Hi, this is Antony with uni-edit and today I will help you avoid bad PowerPoint slides
for your conference presentation.
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This presentation today uses and focuses on Microsoft PowerPoint and will be looking at
these key points.
So let's start thinking about out design.
Remember, you are giving an academic presentation and it needs to be professional and business-like.
Try to use more simple designs as they are not distracting and they will help your content
remain clear.
There are many patterns that you can choose to use but really think about how does your
design reflect the presentation.
Let's say you want to use the water droplets, but if your presentation has nothing to do
with water, they might seem out of place.
Generally, universities can provide you with a design, or you may ask to use their logo.
That's a really great starting point.
Moving into fonts, we can see how different fonts can convey different information.
Title fonts are great at 44 to 36 points, main point fonts can be at 28 points.
It is most important that everybody in the room can read all of the words on your slides.
So think carefully.
Some bad fonts would be: fonts that are to small like mentioned before, capitalized fonts,
which are very difficult for many international students, or complicated fonts, or crazy fonts,
or handwriting fonts.
These are typically considered not to be professional.
When in doubt, just use the prescribed format of your university.
Colors can be equally as distracting.
As you can see here many of these fonts don't work.
So generally, use blacks, blues, greens and reds.
And a quick note on formatting.
PowerPoint itself has a good default format.
And it's good enough to use and I probably wouldn't change that.
Now for the structure of your slides, you should be aiming to present one to two minutes
per slide.
We suggest writing in point form for clarity and not in complete sentences.
Generally, four-five points per slide is recommended.
Try to avoid wordiness and use only your key phrases.
This is what we mean by a wordy slide.
It is distracting and we can't expect the audience to read all of this while listening
to what we have to say.
It's boring and also can be very repetitive.
So, this slide looks ok but if we focus on just the nouns in these sentences, we get
a slide that is much more clear and to the point and the readers can now focus on listening
to you instead of reading your PowerPoint.
The second benefit of a slide like this is that your audience will know what you're going
to talk about and that is essential if you want to keep them engaged.
Now a small note on transitions.
Using them can be good for highlighting important information.
But be careful, because they can be very distracting and unorganized.
Now let's look at some examples.
In this slide, the student is talking about production processes and they've put in their
key words and points and a lot of data.
Now, what audiences will do is they will read this.
So, a good idea is to take out the data and just keep focusing on the key points.
Like this, here we have taken out the data and the key points are clearly recognizable.
This will help your audience stay engaged to what you are saying.
Now lets move on to the use of pictures in your presentation.
First off, pictures in the UK are not free to be taken from google.
You actually have to have permission to use the photos.
And if you don't know who the photo belongs to, than you need to use a photo company that
allow non-businesses use or royalty-free photos.
For example, Pixabay is a great resource.
Just remember, it is copywrite infringement to take anything from the internet that you
do not have permission to use.
So now you have your pictures and you want to use them.
But let's think carefully.
Although this looks cute, is this relevant to what you're presenting?
Or is it distracting from the point you're trying to make?
It's also a good idea to avoid baby picture in any business-like professional presentation.
We would also avoid using cartoons using jokes because they may be funny to you, but seriously
offensive to somebody else.
Pictures are really good to use however, when trying to establish an idea.
This picture of the world represents globalization and it fits in directly with your key talking
points.
When done correctly, these images add to the presentation.
Now we're going to talk about one of the most important parts of any academic PowerPoint.
Graphs.
Choosing your graph is very difficult and you need to make sure that they are not overly
complicated or difficult for an audience to understand.
In addition, a graph like this would be very difficult to interpret from a far distance
away.
When you do present a graph, chart, or table, follow a procedure.
First, it's important that you talk about the graph.
You should explain the axis, you should explain the title, you should explain the sources
if they are relevant.
Even good graphs can be complicated so ensure clarity by describing it appropriately.
Some times, you may need to rebuild graphs and tables to simplify them and that's what's
happened here.
I've rebuilt this graph in a way that's easy to distinguish the differences between the
different months.
In addition to having a clear correlation of the differences, you should also provide
a good oral analysis to complement the graph.
Info graphics are also good to use.
These are very clear and much more entertaining than your traditional charts.
These can be very clear and represent your data in a visually appealing way for your
audiences.
Tables are also a really good idea if they are simple and they are easy to explain.
Remember the font in tables can get very small very quickly.
so be careful.
If you need to put a complicated table in your PowerPoint, please highlight the information
that is most important.
Without these highlights on Mars, the audience would be scanning this chart way to long and
you would have lost their focus.
Next up, we're going to talk about over-crowding slides.
This is something that students often do.
When there is a lot of data, information, or text on the slides, it can be distracting.
And this distraction can take away from your main point.
This example doesn't visually look very nice and people in the back of the room won't be
able to read that chart.
You see here, all of the information is still present on this slide, but it's more organized,
and easier to read.
Now, let's talk a little bit about referencing.
It is vital that you reference all of your material to give credibility to your claims.
One way to do this is to reference after a stated fact or to put the references at the
bottom of the slide in a small font.
Both written and verbal references to source material is extremely important.
Then your completed reference list will come at the end of your presentation and should
follow particular referencing such as, APA style.
And now a final note on spelling and grammar.
Please, proofread your slides for things like spelling mistakes and repeat words, grammatical
errors that you might have made, and other things that might have slipped through the
cracks.
It's even a good idea to have somebody else check your presentation before you go up on
stage.
Even your friends may catch errors that you didn't.
So in summary: think about your design and think about your fonts.
Reduce your ideas to key point and really focus on presenting those key points clearly.
Use graphs and tables for visuals.
Keep one to two slides per minute, and ad visuals for engagement and don't forget about
your referencing.
Thank you again for your attention and we hope you enjoyed this presentation on how
to make good PowerPoint slides.
There will never be one right answer for this, but these are great places to start.