Good Powerpoint presentation

Presentations can be very easy or very challenging based on the speaker, audience and the topic. Though there is no math formula to make a presentation to stand out, there are few tips that would surely help you.

1. Introduce the topic. Why should audience pay attention to this presentation ?
2. Provide the facts, context.
3. Whenever possible use the 10-20-30 rule. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 as the font size
4. Contrast the colors – background and foreground.
5. Never use fonts that are hard to read.
6. Don’t put too much of text (unless its training slides).
7. Don’s use more than one picture in a slide.
8. If you use pictures or graphs then provide the credits.
9. If there are multiple presenters, make sure that there is a natural transition.
10. When starting a presentation or ending it, make sure its done gracefully. Don’t do them abruptly.
11. Choose examples wisely. Don’t use too many examples that may lead to more questions
12. Spell check the content. It seems silly but many presentations has misspelled words.
13. Make sure that the sentences are complete. The presentation slide deck itself should be self-sustaining.
14. If you use a graph/statistic make sure that you describe what it is. Don’t just put the graph there.
15. Acknowledgement and source of the facts, figures and graphs should be mentioned “somewhere” in presentation.
16. Finally, provide takeaways, summary.

Good luck for your next presentation! Remember that everyone wants to present like Steve Jobs. But there is/was only one.

I would be glad to hear other view points.