how to make your powerpoint presentation look more professional

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9 Tips for Making Beautiful PowerPoint Presentations

Ready to craft a beautiful powerpoint presentation these nine powerpoint layout ideas will help anyone create effective, compelling slides..

How many times have you sat through a poorly designed business presentation that was dull, cluttered, and distracting? Probably way too many. Even though we all loathe a boring presentation, when it comes time to make our own, do we really do any better?

The good news is you don’t have to be a professional designer to make professional presentations. We’ve put together a few simple guidelines you can follow to create a beautifully assembled deck.

We’ll walk you through some slide design tips, show you some tricks to maximize your PowerPoint skills, and give you everything you need to look really good next time you’re up in front of a crowd.

And, while PowerPoint remains one of the biggest names in presentation software, many of these design elements and principles work in Google Slides as well.

Let’s dive right in and make sure your audience isn’t yawning through your entire presentation.

1. Use Layout to Your Advantage

Layout is one of the most powerful visual elements in design, and it’s a simple, effective way to control the flow and visual hierarchy of information.

For example, most Western languages read left to right, top to bottom. Knowing this natural reading order, you can direct people’s eyes in a deliberate way to certain key parts of a slide that you want to emphasize.

You can also guide your audience with simple tweaks to the layout. Use text size and alternating fonts or colors to distinguish headlines from body text.

Placement also matters. There are many unorthodox ways to structure a slide, but most audience members will have to take a few beats to organize the information in their head—that’s precious time better spent listening to your delivery and retaining information.

Try to structure your slides more like this:

And not like this:

Layout is one of the trickier PowerPoint design concepts to master, which is why we have these free PowerPoint templates already laid out for you. Use them as a jumping off point for your own presentation, or use them wholesale!

Presentation templates can give you a huge leg up as you start working on your design.

2. No Sentences

This is one of the most critical slide design tips. Slides are simplified, visual notecards that capture and reinforce main ideas, not complete thoughts.

As the speaker, you should be delivering most of the content and information, not putting it all on the slides for everyone to read (and probably ignore). If your audience is reading your presentation instead of listening to you deliver it, your message has lost its effectiveness.

Pare down your core message and use keywords to convey it. Try to avoid complete sentences unless you’re quoting someone or something.

Stick with this:

And avoid this:

3. Follow the 6×6 Rule

One of the cardinal sins of a bad PowerPoint is cramming too many details and ideas on one slide, which makes it difficult for people to retain information. Leaving lots of “white space” on a slide helps people focus on your key points.

Try using the 6×6 rule to keep your content concise and clean looking. The 6×6 rule means a maximum of six bullet points per slide and six words per bullet. In fact, some people even say you should never have more than six words per slide!

Just watch out for “orphans” (when the last word of a sentence/phrase spills over to the next line). This looks cluttered. Either fit it onto one line or add another word to the second line.

Slides should never have this much information:

4. Keep the Colors Simple

Stick to simple light and dark colors and a defined color palette for visual consistency. Exceptionally bright text can cause eye fatigue, so use those colors sparingly. Dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background will work well. Also avoid intense gradients, which can make text hard to read.

If you’re presenting on behalf of your brand, check what your company’s brand guidelines are. Companies often have a primary brand color and a secondary brand color , and it’s a good idea to use them in your presentation to align with your company’s brand identity and style.

If you’re looking for color inspiration for your next presentation, check out our 101 Color Combinations , where you can browse tons of eye-catching color palettes curated by a pro. When you find the one you like, just type the corresponding color code into your presentation formatting tools.

Here are more of our favorite free color palettes for presentations:

• 10 Color Palettes to Nail Your Next Presentation
• 10 Energizing Sports Color Palettes for Branding and Marketing
• 10 Vintage Color Palettes Inspired by the Decades

No matter what color palette or combination you choose, you want to keep the colors of your PowerPoint presentation simple and easy to read, like this:

Stay away from color combinations like this:

5. Use Sans-Serif Fonts

Traditionally, serif fonts (Times New Roman, Garamond, Bookman) are best for printed pages, and sans-serif fonts (Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana) are easier to read on screens.

These are always safe choices, but if you’d like to add some more typographic personality , try exploring our roundup of the internet’s best free fonts . You’ll find everything from classic serifs and sans serifs to sophisticated modern fonts and splashy display fonts. Just keep legibility top of mind when you’re making your pick.

Try to stick with one font, or choose two at the most. Fonts have very different personalities and emotional impacts, so make sure your font matches the tone, purpose, and content of your presentation.

6. Stick to 30pt Font or Larger

Many experts agree that your font size for a PowerPoint presentation should be at least 30pt. Sticking to this guideline ensures your text is readable. It also forces you, due to space limitations, to explain your message efficiently and include only the most important points. .

7. Avoid Overstyling the Text

Three of the easiest and most effective ways to draw attention to text are:

• A change in color

Our eyes are naturally drawn to things that stand out, but use these changes sparingly. Overstyling can make the slide look busy and distracting.

8. Choose the Right Images

The images you choose for your presentation are perhaps as important as the message. You want images that not only support the message, but also elevate it—a rare accomplishment in the often dry world of PowerPoint.

But, what is the right image? We’ll be honest. There’s no direct answer to this conceptual, almost mystical subject, but we can break down some strategies for approaching image selection that will help you curate your next presentation.

The ideal presentation images are:

• Inspirational

These may seem like vague qualities, but the general idea is to go beyond the literal. Think about the symbols in an image and the story they tell. Think about the colors and composition in an image and the distinct mood they set for your presentation.

With this approach, you can get creative in your hunt for relatable, authentic, and inspirational images. Here are some more handy guidelines for choosing great images.

Illustrative, Not Generic

So, the slide in question is about collaborating as a team. Naturally, you look for images of people meeting in a boardroom, right?

While it’s perfectly fine to go super literal, sometimes these images fall flat—what’s literal doesn’t necessarily connect to your audience emotionally. Will they really respond to generic images of people who aren’t them meeting in a boardroom?

In the absence of a photo of your actual team—or any other image that directly illustrates the subject at hand—look for images of convincing realism and humanity that capture the idea of your message.

Doing so connects with viewers, allowing them to connect with your message.

The image above can be interpreted in many ways. But, when we apply it to slide layout ideas about collaboration, the meaning is clear.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s a nice setting and good photography, to boot.

Supportive, Not Distracting

Now that we’ve told you to get creative with your image selection, the next lesson is to rein that in. While there are infinite choices of imagery out there, there’s a limit to what makes sense in your presentation.

Let’s say you’re giving an IT presentation to new employees. You might think that image of two dogs snuggling by a fire is relatable, authentic, and inspirational, but does it really say “data management” to your audience?

To find the best supporting images, try searching terms on the periphery of your actual message. You’ll find images that complement your message rather than distract from it.

In the IT presentation example, instead of “data connections” or another literal term, try the closely related “traffic” or “connectivity.” This will bring up images outside of tech, but relative to the idea of how things move.

Inspiring and Engaging

There’s a widespread misconception that business presentations are just about delivering information. Well, they’re not. In fact, a great presentation is inspirational. We don’t mean that your audience should be itching to paint a masterpiece when they’re done. In this case, inspiration is about engagement.

Is your audience asking themselves questions? Are they coming up with new ideas? Are they remembering key information to tap into later? You’ll drive a lot of this engagement with your actual delivery, but unexpected images can play a role, as well.

When you use more abstract or aspirational images, your audience will have room to make their own connections. This not only means they’re paying attention, but they’re also engaging with and retaining your message.

To find the right abstract or unconventional imagery, search terms related to the tone of the presentation. This may include images with different perspectives like overhead shots and aerials, long exposures taken over a period of time, nature photos , colorful markets , and so on.

The big idea here is akin to including an image of your adorable dog making a goofy face at the end of an earnings meeting. It leaves an audience with a good, human feeling after you just packed their brains with data.

Use that concept of pleasant surprise when you’re selecting images for your presentation.

9. Editing PowerPoint Images

Setting appropriate image resolution in powerpoint.

Though you can drag-and-drop images into PowerPoint, you can control the resolution displayed within the file. All of your PowerPoint slide layout ideas should get the same treatment to be equal in size.

Simply click File > Compress Pictures in the main application menu.

If your presentation file is big and will only be viewed online, you can take it down to On-screen , then check the Apply to: All pictures in this file , and rest assured the quality will be uniform.

This resolution is probably fine for proofing over email, but too low for your presentation layout ideas. For higher res in printed form, try the Print setting, which at 220 PPI is extremely good quality.

For large-screens such as projection, use the HD setting, since enlarging to that scale will show any deficiencies in resolution. Low resolution can not only distract from the message, but it looks low-quality and that reflects on the presenter.

If size is no issue for you, use High Fidelity (maximum PPI), and only reduce if the file size gives your computer problems.

The image quality really begins when you add the images to the presentation file. Use the highest quality images you can, then let PowerPoint scale the resolution down for you, reducing the excess when set to HD or lower.

Resizing, Editing, and Adding Effects to Images in PowerPoint

PowerPoint comes with an arsenal of tools to work with your images. When a picture is selected, the confusingly named Picture Format menu is activated in the top menu bar, and Format Picture is opened on the right side of the app window.

In the Format Picture menu (on the right) are four sections, and each of these sections expand to show their options by clicking the arrows by the name:

• Fill & Line (paint bucket icon): Contains options for the box’s colors, patterns, gradients, and background fills, along with options for its outline.
• Effects (pentagon icon): Contains Shadow, Reflection, Glow, Soft Edges, 3-D Format and Rotation, and Artistic Effects.
• Size & Properties (dimensional icon): Size, Position, and Text Box allow you to control the physical size and placement of the picture or text boxes.
• Picture (mountain icon): Picture Corrections, Colors, and Transparency give you control over how the image looks. Under Crop, you can change the size of the box containing the picture, instead of the entire picture itself as in Size & Properties above.

The menu at the top is more expansive, containing menu presets for Corrections, Color, Effects, Animation, and a lot more. This section is where you can crop more precisely than just choosing the dimensions from the Picture pane on the right.

Cropping Images in PowerPoint

The simple way to crop an image is to use the Picture pane under the Format Picture menu on the right side of the window. Use the Picture Position controls to move the picture inside its box, or use the Crop position controls to manipulate the box’s dimensions.

To exert more advanced control, or use special shapes, select the picture you want to crop, then click the Picture Format in the top menu to activate it.

Hit the Crop button, then use the controls on the picture’s box to size by eye. Or, click the arrow to show more options, including changing the shape of the box (for more creative looks) and using preset aspect ratios for a more uniform presentation of images.

The next time you design a PowerPoint presentation, remember that simplicity is key and less is more. By adopting these simple slide design tips, you’ll deliver a clear, powerful visual message to your audience.

If you want to go with a PowerPoint alternative instead, you can use Shutterstock Create to easily craft convincing, engaging, and informative presentations.

With many presentation template designs, you’ll be sure to find something that is a perfect fit for your next corporate presentation. You can download your designs as a .pdf file and import them into both PowerPoint and Google Slides presentation decks.

Take Your PowerPoint Presentation to the Next Level with Shutterstock Flex

Need authentic, eye-catching photography to form the foundation of your PowerPoint presentation? We’ve got you covered.

With Shutterstock Flex, you’ll have all-in-one access to our massive library, plus the FLEXibility you need to select the perfect mix of assets every time.

License this cover image via F8 studio and Ryan DeBerardinis .

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17 PowerPoint Presentation Tips From Pro Presenters [+ Templates]

Published: April 26, 2024

PowerPoint presentations can be professional, attractive, and really help your audience remember your message.

If you don’t have much experience, that’s okay — I’m going to arm you with PowerPoint design tips from pro presenters, the steps you need to build an engaging deck, and templates to help you nail great slide design.

Download Now

Buckle up for a variety of step-by-step explanations as well as tips and tricks to help you start mastering this program. There are additional resources woven in, and you’ll find expert perspectives from other HubSpotters along the way.

Table of Contents

How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation

Powerpoint presentation tips.

Microsoft PowerPoint is like a test of basic professional skills, and each PowerPoint is basically a presentation made of multiple slides.

Successful PowerPoints depend on three main factors: your command of PowerPoint's design tools, your attention to presentation processes, and being consistent with your style.

Keep those in mind as we jump into PowerPoint's capabilities.

Getting Started

1. open powerpoint and click ‘new.’.

A page with templates will usually open automatically, but if not, go to the top left pane of your screen and click New . If you’ve already created a presentation, select Open and then double-click the icon to open the existing file.

10 Free PowerPoint Templates

Download ten free PowerPoint templates for a better presentation.

• Creative templates.
• Data-driven templates.
• Professional templates.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Creating PowerPoint Slides

3. insert a slide..

Insert a new slide by clicking on the Home tab and then the New Slide button. Consider what content you want to put on the slide, including heading, text, and imagery.

