best powerpoint presentations

best powerpoint presentations

Unleashing the Power of Exceptional PowerPoint Presentations

1. Introduction to Effective Presentation Design

Designing a knockout PowerPoint presentation can turn an average business idea into an extraordinary opportunity that sets your business ahead. Despite the importance of good design, recent data suggests 70% of PowerPoint presentations are sleep-inducing messes, and 20% make listeners question the presenter’s intelligence. There’s no question that the perfect PowerPoint can both engage and sell your audience, but what makes a good design? From layout to color choices to font size, our new guide will help you unleash the full power of a great PowerPoint presentation at your next business pitch.

When creating a PowerPoint presentation, you have to be clear about its core purpose, as this will inform most of the crucial aesthetic decisions of the design. Remember, PowerPoint slide decks are supplementals; the real engagement comes from you, the speaker. So while the visual components are important, they should help to focus the audience on key points and remember information. This means good typography, layouts, icon choice, and other design elements to make sure each and every slide conveys information in the best way possible. Multiple studies prove the importance of the non-verbal elements of a presentation. While adding visual elements is helpful, don’t let it overrun the page. Sticking to 20 to 50 words or three bullet points per slide will help maintain a professional look that looks polished and clean.

2. Utilizing Visuals for Maximum Impact

Standard presentation software does not have the power to streamline and organize ideas. When you or your team presents common information in the standard bullet point format, you are reinforcing stereotypes and have to have complex information to sweep the audience off its feet. Great visuals are effective in getting information across and engaging the audience. Available options like photographs, charts, diagrams, conceptual graphics, tables, and specifications are available. Among these options, the most commonly used visuals are photographs, diagrams, and conceptual graphics.

Additionally, readers should exploit the extensive availability of diagrams and conceptual graphics, which can make your presentation unique. The presentation visuals need to be incorporated as part of the design and be proportionate to the rest of the content in the presentation. Therefore, visuals should have their own story to ensure that they are explained and should be of interest to the audience. Moreover, visuals should be large enough to be seen by everybody in the room.

3. Mastering Slide Content and Structure

We touch much more upon the topic of transitional statements in the section regarding story flow. But because so many presentations are victim to haphazard or arbitrary slide placement, we’re going to talk briefly about them here. Simply put, the best, most seamless way to transition from one point to another is with transitional statements. Instead of letting PowerPoint serve as an excuse to jump from place to place, use it to segue between posts. A good transitional statement should take no more than one or two sentences to give your topic audience essential context before jumping into the subsequent section of your argument.

Regardless of audience or subject matter, all great presentations have a few things in common: they are one of (or more) the following – informational, innovative, entertaining, educational, or persuasive. Speakers use PowerPoint presentations as a tool to enhance the quality of the presentation itself. PowerPoint presentations merely supplement the points in the speaker’s argument. Thus a PowerPoint presentation should generally reflect a bevy of slide content that corresponds to the length and depth of the connected speech. Every PowerPoint slide should have a main heading (referred to as a title), with text that reinforces the speaker’s fundamental point in a smaller font. Often, the text on every slide leads into the text on the next. Especially for PowerPoint newbies, knowing where to start tung slide content can prove difficult. Plan your discussion, and then condense key points of the associated speech onto slides. Make sure that the arrangement of the talk matches the order of the PowerPoint bullet points or other forms of point content.

4. Engaging Your Audience Through Interactivity

Inducing a high level of interaction within the business PowerPoint presentation is beneficial for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it increases your chances of engaging an audience more effectively. As a result, they are more likely to remember and retain the information you deliver. Interactivity is not limited to live presentations, however. You can even do this with PowerPoint presentations that are tailor-made for individual viewing. Two simple ways to do this are by adding clickable navigation buttons wherever possible and incorporating hyperlinks in the presentation itself. This way, the audience can navigate the inner contents of the presentation at their own pace and just click ‘Back’ whenever they want to return to the previous slide.

If you are delivering a virtual live presentation with PowerPoint as part of your business pitch, webinars or any kind of premium sales conferences, think about adding quality videos and interactive elements in the PowerPoint presentation powered by M/S Stream links or Miro board links or anything suitable. These active elements can range from multimedia content to multiple-choice questions and gamified quiz feedback. Do note, however, that the interactivity of the multiple-choice questions and quiz feedback will be disabled in the output sent to your clients as an attachment or as a link. You can, however, record this as a video with ‘Ink Replay’ and embed it as a playback animation into the slide. You may do so for all elements that involve interaction, but consider doing so only for animated multimedia content that involved a fair bit of production cost.

5. Incorporating Storytelling Techniques for Memorable Presentations

Incorporating Storytelling Techniques: From Novices to Masters

Storytelling is an ancient art that can bring even the most detailed and technical topic alive. Storytelling captures and holds your audience’s attention. It hooks them, as readers, listeners, or viewers, into emotional engagement with you and your topic. Stories enable you to make connections and communicate complex topics with ease, deliver your conclusions naturally, and make them much more memorable. A story has a natural structure which, when followed, can break your presentation into easy-to-remember sections:

1. Establish a setting – what is the current situation? 2. Introduce characters – who is it all about? 3. Describe events – what happened? 4. Overcome obstacles – how were problems resolved? 5. Resolve conflicts or issues – what did you learn? 6. Provide a conclusion.

The setting should connect with your audience’s own experience. Create visual, sensory images with attention-grabbing details and share experiences so your audience can relive or imagine being there. Logical structures, such as problem/solution or before/after, can give your story clarity. Anecdotes capture and hold listeners’ attention. They often use descriptive words to paint a picture in the reader’s mind. They usually have unexpected twists and often teach a lesson.

Storytelling Techniques and Models: In the last few years, storytelling in business has been the focus of books, articles, blogs, and videos for authors, designers, business people, and teachers. Several storytelling books are about business storytelling. Some authors repackage old ideas and models, but the best books on storytelling for business look at the basic aspects of the story.