Most of these tips are good. But the best one is this: never put anything on your slide except a table, picture (I include equations in this set), or graph.

The corollary is to never puts words. No bullets, no drawn-out passages, no quotes. No text should ever, ever be inflicted upon your audience.

It used to be, in the pre-computer days, that people would write their notes on 3x5 cards and then deliver their speech (showing whatever pictures they needed via overhead). But nowadays, thanks the ease of computing, people actually display their 3x5 cards. They spend wasted hours sweating over the exact verbiage of these cards, then give these notes the exalted name "slides".

This is a bad idea because it forces people's attention to some meaningless slide when they should be looking at and listening to you. It takes the presenters attention away from the audience and on to the slide, when the presenter should be looking at the people to see how bored they are. And it forces them to read the damn slide along with you to make sure you haven't left out any words. It's a silly practice that should come to an end.

I attend hundreds of these souped-up talks every year in the course of my job (university professor). And I can't think of a worse way to waste time.

Err... I thought that the purpose of any presentation was to impart information? And I thought that words were a pretty good way to do this?

Ignore this advice about not using words in your presentation. It's nonsense. The most important thing about any presentation is the quality/importance/relevance of what your saying. If I attend one more (often text-free), "entertaining", vacuous presentations, I'll top myself.

Typically the presenter is giving the presentation. The powerpoint is just an aid, not the presentation. If the 'presentation' is designed to be used sans a presenter who is using words then I'd say that power point is a lousy medium for this type of presentation.

I suppose if the presentation is the slides and the speaker is just there to guide you through them then go ahead. Load it up. I'll check out after slide 3 or so.

I recommend to split it: The presentation itself should be mainly on graphs, pictures, illustrations and so on. If words are needed, use only some catchwords. If you want to hand out a "reader" afterwards, this can be a seperate document - or use the "notes" function below the slides. You can print the presentation with notes to hand out.

I second that.
This is so irritating to have the presenters notes (that are for the presenter, not for the audience) presented for the audience..

IF someone wants to give information away, then please do handout a script

There is an error in 8.3. It should be your, not you!
Please have pity on those of us who are visual learners (as opposed to the dominant oral learners)! A better rule is 8 lines per slide, with each one a heading, or prompt, brought up separately. It gives us visual learners a bit of a break!
Audrey Guy

For instance it won't catch: "Stay lose"

But I have to give you credit, most people make the opposite mistake.

Oh, wait...

These are good tips. The worst problem with Power Point is not the tool itself, which is actually pretty decent, but the fact that people think using Power Point makes them automatically able to give a good presentation. About half these points can be summed up as: Don't use gimmicks unless you _really_ know what you are doing.

Yeah, and also things like the plural of COO and CEO is COOs and CEOs, not COO's and CEO's. But I agree spell check should be at least the minimum.

The thing I really dislike is when people spell names wrong in important presentations. Especially for company names, which is very hard now that many tech companies insist on InterCapping and using lower case letters, and squashing words together, and mixing cases, there is still no excuse as it usually takes a single Google search.

I even know a top company honcho who still spells a customer company name wrong, even after being corrected, because he thinks it looks better his way!

You have brought up an oft overlooked bias on the part of the presenter.

Some elements of style are cultural: the use of the apostrophe being a a great example.

Starting in the 1950's British newspapers dropped the apostrophe in the pluralization of abbreviations. It has since become common practice (practise in the UK) in the non-US English speaking world.

The United States on the other hand still frequently uses the apostrophe to indicate the missing letters.

So, the moral is to know your audience. If you are presenting:

• Years: 1950s UK, 1950's US
• Abbreviations: COOs UK, COO's US
• Spelling: Colour UK, Color US

And, if you are an audience try to be considerate of your presenter, and focus on the message, not the grammar.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is a great read on some of these matters.

This is incorrect. There are no missing letters. In English, plural is indicated by an "s", possessive by an "apostrophe s". The only time an apostrophe is used to indicate plurality is in the case of lower-case letters, i.e. "mind your p's and q's".

The guidelines on fonts are excellent, but I would like to add one more tip. Serif fonts such as Times New Roman are more difficult and distracting to read during a presentation compared to Sans-serif fonts such as Arial and Verdana. I would suggest not using any kind of Serif font for a Powerpoint presentation.

