The ten commandments of Powerpoint
- Thou shalt not use a template – templates are cheesy and make your presentation look exactly like every other abysmally boring presentation you sat through in high school.
- Thou shalt avoid bullet points – try pictures instead, reinforce what you’re saying but don’t outline it.
- Thou shalt be creative, but not cheesy - there is a fine line between “oh that’s creative” and “wow, that looks REALLY BAD”
- Thou shalt not EVER link to youtube, or anything else outside the presentation. -with the exception of a technical demo, if you’re demonstrating how to use a piece of software, then demos outside the presentation are ok.
- Thou shalt not EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER use “sound effects” – ‘nough said
- Thou shalt not use distracting backgrounds – pictures are nice, but they distract from your information – more about how to use pictures to create GREAT backgrounds later.
- Thou shalt not use plain backgrounds – black is great if you’re just slopping something together, but a plain background of any other color (including white) is tiring to look at.
- Thou shalt develop a separate “Presentation outline” to speak off of – put together a quick document that outlines what you plan to say, then integrate it with your powerpoint. More about this later.
- Thou shalt not show thy presentation on any computer except the one that it was developed on. - This may sound counterintuitive since most modern computers have powerpoint on them. The trick is that if you use any animations or effects, they can and will run differently on different machines. On the other hand it is good to have backups with you, on cd, on a flash drive, and I even upload it to my webserver as another backup option.
- THOU SHALT NOT UNNECESSARILY TURN OFF THE PROJECTOR!! – Modern projectors use metal-halide bulbs which operate as arc-lights. These bulbs have a warm-up and cool-down period during which your projector will be useless. Also each time the bulb is started it reduces its operating lifespan by a few hours, meaning it’s better to just leave it cooking ’till you’re done for the day. This doesn’t sound like such a big deal until I tell you that the average projector bulb is between $200-$400 to replace!
The next question is how exactly to put this all together into a presentation. Stay tuned!