• Finally, PowerPoint Live is a new tool that enables you to do more seamless presentations during video calls and may be a better overall match for doing presentations remotely. Check out this video:

11. Try Using GIFs.

12 Free Customizable Resume Templates

Fill out this form to access your free professionally-designed templates, available on:

• Microsoft Word
• Google Docs
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Google Slides

15. Embed multimedia.

PowerPoint allows you to either link to video/audio files externally or to embed the media directly in your presentation. For PCs, two great reasons for embedding are:

• Embedding allows you to play media directly in your presentation. It will look much more professional than switching between windows.
• Embedding also means that the file stays within the PowerPoint presentation, so it should play normally without extra work (except on a Mac).

If you use PowerPoint for Mac it gets a bit complicated, but it can be done:

• Always bring the video and/or audio file with you in the same folder as the PowerPoint presentation.
• Only insert video or audio files once the presentation and the containing folder have been saved on a portable drive in their permanent folder.
• If the presentation will be played on a Windows computer, then Mac users need to make sure their multimedia files are in WMV format.
• Consider using the same operating system for designing and presenting, no matter what.

16. Bring your own hardware.

Between operating systems, PowerPoint is still a bit jumpy. Even between differing PPT versions, things can change. The easiest fix? Just bring along your own laptop when you're presenting.

The next easiest fix is to upload your PowerPoint presentation into Google Slides as a backup option — just make sure there is a good internet connection and a browser available where you plan to present.

Google Slides is a cloud-based presentation software that will show up the same way on all operating systems.

To import your PowerPoint presentation into Google Slides:

• Navigate to slides.google.com . Make sure you’re signed in to a Google account (preferably your own).
• Under Start a new presentation , click the empty box with a plus sign. This will open up a blank presentation.
• Go to File , then Import slides .
• A dialog box will come up. Tap Upload.
• Click Select a file from your device .
• Select your presentation and click Open .
• Select the slides you’d like to import. If you want to import all of them, click All in the upper right-hand corner of the dialog box.
• Click Import slides.

When I tested this out, Google Slides imported everything perfectly, including a shape whose points I had manipulated. This is a good backup option to have if you’ll be presenting across different operating systems.

17. Use Presenter View.

In most presentation situations, there will be both a presenter’s screen and the main projected display for your presentation.

PowerPoint has a great tool called Presenter View, which can be found in the Slide Show tab of PowerPoint. Included in the Presenter View is an area for notes, a timer/clock, and a presentation display.

For many presenters, this tool can help unify their spoken presentation and their visual aid. You never want to make the PowerPoint seem like a stack of notes that you’re reading off of.

Use the Presenter View option to help create a more natural presentation.

Pro Tip: At the start of the presentation, you should also hit CTRL + H to make the cursor disappear. Hitting the “A” key will bring it back if you need it.

Your Next Great PowerPoint Presentation Starts Here

Now that you have these style, design, and presentation tips under your belt, you should feel confident to create your PowerPoint presentation.

But if you can explore other resources to make sure your content hits the mark. After all, you need a strong presentation to land your point and make an impression.

With several templates to choose from — both in PowerPoint and available for free download — you can swiftly be on your way to creating presentations that wow your audiences.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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10 PowerPoint Tips for Preparing a Professional Presentation

Use these Microsoft PowerPoint tips to avoid common mistakes, keep your audience engaged, and create a professional presentation.

Professional presentations are all about making an impact. Your slides should look the part. Once you know what makes a presentation look professional, you can customize any half-decent PowerPoint template or create your own custom slides.

Our PowerPoint tips will help you avoid common mistakes, keep your audience engaged, and create a professional presentation, in form and content.

PowerPoint Slide Design

The design can leave a first and lasting impression. Give it a professional touch to win your audience's trust and attention.

1. Carefully Compose Your Slides

Don't copy and paste slides from different sources. You don't want your presentation to look like a rag rug. What you're aiming for is a consistent look. This will help your audience focus on the essential; your speech and the key facts you're highlighting on your slides.

To that end, use a basic template or make your own . PowerPoint comes with a wide selection of professional PowerPoint presentation templates , but you can also find free ones online.

PowerPoint Tip: When you open PowerPoint, note the search field at the top. One of the suggested searches is "presentations". Click it to see all of PowerPoint's default presentation templates. Choose a category on the right to narrow down your search.

Pick an easy to read font face . It's hard to get this right, but these professional-looking Google fonts are a safe bet. Unless you're a designer, stick to a single font face and limit yourself to playing with safe colors and font sizes.

If you're unsure about fonts, refer to "The 10 Commandments of Typography" shown below for orientation.

Carefully select font sizes for headers and text. While you don't want to create a wall of text and lose your audience's attention, you do want them to be able to read what you've highlighted. So make your fonts large enough.

PowerPoint Tip: PowerPoint offers several different slide layouts. When you add a new slide, choose the right layout under Home > New Slide . To switch the layout of an existing slide, use Home > Layout . By using the default layouts, you can make coherent design changes across your presentation anytime you want.

Leave room for highlights, such as images or take home messages. Some elements should stand out. So try not to bury them in background noise but give them the space they need. This could be a single quote or a single image per page with nothing but a simple header and a plain background.

Decorate scarcely but well. If you have good content, you won't need decoration. Your template will be decoratively enough.

Note: Restrict the room your design takes up, and don't ever let the design restrict your message.

2. Use Consistency

Consistently use font face and sizes on all slides. This one goes back to using a template. If you chose a professional presentation template, the designer would have taken care of this aspect. Stick to it!

Match colors. This is where so many presentations fail. You might have chosen a funky template and stuck to the designer's color profile, then you ruin it all with ugly Excel charts .

Take the time to match your visuals to your presentation design.

Text and Background Colors

A poor choice of colors can ruin your presentation.

3. Use Contrast

Black text on a white background will always be the best, but also the most boring choice . You're allowed to use colors! But use them responsibly.

Keep it easy on the eyes and always keep good contrast in mind. If you're color-challenged, use one of the many online tools to select a good looking color palette. Or just use a template and stick to its default colors.

PowerPoint Tip: Use PowerPoint's Design menu to quickly change the font and color palette of your entire presentation using preset design layouts.

4. Apply Brilliance

Carefully use color to highlight your message! Colors are your friends. They can make numbers stand out or your Take Home Message pop.

Don't weaken the color effect by using too many colors in too many instances . The special effect only works if used scarcely. Try to limit pop colors to one per slide.

Make a brilliant choice: match colors for design and good contrast to highlight your message . Use a professional color palette, to find which color will work best with your theme. Use The 10 Commandments of Color Theory shown below to learn more about colors:

Text on PowerPoint Slides

K eep I t S traight and S imple. That means...

• Keywords only on your slides.
• Absolutely no full sentences!
• And never read your slides , talk freely.

Remember that your slides are only there to support, not to replace your talk! You want to tell a story, visualize your data, and demonstrate key points. If you read your slides, you risk losing your audience's respect and attention.

PowerPoint Tip: Afraid you'll lose your train of thoughts? Add notes to your slides. Go to View and under Show click Notes to make them show up under your slides while editing. When starting your presentation, use PowerPoint's presentation mode (go to Slide Show and under Monitors , check Use Presenter View ), so you can glance at your notes when needed.

6. Take Home Message

Always summarize your key point in a Take Home Message. Ask yourself, if your audience learned or remembered one single thing from your presentation, what would you like it to be? That's your Take Home Message.

The Take Home Message is your key message, a summary of your data or story. If you're giving an hour-long presentation, you might have several Take Home Messages. That's OK. Just make sure that what you think is key, really matters to your audience.

Make your Take Home Message memorable. It's your responsibility that your audience takes home something valuable. Help them "get it" by making your Take Home Message stand out, either visually or through how you frame it verbally.

Presentation Visuals

Images are key elements of every presentation. Your audience has ears and eyes, they want to see what you're talking about, and a good visual cue will help them understand your message much better.

7. Add Images

Have more images in your slides than text. Visuals are your friends. They can illustrate your points and support your message.

But do not use images to decorate! That's a poor use of visuals because it's just a distraction.

Images can reinforce or complement your message. So use images to visualize or explain your story.

Use a sufficient image resolution. Your visuals might look good on your desktop, but once blown up by a projector, low-resolution images will make your presentation look anything but professional. So choose a resolution that matches the projector's resolution. If in doubt, don't go below a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels (XGA) and aim for 1920 x 1080 pixels (FullHD).

Always maintain your image's aspect ratio. Nothing looks more awkward than a distorted image. Whatever you do, don't stretch images. If you have to resize them, do so with the aspect ratio intact, even if that means dropping slightly above or below your target resolution.

PowerPoint Tip: Need a visual, but don't have one at hand? PowerPoint is connected to Bing's library of online images you can use for your presentations. Go to Insert and under Images select Online Images . You can browse by category or search the library. Be sure to set a checkmark for Creative Commons only , so you don't accidentally violate copyrights.

Note: Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In other words, if you don't have time for a thousand words, use a picture!

PowerPoint Animations and Media

In animations, there is a fine line between a comic and a professional impression. But animations can be powerful tools to visualize and explain complicated matters. A good animation can not only improve understanding, it can also make the message stick with your audience.

8. Don't Be Silly

Sparingly use animations and media. You should only use them in one of two cases:

• To draw attention, for example, to your Take Home Message.
• To clarify a model or emphasize an effect.

Embed the media in your presentation and make sure it works in presentation mode. Testing your presentation at home will save you time and avoid embarrassment.

Target Your Presentation Content

Your target, i.e. your audience, defines the content of your presentation. For example, you cannot teach school kids about the complicated matters of the economy, but you may be able to explain to them what the economy is in the first place and why it is important.

9. Keep Your Audience in Mind

When you compile your PowerPoint presentation, ask yourself these questions:

• What does my audience know?
• What do I need to tell them?
• What do they expect?
• What will be interesting to them?
• What can I teach them?
• What will keep them focused?

Answer these questions and boil your slides down to the very essentials. In your talk, describe the essentials colorfully and use your weapons, i.e. text, images, and animations wisely (see above).

Note: If you fail to hit the target, it won't matter how ingenious your design is or how brilliantly you picked colors and keywords. Nothing matters more than your audience's attention.

10. Practice Your Presentation Like a Professional

A well-practiced and enthusiastic talk will help you convince your audience and keep their attention. Here are some key points that define a good talk:

• Know your slides inside out.
• Speak freely.
• Speak with confidence, loud and clear.
• Speak at a steady pace, better too slow than too fast.
• Keep eye contact with your audience.

Bonus: Implement the 10/20/30 Rule

The 10/20/30 rule is a concept brought forward by Guy Kawasaki:

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

A similar concept is PechaKucha , a storytelling format limited to 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide, i.e. less than seven minutes to conclude the presentation.

Now there's a challenge! Telling your story succinctly, might help you get through to some of the busiest and most distracted people on the planet.

One Final PowerPoint Presentation Tip

I've shown you how to think through your entire presentation, from choosing a design to speaking to your audience. Here's a mind trick: never try to interpret the looks on your listeners' faces. Chances are, you're wrong. Just assume they're focused and taking notes.

You've done your best to create a professional PowerPoint presentation that will help your audience focus on the content and learn new things. The looks on their faces aren't doubt or confusion. It's focus! Well, d'oh! Obviously, you're the expert, and they're the learners. If you can get into this mindset, you can relax and perform at your best.

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• How to make Powerpoint slides look more professional: 16 design tips

Greetings, office peeps! When you’re designing a Powerpoint presentation or page layout, do you ever feel like something doesn’t look right? You can’t put your finger on it. Somehow the slide looks amateur instead of professional. Friends sometimes ask me for help, but if you don’t have a designer friend (or enough time to hire a pro) these DIY tips can help. Small tweaks will make your Powerpoint presentations and page layouts more professional.

1. Gather all the content before you start

Have your text written and any crucial pictures and graphs in a folder, collected before you start designing. Then, like with a moving truck full of furniture, you can simply unpack it and place it around the room. You don’t want somebody showing up with a surprise piano halfway through! You can always add non-essential decorative elements later, but make sure you’ve got all the key ingredients before you start arranging content.

2. Begin with the longest slide

If you’re making a multi-page document, design the page or slide that has the most text first. Use this page as a starting template for the rest of your pages. Then you’ll never run out of room on a page later. You’ll already have planned for the most stuff that needs to fit. If some pages end up with extra white space, great! You can make a picture bigger or just leave some breathing room. (More on that in a sec.)

3. Set healthy margins

A common mistake is skinny margins. Placing items too close to the edges of your document creates uneasy tension. Like a glass on the edge of table near a toddler or a cat.

Pull your content away from the edges, and your page will look more professional. If needed, scale down fonts and pictures, or move some elements to the next slide.

4. Make a visual hierarchy

Where do you want people to look first? Interesting layouts have a clear focal point, where one item is bigger or louder than everything else. A main image could be the star, or big text could be the star. If everything in your layout commands the same attention, the page is boring and our eyes don’t know where to land. Layouts that have a nice mix look more dynamic: a main big thing, some medium things, and some small things.

5. Leave empty space

Unless it’s a dense report or a novel, filling every bit of white space feels crowded and daunting to readers. Aim to leave nearly a quarter of your page empty (or more). You might need to ruthlessly cut some content, shrink pictures, or use more pages. If it’s a presentation, see if you can boil your points down to a short phrase each.

6. Align what you can

Our eyes move through layouts by following edges—edges of paragraphs, boxes, lines, etc. Make it easy on your readers to move through your layout by keeping essential elements organized in rows and columns.

