To The Point

We all use presentations run in college, workplace, or any other place. People use much software to create presentations like Microsoft PowerPoint, Prezi, and many more. Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program created in 1987. Later PowerPoint became a part of the Microsoft Office suite. Since the late 1990’s PowerPoint rules the presentation software market with 95%.

Even though we are using PowerPoint for our daily needs, we still do not follow the easy tactics and tools to beautify our presentations. Today let me share a few points with you related to a few mistakes that we do in creating our presentations and a few good tricks in PowerPoint. Let’s start with fonts.

Fonts

There are 4 basic fonts types namely; Serif, Sans-Serif, Script & Display fonts. Serif is traditional. They are elegant and have feet at the top and bottom. Sans Serif is the modern font. They are classy and easily readable which don’t have the feet. Casual fonts that are mimic cursive handwriting are called Script type and finally Display fonts are unique and expressive. The presenter has to decide to use the type of fonts based on the title, body, occasions, and expressiveness. We usually commit mistakes when we choose fonts in our presentations. Let me take you through a few mistakes related to fonts.

• Readability

There is no point in using the beautiful cursive handwriting if the audience cannot read it. There is no right or wrong or font usage; it all depends on how much the audience can read it

• Size of the Font

We should be mindful not to use too small or too big fonts in the presentation. Always it is advisable to use the moderate size of fonts, which can be visible to the audience.

• Too many words

The third mistake we all do is, using too many words in a slide. But it’s always better to use the point forms to describe a paragraph

• Objects & Scale

When you want to write the words in line with an object, you need to scale up & down the words. So we need to fit the fonts align with the objects.

• Background & Font color

The common mistake, that most of us are doing is the colors to use for background and fonts. It's not good to use the dark color fonts in a dark background and light color fonts in a light background. It should be always cross; which means dark color fonts in a light color background and wise versa.

Pictures

The next component in PowerPoint presentation is pictures. Let's look at some aspects and a few techniques that we can use when we deal with the pictures in our PowerPoint slides.

• Handling the single picture slide

If we have a single picture in the slide, it’s better to align it to the center. Look at the two slides below and you will feel that the second slide is more appealing to an audience than the first one. The appealing look has come with the center alignment.

• Comparative data with pictures

We usually use the pictures to differentiate data. By looking at these two slides, it’s obvious the second one is preferable. It's because the percentage and the size of the object are matching with the second slide while the first slide distracts from it.

• Perfect Shapes

We all know we do use shapes. Have you ever realized, you are unable to create a perfect circle from the objects set? If we want to do it manually, we need to align the shapes perfectly by dragging the lines of the objects. But we can do it easily, by clicking and drawing using Ctrl+Shift, you will get the perfect shapes.

• Align the Objects

We all know we do use shapes. Most of the time we got tired of making them align them to the middle, right, or left. We can align the objects to the right or left or center. The path to align is much easy.

Select the objects → Format → Align

Microsoft PowerPoint is wonderful tool that has so many features to beautify the presentations. Apart from that, it can be used to create beautiful artworks and flyers. We should go a bit deeper in PowerPoint to deliver our presentations To the Point.