When you’re creating a presentation in PowerPoint, it can be tempting to throw in all your information, but this, oftentimes, doesn’t lead to a great presentation. Your PowerPoint should support your spoken presentation in a way that emphasizes your key points and helps your audience follow along. By learning just a few tips, you can make better presentations that will engage your audience and be more effective.
In this blog, I’m going to cover common mistakes in PowerPoint and then give you some bonus tips for giving a great presentation. And, these tips work just as well if you’re using Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides, or any other presentation software. So, keep reading to start improving your presentations today!
1. Common Text Problems
The 2 most common problems with text in your presentations are having too much text and using poor font choices.
Too Much Text
Having too much text is a really common problem in PowerPoint presentations. Frequently, people include all their notes on the page so that they end up reading the screen when they give the presentation. This is a huge mistake.
The slides are meant to support your spoken presentation. If people are reading the slides instead of listening to you, then they will either miss important information you’re telling them, or they’ll zone out because they can read faster than you can talk. By using the text on your slides more judiciously, they can reinforce what you’re saying instead of detracting from it.
We’ve all seen slides that are just completely full of text, and when we watch someone give those presentations, we know it isn’t effective. Yet, when we make our own presentations, we often don’t remember that less is more here. Hopefully these examples help guide creating your slides.
Here are 2 example slides, the one on the left has too much text, while the one on the right is much better:
The left slide might be better as notes, maybe those are all points I might want to talk about. But, the audience doesn’t need to read that. The slide on the right summarizes the points together into a more intriguing and engaging statement. The 2nd slide doesn’t distract from your spoken presentation.
Poor Font Choices
This common mistake goes hand in hand with too much text because the less text on your slides, the more you can vary your font choices (of course, some fonts just aren’t good choices). Looking at the same text examples from before, consider the legibility of these 2 slides.
These slides are much harder to read. And, the slide on the left, with the smaller text, is almost illegible. The slide on the right, with only a headline, is still hard to read, but the effect isn’t quite as bad at the larger size.
When you’re designing your slides, make sure to pick a font that’s easy to read. This will help your audience follow along with your presentation and not get distracted struggling to read it.
2. Poor Color Choices
While it’s important to make your slides visually interesting, it is easy to overdo it. Full slide backgrounds, especially images or textures, can make it particularly hard to read the text you’re included. Some solid color backgrounds can also cause extreme legibility issues for many readers.
Your background and text should have enough color contrast so that it’s legible for all users. If you’re not sure that your choices have enough contrast, you can use a tool, like the WebAIM Contrast Checker, to find out.
Simply put in the hexadecimal color codes into the background and foreground boxes and the website will calculate the contrast. Ideally, you want a contrast ratio of at least 7:1 for best legibility. To get the hexadecimal color codes from any Microsoft program, open the color selection option, then ‘More colors’, and click on the tab for ‘Custom’. It will show you the color code next to where it says ‘Hex’. It’s a 6-digit number following a ‘#’.
Here are our example slides, showing poor color choices on the left, and much better choices on the right.
It is important to check the contrast of your colors, because even if someone looks legible to you, it might be very hard for other people to read. By checking the contrast, you can have a more objective sense of how easy it is to read.
3. Poor Quality Pictures
You can’t make a tiny image bigger without loosing the quality. And, this is made even worse when your presentation is shown on a big screen. So, it’s important to use images that start off big enough to use in your slides.
Here are some example slides. The slide on the left has a tiny image that’s been stretched to fit, while the slide on the right has a larger image that was big enough to fit the slide.
The slide on the left looks really pixelated and isn’t very clear, while the slide on the right is clearly still a field of tulips and flowers.
4. Excessive Animations
There is nothing wrong with using animations in your slideshow. You can use them for transitions and emphasis to help make key points. However, you don’t want to add so many animations that your audience gets distracted or loses interest.
If you’re creating a presentation, you don’t want to add animations just to have animations. And, where you do want to use them, you want to use them sparingly, maybe, at most 1 per slide. Of course, there are times when you shouldn’t use any, and some times when it would be appropriate to use more. Really think about how animations fit within the context of your presentation.
5. Reading Your PowerPoint
I touched on this a little bit in common mistake #1, but when you include all your text and notes in the slide, it can be distracting for your audience since they are going to read it themselves, and it’s also tempting for you to read it out loud to them. Both can be avoided if you don’t put too much text on your slides.
When you read your presentation, it loses a lot of what makes a good presentation. You might not be as familiar with your topic, you’ll sound less rehearsed, your presentation will sound canned, and your audience will lose interest.
It is much better to have only engaging and intriguing headlines and have a separate outline that you’ll use to keep track of your talking points. You can do this with Presenter View in PowerPoint or on notecards. This will give you just enough information to give your presentation without sounding over-rehearsed.
Bonus: 5 Tips for Giving a Great Presentation
Here are more tips for making sure your presentations go well.
- Create your own template with clear fonts, branded colors, and a layout that meets your needs. If you’re not sure how, check out our blog How to Create Your PowerPoint Template.
- Practice, practice, practice. You want to practice your timings and make sure you’re familiar with the topic. If you’re using notes, make sure you have them written in a way that you can easily read and follow them as you go.
- Make sure your presentation length fits the time you have to give it. You don’t want to rush the end of your presentation just because you run out of time, and you don’t want to leave a lot of unused time at the end. If you practice your presentation, it will help give you a sense of how long it will actually take.
- Take a copy of your presentation on a flash drive. This will give you some added flexibility when you go to give your presentation. It will ensure that you can still use your PowerPoint, even if there are some technical difficulties on-site.
- Lastly, make sure your laptop is charged! This is especially true if you’re planning on using your laptop to give the presentation. You don’t want to show up with a dead battery, assuming you can plug it in on-site. Worse, you don’t want your laptop to die part way through your presentation.
Conclusion
Following these tips can help you make great presentations in PowerPoint that capture your audience’s attention. Your presentations will be more engaging, easier to follow, and less distracting.
What tips did you learn? What common mistakes have you made when making PowerPoint presentations? Let me know in the comments!
