Presentation Tips and Guidelines in PowerPoint 2016

During this Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 training tutorial video, we will show you some of the basic tips and guidelines that you need to know with your PowerPoint presentation. We will talk about choosing the right colors, appropriate fonts, number of words per line, number of bullets per slide, and which types of templates to use.

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Okay we’re down in module three now and this is the Getting Started module. Before we start talking about how to create a new presentation let’s take time in this first section and go over some tips and guidelines that will make your presentation look a lot nicer.

Now I want to go ahead and start with colors. Your subtle colors which are blues, blacks, browns, your audience tends to kind of go with the flow. They say it creates a trust with your audience. If you’re presenting to a new customer, you’ve not met them before, stick with the subtle colors because you really don’t know their personality and that sort of thing. Your bright colors tend to create an impact.

So if your presentation is to someone in your company about how much money your department lost last year you might want to use a bright color if you’re trying to make an impact with that. If you’re not, if you’re trying to kind of slide on past that then you’d probably want to use one of your subtle colors.

Also think about if you’re going to present in a room on an overhead projector. You want to think about the lighting that’s currently in the room. So if you’ve got a lot of windows in that room you might want to have a darker background. The opposite could also be true whereas if you have no windows you want a lighter background to put light in the room.

So it’s always good if you know you’re going to be presenting on an overhead that you go and check out the room first. Obviously if you’re just on a laptop and you’re going to sit down with someone it’s probably not that big of a deal.

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Never put red and green right next to each other. You don’t know who’s color blind and they say that depending on their degree of colorblindness they could either not distinguish the colors at all, they see them as shades of brown or they just can’t separate the two colors. So I know that’s hard to do at Christmastime but use the same slide with red and green but don’t put them right next to each other.

And keep your colors consistent throughout your presentation. You don’t want to have one slide that has pink on it, another is black, another is yellow. It just doesn’t flow very well. So just make sure your colors flow.

Okay let’s talk about your fonts a little bit. Now typically you want titles to be size 44, subtitles to be 32 and regular text to be 28. Now that’s not to say that all presentations should have titles size 44.

It just depends on the particular template you’re using. Remember in PowerPoint bigger is better. So if you’re presenting like at a conference, for example, and you know you’re going to have an audience that’s way in the back of the room you can make it even bigger because if they can’t see they’re going to chitchat or go to sleep. Stay away from size 12 like you would type text in Microsoft Word, for example, because no one can read that.

Also limit your fonts to three per presentation. So usually what you’ll see is the titles are all the same font, maybe the text below it on your slide is the same font and sometimes people throw one more in here or there. But don’t have totally different fonts on every single slide. It just doesn’t flow very well that way.

Alright let’s talk about words. You want to limit the words per line to six to eight. And the reason for that is because if you’ve got 12, 13, 14 words and you’re trying to put them all on one line you’ve got to make the font smaller. Remember bigger is better. So if you’ve got a lot of text you want to break it down into a couple of different lines.

Keep in mind though that the less text you have on a slide the better. No one wants to read paragraphs of text, especially slide after slide after slide. So you can always use handouts if you have more text you want your audience to kind of note. Put your text on those handouts and pass those out. And again less is better.

Okay some rules with your bullets. Four to six bulleted items per slide. And again that’s for the same reason we talked about with the fonts. If you’re trying to cram 12 or 13 bullets on a slide you’ve got to make them a lot smaller and people in the back of the room aren’t going to be able to see it. So break your slides up into several if you need more than four to six per slide. Now if you only had seven it’s not a big deal. But if you’ve got 10-12 you need to have two different slides.

You’re going to be able to have up to five levels of bullets. So you’re going to be able to have first levels, second levels which talk about first levels all the way down the line. Later we’ll be talking about pictures because you can have different pictures for your bullets. And if you do that use the same picture for each level. So all the first levels would have the same picture, second level is the same picture and so forth.

Okay your templates. You’re going to use simple templates and you’re actually going to enhance them by using some graphics, clipart or chart, things like that. You want to really limit the number of textures and affects and things like that. There is a fine line between having a nice looking presentation versus one where people going, “Ooo. Aw. How’d you do that?” and they’re not paying attention to what you’re saying. So you have to kind of find that line there.

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When you have text slides try not to use more than three in a row because it gets really boring. So every three or four slides put in a picture or something funny, a graph, something to break the monotony. So what I’m saying is don’t have a presentation that has just a title slide and everything else is bullets because people are going to go to sleep.

So that’s all I want you to know right now. Let’s go ahead and keep those in mind when we go into section two, Creating a New Presentation, because we’re going to be picking templates kind of based on these guidelines.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!