How to use PowerPoint (without severely abusing it)

PowerPoint.

From my point of view, PowerPoint takes the cake as being the most abused program ever, in the way rarely ANYONE uses it properly.

If you use Comic Sans, add 5 second animations to every paragraph in every slide, use the 34th template in the recommendations or put entire books in your slides, I think this article may help you a bit.

Creating your presentation

Do not use templates.

Templates are horrible (in my opinion). They're only useful if you're in such a hurry, you don't have time for anything else.

Quick and boring presentations that don't have a single drop on effort put into them usually use templates.

Yeah.

 If you want your presentation to look professional and full of care and effort, don't use templates.

Start with a blank template, and keep stacking up the design with your own imagination. C'mon, there are so much opportunities in PowerPoint!

Take care about colors.

Think about the projection of your presentation. Try using light, not-too-flourescent colors for the background, and an inverted color as your text color. Don't use screaming colors. Trust me, it makes your presentation unpleasant to watch.

Isn't that beautiful?

If you really need to use funky colors (such as red on green, like here) try using their lighter shades. PowerPoint has a good enough color palette, ready for you to use.

Slightly better.

 Think about the fonts you're going to use.

For additional professionalism, don't leave the font on default. And don't use any of the following fonts if you really don't have to:

• Algerian
• Comic Sans MS
• Impact
• Brush Script
• Curlz MT
• Hobo
• Bauhaus 93
• etc.

TL;DR, don't use "handwritten" fonts or "medieval age" fonts, if you REALLY don't have to. If you do, use it, but don't abuse it!

Use a simple but perfectly readable font (sans serif).

My recommendations are:

• Arial
• Segoe UI
• Helvetica
• Roboto
• Franklin Gothic.

I also recommend you use Consolas if you're about to insert code snippets.

Clean and simple.

Filling up the presentation

Transitions and animations.

Sure, PowerPoint has a crapload of cool animations and transitions. But use them too much, and your presentation loses its magic.

Don't make yourself look 5 seconds the audience while your cool paper plane transition is progressing.

The animations I think are useful and simple are Appear and Fade (whether you use them as an Entrance animation or an Exit animation).

Try to make them short. Each animation should be 0.5 seconds or less. It's fast, simple, and you don't have to wait a century for a paragraph to fade in.

A fade slide transition is simple and fast, and is everything you need in a presentation. Remember that the content matters a lot more than the animations do.

Align your elements.

I suffer from a slight OCD, so my presentation always has to be centered. There's an option in PowerPoint which lets you align your elements to the left, center or right. If you want to center a couple of elements, group them by selecting them, right-clicking and selecting the Group option. Later, you can ungroup them after you align them.

Transparent images.

If you're using logos, shapes or graphic objects, try finding transparent images of those. They'll fit into your presentation nicely, and your slide will look great. Try looking for PNG or SVG files; PowerPoint 2016 will play with both of them nicely. If you can't find a transparent image, but know how to use Photoshop, you can make them yourself using the Background Eraser tool in Photoshop.

And lastly, insert as less text as possible.

The biggest point of a presentation is that you don't read off the slides. Don't put everything you want to say onto the slide. Try memorising the most of it, or represent it by graphics. If you need help, use the Notes part of PowerPoint. They won't be noticeable to the audience, and yet, they will help you in delivery of your presentation.

After this, I think you should be doing better at PowerPoint.

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