7. When in doubt, left align text

Centering lengthy copy looks messy. Those ragged edges mean each line begins in a different place. Our eyes have to do more work to find the start of each row. This is fine when you have only three or four short lines of text, but not when you have more than that. In that case, left alignment is better.

8. Avoid orphans

In typography, an orphan is a sad little word that ends up on a line all by itself at the bottom of a paragraph. They are not cute! Look after those little babies and give them a family. Type some soft returns (shift+enter) to break lines at better places, pushing another word or two down to keep your orphan company.

9. Avoid rivers

Rivers are awkward trails of vertical space that can show up in justified paragraphs. “Justification” is an option for text alignment, where space is added between words to make the left and right edges of a paragraph line up. Choosing justified alignment is not always wrong, but it’s harder to work with. To fix rivers, you’ll need a generous number of words per line and lots of hyphens, often added manually. This is a hassle. In general, left alignment is a better choice than justification. It prevents unsightly rivers.

10. Avoid long lines of text: target 45-90 characters

Long lines of text are hard to follow across a page. In paragraphs, target 45-90 characters per line, including spaces. Research has shown that readers are more likely to avoid reading text when line lengths don’t fit the optimal range. To fix lines that are too long, use a larger font size, wider page margins, narrower text boxes, or more columns. In general, a landscape slide will need two or more columns of text. A portrait letter will need much wider margins than Word’s default settings.

11. Stick to one or two typefaces

Using too many fonts can look chaotic. Choosing just one typeface (a.k.a. family of fonts) and using different weights is nice. For example, use bold headings with regular-weight paragraph text. Or, pick a font from two different families, using one for headlines and one for paragraphs. Make sure they’re noticeably different from each other, so it doesn’t look like an accident.

A reliable combination is pairing a serif font with a sans serif font. (If you just said, “what the what?” serifs are the little feet on some styles of letters. “Sans serif” means without the feet.) See examples below that use free Google Fonts .

12. Use limited colors

To keep your life simple, choose one main color for your design. If you like, add one or two accent colors in smaller amounts. Repeat those accents so they look intentional, not like random one-offs.

13. Use icons instead of bullets

Icons are more interesting than bullets. If your page needs to look more engaging, swap in small icons instead of bullets to add interest and color. Links to free icon sources are below.

14. Use matching icons

It’s easy to get carried away searching for the icon subject matter you need, and then forget to consider the style of the icon. Does it look like the same artist drew all the icons in your document? It should. Consistency is key to professional design. Icon styles can be solid or outlined with thin or thick lines. They can have rounded corners or sharp ones. They can be smoothly geometric or roughly hand-drawn. Make sure they match! The internet is full of designers you can hire, sets you can purchase, or for freebies, check out:

Reshot free icons — a variety of styles Feather icons — adjust the size, color and stroke thickness of 287 icons Font Awesome icons — 2,000+ freebies with 19,000 more for purchase Hand-drawn Goods icons — sets of sketched icons

15. Keep icons small

To help fill a page, it’s tempting to make icons really big. This can look clunky. If your icons don’t have much detail, keep them small, since that’s the purpose they were designed for.

16. Use better illustrations instead of “clip art”

Stock photographs are easy to find (see my list of free sources ) but good, free illustrations are trickier. Some sources of free illustrations are below, or you can purchase stock illustrations or hire an illustrator. Just like icons, make sure all of your illustrations are the same style.

Blush illustrations Humaaans illustrations Storyset illustrations

Be the design star in your office

Often just a few basic tweaks can help designs and Powerpoint presentations look better. Even if you don’t feel like a designer, you’ll be ahead of the pack in your office!

And if your company needs a consistent brand look and feel, instead of every person reinventing the wheel every time, a brand identity designer can help. We use a strategic approach to create a signature theme for your company: colors, fonts, and images in templates that your team can use all the time. No more guessing each time you make a document. If this is something your business could use, let’s talk!

Note: Text in the example images was auto-generated by Corporate Ipsum  for humor. Please do not write this way for real. 🙂 

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Privacy Overview

Create professional slide layouts with Designer

Designer improves slides for Microsoft 365 subscribers by automatically generating design ideas to choose from.

While you're putting content on a slide, Designer works in the background to match that content to professionally designed layouts.

Get design ideas

The first time you try out Designer, it may ask your permission to get design ideas for you. If you want to use Designer, select Turn on .

To learn more, see the Microsoft Privacy Statement .

Once you've turned on "connected experiences," PowerPoint automatically shows you design ideas when you're creating your slides. Over time PowerPoint learns from your experience using design ideas and shows you design ideas at the appropriate time. 

Scroll through the suggestions in the Designer pane on the right side of the window.

Click to select the design you want, or else close the window. If you select one of the ideas, your slide is changed accordingly.

You can also select another idea from the pane or go back to your original slide design: Press Ctrl+Z to undo a design change you've just selected.

What Designer gives you:

A title-slide photo and a design scheme

When you start a blank presentation and enter words on the slide, Designer recommends high-quality photos that reflect the slide text, plus a design scheme with colors that complement the photograph you choose. All the slides in the presentation will fit together visually.

Professional layouts

Designer detects pictures, charts, or tables on a slide and gives you several suggestions for arranging them in a cohesive, attractive layout.

More visuals, less text

Too much text on your slide? Designer can turn text such as lists, processes, or timelines into an easily readable graphic.

Bulleted lists get suggestions for an icon to accompany each bullet item. If you don't like a suggested icon, just select it and use our on-the-spot replacement button:

Illustrations

Designer watches for key terms and concepts that it has illustrations for, and it shows you those illustrations in various layouts. The Illustrations are from the Microsoft 365 icons library.

Designer and "ink"

(Only for Microsoft 365 subscribers) Designer recognizes when you draw or write with ink, and it incorporates that content into the design ideas it shows you.

Turn off Designer

If you don't want Designer to automatically offer suggestions:

On the File menu, click Options .

In the PowerPoint Options dialog box, click the General tab on the left, then scroll toward the bottom and clear the Automatically show me design ideas check box.

Requirements

Requirements for designer on windows.

Ask for design ideas any time by choosing Design > Designer on the ribbon.

The first time you try out Designer, it asks your permission to get design ideas for you. If you want to use Designer, select Turn on or Let's go .

Once you've turned on intelligent services, PowerPoint automatically shows you design ideas when you add photos to your slides.

You can also select another idea from the pane or go back to your original slide design: Press ⌘+Z to undo a design change you've just selected.

SmartArt graphics

Designer can turn text such as lists, processes, or timelines into an easily readable SmartArt graphic.

If you don't want Designer to offer suggestions:

On the PowerPoint menu, select Preferences .

Under Authoring and Proofing Tools , select General .

In the General dialog box, under PowerPoint Designer , clear the Automatically show me design ideas check box.

• The Designer button is grayed out

If you can see the Designer button in PowerPoint but it's grayed out, it means:

You aren't connected to the internet, or

A slide isn't selected. (This can be the case when multiple slides are selected in the slide thumbnail pane in Normal view, or when the focus in the thumbnail pane is between two slides. It also is the case when the focus is in the Notes pane or you are in Slide Show view rather than Normal view.)

The Designer button isn't there

Designer is a feature for Microsoft 365 subscribers. If you don't see the Designer button, you're using an older version of PowerPoint for Mac, rather than PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 for Mac.

Requirements for Designer on the Mac

PowerPoint shows design ideas for your slide.

If you can see the Designer button in PowerPoint but it's grayed out, it means that someone else is currently also editing the slide:

If you're co-authoring a presentation with someone else and more than one person is actively editing a single slide at one time, Designer won't give design suggestions on that slide.

However, as soon as there's only person editing the slide, Designer will begin offering design suggestions again once that person does an action (such as adding a photo) that Designer can respond to.

Requirements for Designer on PowerPoint for the web

Ask for design ideas any time by choosing Design > Design Ideas on the ribbon.

Scroll through the suggestions in the Design Ideas pane on the right side of the window.

The Design Ideas button is grayed out

If you can see the Design Ideas button in PowerPoint but it's grayed out, it means you aren't connected to the internet.

Requirements for Designer on iOS

Requirements for Designer on Android

Requirements for Designer on Windows Mobile

Troubleshooting.

• Which problem are you having?
• I don't see the Designer button
• I clicked the Designer button, but no suggestions are offered

Design ideas are only available to Microsoft 365 subscribers

On desktop versions of PowerPoint, only subscribers get design ideas. You can try or buy a subscription here .

On PowerPoint for the web, design ideas are available to everyone.

One Microsoft 365 subscription package doesn't include design ideas: Office 365 Germany Germany .

Turn on the Office connected experiences

To use Designer, make sure that Office "connected experiences" are turned on:

Go to File > Account , and under Account Privacy select Manage Settings .

See Enabling and disabling intelligent services for more information.

An administrator may have turned off Designer

Designer is a feature for Microsoft 365 subscribers, but some organizations turn off the feature. If you have an Microsoft 365 subscription but don't see the Designer button, ask your IT department.

Reinstall Office to get subscriber features

If you've upgraded from Microsoft 365 to an Microsoft 365 subscription, you need to uninstall Microsoft 365 and then reinstall in order to get the subscriber features. See the instructions in these articles:

Uninstall Office from a PC or Uninstall Office 2016 for Mac

Reinstall Microsoft 365

Restart the app to get Designer

Sometimes users find that the first time they start PowerPoint after installing Microsoft 365, the Designer button isn't available. Restarting the app fixes this problem.

If there are no design ideas available for you, a few things might be the cause. First of all:

Make sure you're connected to the Internet. Designer goes online to get its design ideas.

Use a theme that comes with PowerPoint (not a custom theme or one that you've downloaded from elsewhere).

Following are other problems and how to solve them:

No design ideas for slides with pictures

Make sure your slide has either the Title or Title + Content slide layout applied.

Don't use any additional objects or shapes on the same slide as your photo.

Use a maximum of four photos (.jpg, .png, .gif, or .bmp) per slide, and make sure they're larger than 200 x 200 pixels in size.

No design ideas for process-based slides

Make sure your slide has the Title + Content slide layout applied.

Don't use any additional photos, objects, or shapes on the same slide as your process text.

Because Designer is a relatively new service, it is still learning new tricks. If Designer can’t generate high-quality options for you, it won’t show any options at all. We're working hard to be able to generate great design ideas for more varieties of your content.

And of course, if you don’t find Designer useful, you can turn it off by going to File > Options > General , and then clearing the box that says Automatically show me design ideas .

Someone else is editing

No design ideas for slides that have shapes or text boxes.

Designer isn't able to suggest design ideas when a slide has a shape or text box drawn on it. You can have photos and you can have text in a placeholder.

You aren't connected to the internet , or

A single slide isn't selected . This can be the case when multiple slides are selected in the slide thumbnail pane in Normal view, or when the focus in the thumbnail pane is between two slides. It also is the case when the focus is in the Notes pane or you are in Slide Show view rather than Normal view.

Combining colors in PowerPoint: Mistakes to avoid

Format the background color of slides

Start with a presentation template

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How to Design a Professional PowerPoint Presentation

Our series of tips on presentation design outlined some generic rules and ideas that you can live by to create better, more professional presentations. Today we want to follow that up by taking you through the actual process of designing a presentation from start to finish.

We’ll break down every step of the design process, from choosing colors and images to using whitespace properly. After reading through this you should be all set to design your own beautiful presentation slides that will put your coworkers to shame.

Using a pre-built PowerPoint template can be a good starting point for many people (we collected some of the best PowerPoint templates for you!). But if you’re wanting to design your own from start-to-finish, you’re in the right place!

How Does Unlimited PowerPoint Templates Sound?

Download thousands of PowerPoint templates, and many other design elements, with a monthly Envato Elements membership. It starts at $16 per month, and gives you unlimited access to a growing library of over 2,000,000 presentation templates, fonts, photos, graphics, and more.

Ciri Template

Pitch PowerPoint

Explore PowerPoint Templates

A Word About Content

I usually make a big deal about content preceding design, and presentations are no exception. Ideally, you’ll have the topic and much or all of the content outlined before you even think about design. This will in every way shape the appearance of your design, which is why working from pre-built templates isn’t always the best move (though generic templates can and do work great in some circumstances).

The reason that I bring this up is that I don’t really have an actual presentation in mind for this project. I’ll be running with a basic theme, but the textual information will be entirely placeholder copy. Your image, font, color and layout selection shouldn’t necessarily match mine but instead reflect the topic and content you’re working with.

Choosing A Color Scheme

Before I even open Photoshop (yes, I design PowerPoint/Keynote slides in Photoshop and drop them in), I want to find a color scheme on which to base my entire design. When I need to quickly find several colors that go together I usually start with Adobe Color CC . Not only is it a great way to build your own color schemes, it’s an outstanding source to find schemes built by others that you can just grab for your projects.

As luck would have it, I liked the very first color scheme I saw upon opening Color. This scheme was featured on the home page and looked like a great place to start for our presentation design.

