For the longest time my PowerPoints all had the basic title + bullet points format with maybe a picture or two. I’ve always felt that they were stale, but I never knew how to really improve them. Of course, there are templates and fancy animations, but those felt surface-level—no amount of visual styling can save slides with poor structure, long sentences and little images. In the past week I’ve made multiple slide decks, and while it’s fresh in my mind I’d like to share some things that have helped me improve my slides. This has helped me be more confident and successful in my presentations.
The backbone to good slides is a logical structure. The first practice that changed my presentation quality was fully planning everything out beforehand in a Word document. I used to treat the slides as my development area and just throw things on there as they came to mind. The issue with this is modifying them afterwards; sometimes I’d try to add a piece of information to a specific slide, but there would be no room left. This would force me to completely change the entire structure I had already committed to or concede to poor structure and over-wordiness. Laying out all the information beforehand makes it easy to divide everything into logical sections and make an intuitive structure on the first try. This is especially useful for longer presentations. Additionally, make sure to add a table of contents or some way to communicate this structure at the very beginning of the presentation.
The next practice I’ve found useful is treating the slides more as a visual aid than a comprehensive information guide. I know that it is common for people to send out slides after presentations for others to recap the information, but I think this idea is wrong. That is, the slides should not directly contain all the information that the speaker is trying to convey. Instead, it should provide a basic roadmap and a visual aid to the speaker’s verbal communication. That may mean only including a title and picture, or a short sentence, instead of 5+ long bullet points. (I think the caveat to this rule is settings where listeners are expected to take notes and remember every piece of information, such as a professor’s lecture. In these settings, the written information is important to ensure that listeners can take adequate notes and be clearly aware of all important information.) This more minimal format puts the spotlight on the speaker and not the slides, as most people cannot read and listen at the same time. It also allows more room for personality and creativity from the speaker themselves when they are not hindered by a strict bullet-point by bullet-point structure. Importantly, images should be both relevant and of high quality.
Overall, while these ideas are not new or particularly groundbreaking, they serve as a good reminder for myself to develop better slides and give better presentations. Once there exists a good structure and slide format, then styling and other aesthetics can be the cherry on top.
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