What makes a great slideshow

If you've already created a presentation, double click the icon to open the existing file. Microsoft offers built-in themes and color variations to help you design your slides with a cohesive look. To choose from these pre-built themes, choose the "File" tab again, select "New", choose one of the options, and click "Create.

Otherwise, you can use PowerPoint elements, your design sense, and your brand's color palette to make your own "theme. You don't want to present the same exact slide, just with different content on it. This would bore your audience. Ensure that you create multiple variations, accommodating some of the common uses for slides. At minimum, you'll need:. There's no reason to create these designs over and over again. Now that you have a few to draw from, you can simply duplicate them before inputting your content.

Here's how to do that:. This will automatically add a copy of this slide to the presentation. From there, you can customize it for your needs. Done well, transitions can add a little bit of movement and showmanship to your presentation. PowerPoint has several transitions built in for you to choose from. To access them, select the "Transitions" tab from the top ribbon. From there, you can select a transition for it to preview on your screen.

To customize it further, click "Effect Options" and play with the features to find something that suits your liking. To remove a transition, select "Transitions" and click "None.

Like transitions, animations can add movement, reveal information, and help you underscore the points you want to hit during your speech. To animate an element, follow these steps:. These describe how you want the effect to behave, so play around with them until you find an effect that suits your liking. You'll also have the option to move animations around as you edit your slides with the "Reorder Animation" function in the top ribbon.

Click "File" and "Save", making sure to specify which folder or destination you want your PowerPoint to be stored. It's always good to do a trial run to ensure that your slides are set up properly and your animations fire they way you expect them to. The slide will cover your whole screen, blocking out your desktop and PowerPoint software. This is so your audience in this case, you for the trial run is solely focused on the visual elements of your presentation.

When you're done with one slide and want to show the next in your sequence, click your mouse in presentation mode. This will advance the slide. Microsoft wanted to provide PowerPoint users with a lot of tools. But this does not mean you should use them all. Here are some key things to look out for:. While you usually can get away with the default slide size for most presentations, you may need to adjust it for larger presentations on weirdly sized displays. If you need to do that, here's how.

Tip : Resize your slides before you add any objects to them or the dimensions of your objects will become skewed. Often, it's much easier to edit your PowerPoint template before you start -- this way, you don't have design each slide by hand. Here's how you do that.

A significant part of a PowerPoint's content is text. Great copy can make or break your presentation, so evaluating your written work from a few different angles could make you seem more persuasive. Thinking about how your text is received differentiates good presenters from the best.

Many people underestimate the influence of typeface, but choosing the right font is important -- the perception of your font type could influence your audience's impression of you. The right font is an opportunity to convey consistent brand personality and professionalism. Some fonts are seen as clean and professional, but this doesn't mean they're boring. A common mistake is thinking your font isn't "exciting" enough, which could lead you to choose a font that distracts from your overall message.

What's left is only that information that drives toward a decision. Good presentations include stories. Unlike facts, stories speak to the heart, and every good presentation uses stories to illustrate points and to help people make an emotional connection to the message.

Great presentations are stories. Rather than containing stories, great presentations take the audience through an emotional journey that creates a reason to decide right here, right now. Let them draw their own conclusions. Many of the best talks have a narrative structure that loosely follows a detective story. The speaker starts out by presenting a problem and then describes the search for a solution.

Even if the topic is important, random pontification without narrative is always deeply unsatisfying. I was at an energy conference recently where two people—a city mayor and a former governor—gave back-to-back talks. It came off as boasting, like a report card or an advertisement for his reelection. It quickly got boring.

Yes, she recounted anecdotes from her time in office, but the idea was central—and the stories explanatory or illustrative and also funny. It was so much more interesting. There are three main ways to deliver a talk. You can read it directly off a script or a teleprompter.

Or you can memorize your talk, which entails rehearsing it to the point where you internalize every word—verbatim. And as soon as they sense it, the way they receive your talk will shift. Suddenly your intimate connection evaporates, and everything feels a lot more formal. We generally outlaw reading approaches of any kind at TED, though we made an exception a few years ago for a man who insisted on using a monitor.

At first he spoke naturally. Many of our best and most popular TED Talks have been memorized word for word. One of our most memorable speakers was Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher who had suffered a stroke. She talked about what she learned during the eight years it took her to recover.

After crafting her story and undertaking many hours of solo practice, she rehearsed her talk dozens of times in front of an audience to be sure she had it down.

Obviously, not every presentation is worth that kind of investment of time. If they give the talk while stuck in that valley, the audience will sense it. Their words will sound recited, or there will be painful moments where they stare into the middle distance, or cast their eyes upward, as they struggle to remember their lines.

This creates distance between the speaker and the audience. Getting past this point is simple, fortunately. Then you can focus on delivering the talk with meaning and authenticity. Go with bullet points on note cards. Focus on remembering the transitions from one bullet point to the next.

Also pay attention to your tone. Just be you. Some speakers project too much ego. They sound condescending or full of themselves, and the audience shuts down. For inexperienced speakers, the physical act of being onstage can be the most difficult part of giving a presentation—but people tend to overestimate its importance. And when it comes to stage presence, a little coaching can go a long way. The biggest mistake we see in early rehearsals is that people move their bodies too much.

They sway from side to side, or shift their weight from one leg to the other. Simply getting a person to keep his or her lower body motionless can dramatically improve stage presence.

But the vast majority are better off standing still and relying on hand gestures for emphasis. Perhaps the most important physical act onstage is making eye contact. Find five or six friendly-looking people in different parts of the audience and look them in the eye as you speak.

That eye contact is incredibly powerful, and it will do more than anything else to help your talk land. People deal with this in different ways. Many speakers stay out in the audience until the moment they go on; this can work well, because keeping your mind engaged in the earlier speakers can distract you and limit nervousness.

She recommends that people spend time before a talk striding around, standing tall, and extending their bodies; these poses make you feel more powerful. But I think the single best advice is simply to breathe deeply before you go onstage.

It works. In general, people worry too much about nervousness. We asked Aaron to bottle his Keynote mojo so that others could benefit from it. Here, 10 tips for making an effective slide deck, split into two parts: the big, overarching goals, and the little tips and tricks that make your presentation sing.

He asked for permission to use the image, and credited the photographer, Blair Harkness. View the whole slidedeck from this presentation.