Now, if you wanted to get everything exactly right, you could make a list of the RGB or Hex values, but I prefer a quicker, more direct route. What I usually do is snap a screenshot of the color scheme, paste it into my document and stretch it across the canvas on its own layer for easy access. This way I can quickly activate the layer, eyedropper the color I want, then hide the layer and get back to work. It’s a bit like having a palette of colors to dip your paintbrush in.

Designing Your Cover Slide

Now that we have a color scheme, the design work is going to be much simpler. One trick that designers often use in presentations is to leverage the color scheme as heavily as possible. If you’re new to design, you’ll likely think that this is too easy, too plain or even that it’s cheating somehow, but trust me, it’ll be much more attractive and professional than that horrid Microsoft clipart library you love so much.

To start, simply grab one of your colors from the scheme you chose and flood the background of your slide with it (I chose #631c25). Good job, there’s your background. Don’t freak out. It’ll look great. Now let’s throw in some typography.

Choosing a Font

Font choice is a major issue for non-designers. The tendency is to think that most fonts are “boring” and to look around for something exciting and fun. This inevitably leads to the use of Comic Sans or some other equally hideous font.

Unless you’re an elementary school teacher, your presentations should never look like this. Instead, why don’t you try one of those “boring” fonts to see if you can come up with something you like.

Combining fonts can be a tricky task and can take a trained eye to pull off. Fortunately, font designers have already created collections that work well together and if you’re not a designer, they make it easy to pull off great typography. The trick is to just stay in a family. Again, I know this sounds lame, but it works really well if you make sure the two styles you choose are very different.

For instance, I chose a Helvetica Bold Condensed and a Helvetica Light for my cover slide. Notice how different the fonts are from each other in terms of thickness. Choosing two styles that are relatively close causes visual confusion and should be avoided as a general rule of thumb. Instead, what you want is contrast and plenty of it.

Alignment and Layout

Notice a few things about the way I set up this slide. First, I used a strong left alignment for the text. As I say in just about every design article I write, center alignment should be a last resort, not a first. It tends to be the weakest text alignment that you can choose, having a hard edge increases readability considerably (notice that book pages aren’t center-aligned).

Also, notice the generous whitespace that I used. Remember that you don’t have to eat up every inch of space. Giving your text room to breathe helps your layout immensely and gives the design a clean look.

Adding an Image

At this point you might be wondering why you wasted your time reading so I could give you such plain advice. The truth is, most people that create presentations could improve them by 100% from following the advice above. However, I realize minimalism may be too extreme for some folks so let’s throw in an image to make it look nice.

Since our text is on the left, I wanted to find something a little heavy on the right. The general theme that I’ll go for is “City photos” assuming I had some sort of architecture or city-centric presentation to give. Again, you’ll have to choose iamges relevant to your own topic.

I grabbed this Flickr Creative Commons image from photographer Ben Spreng .

Now, if we just made this image our background, the text would become unreadable and we would be ditching our color scheme. What we’re going to do instead is set it on top of the colored slide and set our blending mode to Overlay. Then throw your opacity to around 45%.

As you can see, this helps the slide look much more interesting but keeps the text and colors fairly intact. It’s a simple solution that adds a lot of interest to an otherwise plain design.

Adding Content Slides

The cover may seem like it’s only a tiny part of the battle, but you’ve actually already set the tone for the entire presentation. You’ve got your theme, color scheme and fonts already in place. Now you just need to set up a few different layouts for your content.

The thing to keep in mind is to keep everything extremely simple, and that includes the level of content that you include. Apart from design, these are just good presentation tactics that you’ll learn in every public speaking class. Filling your slides with everything you’re going to say makes you unnecessary. You could just email everyone the slides and shut up.

Instead, the slides are merely meant to be a visual aid. Show a slide with your overall topic or main point, then speak the rest, without reading. Nothing is worse than watching a guy read his note cards word-for-word for thirty minutes, except perhaps watching a guy turn his back to the audience so he can actually read his slides out loud to you the whole time! You may laugh, but I’ve seen it happen folks.

For our first content slide, we’ll grab another Flickr photo and set it to the bottom portion of our slide at full bleed. Then we’ll set the top to another color from our scheme and toss in some text using the same exact formatting that we used on the cover.

See how this closely resembles the theme we’ve already established while still looking significantly different? This is they key to good presentation design: cohesiveness without redundancy.

Now for our third slide, we can simply do the inverse of the second slide with a new color and a new image .

Adding Informational Elements

It would be nice if every slide ever presented could work in a full bleed image, but the truth is that this simply isn’t practical. It will often be the case that you’re presenting graphical information or some other item that isn’t necessarily a photo.

My advice here is to try to stick as close to your theme as possible. For the slide below I flooded the entire background with a solid color from our original scheme and made a quick 3D graph with white columns (I drew a few flat boxes in Illustrator and applied a 3D effect).

As you can see, this slide is very information-focused and yet it doesn’t sacrifice the aesthetics and simplicity we’ve already established.

You’re All Set

From here you might come up with one or two more alternate slide designs and then rotate between them for the duration of your speech. The result is a presentation that is beautiful, very readable and highly professional. The bonus is that the simple, straightforward design will probably result in less work than a clip-art-filled horror show.

Most of the time, great design doesn’t mean being particularly artistic or knowing how to create amazing complex layouts. Instead, it’s about presenting information in an attractive and user-friendly way. With this goal in mind you realize that you’re probably trying way too hard if your end result is ugly. Try cutting out half or more of the elements on one of your slides and giving what’s left a strong left or right alignment with plenty of whitespace.

I hope this article has convinced you to abandon that clip art gallery once and for all. The benefits of clean, minimal design in presentations are clear: the information is easier to take in and the end result is more professional than the mess of information you typically see in presentation slides.

Of course, if you’re looking to get started quickly, flick through our collection of the best PowerPoint templates to find a beautiful set of pre-made designs!

10 Tips For Designing PowerPoint Presentations That Don't Suck

At Workfront, we want to help you improve the way you work. The following is the first in a two-part post full of tips to help you design more effective presentations, making your job a little easier. You can see part two here .

PowerPoint has produced more bad design in its day than perhaps any other digital tool in history with the possible exception of Microsoft Paint.

In this post we’re going to address the epidemic of bad presentation design with 10 super practical tips for designing better looking and more professional PowerPoint presentations.

Along the way we’ll see a number of awesome slide designs from Note & Point along with some custom examples built by yours truly. Let’s get started!

Not a Designer?

This post is for everyone who has ever created a presentation. Whether you’re a student, the leader of a self-help group, or a corporate executive, the second you open up PowerPoint or Keynote, you become a designer whether you like it or not.

You’ve chosen a visual tool to communicate and should therefore take the time to learn a thing or two about visual communications.

One of the major reasons for this, especially for people in the professional business world, is that your colleagues will subconsciously make judgments about you based on the visual appeal of your presentation.

Follow the 10 tips below and see if you don’t start getting comments about your awesome presentation design skills. Just watch out, if your co-workers notice you getting good at it they’re likely to start asking for help with theirs!

1. Don’t Use Built-In PowerPoint Themes

To illustrate this idea I opened up PowerPoint, grabbed an actual default theme at random, and added some text.

This workflow is nearly identical to that of countless presentation designers and the result is a typical presentation slide that I’ve seen countless times throughout college and my career:

Here’s a design secret: this slide sucks, as do many of the default themes you’ll find in PowerPoint.

Granted, they’ve definitely improved the offering in recent years and Keynote (Apple’s presentation software) has some awesome templates. However you shouldn’t view these as the go-to method, but rather a last resort if you need to create a presentation on a very short deadline.

The point here is that something custom makes a much stronger statement. Your colleagues know and use the templates in PowerPoint and they’ll recognize immediately that you didn’t put any work into the aesthetics of the slides.

I know for non-designers leaving behind templates may seem a bit radical, but you can do it!

Just be sure to read the other tips below before striking out on your own. Otherwise you might end up with something much worse than even the Microsoft designers could come up with (and that’s saying something).

2. Use Quality Photography

Photography is one of the single best ways to make your presentation look awesome. It’s also one of the single best ways to make it lame. The “business people on white background” look is nice, but it’s overdone and tends to look a bit too much like stock art or flat out cliche.

Also, just because a picture is on a white background doesn’t mean it’s a good photo. Stop using ugly or awkward photography just to have something to put on the slide. Remember that using no photo at all is better than using a bad photo.

For example, compare the slide above with the one below.

See the difference? The image in the slide below is unique, attractive, and void of cliches. Don’t get stuck in a pattern of using cheesy stock art when you can use free high quality photos that make a much stronger visual statement.

Where are these free photos?

For starters, check out freeimages.com , a free stock photography website with tons of content (good and bad).

You can also search Flickr specifically for Creative Commons licensed content. These photos are free to use and many only require attribution, which can come in the form of a simple slide thrown in at the end of your presentation with a link to the photo sources.

As an example, the photo above is by Lauren Tucker and is from Flickr's Creative Commons search results.

3. Choose a Strong Color Palette

You don’t always need a fancy photo or crazy custom background to make a presentation look professional. Using a strong palette of solid colors can make a presentation feel professional and still visually interesting.

The slide above is a perfect example of using very plain design and little effort to create something that looks really polished. This approach is perfect for non-designers who still want a high quality slide deck.

The key here is to be very cautious about your color choice. Something too bright and colorful will overwhelm and distract an audience. Also make sure to use plenty of contrast as your secondary color for some eye-catching elements.

A crash course in color theory can help you learn how to use color to your advantage.

If you need help building color palettes, check out the free tools below.

Color is the quintessential online color tool. Choose from thousands of awesome pre-built color schemes or generate your own with advanced but user-friendly tools.

Aurlien is one of the most basic color tools on the planet and definitely one of my favorites. Simply move your mouse around to change the color, scroll to change the luminosity, and click to copy the values to your clipboard.

I use this daily when building websites to get a feel for what a color will look like when it covers the whole screen, which makes it perfect for presentation slides as well.

Another one of my favorites is 0to255, an amazing tool for finding variations of a color. It is perfect for finding just the right hue for hovers and borders in web design but it can also be great for finding an accent color for typography or other elements in a presentation.

4. Use Professional Typography

Non-designers frequently stress out about finding the proper typeface for a presentation, and for good reason. The right font can make or break your presentation. Typography is a major art form in the design world and it can really set the stage for what you want to say.

Remember that typefaces can communicate a mood, a point in time, or any number of other factors. Instead of browsing your font list and looking for “something cool,” think about the message you want to convey.

Consider the fonts below as an example of how typography can communicate just by virtue of its design. Old style serif fonts tend to feel formal and professional while sans-serif fonts feel modern and clean.

The biggest mistake that people make with fonts in presentations is assuming that the first three font styles listed above are boring. This causes them to jump to something like the font on the bottom because it feels more unique and interesting.

If you’re not a professional designer, remember that the first three styles above aren’t boring, they’re safe. They’re great looking typefaces that have been professionally designed to make you look good and that’s exactly what they do.

Never be afraid of standard-looking fonts. Using them can help ensure that your design remains inside the realm of clean and professional and away from cluttered and ugly.

Notice how the slide below uses relatively “boring” fonts but varies the size and weight to add visual interest and create something that is ultimately quite non-boring.

But, don't worry. You don’t have to avoid cool fonts 100 percent of the time. There is a time and a place to throw in something fun, just know that you should use these types of fonts wisely and sparingly.

As the image above illustrates, one great trick for using crazy fonts is to only use them for a headline while leaving the rest of the text plain. When you have too much of a complicated font or start mixing complex styles, what you get is an impossible-to-read mess.

In the slide above, we’ve left most of our messaging in a typeface that you can actually read while still bringing plenty of awesomeness to the page with the headline.

5. Remember Readability

While we’re on the subject of typography, you should always be aware of how readable the type is in your presentations. Sometimes the amazing photography tip from number two will leave you in a situation like the one below.

Here we have a really captivating image, but it’s wreaking havoc on the readability of our text. Even if we make the text bold and try different color variations, it still comes up short. This can be immensely frustrating to new designers.

The solution however is quite simple: use tip number three (solid colors rock). By creating a simple color bar behind the text we increase the readability by leaps and bounds and still maintain a stylish looking slide.

This is an extremely common tactic carried out in a number of different ways. Check out the examples below for some inspiration.

Paper Scraps

• PowerPoint Themes
• Latest PowerPoint Templates
• Best PowerPoint Templates
• Free PowerPoint Templates
• Simple PowerPoint Templates
• PowerPoint Backgrounds
• Project Charter
• Project Timeline
• Project Team
• Project Status
• Market Analysis
• Marketing Funnel
• Market Segmentation
• Target Customer
• Marketing Mix
• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Resource Planning
• Recruitment
• Employee Onboarding
• Company Profile
• Mission Vision
• Meet The Team
• Problem & Solution
• Business Model
• Business Case
• Business Strategy
• Business Review
• Leadership Team
• Balance Sheet
• Income Statement
• Cash Flow Statement

Executive Summary

• 30 60 90 Day Plan
• SWOT Analysis
• Flow Charts
• Gantt Charts
• Text Tables
• Infographics
• Google Slides Templates
• Presentation Services
• Ask Us To Make Slides
• Data Visualization Services
• Business Presentation Tips
• PowerPoint Tutorials
• Google Slides Tutorials
• Presentation Resources

17 Tips On How To Make A Professional PowerPoint & Google Slides Presentation

Creating impactful presentations is no easy task. It comes with rigorous practice over the years. Get expert guidance and professional presentation tips on how to make a professional PowerPoint and Google Slides presentation.

