There are basic skills that most consultants learn at the beginning of their career, among these skills, they learn how to prepare good quality slides in terms of content and design. I will be sharing with you in this article few of my personal preferences on how to create good quality PowerPoint slides.
Make it visual when possible
It's true that many reports require writing and heavy-text but try to use images, graphs and charts whenever it's possible to break the monotony of words and make it easier and faster to understand. When the deliverable requires the heavy-text, make sure not to use these same slides when presenting your findings to the client, but prepare a new PowerPoint document less wordy but more visual just for that presentation.
Patterns and Perfection
I think that beauty can be found in patterns, perfection and simplicity. The same thing applies for sliding. In fact, we feel satisfied when everything in the slides is aligned and has patterns. On the other hand, it can feel unpleasant to look at slides with size disproportions or unaligned boxes. Make sure to pay attention to small details.
Keep it simple
Avoid using animations or transitions. While animations makes you think that you are making your presentation more interesting, if you use too many, they could become distracting to your audience and damage the presentation's professionalism.
You should also avoid using many colors in a single slide, or even in the whole presentation. Create a template of colors to use in the presentation and stick with it. In fact, using four to five colors will be enough for the whole presentation. Paletton is a powerful online free tool to get your color scheme quickly.
Lift & Shift
Make sure to check your past decks for reference, Slidecraft is all about iterating and refining prior versions. It certainly helps your speed efficiency when you have templates to work with (either entire slides or sections within slides). After all, why reinvent the wheel when some graphic designer already put the effort in.
Get inspired
When you are thinking about how to present your findings in a good design and don't have an existing reference, check if your company has a set of templates you can use, or simply search on Google for templates to get inspired from. There are also tools, that can help with that.
Use Slide Master
PowerPoint’s Slide Master lets you quickly modify the slides and slide layouts in your presentation. Editing in slide master will affect every slide in the presentation including background, color, fonts, effects, placeholder sizes and positioning. You can access the Slide Master from the View tab. Get familiar with using it because Slide Master is the baseline to template your presentation.
Use Guides
Using guides will helps you with formatting, positioning and slide-to-slide consistency. You want to keep it consistent throughout the piece. Start by adding at least four guides before sliding to delimit the body of your presentation. Make sure to never cross the guides for the body.
To display guides in PowerPoint, go to View tab and check Guides. To add a guide, right click on a slide, select Guides then Add Vertical/Horizontal Guide.
I recommend you to add the Guides I talked about earlier in the Slide Master view, that way, you can't move them by mistakes (it happens and can be very annoying).
Use Align
As I mentioned before, good slides are perfectly aligned. Our brain unconsciously detect imperfection and you will feel uncomfortable looking at a slide to the smallest inequivalent distance or misalignment. Get use to the align feature available on PowerPoint instead of moving object with your mouse. Not using align is time consuming and you won't be sure of the exactitude of your alignments.
Don't distort images, crop them
When someone inserts a picture in a slide but the size picture seems a bit off, they usually distort the picture to fit it in. In fact, distorting the picture will have two bad consequences, first, the picture loses its quality, and second, it creates a disproportion which takes out the realism from the picture.
When you want to increase or reduce the size of a picture or an icon, alway do it while keeping the width and hight proposition the same (only distort the picture promotionally, not left/right or top/down). To maintain the proportion of an image while resizing, hold down the Shift key while dragging the corner of the image.
Let me show you an example:
1. The image is too large to fit in the slide and we have to reduce its width.
2. When you distort the picture to reduce its width, you notice the man's head looks a bit compressed and unnatural. As I said before, your brain unconsciously detect the imperfections. When you look at the slide for the first time, you will feel it's a bit off but you won't be able to understand why instantly.
3. Instead of distorting the picture, crop it and remove the disposable part from it. This operation keeps the picture's authenticity and quality. Unfortunately, you lose part(s) of the picture, but there are situations where you can crop the picture and still keep the important parts.
Use tools and add-ins
Make it visual when possible
It's true that many reports require writing and heavy-text but try to use images, graphs and charts whenever it's possible to break the monotony of words and make it easier and faster to understand. When the deliverable requires the heavy-text, make sure not to use these same slides when presenting your findings to the client, but prepare a new PowerPoint document less wordy but more visual just for that presentation.
