Saturday, July 2, 2011

Tips to make good presentations

I have been reading some material on making good presentations and below are an assortment of things I recall

1. Do not dim the lights during the presentation - the presenter is as much part of the presentation as are the slides, so presenter should be clearly visible to the participants. Also I have noticed the audience might tend to drift and catch a nap if the room is dark


2. Try to keep the slide simple e.g. only one or 2 graphs in a slide,

3. Question the habits - do we really have to use the corporate template?, do we really need that company logo on each slide?


4. Avoid bullet points, try to use format as per the following image



5. When showing logos of other clients as success stories, do not pack the slide with logos. Keep 8-10 relevant logos. Suggestion to have 3 rows on the slide, top and bottom rows to have the 10 logos and middle row will have a simple statement like "Our success stories"


6. Graphs and chart - Use just 2,3 colors on the slide. Ensure that there is good contrast in the background and the colors in the graphs, this improves readability. I prefer white as a safe option. When displaying bar graphs, show data only for relevant values. e.g. if you have sales figures for last 15 years, show only for 1st, 5th, 10th and 15th year - just 4 bars to read rather 15 where one may not be able to read all the values. Highlight the bar with a different color if you want to talk about it say "sudden growth was had in 10th year" - keep other graphs in gray and 10th year graph in blue



7. Avoid animations and transitions that MS Office offers so easily



8. Avoid slanted or curved text, have text horizontally aligned, it makes reading easier.



9. If you have a heavy content side, try to have a narrative in the title or a seperate block to tell the audience in one line what you are trying to tell them on this slide



I'll try to add more - these really are not my suggestions, just observations.

Readers are requested to add their observations on good presentations

4 comments:

Shubham Bhardwaj said...

Nice..

Mishka said...

Good stuff! Things you'd probably not think of immediately, but which should really be of help

Raks said...

did u run this with 'P' before publishing it.. He may not agree with couple of points above.. Remember those days we use put a 360 view in one slide with no content to put on the other slides

brijesh shirodkar said...

@Raks: Haha, some plesant, some frustrating memories associated with that