A PowerPoint presentation is a fantastic tool for communicating vital information. Even though people think it’s simple to put all your content together and make a presentation, arranging and preparing the template and design takes time to ensure it is impactful and professional. But do you know how to make a professional PowerPoint & Google Slides presentation?

An engaging presentation goes beyond simply exchanging information; it connects with the audience . It must transport the listener on a journey, induce emotions, and leave an unforgettable impression. Let’s dig deeper and understand how to make a PowerPoint look professional.

What Is A Professional Presentation?

A professional presentation is a well-structured and effectively delivered communication that conveys information, ideas, or proposals in a business or formal context. 

It typically adheres to specific standards and practices to effectively engage and inform the audience. As a result, such presentations can be diverse, and they may be necessary to complete job interviews , provide sales pitches to potential clients, or present project proposals to top management. 

Let’s discuss the best tips on how to make a PowerPoint look professional.

How To Make A Professional PowerPoint Presentation? 

Making a professional PowerPoint and Google Slides presentation might be a hectic task. It needs your time to create amazing professional presentations and at the same time ensure you include all the key things. We have compiled a list of the best tips for you, which you can also use as a checklist. We have bisected the tips into three categories to make it easier for you to grasp. 

The three categories for tips for professional looking PowerPoint are as follows:

• Content and Slide Tips
• Presentation Design Tips
• Delivery Tips

Content And Slide Tips On How To Make A Professional PowerPoint

Follow the steps below on how to make a PowerPoint look professional:

• Start with a title slide
• Add an agenda slide
• Logically arrange the middle slides
• Include a call-to-action slide at the end of your presentation
• Conclude with key takeaways

1. Start With A Title Slide

An eye-catching first slide serves as an introduction to your subject. To make it clear to read across the room, place the title of your presentation in huge letters in the middle of the slide. You can also include your name and title on the slide, depending on the type of presentation. 

One of the most underrated and important presentation tips – On the title slide, keep the background simple to avoid drawing attention away from you while you speak. 

2. Add An Agenda Slide

List what the audience can anticipate. Label your slide with “Presentation Agenda,” or as “ Meeting Agenda ,” or a phrase to that effect. List the key lessons you want your audience to take away from the presentation. It not only makes it easier for your audience to follow along, but it also clarifies your main objective. Let’s discuss another tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint.

3. Logically Arrange The Middle Slides

Identify the presentation’s beginning, middle, and end for more clarity. Make a list of the facts you want to provide and essential points you want your audience to take away from your presentation. Take what you’ve written and arrange the ideas in an outline so that each idea leads naturally into the next. 

For instance, if you’re making a persuasive presentation, you might begin by providing background information on the subject and then discuss potential solutions before concluding by outlining actions an audience member can take to contribute.

4. Include A Call-To-Action Slide At The End Of Your Presentation

The next tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint is to include a CTA. After you finish your presentation, inform your audience of the next steps. After reviewing the key points of your presentation, provide a list of actions your audience may take to advance the project. So that your audience has several options for what to do next, try to come up with some concrete ideas.

5. Conclude With Key Takeaways

Summarize your important points so your audience will remember them. Start the last slide with a header at the top that reads “Takeaways” or “Key Points.” Make a final list of bullet points containing the most crucial information you have covered. 

Emphasize your previous presentations’ key ideas and speak them aloud to your audience. In this manner, your presentation will leave a lasting effect on the audience, making them more likely to recall what you say.

Content forms the foundation of any presentation. But, if not designed correctly, it can lead to a boring presentation. That’s where an impactful design for a presentation comes into the picture. Now, let’s discuss design tips for professional looking powerpoints.

Design Tips On How To Make A Professional PowerPoint

Now that you know some content and slide-related tips, let’s read about the top design-related tips on how to make a PowerPoint look professional:

• Write content for your audience
• Select readable fonts
• List the important points in brief bullets
• Aim to have about 10 slides
• Make your presentation background & Theme consistent
• Use “Format Object”
• Use PowerPoint Shapes and SmartArt
• Include relevant graphics and multimedia
• Reuse your slides

1. Write Content Considering Your Audience

Your content is the king. What you write and present in your presentation can make or break it. You have to consider your audience and write content that relates to them. What’s the point of writing in a way that’s hard for your audience to comprehend?

Let’s say your target audience is freshers you hired recently, and your presentation includes multiple industry jargon that is difficult for them to understand. Senior professionals in the company can clearly understand this jargon, but your freshers might find it difficult. Hence, your content tone and style need to align with your targeted audience.

This way, you will also boost your audience’s participation and engagement. Now, let’s consider other tips on how to make a professional PowerPoint. 

2. Select Readable Fonts

Keep your fonts large and sans-serif so your audience can read them clearly. Keep your content between 28 and 40 points because small fonts might be difficult to see from a distance. Choose Proxima Nova or Arial rather than Times New Roman or another serifed font to show your content because sans-serif is more straightforward to read on a screen. 

Bold, italicize, or highlight the words you want to stand out as particularly important. Throughout the slide, change the font size. For instance, the slide’s headline should be larger than the body content.

READ MORE: Best Presentation Fonts

3. List The Important Points In Brief Bullets

Another tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint is to use bullet points. Your slides will be easier to follow if they have pointers. Paragraphs on a slide can be very intimidating, and your audience could choose to read them rather than pay attention to you. Keep your slide to a bulleted list of essential phrases or terms rather than writing out every word you plan to speak. Keep your slides to a maximum of six bullet points, each with a maximum of six words.

4. Aim To Have About Ten Slides

More than 10 concepts at once will be difficult for your audience to recall. Count your slides once you’ve organized your data to check if you have 10 or fewer slides. If you have more than 10, review the content once more to see if you can squeeze anything onto one slide. 

Decide which ideas need to be covered the most, and eliminate anything that doesn’t seem appropriate or doesn’t fit the style of your presentation. Now, Let’s discuss another tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint.

5. Make Your Presentation Background & Theme Consistent

Keeping the same straightforward theme and style for each slide can help you create professional PowerPoint presentations. You can make a background in PowerPoint or explore PowerPoint backgrounds from SlideUpLift. Use easy-to-read layouts that don’t draw attention away from the text or graphics you want to use.

Consistency in your background images and themes shows professionalism. This subconsciously attracts your audience and leaves a good impression.

6. Use “Format Object”

You must have used multiple objects in your slides, but there are chances that not all the objects are as per your requirements. You may need to alter a few things in your objects to align them properly with your overall presentation and good formatting. 

You can simply change your objects using the “Format Object: feature. Just right-click on the object you want to edit and choose the “Format Object” feature. Now, you can change the object’s size, add reflections, and even alter the text or content.

7. Use Powerpoint Shapes And SmartArt

The next tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint is using Shapes and SmartArt. Do you know PowerPoint provides multiple Shapes and SmartArts to help you create better presentations? In your slides, you can easily insert different shapes, like rectangles, circles, ovals, etc.. You can use these shapes to create various diagrams to showcase your content effectively.

Similarly, SmartArts also enhances your presentation’s visual appeal by providing you with multiple graphics options. These are pre-built in MS PowerPoint , and you can modify them as per your requirements. 

Using Shapes and SmartArts gives you more control over making professional presentations, as you can make changes to meet your requirements.

8. Include Relevant Graphics

Select charts and photos of the highest quality to highlight your content. You should use visuals only if they are essential to the argument you are attempting to make. You can use illustrations, PwerPoint images , infographics , graphs, or chart diagrams to display facts or make your point more obvious. You can also add GIFs and embed videos to your presentations.

This is a very crucial tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint. To avoid making your presentations appear cluttered, ensure all the images are the same size and resolution, and arrange them in the same spot on each slide. Charts and graphics that are challenging to interpret should have captions. Make one image on a slide stand out by giving it a different hue from the rest of the presentation.

Once you have the content, your PowerPoint presentation is all set, and it’s designed to create impact. How you create impact and engage the audience depends entirely on how you deliver presentations.

9. Reuse Your Slides

Another tip on how to make your Google Slides look professional is Reusing slides. It is a very potent way to breeze through your presentation and, in the process, make sure that the overall visual consistency of your design is improved. This will save you time when creating new slides again. It is greatly important as it offers ways through which a very polished and professional look can be maintained across your presentations.

If you are designing the slides, maybe save them as templates. This will permit you to replicate the slide framework and yet customize the content as necessary for different presentations. However, you can use your presentation software to create Master Slides that will enable you to build your own themes and ensure not just design consistency but also content consistency is adhered to across all presentations within your organization.

Delivery Tips On How To Make A Professional PowerPoint

The way you deliver your PowerPoint slides can either make or break your overall presentation. Let’s see some tips on how to make a PowerPoint look professional:

• Keep your transitions simple
• Practice your presentations out loud
• Practice in front of the crowd

1. Keep Your Transitions Simple

Adding Animations and transitions draws attention away from the material. While adding animations to your slideshow may seem creative to make it stand out, doing so might add a lot of extra time and distract the audience. Have the slides change as soon as the mouse clicks, rather than having the text fly in or the slides animate. Provide the information quickly and simply to make your presentation look stronger and more formal.

2. Practice Your Presentation Out Loud

The best tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint is to practice your presentation. Run the complete presentation to increase your confidence. After practicing your presentation a few times, you’ll feel much more at ease giving it. Practice as if you were presenting to a group of people; raise your voice to the appropriate pitch and volume.

Ensure the slides flow together by practicing clicking through them as you speak. Go back and change your slides to make any necessary corrections if you encounter issues. Consider recording your speech to see or listen to it later. You will be able to identify what needs to change as a result.

3. Practice In Front Of A Crowd

Request some early feedback to determine the success of your presentation. Take a group of friends or coworkers and walk them through the full presentation. When you’re done, ask them what they thought of the presentation and whether any points you tried to express confused them. Asking them questions you anticipate your audience will have will allow you to practice providing succinct responses.

Now that you have more than ten tips on how to make your Google Slides look professional, knowing how to present your ideas professionally is also vital.

How To Professionally Present Your Ideas?

Check out the below tips on how to make a professional PowerPoint and deliver it in an effective way:

• Choose the right time
• Incorporate Brevity
• Encourage Engagement from the audience
• Incorporate An emotional connection
• Use Visual tools
• Use Images and graphics

1. Choose The Right Time

One of the most important professional PowerPoint presentation tips is timing. Choosing the right time slot is very important when giving a presentation. If you have the option to determine your presentation timetable, it would be preferable to select a mid-morning time slot. People’s attention is better captured in the morning.

2. Incorporate Brevity

The best tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint is to incorporate brevity. Typically, audiences have a limited attention span. When given lengthy materials to read, people rapidly become bored. Be direct if you want people to pay attention and continue to listen. Avoid including unrelated material because this will just make the presentation longer.

3. Encourage Engagement From The Audience

Keeping the audience interested in what you say is a difficult task. You can engage them and get them involved in the topic by making a good first impression in the first 30 seconds. You can also keep them engaged by injecting humor as you change the slides.

4. Incorporate An Emotional Connection

A good tip on how to make a professional PowerPoint is using an emotional connection. Any professional presentation must emotionally engage the audience, much like in advertising. When communicating your message, use feelings. By doing this, you give the visual aids a human face and make your point more understandable to the audience. Encourage them to act by awakening their emotions.

5. Use Visual Tools

Most people learn best visually. Presenters must know that their audience needs visual aids to grasp their words. Make sure that you use visuals to support your claims. The audience will understand your message more clearly if they can visualize it.

6. Use Images And Graphics

Using Graphics and images is a great practice on how to make a professional PowerPoint. They support you admirably as you give your speech. Charts and other complex data points can make visualizations difficult to design. To ensure precise and easy-to-understand details, you can create simple templates. However, if you find it difficult to create to-the-point, detail-oriented graphics, and templates that create an impact, you can outsource your presentations. 

Why Should Organizations Outsource Their Presentations To Specialists?

We discussed the best tips for professional looking PowerPoints. Now, let’s consider why to outsource presentation creations. Here are some reasons on how to make your slides look professional by outsourcing presentations:

• Improving presentations for external clients
• Assisting graphics team
• Saves Manual efforts and time
• Cost saving
• Elevating design excellence
• To support your marketing team with presentations

ALSO READ: Why Consultants Choose to Outsource Presentations ?

1. Improving Presentations For External Clients

Your PowerPoint presentation acts as a virtual handshake with your clients, making it an important factor in determining how they will perceive you or your company. For this reason alone, many professionals choose to outsource their external presentations.

2. Assisting Graphic Team

Your devoted graphic team is constantly creating different types of visual content. Your in-house designers probably already have their hands complete with daily design work. When this happens, outsourcing presentation design seems appealing because it relieves your graphic team’s workload and frees them up to succeed in their primary duties. 

3. Saves Manual Efforts And Time

Save your team from stressing about how to make a professional PowerPoint. The possibility of saving time motivates professionals to choose presentation outsourcing. As anybody who has struggled with slides knows, creating an engaging PowerPoint presentation takes time. By delegating the creation of presentations to external professionals, professionals can free up their time to work on more essential duties or, better yet, to thoroughly rehearse and perfect their message.

