What makes good slideshow

Fully-stocked eLearning authoring toolkit for PowerPoint. No training required to start! One of the most important things to remember is that PowerPoint is a tool to support your story.

Avoid putting the literal text on the screen. Instead, try and shorten your bullets and keep it to the point. This causes your audience to focus on you instead of the slides on the screen. Try and pick a classic font instead of a creative one. Picking the wrong font can easily cause your text to be unreadable for your audience. Besides that, if the computer you are presenting on does not have the font you used installed, PowerPoint will replace it with a random one.

Verdana, Calibri and Helvetica, for example, are all safe choices. These fonts are available on all computers. Picking the right font size can be difficult. On the one hand your audience needs to be able to read whatever you put on the screen. For headers the minimum is around 20pt, while for the body you have a minimum of 18pt. With these sizes you can be assured your text will be legible in every situation. This goes for laptops, computers, tablets, TVs and beamers. Besides the looks and size of your font, it is important to take contrast into account.

Usually your text is supported by a low-quality image. We often see that when people are talking about a car, the first picture on Google images is picked. This results in inconsistency because some images tend to be illustrations and drawings, making your presentation look unprofessional or even childish. Make sure you select high quality images that support your message.

Patterned backgrounds can reduce readability of text. These features may seem impressive at first, but are distracting and get old quickly. Ensure that your images maintain their impact and resolution when projected on a largerscreen. Only "build" screens when necessary to make your point because they can slow your presentation.

Presenters who constantly "flip" to the next slide are likely to lose their audience. A good rule of thumb is one slide per minute. View the whole deck from this presentation. The first is Resonate , by Nancy Duarte. In it, she breaks down the anatomy of what makes a great presentation, how to establish a central message and structure your talk, and more. Think of this as prerequisite reading for my second recommendation, also by Duarte: Slide:ology.

This is more focused on presentation visuals and slides.