Microsoft PowerPoint: Excel's Ugly Sister.

::sigh::

Besides spewing vast amounts of common sense, the 'Good PowerPoint' articles were somewhat helpful. A PowerPoint can give your presentation a visual edge that you would otherwise lack in giving a lecture; if used properly, your audience will be more interested in what you are talking about. PowerPoint is a useful tool to help keep an intrigued and alert audience; that being said, the user must know how to not distract their audience or bore them to tears. I gathered from the articles and my own common knowledge how to make an effective PowerPoint presentation. Yayyy.

If you plan on making a PowerPoint, I recommend you follow these simple guidelines - from me to you:

1) Powerpoints are not meant to be novels. Don't insult our intelligence by reading every single word off the slide - being in college indicates that we possess reading skills... for the most part. And if we wanted to be bored to death by reading about economics or tree frogs, we'd go on the internet and do it ourselves, with Facebook on another tab (it's boring, remember...?). Be concise and relevant, and you're good.

2) Nobody likes being lectured, so at least make the Powerpoint fun to look at. Make your presentation well organized and use good graphics if you want any hope in holding an audience. Be sure to use pictures, videos, colors - everything a 3 year old would be entertained by. No overkill, please. If I can't see the title of your farm presentation because there are 68 different pictures of cartoon chickens - that is a problem. We want to appreciate detail and not get confused by it.

3) As with perfume, makeup, and Celine Dion music - LESS IS MORE.  If we are reading more than you are speaking, you have too many words on your slides and that is very annoying. Make one-sentence bullet points and expound on the general ideas of the slide. Don't let the slides present for you. Booooring.

4) Keep it simple. Using every color of the rainbow on each slide is distracting and unprofessional. Make your color scheme congruent throughout the presentation to make it look tidier.

5) Make use of all that torturous Excel training. If you have statistics of any kind, take the information from Excel, make a chart or graph, and transfer the data accordingly to the slide. I would personally much rather look at a pie chart than read a bunch of numbers. Naturally, the entire world shares my point of view, so just take that into consideration. Please and thank you.

Cheers,

Kendra