Third.. Insight into PowerPoint Presentation

It was 25^th of July 2007. Ms. Ng was talking about the how to effectively use PowerPoint presentation in a lesson during her ‘debut’ to our class. She talked about the crucial thing that we need to apply in our presentation in order to successfully deliver our points and some of the taboos that should be avoided when doing PowerPoint presentation. I was listening and I would say…Ms. Ng indeed have changed my perception on designing slideshows for presentation.

What I’ve learnt on that day is that, SIMPLICITY is the main principle if you are thinking of making slideshows. Simplicity here means that you don’t put too much info on one slideshow. Just put the main point just fine, unless your slides will look cluttered. Nothing interesting with cluttered slides..you will end up making your audiences feel annoyed with you. Get the idea? Just practice simplicity, do not put too many words into 1 slide and organize your slides well. From my previous piece of works of PowerPoint presentation, I tend to choose animated pictures to my slides (although the animation was not related to the point) because of the perception of designing the slides that “more than meets the eye” which is nothing but a total misconception of ideas I created. According to Ms Ng, pictures displayed in slides should be relevant to the topic or issues we are discussing. It’s true…if the picture is not relevant to the topic, then why must the picture be there? Please..be more considerate..although it’s only a picture, but sometimes picture can help deliver our meaning. Thanks to Ms. Ng, these new information did help me to change my view about PowerPoint presentation. Another interesting point that was mentioned by Ms. Ng is the main title/topic should be included in each slides so that the audiences will be clear with the purpose of that particular presentation. Other important principles that we need to consider are the choice of background colour, types, size and colour of the font chosen and which is more preferable, 2D or 3D charts (2D is more appropriate since it can show the portions more clearly).

From what I’ve been taught, I make a conclusion that when we are designing PowerPoint slideshows, we do not need to put everything that we want to deliver on slides. It won’t help our presentation. Instead, only important points need to be displayed. That way, our audiences can get what we meant to deliver. If we put everything on the slides, and we are presenting just by reading the whole text we put in the slides, they just can’t see what we are trying to deliver. In the end, our presentation would be pointless. Therefore, organization of our slides is important in attracting the attention of our listeners. The most important thing is, we MUST know what we are presenting, and elaborate on the points that we include. The best thing to successfully deliver our presentation is we are well-prepare before we carry out our presentation. Of course you don’t want to go ‘numb’ in front of the audience. I really like this one video shown to us, where a man doing a presentation. Each of his slides contained ‘a very limited word or picture’ and he delivered his speech in face pace. It was hilarious, but his intention was not being hilarious, but to introduce his topic. That kind of approach indeed can attract the audience. And only well-prepared man can do that kind of presentation…