I love Verdana - its a good readable font online and in print. But sometimes it uses to much space - then I go back to Arial. But don't ever go to Times New Roman - that is absolutely boring (and unfortunately it's the standard in office)

Here's a technique I've used successfully twice. Bring 8-10 cheap laser pointers to your talk and pass them out to random members of the audience. You need one with a different color (like green) for yourself. You need to have prepared some 'prompt' slides that have options on them. For example, at an accreditation conference I had a slide with:

Years to accreditation: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I asked the laser-enable attendees to put a spot on the screen corresponding to their own status. This is a lot quicker than Q&A and generates excitement. One caveat--it's hard for them to tell which spot is theirs, so they dance around a fair bit. Obviously you need a well-behaved audience for this. Not all slides need to be interactive, but about one in four or five seems to work fine.

The whole story is at http://www.coker.edu/assessment.

David Eubanks
http://zzascape.blogspot.com

One of the worst presentations i've had the displeasure of attending was not even made in powerpoint. It was 30 minutes of black text-on-white-background agony - in PDF form - and 10 pt font.

So here are my tips:

*if your presentation is longer than 10 minutes, think of text and background color. Black text on a bright background, along with a big screen puts a lot of strain on the eyes. Use a brighter text on a dark background.

* instead of trying to cram 500 words into one slide, try diving it up into several slides. You shouldn't even have that much text in your presentation to begin with!

* ppl like to look at images. If they are listening to you, they're not reading the text and vice versa. So if you want them to listen to you, put a small simple clipart or image (in the corner) that ppl can associate with what you are talking about. That way the audience can rest their eyes on that (instead of you!). This applies to the slides when you dont have any important graphical objects, like diagrams.

* use a large font size (its a presentation, not a visit to the optician).

* dont go with any fancy schmancy fonts. Use a nice sans-serif for headers and bullet points, or if you have sentences, a nice serif will do. Personally i think Georgia is a good serif for presentations since its included in Windows and since it was designed for beeing read on a screen. A sans-serif font that'll do which is also included in Windows is Trebuchet MS.

* DO NOT use Arial or Times new roman, I *despise* those two fonts because they're so ugly. Using some other fonts will actually make me think you cared enough of your audience to put some effort into your slides.

Ok, the last point had a more personal touch to it

Unless you want your audience to fall asleep, a dark background with light text is a bad idea since you will invariably have to dim the lights or turn them off completely for proper contrast. A light background with dark text (20 pt minimum for bulleted text) is readable and allows one to leave the lights on.

Of course, the brightness of the projector also plays into both scenarios.

K : Keep
I : It
S : Simple
S : stupid

"K.I.S.S" ... well the stupid part is just there, but keeping the presentation simple might be the most important thing to do for it's success.

I have four tips:

CLIPART: NO NO NO
Whenever I see that silhouette clipart guy bonking himself on the head or having a light-bulb idea I think

(1) The presenter is utterly unoriginal and bereft of ideas
(2) The presenter has no sense of visual panache
(3) Time for a nap

People, I beg of you, don't use clipart. Find a decent high-res stock photo (there are many free photo sites) and customise it to fit your colour scheme. If you don't know how, or can't be bothered, don't use images at all.

FONTS
Don't use comic sans. It's not friendly, it's retarded. It says "my presentation and style are so dull I'm using a kiddy font to make it seem exciting and accessible".

PROGRESS BAR
Google for "powerpoint thermometer". It adds a progress bar to your presentation so the audience knows how far through you are. It's a matter of courtesy and prevents unnecessary boredom.

NOBODY'S IMPRESSED
Slide transitions, unnecessary animations and sound effects impress NOBODY. They should only be used if NOBODY is going to watch your presentation. YOU should be interesting enough that your text doesn't need to whoosh in riding a whirlwind. See "comic sans" above.

Google for "powerpoint thermometer". It adds a progress bar to your presentation so the audience knows how far through you are. It's a matter of courtesy and prevents unnecessary boredom.

I didn't go look at this marvel but I'm having a hard time grasping how a progress bar will make a boring presentation less so.

used sparingly and correctly slide transitions can add elegance and provide an effective visual cue to the audience. ex: simply, heres a new slide or more dramatic, were beginning a new subject. etc. the problem is people that have no design knowlege or idea what theyre doing misuse the program. slide transitions dont kill people, people kill people.