4. Cost Saving

Consulting firms might cut costs by outsourcing presentations to specialists. Outsourcing presentations to an agency costs less than hiring an internal presentation designer . This saved money can be utilized toward other essential business objectives while reducing labor expenditures.

5. Elevating Design Excellence

True masters of their trade are presentation designers who work professionally. Their knowledge spans more than just visuals; it also includes the complex art of slide layout and the crucial components that turn a presentation from good to spectacular. 

For instance, our team at SlideUpLift is proud of its design and presentation services after working with businesses from a variety of industries throughout the world. When creating excellent PowerPoint presentations, this abundance of knowledge is priceless.

Beyond improving aesthetics, the goal is to use this knowledge to make visually striking presentations that instantly connect with your audience. Hence, save your team’s efforts learning how to make a professional PowerPoint.

6. To Support Your Marketing Team With Presentations

Presentations are in high demand, particularly among marketing consultants. They have to unite their staff, discuss their marketing strategy with the rest of the organization, and win new clients for their enterprises. PowerPoint presentations are a fantastic tool for all of this! 

An intelligent marketing presentation can improve communication inside and outside your firm; outsourcing is the best option. In today’s competitive landscape, outsourcing presentations to professionals gives firms a strategic advantage. 

Outsourcing is appealing due to its time efficiency, access to cutting-edge equipment, brand consistency, new ideas, scalability, and cost savings. By consulting with you, outsourcing presentation companies can make compelling presentations that create a lasting impression on the audience.

How To Make A Professional PowerPoint With Templates From SlideUpLift?

The ability to generate professional-looking slides is a skill that may take your message to new heights in the dynamic world of presentations. SlideUpLift.com has materials and tools to assist you in every aspect of creating presentations:

• Suppose you want to create presentations but need a starting point. In that case, you can download any template from our 40,000+ PowerPoint and Google Slides themes collection. Just download the template you like and change the content as you need.
• If you don’t want to make changes to the templates, you can ask us to customize them through our custom slides service. You can expect fast delivery within 1 Business Day.

If you need multiple presentations every week, you can try our Presentation Services .

Check out our best professional templates below and learn how to make your PowerPoint look professional:

Detailed 30-60-90 Day Plan

Learn how to make a professional PowerPoint with this template. It covers the first 90 days of work and is strategically divided into 30-day intervals. For each 30 days, managers and professionals can lay out their tasks and set realistic goals.

It serves as a compass, guiding managers to set the course for their team or department. By presenting strategic plans and objectives for the first 90 days, managers can ensure alignment with the broader organizational goals.

Pre-designed slides in the template provide an organized framework for showcasing executive summary including corporate objectives, financial summaries, and project updates. This adaptable template can be utilized in various business settings, such as showcasing milestones, initiatives, trends, reports, or proposals.

Customer Journey

Learn how to make a professional PowerPoint with this template. It helps businesses in understanding the different stages and touchpoints customers encounter when interacting with their brand. Moreover, It also enables businesses to identify more areas for improvement and gain a detailed understanding of the customer journey.

You can use this for marketing, sales, customer support, and product development teams. This tool is valuable for companies across various sizes and industries who want to enhance the customer experience.

Business Review Dashboard

Learn how to make PowerPoint look professional with this template. It is highly effective for professionals who need to present and analyze corporate data. You can create professional presentations that effectively communicate complex business information, like revenue models, gross profit, customer satisfaction, and sales on a quarterly basis.

This dashboard is suitable for business professionals, managers, executives, product developers, sales professionals, and analysts. Moreover, It facilitates informed decision-making and supports tasks such as data analysis, financial reporting, and performance evaluations .

Company Timeline

This template helps track the annual progress of a company. It features a clear and visually appealing timeline that allows users to compile and visualize the evolution of a project or the business itself.

Learn how to make a presentation look professional with this template. It has a customizable annual schedule, enabling users to track their business’s development effectively. It is ideal for HR, sales, and marketing professionals.

Presentations are crucial for professionals to host meetings and influence their team members and stakeholders. This blog taught you how to make a professional PowerPoint and Google Slides presentation that attracts your audience. We discussed the best tips to consider while creating presentations and shared the best professional templates from SlideupLift .

How do you get ready for your first professional presentation?

With thorough preparation, you can confidently deliver a polished and impactful presentation. Begin by thoroughly researching your topic and understanding your audience’s needs and expectations. Organize your content logically, creating a clear structure with a compelling introduction, main points, and a strong conclusion. 

How to make a professional PowerPoint?

Some tips for professional PowerPoint presentations include:

• Focus on clear content organization
• Use a consistent and appealing design template
• Incorporate high-quality visuals
• Practice your delivery to ensure a smooth and engaging presentation
• Keep slides concise and avoid clutter to maintain audience interest and understanding.

What are the key elements of a professional-looking presentation?

A professional-looking presentation typically includes well-structured content, visually appealing slides, clear typography, cohesive design elements, and effective use of visuals.

What are some effective strategies for effectively rehearsing and delivering a professional presentation?

Effective rehearsal involves practicing your presentation multiple times, focusing on your tone and pacing, and anticipating questions from the audience.

What Are The Best Tips On How To Make A Professional PowerPoint?

These are the top 10 PowerPoint tips for preparing a professional presentation:

• Add key takeaways and include CTA at the end
• Do not have more than 10 slides
• Add a consistent presentation background
• List important points in bullets
• Include relevant graphics
• Keep simple transitions
• Practice your presentations loudly and in front of the crowd.

Table Of Content

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Project Planning Presentation PowerPoint Template

Business Case PowerPoint Template

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10 Best Business PowerPoint Templates for Presentations

10 Best Business Presentation Topics to Captivate Your Audience

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How to make the best Powerpoint presentation + real examples!

July 1, 2023

Ever sat through a PowerPoint presentation and thought, "Wow, that was mind-blowing"? Yeah, us either. But, let's face it, we've all been there—either on the giving or receiving end of a less-than-stellar presentation. It's high time we changed that narrative. Creating your best PowerPoint presentation isn't just about throwing together a bunch of slides – it's an art. It’s about telling a story that captivates, informs, and even entertains your audience. 

A new age is upon us, and it’s time to explore the ins and outs of what makes a PowerPoint presentation not just good, but great. From nailing your content and story flow to the nuances of design and delivery, we've got you covered. So, whether you're gearing up for that crucial sales pitch or prepping for an all-important investor meeting, buckle up! Your presentation skills are about to go from mundane to magnificent.

Your Presentation Should Tell a Story

When it comes to creating a killer PowerPoint presentation, it all starts with the story. You heard that right! Not the fancy animations or the snazzy graphics (though they do have their place), but the story. It’s the backbone, the foundation, the heartbeat of your presentation.

Think about how you feel when you watch your favorite TV show or read a book you can’t put down. Good storytelling takes us to another place, where the rest of the world slips away and the story steps into the forefront. Great presentations can do the same thing if the presenter can harness the power of storytelling. 

There are also plenty of science-backed reasons to prioritize good storytelling. One article by Lani Peterson for Harvard Business Corporate Learning says, “Scientists are discovering that chemicals like cortisol and dopamine are released in the brain when we’re told a story. Why does that matter? If we are trying to make a point stick, cortisol assists with our formulating memories. Dopamine, which helps regulate our emotional responses, keeps us engaged.“ More engagement; more impactful presentations.

So, how do you nail down a storytelling strategy that sticks? Let’s break it down.

Craft Your Narrative

First, identify your core message. What’s the one thing you want your audience to remember when they walk out of the room? This is your North Star, guiding every aspect of your presentation. If you’re having trouble with this step, ask yourself, “Why am I giving this presentation?”

Understand Your Audience

Who is your audience? Tailor your story to resonate with them. Are they tech-savvy millennials or industry veterans? Your story should speak their language. Presentations that skip this step will miss out on a crucial opportunity to connect with the audience. And if you can’t connect with them, then what’s the point? One solution is to focus on understanding the needs, challenges, and aspirations of your audience. That way, you’ll be able to address their specific pain points and interests.

Create a Structured Flow

Like any good story, your presentation needs a beginning, middle, and end. Start with an introduction that hooks, follow with content that informs and engages, and conclude with a memorable takeaway. If you need ideas on how to start your presentation, see this guide with 12 ideas for hooking your audience from the very start .

Find Inspiration

Look to the pros! Ever read an article by Andy Raskin or April Dunford ? These folks know their stuff when it comes to strategic narratives. Dive into their work for some inspiration on how to weave a compelling story in your presentation. Just like we’ve all been through our fair share of boring presentations, most likely you’ve experienced a presentation that left an impression. Ask yourself why it was so impactful–you might be able to draw from their expertise!

Change the Narrative

Say you’re working on a sales deck. Instead of going with the typical problem-solution story structure, Andy Raskin has a different take on it:

Start with a big, relevant shift in the world. “We are living in a new era” type of statement. This will grab the attention, but also create some urgency for the prospect.

Then you move on to show that there will be winners and losers in this new era. The ones who act on this shift will have more probability of winning. In other words, “what I am about to offer you is crucial for winning in this new era.”

Now that you have set the stage, you can “tease the promise land” as Andy calls it. This is not where you show your product features. This is simply a teaser about this new future state and what to expect if you react to this shift in the market.

Then, you highlight the “Old world vs New world” to show the contrast, and how old methods do not work in this new era.

And finally, you provide real-life stories to support your claims. These could client case studies, article snippets, industry updates - anything that adds credibility to everything you just said.

Voilà, you’ve got yourself a story arc! This is a simple and straightforward way to craft a story that connects.

Nail Your Story First

Remember, at the end of the day, your presentation is more than just a collection of slides, but rather a vessel for storytelling. It’s not just about what you say, but how you say it. A well-crafted story can transform your presentation from a mere transfer of information to an impactful, memorable experience. So, take the time to nail your story, and you’re already halfway to creating your best PowerPoint presentation. Your audience will thank you!

Embracing Professional Design for Impactful Presentations

When you've nailed your narrative, the next crucial step in crafting your best PowerPoint presentation is design. This stage is where your story gets visually translated, elevating it from a mere script to an engaging, compelling experience.

The Role of a Presentation Agency

Not everyone possesses an innate talent for design, and that's perfectly fine. This is where a presentation design agency can become an invaluable asset. These presentation experts act as the alchemists of your PowerPoint, transforming basic slides into visually stunning and strategically aligned pieces of art. However, be selective when you choose who to work with. There is a big difference between a "meh" designer vs a “wow” designer when it comes to preparing well-crafted presentations.

Simplifying Complexity

One of the critical talents of a presentation design agency is their ability to distill complex concepts into simple, digestible visuals. An overcrowded slide can quickly lose your audience's attention, but a well-designed one can convey your message succinctly and effectively. Not only that, presentation experts can remove the complexity of creating great slides by designing the best presentation templates for your needs, making the process easier for you in the end.

"We have been using SLIDES™ services for our corporate PowerPoint template, and the PPT template is so well done and easy to use that we all feel like we now have PowerPoint superpowers creating new presentations in no time with stunning look!"

Jérôme neuvéglise, product owner qoqa, creating visual harmony.

Consistency in your presentation’s visual elements - such as color schemes, typography, and imagery - is essential. A presentation design agency ensures that these elements work in harmony, creating a unified and professional look that enhances your overall narrative. The best presentation layouts are those created by experts who know how to make your brand stand out.

Visualizing Ideas Effectively

Presentation agencies excel in translating your ideas into impactful visuals. They ensure that your graphics, charts, and images aren't just visually appealing but also contribute significantly to the telling of your story. After all, why spend so much time honing your story if your visuals fall flat?

When to Opt for Professional Presentation Design

We know that deciding to outsource is a tough call, and you want to make sure your resources are well spent. Here are a few things to consider before seeking out help from a presentation agency:

High-Stakes Presentations

For presentations that can have a significant impact on your business - such as those in sales, partnerships, or investment pitches - professional design isn't just a luxury, but a necessity. These are the scenarios where the expertise of a presentation design agency can make a substantial difference. 

Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison said in a recent podcast:

 “My intuition is that more of Stripe's success than one would think is down to the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons. Because, what does a beautiful thing tell you? It tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only care about those and did everything else in a slapdash way. So, if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics is not an irrational thing to do.“

Oftentimes in presentations, we ignore how we are making people feel with our slides. Think about this quote next time you’re preparing your slides.

Overcoming Skill and Time Constraints

If you're not well-versed in design or if time constraints are tight, opting for professional help is a wise decision. This not only ensures quality but also frees you up to concentrate on refining and rehearsing your presentation. This guide shows 18 of the most common presentation mistakes people make, and gives tips on how to avoid them.

In essence, professional design is about giving your presentation the visual edge it needs to not just capture but also maintain your audience's attention. By considering the services of a presentation design agency, you're ensuring that your presentation is not just seen, but also remembered and appreciated.

Mastering the Art of Delivery

Alright, you’ve got a gripping story and a set of stunning slides. But wait! There’s still a crucial piece of the puzzle left – your delivery. This is where the rubber meets the road. Remember, no matter how dazzling your slides are, they can’t rescue a lackluster delivery. 

