A plea: Can someone who knows POwerpoint step this way and give me some help please?

[sassy]

Have got to give a 20min presentaion in interview on Tue and I am not very good at all! Any tips appreciated.

(Posted in chat as well)

when it comes to your Powerpoint slides, have nice clear font, large size. Don't put too much info on each slide - they should be as quick and easy to read as a poster, in general. Depending on what your presentation is about, use bullet points - again, not too many to a page. Again depending on who/what the interview is for, I would avoid fancy fonts - stick to the basics (and not Comic sans unless you are going to be a primary school teacher or work with children in some other way).

Use colours that are easy to read - white on blue works well, black on yellow is the easiest to see but not very pleasant to look at - avoid red and blue combinations like the plague, ditto magenta and green as these are headaches waiting to happen.

If you can include graphics, that works well to break up the tedium of lots of words, but don't go overboard with them.

Hope that helps.

tutorial

(Have posted on your other thread too)

Don't use tables of numbers use charts.

Stand as far away as your furthest audience member - can you still read your presentation (or half the distance if you are looking at it on your laptop).

Otherwise everything thumbwitch said, white on blue header banners with blue on white body text works very well.

Make sure you know the content of your slides so you can present without looking at the slides.

Work on the basis that everybody in the audience can read, so you shouldn't read the slides you should present about the content.

NEVER EVER have a slide up where you have to say "I know that this isn't easy to read but..", if its not easy to read then don't put it up!

Also - don't put text on slides which you just read from - little point in doing a presentation if folk could just take copies of your slides with them

Oh and don't have loads of fancy headers nad text flying in - really annoying!

Less is more. Remember that you are the focus of the interview, and the ppt is just to provide some assistance to your presentation rather than be the main subject of it. Your audience should be looking at and listening to you rather than spending ages trying to understand your slides.

I would say you need no more than 4-5 slides for a 20 mins presentation.

Think carefully before using red and green as some people might be colour blind. Agree that white/blue is a good combo if you want to get away from white and black. If you need a third colour to highlight things or have to colour in boxes etc, I often find a lighter or darker shade of your main colour is often better than a completely different colour.

Spend a bit of time at the end checking that all your slides look similar - same font (Arial is always the simplest to read and looks professional) and same size, same colours used throughout, all headers centred or to the left rather than mix and match etc. This makes it look really professional and like you have spent time thinking about your presentation

Thanks all, helpful stuff here

How are you going to be showing the presentation?

If you're using their computer check the version of Powerpoint is compatible, or save your presentation in a form that can be read by any computer.

If you are using your computer & need to switch the display to show it with a projector, make sure you know how to do it.