Developing Presentation Slides that Complement your Content
Written by PR Etc., Inc.
Published by Rockford Register Star
Monday, October 29, 2007

In the previous column, I shared insight on some simple guidelines to make your presentation content relevant to your audience. It’s absolutely essential that your message and content are clear before creating your slides and visuals, but here are some basic tips to ensure your slide presentation is engaging as well:

• Include only necessary information. Limit the details on the slides to the essentials. Slides should convey key points; your job is to convey the content.
• Be brief. In general, use no more than six words per line and no more than six lines per slide. This makes is easier for your audience to take in the information and focus on what you are saying and less time reading your slide.
• Keep it simple. Fancy fonts, intense charts and too many visuals on a slide can overwhelm the audience. Clip art, sound, fonts, colors, backgrounds, transitions can be distracting and can misdirect the attention of the audience from the intended content.
• Provide examples. If possible within your presentation, try to use interactive links that can connect to demonstrations, videos, and other interesting graphics or sites that relate to your discussion.

All of these ideas might make for a basic presentation, but it is the role of the presenter to be exciting and informative. Too often when presenters are preparing a slide show they forget why it is being used; it should only be utilized to focus the audience’s attention. Remain committed to focus on the content and the audience will too.