Ms.

Petries Power Point Presentation Perimeters

1. Dont give your presentation software center stage. PowerPoint is a tool designed to assist a presentation not be a presentation. Never forget: You are the presenter. Your message should be the focus. Not your slides. Not your props. You are in the lead role, and you need to retain that role. No amount of razzle dazzle or slide effects can overcome a weak presentation. If you dont do your job, slides wont save you. It only makes a bad presentation worse. 2. Create a logical flow to your presentation. Better yet, tell a story. The absolute last thing you want to do is turn your presentation into a random assortment of bulleted lists, which is what often happens, especially when PowerPoint is involved. There must be a flow. Start with a good outlining of your information. What happened first, second, last, etc. If you put images, data, cartoons, maps, etc. make sure that they are relevant to the portion of the presentation that you are currently discussing. 3. Make your presentation readable. a. Avoid paragraphs or long blocks of text. Use an excerpta couple of sentences if you feel there is a quote that you really want the audience to see. Emphasize the important words. Put the text block by itself on a single slide. b. Use appropriate fonts. I recommend a sans serif font for titles (e.g., Arial, Verdana, Helvetica) and a serif font for bullets or body text (e.g., Times New Roman, Garamond, Goudy, Palatino, etc.). Most books are typeset this way because it make them more readable. c. Avoid detailed reports. If you need to include a report in your presentation, hand it out. Dont force people to try to read a ledger printout on a slide. (Financial people take note!) If you must show a report, use it as a picture and then use a call out to emphasize the part of the report you want people to focus on. Better yet, just fill up a whole slide with the one number you want people to take away from the presentation. d. Avoid title capitalization unless (duh!) its a title. Sentence capitalization is much easier to read. For example, Sales are up 100% in the southeast region is easier than Sales Are Up 100% In The Southeast Region. This is especially true when you have numerous bullet points. 4. Less is more. Fancy slide transitions and fly-ins get old quickly. I strongly recommend that you keep things simple. Have all your bullets appear at once rather than one at a time. DO NOT USE sound effectsthey serve no other purpose than annoying the audience and distracting them from your presentation. 5. Make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what youre saying is true not just accurate. Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? Amazingly, its more fun than doing it the old way. But its effective communication. You should never read off your slides! Reading off slides communicates that you do not know enough about your topic to speak about it. The slides should contain important facts, dates, numbers, etc. not basic information.

Ms. Petries Power Point Presentation Perimeters Do This

The Civil Rights Movement 1945-1970 African Americans wanted equal rights Primarily took place in southern states

Not This
The Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights movement took place between 1945 and 1970 African Americans did not have equal rights and there was a lot of racism. African Americans had wanted equal rights for a long time. Most of the civil rights movement took place in the south.

What Was It

The Civil Rights Movement After the Civil War: o African Americans had no homes o Whites refused to employ African Americans No income

The Civil Rights Movement After the Civil War African Americans had problems. African Americans did not have equal rights African Americans did not have anywhere to live and they could not buy homes because they did not have jobs to make money. The Civil Rights Movement

How It Began

The Civil Rights Movement

Media
The Civil Rights Movement
This is a graph of where lynchings occurred between 1940 and 1970. As you can see, most were in the south, but some were also in the North.

The Civil Rights Movement

Data