From Bad to Great: Transforming Your PowerPoint Presentations is the title of a free Web Cafe seminar from Office Depot. Although the live semimar was offered in January, you may replay it at any time.
Of, if you are like me and don’t want to take the time to listen to the whole thing, take a look at the highlights for some quick tips on improving your PowerPoint presentations. From the highlights:
Top Audience Complaints:
#1 – When a presenter stands there and reads the PowerPoint slides.
#2 – Text that is too small. Don’t rely on PowerPoint automatically resizing the text for you, because the program doesn’t know if the text is big enough. Test it out to make sure it’s large enough for audiences to read.
#3 – Poor color choice. Choosing colors with little contrast makes it hard to see what’s on the slide.
#4 – Full sentences instead of bullet points are boring and lead to presenters reading the slide.
#5 – Swirls and twirls. Excessive animation is annoying and does not serve a purpose.
#6 – Diagrams and charts that are too complex. If you need to use a pointing device to explain the diagram or chart, it’s too complex.
Other Web Cafe seminars available are on the following topics: office makeover, data security, tracking money. Check back in March for a new series.
Source: inter alia