Finally!! Someone who knows that clipart beenie men and comic sans fonts are totally "not done".
Thanks for sharing!!

I've found your post very useful and translated it to French. Your original page is linked at the really beggining of the post. Let me know if you find an error or if you do not want me to keep it published.

Thanks

I would like to second the 'no Comic Sans' rule. I cant believe how many people even at scientific conferences (ab)use this font. I dont even want to imagine how bad it would be in a corporate setting.
As a rule of thumb I found that there seems to be a very high correlation between the use of Comic Sans and bad talks/presentations. So if I see Comic Sans on the title page, I now try to sneak out of the room if at all possible.

This may just be a degenerated part of the office "culture" in which I find myself these days, but all-too often the PowerPoint or Impress ( this second for the few who have gone the OpenOffice route, there-by sticking it to "the Man," or so we pointlessly like to think. It takes so little to pump us we office drones) presentations I have encountered WEREN'T created as a public presentation tool, but rather as something that can be printed out and distributed to the masses in the digital Gutenberg fashion. Because of this, the presentations tend to be far too long, far too complex, and contain far too much text, often at a size that even makes it difficult to read when printed.

Sure, nifty packages of information ARE cool, but this is an entirely too complex a fashion to distribute material. A cut 'n paste of the text from these things into a regular word-processed document finds it reduced in size significantly.

When these gargantuan presentations are actually presented on a computer screen or a always-just-slightly out of focus video projector, the results are a general numbness above the brain stem of those on whom it is inflicted and the overwhelming thought of these folks running along the lines of, "Well, I can't figure this out at all. I'll just wait to read the printed version. Are there any muffins left? Ooo, blueberry!"

Gad . . .

All good stuff. I teach at a university in the UK, and I've passed this on to my students.
My absolute favourite Powerpoint shows are the ones where the speaker hands out copies of his text, reads out a copy of his text, and has all the text on Powerpoint slides. There's just no escape.

How can I change the fonts at once in every slide? I'm presently using powerpoint for our church songs. Some song slides have different fonts and different masters. One can select all slides but this will not permit the changing of the fonts, thus I do them individually. Your help is needed. Thank you.

PowerPoint guru Steve Rindsberg, in his PPTools website (http://www.rdpslides.com/pptools/) has a great post on how to do this here.

If they have used masters you can go into the master (from the main menu go to View -> Master -> Slide Master) and change the fonts in the text boxes and titles there. If the user has stuck to using the master then all of the slides will be updated. - Updated Feb 8, 2006

Format menu -> Replace Fonts command, then dial in the font to replace and the one you'd prefer in the lower field. As close as it gets to all at once.

Ever hear of Power Pointlessness? http://joycevalenza.com/powerptart.html or check out the whole site http://fno.org
The medium IS the message and this one is particularly inane . I have to reteach all my grade 9s when they come form the K-8 schools since a lot of teachers think the 'bells and whistles' are a substiute for content.I'd like to see powerpont banned altogether as it doesn't ecourage critical thought, but rather point form coverage of complex issues. We get enough of that with the News; sound and image bytes that bombard us daily while really doing little to bring meaning to the world around us.
Technology for it's own sake with no examination of why it's being used is why we have millions of dollars being spent on computers and less and less on teachers. Technology is not going to be our saviour and I would recommend all technology teachers read this book to examine their perconcieved notions about technology:
The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved

Robert

Thank you for your insightful comments, my wife is a teacher and has some of the same misgivings you have mentioned here. Many users tend to leave comments like 'You forgot the most important point - don't use Powerpoint', and while some of them are speaking about platform preference, I think many of them are trying to convey the same message you make here quite effectively.

I've taken the liberty of creating live links to the sites and the book you mentioned. Thank you again for taking the time to leave a comment.

Thank you DavidC for this article. I have to do a presentation soon and think this dos and donts will help me - some of the comments her too...

Yes, helped me very much, too. I did have a presentation yesterday evening. I was lucky that I was here before and have read those articles. Thanks!

Erde and Einkaufen

Glad you found it useful, and that you had successful presentations.

Great article indeed. Have you also got at translated version in Germen? Would be to great!