Nitro-charge your PowerPoint presentations to get the message across

PowerPoint is one of the oldest and most used tools for presentations in business circles. And with time, it has evolved to become an extremely potent way to conduct business. Therefore, it’s of grave importance indeed to understand how to make it work for you and your business.

Your PowerPoint presentations can speak volumes about you as a person, and thus, emphasis on perfecting the art is greater for a businessman or an entrepreneur. Yet most individuals remain blind to its importance. Their reasons mostly include the time it takes to make and perfect a presentation. But what they fail to see is the impact it stands to create on potential clients.

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Here are a few ways in which you can nitro-charge your presentations.

Keep it organic

According to an article by Weidert Group, “Human eyes aren’t used to seeing brilliant, out-of-this-world visual movement. Good presentations aim to comfort the viewer, not amaze. When you choose an overall style, try to envision your PowerPoint slides as one or many real objects. Imagine canvases, tabletops, landscapes, and shadow boxes.”

Simplicity is the opposite of complexity, as order is of chaos. A simple presentation doesn’t mean it must be boring, it just means that it conveys your business proposition in a way that’s not jarring to the viewer. A presentation that aims to be dazzlingly quirky, overwhelmingly colorful and altogether a jamboree of colors and sounds will fail to convey its point and instead appear to be beating about the bush. In the end, you will be tagged as someone who is a showman without substance or value. So try to keep your presentation real and organic. It’s important to remember that your presentation is meant to start a dialogue - between the client and yourself - and not end as an ego-thumping monologue.

Pictures can be words too

According to a design theory called ‘Picture Superiority Effect’- people are able to recall significantly more information when a message is conveyed through pictures rather than ‘cumbersome text’. The practical advantages of this theory can be applied and seen in your presentation. More images will give you the chance to speak more to your clients and in return it will also be easy for the clients to remember. You can use one image per slide and wherever the need to use text supersedes the use of picture apply bullet points.

Save your slides as jpegs

When you save your slides as jpeg images, it conveys two things to your client –

• You are attentive to details
• You like to make things easy for those you work with

These two aspects are bound to create a good impression on the client. In addition to this, you can create a separate folder that contains all the jpegs in order of appearance in your presentation. This would come in most handy if and when your client asks you to email a particular slide(s) for their internal review.

Don’t underestimate the power of color

It may stand to your advantage to experiment beyond the usual fonts like Calibri and Cambria, but when it comes to the color theme of your presentation you need to exercise caution. Colors represent emotions. Therefore, in order to ‘set the right mood’ for your presentation, engage in ground-level research of which colors suits your presentation the best. It will guide your presentation in a desired direction.

A PowerPoint presentation is a great way to engage your clients, as it can give them something to talk about. If you wish to be spoken about in the way that you desire, start by re-looking at the art of PowerPoint presentation today.

Read Also: How to be a pro at presenting