint slides. If you want to learn how to make a presentable PowerPoint, it's a must to lock in the time limit and ensure that your slides support that timeframe. 

Expert presenter Stephanie Ottavan offers one of our top tips for a good PowerPoint presentation based on time limits:

A presenter is usually limited to a specific time frame and you want to adhere to that as closely as you can. If you have animations and transitions in your deck, these take added time so make sure to rehearse in “show mode” of PowerPoint or Keynote and time yourself.

Believe it or not, setting a time frame is one of the most important part of creating a PPT presentation. It helps you influence how many good PowerPoint slides you should design.

30. Test Your Content Everywhere

PowerPoint in 2024 could take place anywhere. Maybe you present, online, in-person, or beam it to mobile devices. It's important to remember that the content will appear differently on each device.

PowerPoint Online is a different medium than many other apps. Make sure that your presentation design appears the same by testing it with the help of this tutorial. It shows you how your PPT presentation appears even in a browser:

Discover Great Premium PowerPoint Templates With Google Slides (For 2024)

Creating a great presentation starts with a great template. And a great PowerPoint slide design use the best presentation practices, for example:

• Use high-quality photos and graphics to help tell the story.
• Keep text to a minimum.
• Stick to one idea per slide.

Designing a great template doesn’t mean you've got to start from scratch, though. Take a look at some of the best PowerPoint templates we've got on Envato Elements.

1. Neo PowerPoint Template

The Neo PowerPoint template features a modern and bold design and includes five color variations to get you started. Along with this, you'll also get 10 master slides and 30 individual slides for all your presentation needs.

2. Vexana PowerPoint Template

The Vexana template is a great choice for brands that need a touch of elegance. This template works with PowerPoint and Google Slides and comes with a grand total of 150 slides. It also has five color variations and includes infographic elements and photo placeholders.

3. Sprint PowerPoint Template

The Sprint PowerPoint template features a professional and modern design. The template is easy to customize. You'll find 20 masters in the standard 4:3 size, allowing you to choose the best layout for your information.

4. Travelicious PowerPoint Template

For any presentation that deals with the topic of travel, check out the Travelicious template. This template is compatible with both PowerPoint and Google Slides. It includes three premade color variations as well as 30 unique slides.

 As you can see from the examples above, there's no shortage of beautiful and professional PowerPoint slide designs on Envato Elements . What’s more, Envato Elements allows you to download as many PowerPoint templates as you want. Plus, get thousands of other design assets such as fonts, photos, and icons—all for one low monthly price.

Want to see even more great PowerPoint template examples? Be sure to check out our related roundup:

Need Help? Grab Our Making Great Presentations eBook (Free)

We've got the perfect complement to this tutorial. You can find more information in our eBook on making great presentations . Download this PDF eBook now for FREE with your subscription to the Tuts+ Business Newsletter. 

It'll help you master the presentation process from initial creative ideas through to writing, design, and delivering with impact.

PowerPoint Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Now that you’ve read about PowerPoint tips and tricks, if you want to learn more about PowerPoint, here are some FAQs:

1. What Is a Placeholder?

Placeholders in your slide on PowerPoint help you easily add text or images to your slide without changing your design.

In a template, sometimes the placeholders have prompts such as “Click to insert a picture” or “Click to add text.” These prompts let you know what kind of placeholder it is. To learn more about placeholders, read this article: 

2. How Can I Automatically Play a Video?

A PowerPoint tip is to insert an automatically played video in your presentation. When you've got a video that'll play automatically, it saves you the trouble of starting your video manually.

Videos can illustrate topics or specific points. They're also a great way to keep your audience engaged. If you want to learn how to play a video automatically, read this tutorial:

3. How Can I Add a Map to my Slide?

Another PowerPoint trick is to add a map to your slide. If you're discussing a specific location, then a map can help your audience visualize the location you're presenting. To learn how to add a map to your PowerPoint slide, read this tutorial:

4. How Do I Add a GIF to My Presentation?

Adding a GIF to your slide on PowerPoint is one way you can grab your audience's attention. To add a GIF to your slide, you’ll need to download a GIF.

Once you download it, upload it into PowerPoint and use it on your slide. For more information about how to add a GIF to your slide on PowerPoint, read this article:

5. Can I Recover My Unsaved Presentation?

Another PowerPoint trick is to learn how to recover unsaved PowerPoint files so that you can be prepared in case of an emergency. If you want to learn more, read this tutorial:

Learn More About How to Make Presentable PowerPoints

These quick PowerPoint Presentation tips are some of my favorite ways to rapidly improve a presentation. Keeping them in mind while you build a presentation can help you build a deck that you'll be confident about presenting.

Check out these tutorials to keep learning more about PowerPoint. These tutorials will give you more ideas for fixing up your PowerPoint presentation slides efficiently:

Find More Templates

Didn't see a template you like? Here are some more:

Use These PPT Presentation Tips on Your Next Presentation

Now that you've studied some of our best PowerPoint tips, it's time to put them to use. Download one of our top-notch PowerPoint themes from Envato Elements to get started. These PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks give you confidence to make you a skilled presenter.

Editorial Note : This post was first published in February of 2019. Our staff updates this post regularly — adding new, exciting PowerPoint tips and templates (with special help from Brenda Barron , Andrew Childress and Sarah Joy ).

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Blog / Presentation Design / The six rules of impactful PowerPoint design.

The six rules of impactful PowerPoint design.

