Cut Back on Words

Imagine this scenario.

It’s Thursday afternoon, 3pm. Your boss comes to your desk, obviously panicked. He explains that a small group of senior managers from headquarters in Sydney will be at your office tomorrow morning for a sales update. Everyone needs to prepare. Your job, he explains, will be to deliver a 20-minute presentation explaining how the recent economic downturn caused sales to go flat, and to make positive projections for the coming year. “Drop everything and get to work on it now,” he says. “You’re on at 9:30 tomorrow morning.”

As he leaves, your head falls into your hands. A 20-minute presentation? Tomorrow morning? What am I going to say?

So, you call up PowerPoint on your laptop and begin filling your slides with words, words, words so you don’t forget what you want to say.

You’ve seen PowerPoint presentations like this yourself, I’m sure. From beginning to end, each slide is up to 150 words worth of nothing but text. As a result, the presenter stands in front facing the screen reading each word to you. How long can you listen to this attentively?

If you are delivering a presentation using text, remember, less is more. Rather than designing slides with full sentences and even paragraphs, stick with short bullet points for each main idea. Read the bullet point to the audience, and elaborate spontaneously with the details. If you need help remembering details, use an outline on a separate piece of paper in your hand or, better, on the table in front of you and glance at it when you need to.

The main advantage of using few words is that your audience will remember your main ideas more easily. Show them a slide filled with 150 words and they’ll remember nothing when you move on. Show them a few clear bullets representing your main ideas, however, and these will stick with them, especially if you present them effectively.

How many words can you get away with? Use this as a design guideline: No more than five bullet points per slide and no more than five words per bullet. Twenty-five words. That’s about the most your audience can handle.

Keep this in mind: The more you read, the more they know. The more they know, the more they forget. The more they forget, the less they know. So don’t read.

Be Purposeful with Your Animation

Some of the most basic elements of PowerPoint slide design can help you get the greatest impact from your business presentations. Choosing the correct font, for example, makes your slides more readable. Using a high percentage of graphic slides rather than a lot of text helps your audience focus better and allows you to speak more spontaneously rather than reading your slides word for word.

A third element of slide design that you can use effectively is animation.

When designing your slides, you can animate your textual bullet points and you can animate your graphics.

Bullet points are animated when you display them one at a time rather than showing them all at once when you change your slides. If your audience sees just one bullet at a time, it’s clear to them exactly which idea you’re speaking about, and they can’t read ahead, which might result in their losing focus.

When you animate your bullet points, use the same effect for each one that you display. You may think that a variety of effects, such as fly-ins, fade-ins and crawl-ins, make your presentation more interesting, but actually, using the same effect each time develops consistency in your presentation and makes your animation less distracting.

The best effects you can use for your bullet points are fly-ins and wipes from left to right. This is because your audience reads them from left to right. Using these effects, therefore, helps your audience absorb the textual information more quickly.

In addition to bullet points, you can also animate your graphics. Graphics are animated just like your bullet points, and you can choose from a variety of effects to bring them onto your screen. Like your bullet points, however, consistency is key. Using the same effects for each graphic helps develop the consistency your audience needs to follow you better.

Some of the clip art graphics available are already animated, meaning that they move. While these are useful for illustrating some of your points, they can be distracting. Leave them on your screen for just a short time to make an impact, and remove them when you move on to another idea. Your audience will focus on you if they’re not watching your animated clip art.

Animation is effective for both bullet points and graphics, but be careful not to over-animate. Too much, and in addition to losing your impact, your business presentation begins to look like a cartoon. For each animation you choose, make sure you have a clear purpose for using it.

Graphic Slides or Text Slides?

Basic elements of PowerPoint design used appropriately can help you maximize the impact that your slides have on your audience. Choosing the right font for your text, for example, can make your slides more readable and help you emphasize key ideas.

Choosing the right graphics can boost the impact even further. Here’s why.

Graphics, such as charts, graphs, photos and flow charts, are more attractive than slides with nothing but words. As a result, they help your audience to focus. In addition, your audience absorbs and understands graphics up to ten times faster than text, so they’ll understand the purpose of your slides more quickly.

Besides being better for your audience, graphics are also better for you – the presenter. Graphics are indispensable for showing trends, making comparisons and illustrating a process. They prevent you from reading text, and few presentations are less interesting than those which you read, slide by slide, with your back turned to your audience. Graphics give you something to talk about and help illustrate and enhance what you have to say. As a result, your presentations are more spontaneous and more appealing.

The most memorable presentations contain a high percentage of graphic slides. Think about this. What do you recall in your mind from presentations you’ve attended? Do you see pictures, or do you see text? Words fall away. Graphics endure.

In fact, graphics are remembered up to ten times longer than words. That’s why graphic images that you implant in your audience’s minds through your PowerPoint slides can assist them later in recalling what you had to say.

Most of the people in your audience learn through what they see rather than through what they hear or do. That’s why you can’t overdo graphics in your slides.

Text is useful and serves a purpose, but when given a choice, remember, it’s your graphic slides that have the greatest and longest-lasting impact.

PowerPoint Design Begins with the Right Font

In businesses around the world, the traditional written business report is gradually being replaced by live PowerPoint presentations. Managers are finding it more useful to hear what you have to say rather than read it. Now, does this mean that your business report writing skills have become obsolete? No, but it does mean that what you would normally write in a business report must now be condensed into a series of PowerPoint slides.

Effective business reports begin with good structure and format. Effective PowerPoint slides begin with good design. So, let’s talk about basic design techniques that can make a big difference in the impact your slides can make on your audience.

Let’s begin with fonts. The font you choose for your slide design provides three essentials for your audience: Environment, Emphasis and Ease of reading.

First, environment. For formal meetings of four to five people around a small conference table, choose a more formal font like Times New Roman. It looks elegant and stylish. For general business and presentations in larger rooms, a no-nonsense business font will work best for you. Arial is one of the most popular. For informal discussions, such as planning a company trip or a teambuilding program, PowerPoint and similar presentation software packages provide an extensive menu of fonts that you can choose from. Try to find one that best fits the theme of your event.

Next, emphasis. You can choose from many different methods to emphasize key points visually on your slides. Using upper-case, or capital letters, for key words can set them apart from the rest of the text. Simple features like boldface, italics and underlining can do the same.

Different colors also emphasize key ideas, but choose the color that says what you want to say. Colors talk. What comes to your mind with red? Blue? Green?

No matter which technique you choose to emphasize, remember to keep it minimal. If you emphasize too much, you’re not emphasizing anything at all.

Finally, ease. The font you choose should be readable. That’s why simple, straightforward fonts like Arial are usually your best choice. Readability, of course, is also enhanced by using the appropriate font size. When you design your slides, always use 16-point or greater. Sixteen-point is relatively small and should only be used for labeling charts and graphs or filling in data tables. For bullet points, you’ll want something larger. Use 24-point or greater to make reading easier.

Choosing the right font is basic to PowerPoint slide design, and as a result, it’s often overlooked. So take a minute to think about it. If your font provides environment, emphasis and ease of reading, your slides will make a much bigger impact on your audience.