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.