Planning Your Next PowerPoint Presentation - Part 1

Before you even open PowerPoint, let's stop and think about a few things first.

What do you think we should consider? You can approach your planning using the Three Pillars of PowerPoint. The three pillars are People, Purpose and Place.

People

Let's go ahead and start by thinking about whom you're presenting to. It could be primary school children, your peers, an executive committee, potential customers, a keynote at a conference or members of the general public. Would you use the same slides for each of these different groups? Of course not! Slides for children would have very little text, and the text would be large enough for them to read, with big pictures, and be bright and eye-catching. Slides for our peers may be more polished and professional. Whereas slides for an update to an executive committee may be more formal – depending on the organisation, of course, and contain more facts and figures. Slides for a keynote would have powerful images that support our message and little or no text. If we are presenting to young children, there will likely be interruptions, and you want to make your presentation fun. For other groups, you could specify whether you wish to take questions at the end or during your talk. There may be no questions at a conference, or there could be a roaming mic. Perhaps you'd like to get feedback from the conference attendees with a poll integrated into a slide.

Purpose

Next, let's consider why we are presenting. Even if we are asked to present, there is always a reason, although sometimes we overlook this. There are three main reasons why we formally speak to people;

Inspire

We are trying to motivate someone to take action, for example, to lose weight, apply for a new job or go for that promotion, start a business, or go outside their comfort zone!

Inform

For example, we may share information with our audience about a new pension scheme, plans that affect the local community, or what it's like to work with you.

Influence

We may want to influence someone to see things from our perspective. To get someone to change a behaviour, belief, or opinion. We may want investors for our start-up, volunteers for our sports club or people to join our paid subscription offering.

When we want to inspire people, think of powerful images to support the message of success. Ensure photos are relevant to the topic to ensure your audience understands.

When we inform people, there may be lots of information, and a second, text-heavy version of the slides may be available for people to digest at their leisure. This is also true for regulatory topics requiring detailed legal descriptions. An infographic containing all the information may be sent as a PDF afterwards for a project update.

To influence people, consider ways to visualise data. Let's say you quote research that states 66% of children do X. Instead of a slide with the words 66%, how could you show this visually? Here's an example that illustrates 66% of children, or otherwise, 2 in 3 children.

Place

Finally, I'd like you to consider the place. Are you presenting online or in person? If online, do you have a monitor or just your laptop (this impacts the use of the Presenter View, where you can see your notes while presenting)? Will your audience watch at their desks or on mobile phones? How will your slides look on a mobile phone? If it's in-person, where exactly – in a familiar meeting room where you know the set-up, or in a new venue? If it's a new venue, what facilities do they have? The default for slides is widescreen, but many hotels use ceiling-mounted overhead projectors (OHP). Why does this matter? OPHs use a 'standard' slide size, which is more square in shape than widescreen. If you are presenting with widescreen slides on an OHP, you will have two unused black spaces to the top and bottom of your slides, and if you have standard slides on a widescreen monitor, you have black bars to the left and right of the slides.

Why does this matter? Well, in a large room, the people sitting at the back will find it difficult to read words on the screen, so you want to use all of it, not waste valuable space with unnecessary black space!

You can change your slides from widescreen to standard and vice versa, but they will need some formatting, so best start with the correct size before designing your slides.

Thank you for reading this article. I’d love to hear your feedback on these tips, and if you’d like help planning for your next PowerPoint presentation, please reach out!?