PowerPoint for Business Presentations

Each presentation is unique, even if the target audience is the same each time. Most people know the strategy involved in creating PowerPoint presentations but for the ones that don’t we thought we’d throw out a few tips about what makes a good PowerPoint business presentation.

A few tips for PowerPoint…

Storyboarding

Before even opening PowerPoint create a storyboard with your assets which can be anything to do with the presentation including charts, images, video, financials…..

Once acquired you should create a story flow around them and decide just where each asset fits in the presentation flow.

What is a Story Flow?

You create the story for your presentation by creating a board. It’s irrelevant whether this board is in PowerPoint itself or sketched out on the back of a napkin with a ballpoint pen. It’s there for you to position your piece’s and keep a logical flow going. You will, of course wander off topic at some point but it’s a good way to focus the creative flow of assets, layout and general look of the presentation.

Don’t over complicate, keep it simple. It’s always a good idea to catch your audience from the off so try to start off with perhaps a conflict or problem and the solution you took.

And keep the word simple in mind when designing the presentation itself – don’t overload the audience with too much information. Remember that’s what PowerPoint notes and follow-ups are for.

Company Branding

Make sure to pay as much attention to your branding in the presentation. This is why PowerPoint comes loaded with so many features and tools to help you do. 

We focus on building PowerPoint decks on our courses all of which are based on slide masters.

Depending on the amount of slides and their function you can have multiple slide masters in one presentation.

What is a slide master?

Anything placed on a slide master will appear in that exact position on every ordinary slide based on it.

For example you may want to have your logo appear at the exact same place on every slide, so you’d use a slide master for that. You wouldn’t want to spend ages positioning the logo manually on every page and the same goes for fonts. You may want a styled title on every page with exactly the same font, font size and colour.

Slide masters work well for any repetitive positioning task on the slides.

Read more about PowerPoint’s slide masters

Use Rich Media

Make use of video in your presentation. People are used to video, it’s quick and easy and lets you make your point succinctly.

Didn’t someone once say a picture paints a thousand words? Well, I wonder how many words a video paints.

You have a number of ways to use video in PowerPoint. You could link to your website or your companies YouTube channel to make some strong point or you could make use of PowerPoint’s screen recording features and record parts of the presentation during the session. You can record in seconds, save the video out then send it across to the interested parties immediately or after the event.

10/20/30 Rule

For years the 10/20/30 rule has been applied to presentations regardless of delivery audience.

In essence it means that your presentations should contain no more than 10 slides, last no more than 20 minutes and any font use to be 30 point and above. Actually digressing slightly and discussing fonts it’s also probably a good idea to stick with sans serif fonts which extremely good for onscreen delivery and eyesight.

Read more about the 10 /20 /30 rule

Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation Training

If we can be of any help with your PowerPoint Training please don’t hesitate to get in touch for an informal chat. Our Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation Training Course focuses on many of the above features.

Find out more about this course

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