How to Make a Great PowerPoint Presentation

Create Your Narrative

1. Decide what you want your audience to learn. Before you begin, it will be necessary to determine what you want your main take-away message or information to be. This should be an identifiable main point, which all of your other information will support. If you are doing an academic presentation, it will be the equivalent of your thesis statement. If your presentation is business related, it will be the product or service which you are proposing or advocating. Nevertheless, prepare for the content to put in your presentation before you open and start with a blank presentation.

2. Boil your information down. Try to only keep the information that you can't do without. If you have a load of text in your hands, cut it down to the most important bits. If you have a boring graph about how internet users have increased throughout the years, make a statistic instead. Say, the amount of internet users have tripled since the last decade, now up to 3 billion. This way, you will be presenting the same information to your audience, just in a more interesting and instigating way. It will also keep your presentation from being to long or sounding "rambling".

3. Plan out your structure. Now that you know what information must be included, begin to plan the structure of your presentation. You will want to plan as much of your speech and slides on paper as possible. Outline not only your speech but your slides as well.

   1. The structure of an academic presentation should follow roughly the same structure as an academic paper, first introducing your main point, supporting it with evidence, and then a short conclusion.
   2. For business presentations, Guy Kawasaki (a notable business adviser and marketing guru) suggests this standard presentation structure^{[1] X Research source} :
      1. The Problem
      2. Your solution
      3. Business model
      4. Underlying magic/technology
      5. Marketing and sales
      6. Competition
      7. Team
      8. Projections and milestones
      9. Status and timeline
      10. Summary and call to action
   EXPERT TIP

   Maureen Taylor
   CEO, SNP Communications

   Use your slides to emphasize what you're saying. Maureen Taylor, the founder and CEO of SNP Communications, says: "The powerpoint is there to add to your presentation. When a visual comes up, first tell the reader what they're seeing, like, 'Here's a graph that shows profit and loss.' That gives the audience time to process the new information before you tell them the significance of it. Then, before you click to the next slide, make a transition. For instance, you might say, 'Okay, now let's talk about how many employees it's going to take to make this effort happen.' Then you click, and tell them what they're seeing again."