If you’re like most people, you probably dread giving presentations. But with a little preparation and some clever timing, you can make your presentations much more effective. Here are four tips for making your PowerPoint slides work better:

  1. Use visuals that support your points. If you have slides with text on them, make sure to use visuals that help illustrate your points. For example, if you’re talking about the benefits of a new product, include images of people using the product or happy customers testimonials. This will help keep your audience engaged and focused on what you’re saying.
  2. Keep your presentation short and sweet. Most people don’t have time for long presentations, so keep them to under 10 minutes if possible. This will keep everyone’s attention focused on what’s important and prevent them from getting bored or distracted.
  3. Use transitions to break up the monotony of long speeches. Transitioning between slides can be a great way to add excitement and energy to a presentation. Try using music or video clips to help set the mood for each section of your speech.
  4. Make use of bullet points and charts to break up text-heavy slideshows . These visual aids can be very helpful when trying to keep an audience engaged during a long speech or presentation.. ..

Delivering a presentation is not just about giving good slides, it is also about making sure that our presentation finishes by the time our audience wants to have their tea break—so practicing how long to speak for each slide is essential for a proper presentation.

Rehearsing our Slides

Before we rehearse, make sure that we select our first slide. Now open the ‘Slide Show’ tab and click the ‘Rehearse Timings’ button.

Powerpoint will start the usual presentation mode with a timer panel. The clock on the panel will start ticking once we enter the presentation mode.

Click on the arrow button to move on the next slide and Microsoft Powerpoint will record each timing as you progress from one slide to the next one. You can also click on the pause button just in case you need to answer the phone or turn off the oven while you’re rehearsing your slides.

You will see a summary on how much time you have spent on each slide at the end of the rehearsal.

Create a Self-Running Presentation

You can even set a self-running power point slides and let it run according to these timing, relieving us from the need to manually navigate the slides. Bear in mind that we can run into a situation where Powerpoint changes the slides before we finish, so make sure that you can deliver each slide based on your rehearsal timing.

Click on the setup slide show button.

Select the ‘Browsed at a kiosk (full screen)’ option to setup a self-running Powerpoint presentation. Press the ‘esc’ key to stop the self-running presentation.

You can re-adjust the presentation timing by recording back from the beginning or from the current slide.

If we’re still not happy with the timing, we can clear all the slides timing and redo our presentation rehearsal.

Delivering a good presentation is not an easy task and requires a lot of practice. There are tons of great things that we can do with Powerpoint to add punch to our presentation, for example:

Adding live web pages to our presentation Animating text and objects Putting video from the web in our presentation Using your mouse as a laser pointer in PowerPoint 2010

What other tips do you have for giving an effective presentation?