More Than Just Slides

First things first, let’s get one thing straight: people aren’t just buying into your PowerPoint. They’re buying into you – your ideas, your enthusiasm, your conviction. Your slides are merely a tool to complement your narrative, not the other way around. Your slides are never the star of the show. It's you. It sure is harder to improve your delivery compared to your slides. But it will be the best investment of your life.

The Human Connection

At its core, a great presentation is about making a connection with your audience. It’s about storytelling, not just through words on a slide, but through the way you present them. Your tone, your body language, your ability to engage – all these elements combine to create a compelling delivery.

Know Your Story Inside Out

Your first step should be to know your story like the back of your hand. This doesn’t mean memorizing your script word for word but being familiar enough with your content to speak confidently and fluidly about it.

Rehearse, Then Rehearse Some More

Practice might not always make perfect, but it sure does make confidence. Rehearse your presentation multiple times. This will help you iron out any kinks in your delivery and help you manage those pesky nerves.

When our founder Damon gave his first keynote presentation, he experienced some technical issues that would throw off any professional speaker. But since he had rehearsed his speech so well, he knew it inside out. And he could handle the mishap with calm, make some jokes about it, and then get back to his talk when the tech decided to work again.

Engage With Your Audience

Remember, a presentation is a two-way street. Engage with your audience, ask questions, and encourage participation. This interaction makes your presentation more memorable and impactful. The former product manager at Netflix , Gibson Biddle, shared this great example:

“In a virtual setting you need to double-down on engagement tactics. Today, I use Google Slides plus Slido to do real-time polling, word clouds and to answer questions. It makes the experience incredibly interactive to the extent that I now have an equal NPS for virtual and in-person presentations.”

Body Language Matters

Your body language speaks volumes. Maintain eye contact, use gestures to emphasize points, and move around if possible. This non-verbal communication can significantly enhance the impact of your delivery.

In today’s increasingly digital world, we also have to think about virtual presentations and how to put our best foot forward through a screen. An awkward camera angle or a weird background can be a distraction to your audience, so shift your focus to a flattering camera angle, solid camera quality, and a neutral background. 

Authenticity is Key

Be yourself. Your audience can tell when you’re putting on a façade. Authenticity breeds trust and connection, which in turn makes your message more persuasive.

Investing in Yourself

Finally, investing in your delivery skills is investing in yourself. Whether it’s through public speaking courses, professional coaching, or simply seeking feedback from peers, improving your delivery skills is invaluable. Remember, a great delivery can elevate a good presentation to a great one. So, give your delivery the attention it deserves, and watch as you transform from a presenter to a storyteller, captivating your audience one slide at a time.

Final Thoughts

So, there you have it – the roadmap to creating a PowerPoint presentation that’s not just good, but outstanding. It all starts with crafting a compelling story, enhanced by visually striking and well-thought-out design, and brought to life through engaging and authentic delivery. Remember, your best PowerPoint presentation will feel like more than just a collection of slides to your audience. This is a powerful storytelling tool, and you are the storyteller.

The key takeaway? Invest time and effort into each aspect of your presentation. Understand your narrative, collaborate with design professionals if needed, and hone your delivery skills. It’s this combination of content, design, and delivery that transforms a standard presentation into an unforgettable experience.

In the end, what sets a great PowerPoint presentation apart is the ability to not just share information but to tell a story that resonates, inspires, and persuades. Whether you’re pitching to potential clients, investors, or sharing insights with your team, remember that the most impactful presentations are those that connect with the audience on a deeper level. So go ahead, create, deliver, and captivate.

Your audience is waiting.

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Three easy hacks to make your presentations look more professional

• Written by: Hannah Harper
• Categories: PowerPoint design , Visual communication
• Comments: 5

No matter how good your content might be, if it doesn’t look good you’re going to put your audience off even before you’ve started speaking. Here are three design hacks that will have you creating professional-looking presentations in about half an hour.

Before we start, I’m going to admit to you that I’m not a designer. BrightCarbon has a whole host of excellent designers that will be able to tell you all about image manipulation and kerning. But after working closely with all of them, I’ve learnt some great design hacks that non-designers (like you and me) can use to make dull slides look engaging.

And one more thing… a lot of the tools used in this tutorial are hidden in the depths of PowerPoint. Download our Quick Access Toolbar  to get these useful features in a ribbon of convenience at the top of your window.

Gross. Calibri bullet points on a white background with a cacophony of supposedly helpful illustration that looks suspiciously like clip art. Kill me now.

The background

White can be a very stark colour if you don’t have other bold design elements on your slide, it makes it very obvious you haven’t thought about design, or that you’re just too darn scared of it.

It’s amazing what a nice picture can do to make your presentations look more professional. There are plenty of stock image websites around that will help you choose a picture to put as the background of your slide. You can even head to Google and do a Creative Commons search for free images (just make sure you read all the terms and conditions. And don’t be that guy – make sure you pay or give credit for what you use). Check out our blog post for more tips on how to create a professional and sleek slide background in 3 different ways. 

Do: Choose images in-keeping with your brand colours. Try and make sure your picture is relevant, but not fake – Photoshopped hills and airbrushed models are becoming the new clip art #justsaying…

Don’t:  Choose a busy picture! If there’s a lot going on it will just end up being a distraction for your audience. Instead, you might want to choose a picture with the focal point on one side so you can put text on the other side.

Advanced tip: To give a really professional look duplicate your image (Ctrl+D) and go to Artistic Effects on the Picture Tools tab at the top of your window. Choose Blur and add a Fade animation After Previous to your blurred picture (your original picture doesn’t need animating). Now you’ll transition to your new slide with your picture, it will then blur out and your content can appear distraction free!

Bullet points

We hate bullet points at BrightCarbon. They look so 90s and it’s really hard to pace the information so that you’re not giving away your punchline before you’ve started talking. But we understand that sometimes you just don’t have time or enough expertise to think of interesting ways to display your content.

So our next professional presentation hack is this – make each bullet point a separate box. Draw a rectangle and type your text in the box. Get the proportions right for your content and then duplicate (Ctrl+D) the box, line it up under the first one and then duplicate again until you have enough (change the text too, obvs).

Now add an animation to each of them – we like Fly in . Have them fly in from left or right (depending on which side they’re on) and have them come in after each other, or on a click. This will help you pace the information.

Do: Try and cut down the amount of text you use – check out our top tips here. If you’re going to be talking through the points, put brief notes on your slide and NO MORE! It’s only there as a guide and a reminder for your audience. Another great design hack is to reduce the size of text on your slide – your audience can read size 16 quite easily, so you could even go down to size 14 without causing eye strain. Big text makes your slide look like a primary school project #fact. Take a look at our more in-depth recommendations for text size in our article here.

Don’t:  Don’t create text boxes in different sizes or shapes – it looks messy and unprofessional. Don’t rely on your own eye to line them up as well. PowerPoint has some great alignment tools to make sure that there is an even amount of space between each box, and that they’re all lined up according to the same point.

Advanced tip:  Once you’ve chosen a colour for your boxes right click and choose Format Shape , choose Shape Fill . You’ll see a scale, this will adjust the transparency of your object – drag the slider to 25%. This will make the edges of your boxes seem less harsh.

Iconography

Confused illustration and different styles really can make your corporate presentation look like your child’s IT project. BAN CLIP ART. In fact make it illegal. Instead find yourself some nice icons . You can find them on stock image websites, or if you’re feeling adventurous you can try making your own with PowerPoint shapes. Read this blog post if you want to find out how to create your own custom set.

By choosing a set of icons you can create a visual language to help understanding, but you’ll be using a coherent style (and it will look like it’s been through a design agency).

Once you’ve chosen your icons (one for each concept, and keep it consistent throughout your presentation) create a square box (the same height as the boxes we made earlier). Put the icon on top of the box and use the alignment tools to centre everything. Group the two items together and add a Zoom animation to happen With Previous . Move it in the animation pane to happen at the same time as the corresponding text box appears.

Now you should have something that looks like this. We’ve gone from basic to could-have-been-done-by-a-designer in three steps. Have a go at making your presentations look more professional with our hacks, and once you get used to them, try experimenting with different layouts and sizes. Even though you’ll be using the same three simple principles, you’ll be adding loads of variety. Trust me, your audience will thank you for it.

Watch a video comparison of the before and after:

And if you want to see a cool SlideShare of this article, head on over here .

Hannah Harper

Principal consultant, related articles, how to level-up your presentation visuals.

• Visual communication
• Comments: 2

Relationships are everywhere and if you can crack how to show relationships effectively on your slides then you’ll have your audience swiping right instead of left.

How to get the most out of PowerPoint and PDFs

• PowerPoint design

This article is dedicated to the bit hitting combination of PowerPoint and PDFs, and three particular use cases that will have these two giants working together in perfect harmony: how to convert PowerPoint to PDF on Windows and macOS, how to convert PDF to PowerPoint, and how to insert a PDF into PowerPoint.

Storytelling in presentations: Creating compelling content

• Sales messaging / Visual communication
• Comments: 1

As humans we find stories incredibly compelling, but why is that? And how can we make sure we're infusing storytelling in our presentations to keep our audiences engaged and invested? Read on to find out the rest of the story!

Great tips, Thank you very much.

Yes, I like it Thanks for the support

Simple yet useful, thank you,,

As always, very useful! Thank you so much for sharing!

Great tips looking forward to trying them out when designing my next workshop

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Thank you so much for conducting our advanced PowerPoint training workshop. We will definitely use BrightCarbon in the future – we really think that we would be hard pressed to find anywhere better! Emma Pring Iona Capital

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

• Carmine Gallo

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

• Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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Home Blog Presentation Ideas 23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging and Interactive Presentations

23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging and Interactive Presentations

PowerPoint presentations are not usually known for being engaging or interactive. That’s often because most people treat their slides as if they are notes to read off  and not a tool to help empower their message.

Your presentation slides are there to help bring to life the story you are telling. They are there to provide visuals and empower your speech.

So how do you go about avoiding a presentation “snoozefest” and instead ensure you have an engaging and interactive presentation?  By making sure that you use your slides to help YOU tell your story, instead of using them as note cards to read off of.

The key thing to remember is that your presentation is there to compliment your speech, not be its focus.

In this article, we will review several presentation tips and tricks on how to become a storytelling powerhouse by building a powerful and engaging PowerPoint presentation.

Start with writing your speech outline, not with putting together slides

Use more images and less text, use high-quality images, keep the focus on you and your presentation, not the powerpoint, your presentation should be legible from anywhere in the room, use a consistent presentation design, one topic per slide, avoid information overwhelm by using the “rule of three”.

• Display one bullet at a time

Avoid unnecessary animations

• Only add content that supports your main points

Do not use PowerPoint as a teleprompter

• Never Give Out Copies of the Presentation

Re-focus the attention on you by fading into blackness

Change the tone of your voice when presenting, host an expert discussion panel, ask questions, embed videos, use live polling to get instant feedback and engage the audience.

• He kept his slides uncluttered and always strived for simplicity
• He was known to use large font size, the bigger, the better.
• He found made the complex sound simple.

He was known to practice, practice, and keep on practicing.

Summary – how to make your presentation engaging & interactive, fundamental rules to build powerful & engaging presentation slides.

Before we go into tips and tricks on how to add flair to your presentations and create effective presentations, it’s essential to get the fundamentals of your presentation right.

Your PowerPoint presentation is there to compliment your message, and the story you are telling. Before you can even put together slides, you need to identify the goal of your speech, and the key takeaways you want your audience to remember.

YOU and your speech are the focus of this presentation, not the slides – use your PowerPoint to complement your story.

Keep in mind that your slides are there to add to your speech, not distract from it.  Using too much text in your slides can be distracting and confusing to your audience. Instead, use a relevant picture with minimal text, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

This slide is not unusual, but is not a visual aid, it is more like an “eye chart”.

Aim for something simpler, easy to remember and concise, like the slides below.

Keep in mind your audience when designing your presentation, their background and aesthetics sense. You will want to avoid the default clip art and cheesy graphics on your slides.

While presenting make sure to control the presentation and the room by walking around, drawing attention to you and what you are saying.  You should occasionally stand still when referencing a slide, but never turn your back to your audience to read your slide.

You and your speech are the presentations; the slides are just there to aid you.

Most season presenters don’t use anything less than twenty-eight point font size, and even Steve Jobs was known to use nothing smaller than forty-point text fonts.

If you can’t comfortably fit all the text on your slide using 28 font size than you’re trying to say and cram too much into the slide, remember tip #1.4 – Use relevant images instead and accompany it with bullets.

Best Practice PowerPoint Presentation Tips

The job of your presentation is to help convey information as efficiently and clearly as possible. By keeping the theme and design consistent, you’re allowing the information and pictures to stand out.

However, by varying the design from slide to slide, you will be causing confusion and distraction from the focus, which is you and the information to be conveyed on the slide.

Technology can also help us in creating a consistent presentation design just by picking a topic and selecting a sample template style. This is possible thanks to the SlideModel’s AI slideshow maker .