Patterns and Perfection
I think that beauty can be found in patterns, perfection and simplicity. The same thing applies for sliding. In fact, we feel satisfied when everything in the slides is aligned and has patterns. On the other hand, it can feel unpleasant to look at slides with size disproportions or unaligned boxes. Make sure to pay attention to small details.
Keep it simple
Avoid using animations or transitions. While animations makes you think that you are making your presentation more interesting, if you use too many, they could become distracting to your audience and damage the presentation's professionalism.
You should also avoid using many colors in a single slide, or even in the whole presentation. Create a template of colors to use in the presentation and stick with it. In fact, using four to five colors will be enough for the whole presentation. Paletton is a powerful online free tool to get your color scheme quickly.
Lift & Shift
Make sure to check your past decks for reference, Slidecraft is all about iterating and refining prior versions. It certainly helps your speed efficiency when you have templates to work with (either entire slides or sections within slides). After all, why reinvent the wheel when some graphic designer already put the effort in.
Get inspired
When you are thinking about how to present your findings in a good design and don't have an existing reference, check if your company has a set of templates you can use, or simply search on Google for templates to get inspired from. There are also tools, that can help with that.
Use Slide Master
PowerPoint’s Slide Master lets you quickly modify the slides and slide layouts in your presentation. Editing in slide master will affect every slide in the presentation including background, color, fonts, effects, placeholder sizes and positioning. You can access the Slide Master from the View tab. Get familiar with using it because Slide Master is the baseline to template your presentation.
Use Guides
Using guides will helps you with formatting, positioning and slide-to-slide consistency. You want to keep it consistent throughout the piece. Start by adding at least four guides before sliding to delimit the body of your presentation. Make sure to never cross the guides for the body.
To display guides in PowerPoint, go to View tab and check Guides. To add a guide, right click on a slide, select Guides then Add Vertical/Horizontal Guide.
I recommend you to add the Guides I talked about earlier in the Slide Master view, that way, you can't move them by mistakes (it happens and can be very annoying).
Use Align
As I mentioned before, good slides are perfectly aligned. Our brain unconsciously detect imperfection and you will feel uncomfortable looking at a slide to the smallest inequivalent distance or misalignment. Get use to the align feature available on PowerPoint instead of moving object with your mouse. Not using align is time consuming and you won't be sure of the exactitude of your alignments.
Don't distort images, crop them
When someone inserts a picture in a slide but the size picture seems a bit off, they usually distort the picture to fit it in. In fact, distorting the picture will have two bad consequences, first, the picture loses its quality, and second, it creates a disproportion which takes out the realism from the picture.
When you want to increase or reduce the size of a picture or an icon, alway do it while keeping the width and hight proposition the same (only distort the picture promotionally, not left/right or top/down). To maintain the proportion of an image while resizing, hold down the Shift key while dragging the corner of the image.
Let me show you an example:
1. The image is too large to fit in the slide and we have to reduce its width.
2. When you distort the picture to reduce its width, you notice the man's head looks a bit compressed and unnatural. As I said before, your brain unconsciously detect the imperfections. When you look at the slide for the first time, you will feel it's a bit off but you won't be able to understand why instantly.
3. Instead of distorting the picture, crop it and remove the disposable part from it. This operation keeps the picture's authenticity and quality. Unfortunately, you lose part(s) of the picture, but there are situations where you can crop the picture and still keep the important parts.
Use tools and add-ins
There are many consulting tools, such as ThinkCell and Efficient Elements, which can save you tremendous time while working on your presentation:
- ThinkCell
- Efficient Elements
- Flevy
- Power-user
- MLC PowerPoint Addin
- Office Timeline
I hope you found this helpful. Please leave a comment below if you have any question or any recommendation to share.
You can follow me on Twitter and add me on LinkedIn.
Related posts:
How to Write Quality Consulting Reports
Consulting Tools
You can follow me on Twitter and add me on LinkedIn.
Related posts:
How to Write Quality Consulting Reports
Consulting Tools
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