School Tips: 17 Powerpoint Presentation Guidelines

1. Remember to use strong, contrasting colors to easily grab the attention of your audience. Use dark font color in light background and light font color in dark background. This is one basic rule you ought to know before using a power point presentation for your reports, and sadly, a lot of people still don’t apply it. I have seen something like sky blue font color in a yellow green background during one our reporting assignments and I tell you, it was painful to eye.

2. Remember that what may look good on your computer may be unreadable in the classroom. Always do test your .ppt file beforehand.

3. Stick with a single background.

4. Do not use pictures as backgrounds. Although photographs can be powerful, using them as backgrounds is a different story. First it distracts the audience. Second, it makes your text unreadable.

5. Do not over-decorate your presentation with graphics or style, unless you actually intend your presentation to be a picture slideshow. A few excellent graphics are better than many poor ones. Remember to use hi-res images as much as possible as not to make your presentation look like el cheapo.

6. Bullets are focal points to highlight your ideas, use them instead of paragraphs. Bullet points should always be left-aligned, never centered.

7. Do not place graphics at the center, except when stressing the picture itself. By doing this, you leave little room for text.

8. Do not use ALL CAPS, except for titles. Also, capitalizing the first letter of every word makes it more formal while capitalizing only the first letter of the clause makes it less formal.

9. Avoid fancy fonts. It distracts the audience.

10. Use only a few fonts and keep them consistent all throughout.

11. Keep font size consistent and uniform for the title, headings and captions

12. Avoid using italics. it makes your text difficult to read

13. Use the bold feature to make your point stand out.

14. Make font size readable. I suggest using size 28 as your smallest size.

15. Remember the Rule of 6: Six words per line, six lines per slide. This is to avoid information overload which actually makes your audience distracted and downright bored.

16. Use builds and make your words concise as much as possible. Now it is your job, the presenter to do the elaboration.

17. Make slide transitions uniform all throughout.