Each slide should try to represent one topic or talking point. The goal is to keep the attention focused on your speech, and by using one slide per talking point, you make it easy for you to prepare, as well as easy for your audience to follow along with your speech.

Sometimes when creating our presentation, we can often get in our heads and try to over-explain. A simple way to avoid this is to follow the “ Rule of Three ,” a concept coined by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

The idea is to stick to only 3 main ideas that will help deliver your point.  Each of the ideas can be further broken into 3 parts to explain further. The best modern example of this “Rule of Three” can be derived from the great Apple presentations given by Steve Jobs – they were always structured around the “Rule of Three.”

Display one sentence at a time

If you are planning to include text in your slides, try to avoid bullet lists, and use one slide per sentence. Be short and concise. This best practice focuses on the idea that simple messages are easy to retain in memory. Also, each slide can follow your storytelling path, introducing the audience to each concept while you speak, instead of listing everything beforehand.

Presentation Blunders To Avoid

In reality, there is no need for animations or transitions in your slides.

It’s great to know how to turn your text into fires or how to create a transition with sparkle effects, but the reality is the focus should be on the message. Using basic or no transitions lets the content of your presentation stand out, rather than the graphics.

If you plan to use animations, make sure to use modern and professional animations that helps the audience follow the story you are telling, for example when explaining time series or changing events over time.

Only add engaging content that supports your main points

You might have a great chart, picture or even phrase you want to add, but when creating every slide, it’s crucial to ask yourself the following question.

“Does this slide help support my main point?”

If the answer is no, then remove it.  Remember, less is more.

A common crutch for rookie presenters is to use slides as their teleprompter.

First of all, you shouldn’t have that much text on your slides. If you have to read off something, prepare some index cards that fit in your hand but at all costs do not turn your back on your audience and read off of your PowerPoint.  The moment you do that, you make the presentation the focus, and lose the audience as the presenter.

Avoid Giving Out Copies of the Presentation

At least not before you deliver a killer presentation; providing copies of your presentation gives your audience a possible distraction where they can flip through the copy and ignore what you are saying.

It’s also easy for them to take your slides out of context without understanding the meaning behind each slide.  It’s OK to give a copy of the presentation, but generally it is better to give the copies AFTER you have delivered your speech. If you decide to share a copy of your presentation, the best way to do it is by  generating a QR code  for it and placing it at the end of your presentation. Those who want a copy can simply scan and download it onto their phones.

Tips To Making Your Presentation More Engaging

The point of your presentation is to help deliver a message.

When expanding on a particularly important topic that requires a lengthy explanation it’s best to fade the slide into black.  This removes any distraction from the screen and re-focuses it on you, the present speaker. Some presentation devices have a built-in black screen button, but if they don’t, you can always prepare for this by adding a black side to your presentation at the right moment.

“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”

Part of making your presentation engaging is to use all the tools at your disposal to get your point across. Changing the inflection and tone of your voice as you present helps make the content and the points more memorable and engaging.

One easy and powerful way to make your presentation interactive is experts to discuss a particular topic during your presentation. This helps create a more engaging presentation and gives you the ability to facilitate and lead a discussion around your topic.

It’s best to prepare some questions for your panel but to also field questions from the audience in a question and answer format.

How To Make Your Presentation More Interactive

What happens if I ask you to think about a pink elephant?  You probably briefly think about a pink elephant, right?

Asking questions when presenting helps engage the audience, and arouse interest and curiosity.  It also has the added benefit of making people pay closer attention, in case they get called on.

So don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if rhetorical; asking a question engages a different part of our brain. It causes us to reflect rather than merely take in the information one way. So ask many of them.

Asking questions can also be an excellent way to build suspense for the next slide.

(Steve Jobs was known to ask questions during his presentations, in this slide he built suspense by asking the audience “Is there space for a device between a cell phone and a laptop?” before revealing the iPad) Source: MacWorld SF 2018

Remember the point of your presentation is to get a message across and although you are the presenter, it is completely fine to use video in your PowerPoint to enhance your presentation.  A relevant video can give you some breathing time to prepare the next slides while equally informing the audience on a particular point.

CAUTION: Be sure to test the video beforehand, and that your audience can hear it in the room.

A trending engagement tool among presenters is to use a live polling tool to allow the audience to participate and collect immediate feedback.

Using a live polling tool is a fun and interactive way to engage your audience in real-time and allow them to participate in part of your presentation.

Google Slides has a built-in Q&A feature that allows presenters to make the slide deck more interactive by providing answers to the audience’s questions. By using the Q&A feature in Google Slides, presenters can start a live Q&A session and people can ask questions directly from their devices including mobile and smartphones.

Key Takeaways from one of the best presenters, Steve Jobs

He kept his slides uncluttered and always strove for simplicity.

In this slide, you can easily see he is talking about the battery life, and it uses a simple image and a few words. Learning from Jobs, you can also make a great presentation too. Focus on the core benefit of your product and incorporate great visuals.

Source: Macworld 2008

SlideModel.com can help to reproduce high-impact slides like these, keeping your audience engagement.

He was known to use large font sizes, the bigger, the better

A big font makes it hard to miss the message on the slide, and allows the audience to focus on the presenter while clearing the understanding what the point of the slide is.

He found made the complex sound simple

When explaining a list of features, he used a simple image and lines or simple tables to provide visual cues to his talking points.

(This particular slide is referencing the iMac features)

What made Steve Jobs the master of presentation, was the ritual of practicing with his team, and this is simple yet often overlooked by many presenters.  It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking you don’t need to practice because you know the material so well.

While all these tips will help you create a truly powerful presentation , it can only achieve if applied correctly.

It’s important to remember when trying to deliver an amazing experience, you should be thoroughly prepared. This way, you can elevate your content presentation, convey your message effectively and captivate your audience.

This includes having your research cited, your presentation rehearsed.  Don’t just rehearse your slides, also take time to practice your delivery, and your tone.  The more you rehearse, the more relaxed you will be when delivering. The more confident you will feel.

While we can’t help you with the practice of your next presentation, we can help you by making sure you look good, and that you have a great design and cohesiveness.

You focus on the message and content; we’ll focus on making you look good.

Have a tip you would like to include?  Be sure to mention it in the comments!

Like this article? Please share

Audience, Engaging, Feedback, Interactive, Poll, Rule of Three, Steve Jobs Filed under Presentation Ideas

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2 Responses to “23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging and Interactive Presentations”

Very great advices!

Greetings ! A compact composed communication for the host to have an impact -VOICE

Thank You ?

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How-To Geek

6 ways to create more interactive powerpoint presentations.

Engage your audience with cool, actionable features.

Quick Links

• Add a QR code
• Embed Microsoft Forms (Education or Business Only)
• Embed a Live Web Page
• Add Links and Menus
• Add Clickable Images to Give More Info
• Add a Countdown Timer

We've all been to a presentation where the speaker bores you to death with a mundane PowerPoint presentation. Actually, the speaker could have kept you much more engaged by adding some interactive features to their slideshow. Let's look into some of these options.

1. Add a QR code

Adding a QR code can be particularly useful if you want to direct your audience to an online form, website, or video.

Some websites have in-built ways to create a QR code. For example, on Microsoft Forms , when you click "Collect Responses," you'll see the QR code option via the icon highlighted in the screenshot below. You can either right-click the QR code to copy and paste it into your presentation, or click "Download" to add it to your device gallery to insert the QR code as a picture.

In fact, you can easily add a QR code to take your viewer to any website. On Microsoft Edge, right-click anywhere on a web page where there isn't already a link, and left-click "Create QR Code For This Page."

You can also create QR codes in other browsers, such as Chrome.

You can then copy or download the QR code to use wherever you like in your presentation.

2. Embed Microsoft Forms (Education or Business Only)

If you plan to send your PPT presentation to others—for example, if you're a trainer sending step-by-step instruction presentation, a teacher sending an independent learning task to your students, or a campaigner for your local councilor sending a persuasive PPT to constituents—you might want to embed a quiz, questionnaire, pole, or feedback survey in your presentation.

In PowerPoint, open the "Insert" tab on the ribbon, and in the Forms group, click "Forms". If you cannot see this option, you can add new buttons to the ribbon .

As at April 2024, this feature is only available for those using their work or school account. We're using a Microsoft 365 Personal account in the screenshot below, which is why the Forms icon is grayed out.

Then, a sidebar will appear on the right-hand side of your screen, where you can either choose a form you have already created or opt to craft a new form.

Now, you can share your PPT presentation with others , who can click the fields and submit their responses when they view the presentation.

3. Embed a Live Web Page

You could always screenshot a web page and paste that into your PPT, but that's not a very interactive addition to your presentation. Instead, you can embed a live web page into your PPT so that people with access to your presentation can interact actively with its contents.

To do this, we will need to add an add-in to our PPT account .

Add-ins are not always reliable or secure. Before installing an add-in to your Microsoft account, check that the author is a reputable company, and type the add-in's name into a search engine to read reviews and other users' experiences.

To embed a web page, add the Web Viewer add-in ( this is an add-in created by Microsoft ).

Go to the relevant slide and open the Web Viewer add-in. Then, copy and paste the secure URL into the field box, and remove https:// from the start of the address. In our example, we will add a selector wheel to our slide. Click "Preview" to see a sample of the web page's appearance in your presentation.

This is how ours will look.

When you or someone with access to your presentation views the slideshow, this web page will be live and interactive.

4. Add Links and Menus

As well as moving from one slide to the next through a keyboard action or mouse click, you can create links within your presentation to direct the audience to specific locations.

To create a link, right-click the outline of the clickable object, and click "Link."

In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, click "Place In This Document," choose the landing destination, and click "OK."

What's more, to make it clear that an object is clickable, you can use action buttons. Open the "Insert" tab on the ribbon, click "Shape," and then choose an appropriate action button. Usefully, PPT will automatically prompt you to add a link to these shapes.

You might also want a menu that displays on every slide. Once you have created the menu, add the links using the method outlined above. Then, select all the items, press Ctrl+C (copy), and then use Ctrl+V to paste them in your other slides.

5. Add Clickable Images to Give More Info

Through PowerPoint's animations, you can give your viewer the power to choose what they see and when they see it. This works nicely whether you're planning to send your presentation to others to run through independently or whether you're presenting in front of a group and want your audience to decide which action they want to take.

Start by creating the objects that will be clickable (trigger) and the items that will appear (pop-up).

Then, select all the pop-ups together. When you click "Animations" on the ribbon and choose an appropriate animation for the effect you want to achieve, this will be applied to all objects you have selected.

The next step is to rename the triggers in your presentation. To do this, open the "Home" tab, and in the Editing group, click "Select", and then "Selection Pane."

With the Selection Pane open, select each trigger on your slide individually, and rename them in the Selection Pane, so that they can be easily linked to in the next step.

Finally, go back to the first pop-up. Open the "Animations" tab, and in the Advanced Animation group, click the "Trigger" drop-down arrow. Then, you can set the item to appear when a trigger is clicked in your presentation.

If you want your item to disappear when the trigger is clicked again, select the pop-up, click "Add Animation" in the Advanced Animation group, choose an Exit animation, and follow the same step to link that animation to the trigger button.

6. Add a Countdown Timer

A great way to get your audience to engage with your PPT presentation is to keep them on edge by adding a countdown timer. Whether you're leading a presentation and want to let your audience stop to discuss a topic, or running an online quiz with time-limit questions, having a countdown timer means your audience will keep their eye on your slide throughout.

To do this, you need to animate text boxes or shapes containing your countdown numbers. Choose and format a shape and type the highest number that your countdown clock will need. In our case, we're creating a 10-second timer.

Now, with your shape selected, open the "Animations" tab on the ribbon and click the animation drop-down arrow. Then, in the Exit menu, click "Disappear."

Open the Animation Pane, and click the drop-down arrow next to the animation you've just added. From there, choose "Timing."

Make sure "On Click" is selected in the Start menu, and change the Delay option to "1 second," before clicking "OK."

Then, with this shape still selected, press Ctrl+C (copy), and then Ctrl+V (paste). In the second box, type 9 . With the Animation Pane still open and this second shape selected, click the drop-down arrow and choose "Timing" again. Change the Start option to "After Previous," and make sure the Delay option is 1 second. Then, click "OK."

We can now use this second shape as our template, as when we copy and paste it again, the animations will also duplicate. With this second shape selected, press Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, type 8 into the box, and continue to do the same until you get to 0 .

Next, remove the animations from the "0" box, as you don't want this to disappear. To do this, click the shape, and in the Animation Pane drop-down, click "Remove."

You now need to layer them in order. Right-click the box containing number 1, and click "Bring To Front." You will now see that box on the top. Do the same with the other numbers in ascending order.

Finally, you need to align the objects together. Click anywhere on your slide and press Ctrl+A. Then, in the Home tab on the ribbon, click "Arrange." First click "Align Center," and then bring the menu up again, so that you can click "Align Middle."

Press Ctrl+A again to select your timer, and you can then move your timer or copy and paste it elsewhere.

Press F5 to see the presentation in action, and when you get to the slide containing the timer, click anywhere on the slide to see your countdown timer in action!

Now that your PPT presentation is more interactive, make sure you've avoided these eight common presentational mistakes before you present your slides.