By Chang Ge – Lecturer/ Digital Lead – Lincoln International Business School – Staff
Take a look at part 1 of this post for the fundamentals of PowerPoint. Moving forward! With the session well under way and our objectives for creating a good PowerPoint presentation established, we moved onto more of Chang’s top tips:
Images
Ctr+C & Ctr+V. Sound familiar? Copied and pasted images from Google is one of the reasons PowerPoint gets such a bad rap. Chang instructs that a good presentation should have a high quality of visual content that students will engage with – easily done by accessing free stock images from creative commons websites like Pexels or Pixabay. “Better images will encourage better discussion.”
Background
Another option would be, like well-designed websites scrap the flat white background and use professional photos as your background. PowerPoint is equipped with a simple photo editing feature that can edit pictures for those without the experience using Photoshop. Chang suggests that by using PowerPoint you can edit photos to fit your purpose and make images more attractive.
Animation
The key to this would be continuity, simplicity, and knowing the difference between animations and transitions. Which are all easily accessed from either the animation or transition ribbon. Chang gave us a great example of an animated poster produced in PowerPoint that used animated text boxes and arrows to clearly lead from one point to another.
Transition
Funnily enough, the key is consistency again, especially between slide changes. Effortless transitions between slides can reduce the fatiguing impact of a slide-heavy presentation. Chang used the cube transition in her presentation to show us how a particular large spreadsheet, that would need several slides to cover, was broken up part into smaller more easily understood sections. It also served as an example of how a transition can and also give a presentation fluidity.
Check out how this can be achieved and more in part 3. Part 1 is also available here.
Chang Ge is a Lecturer in the Lincoln International Business School.