Working with PowerPoint and other visual aids

Capturing the audience attention is never an easy task, while others are visual learners who prefer to look at certain things in different viewpoints. This is when PowerPoint comes into play as it provides the audience with better understanding of the presenter's topic making it easier for them to remember it more than the words spoken. Another thing to keep in mind when using visual aid is to understand the culture of the whom you are presenting, for business purposes presentations this is really important especially if some members of the audience are from different cultures. It is important to be consistent when providing main idea in each slide, try to abbreviate if possible and use graph/charts to effectively convey statistics of financial information. Avoid using too many colors and try to match the them with the topic. While bright colors can be used if the lights will be off during the presentation and dark colors when discussing serious matters. I thought it would be helpful to share the following videos because it provides a step by step explanation on how to plan and structure information in PowerPoint.

 

According to David Kawasaki, a chief evangelist of Canva (a graphic design software), a successful speaker takes more than just being confident and definitely will require more practice to be competent. As a result, David came up with 10-20-30 a PowerPoint rule saying that slides should be no more than 10, a presentation should not go over 20 minutes and smallest points should be 30 font. I agree with the concept offered by Kawasaki, because as human beings, we all have different limitations in terms of our learning capacities. It may be impossible to absorb more than 10 ideas at the same time especially in business, the audience would probably care more about the solution to a problem rather than spending more time explaining the problem itself. If a presenter talks more than 20 minutes chances are people will have trouble retaining valuable concepts as new ideas replaced the old ones. A common mistake when using a PowerPoint is the use of fonts lower than 30. As soon as the audience figures out that the presenter is reading right on the slides, the audience may read ahead causing them and the speaker to be out of synch. Kawasaki, G.(2015)

For more information about the 10-20-30 rule feel free to visit Kawasaki's website at PowerPoint 10-20-30 rule