You don’t need to be a professional designer to enhance the look of your PowerPoint presentations. Find out how to design professional, visually-striking slides with our six PowerPoint design rules. Given the fact that PowerPoint presentations are the most ubiquitous communication tool in business and education, it’s crazy how many bad ones are out there. You’d think that because of how important presentations are to business strategy , most organisations would have at least a vague idea of PowerPoint design best practice. But we’ve seen enough presentations to make the call that most organisations follow the old school design rubric with a bit too much fervour for today’s competitive climate. There’s no more room for excuses. Your audience isn’t going to forgive you for making them sit through slides overstuffed with bullet points and blinding colour choices. You’ve got to find a way of standing out in a crowded landscape of presentations. As a PowerPoint design agency , we’re huge advocates of clean, slick, minimalist design, and we’re going to share five PowerPoint rules to help you design slides to be proud of.

PowerPoint rule #1. Content first, design second

Before you think about designing anything, you’ve got to finalise the content you want to display on each slide. The words you write will dictate how the slides are visualised, so outlining the messages you want to communicate is the first step on your journey to designing a good-looking slide.  Once you have your content hashed out in written form, decide what goes on which slide by putting your ideas onto post-it notes and organising them into your desired flow. Storyboarding is a great way of doing this. This way, you can gauge the scope of your presentation in a visual way and avoid time-consuming edits of your final designs later in the process.

PowerPoint rule #2. Strip copy back to a point per slide

If you’re planning on splitting a slide into a group of bullet points and an infographic, you’re brewing the recipe for a congested presentation. By this point, you should have cut away the excess fat of your messaging, leaving only the most impactful soundbites that’ll actually matter to your audience. You don’t want to put your messages in a position where they have to compete for audience attention. Breaking your points up will give your listeners room to digest each of your ideas, one at a time. You, as the presenter, will act as a guide, leading them smoothly from point to point with a relevant, tailored visual to enhance your delivery.

PowerPoint rule #3. Harness core design principles

There are a handful of core PowerPoint design principles you should keep at the forefront of your mind whenever you’re putting presentation layouts together. In true one point at a time fashion, let’s address them individually:

If the point you’re making on a slide has different elements to it that form a whole, make sure their distinct from one another is stark. Graphics, text and background images should contrast and stand out among each other. An easy way to do this is through varying colour palettes , but make sure you select colours that complement each other.

Using repetition to link ideas together is a great way of creating visual uniformity. Curate a look and feel of the kind of design direction you want to go down, implement this style in a PowerPoint template , lock it down and you’ll have formed the groundwork of your presentation design.

Alignment is what gives design a sense of balance. How you arrange the information on a slide and where each component is situated will direct how the content is interpreted by the audience. When things are properly aligned, every component appears as though it’s in the right place and cohabiting equally instead of fighting for space.

Elements that are related to each other should be placed close together. This will make it easier for your audience to detect the cohesion of your ideas and understand the connection between them, while eliminating ambiguity.

PowerPoint rule #4. Turn your copy into a visual

Each visual element in your PowerPoint presentation should serve a purpose: your slides aren’t just there to house your content, they should act as powerful visual assets that deliver your story in a more impactful and compelling way. There are four aspects to designing presentation visuals that you should be mindful of:

Every image you select has to be relevant and high-quality. Stay away from tacky stock photos of professionals shaking hands, fake business meetings and groups of people high-fiving. Start communicating with visuals that match the personality of your brand. With a bit of digging and the right keyword searches, you can find some really cool images from subscription stock libraries, some of which are free like Unsplash and Death to the Stock Photo .

Ever wondered why most bank logos are blue and those of fast food outlets usually include red? It’s no coincidence – it’s because blue is culturally associated with trust and responsibility, while red evokes feelings of energy and immediacy. Colour plays a big part in how we digest and process information. The cultural and psychological meanings behind colours are definitely something you should take into account in your PowerPoint design. Think about how you want your message to be perceived and pick a colour scheme that reflects that. You can use Adobe Colour to find popular palettes if you’re stuck.

Choosing the best presentation fonts depends on the tone of your presentation, your audience and the overall vibe of the environment you’re speaking in.  Serifs are more prevalent in print, whereas sans-serifs are more common in web design, which might be why serifs are considered more ‘classic’ and sans-serifs ‘modern’. Consider the different characteristics and connotations of a font when selecting typefaces for your presentation, and how these associations align with your subject. Legibility is the most important thing for presentation – so keep it simple by sticking to between 45-90 characters (including spaces) per line, and pay special attention to spacing. If you use decorative fonts and scripts, make sure they’re just in the headings. As a general rule to follow, try to limit yourself to 2-3 typefaces per presentation to ensure visual consistency.

PowerPoint rule #5. Control the eye with slick animation

PowerPoint animations and transitions are often approached with caution – which perhaps isn’t surprising considering we’ve all endured a few ill-advised fly-ins in our time. The trick to effective animations and transitions is making sure that they’re in service of the story you’re telling: use them in a minimalist way to reduce disruption between slides, help your information flow along naturally, and build up multiple layers of messaging.

PowerPoint rule #6. Visualise your data effectively

If data or financial insight forms an important part of your presentation, you’re going to want to deliver it in an exciting and interesting way. When dealing with large numbers, it’s a good idea to use scale to your advantage – providing a visual size contrast between two data points makes it much easier to comprehend the difference. You could also communicate the data using visuals of the subject you are talking about to establish a context for your audience.

If you reflect on your data, they’ll probably only be a handful of figures that actually matter and support your message. So alternatively, why not pick these out and display them in a large, visually-impactful way on their own slides? They’ll focus your audience’s attention and you can then talk around them, adding relevant supplementary information. Overall, the key to PowerPoint design is to keep things simple. Tell a visual story by introducing one piece of information at a time and keep your design clean and focused. Stick to these five commandments and you’ll ensure your presentation is easy for your audience to follow and absorb.

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