Yes, you can control that 900 lb. gorilla! Using PowerPoint Effectively

How do you make sure you deliver the message you want your audience to hear and avoid unintentional or overlooked messages caused by misspellings, poor grammar, etc? At UCCSC conference in July, Dr. Leo Schouest offered some guidelines to creating an effective presentation. Here are some of his suggestions:

• Do you need to use it? Recognize your purpose, audience, occasion
• Select a template that connects with your purpose and audience
• Choose the right template: avoid cliched designs, clutter. Look for a distinctive, simple, elegant layout that doesn’t overuse style variations. Don't be afraid to create your own.
• Use a master slide to keep your presentation consistent. Don’t move text and boxes around.
• Use appropriate fonts, sizes and faces, the same with animation
• Use high contrast, don’t use color badly
• Limit the info on each slide: ‘chunk’ information and avoid density
• Use animation sparingly
• Limit all CAPS
• Plan the next to the last slide carefully\go to black at end for closure

A hint of our own: If you intend to post a presentation on a website, change the template to one that's print-friendly [no color backgrounds!] and convert it to a .pdf [Acrobat Reader format] to reduce the file size.