A Few PowerPoint Don'ts

I don't you about you, but I've had to sit through a lot of terrible PowerPoint presentations over the years. It seems like, despite the resources out there that can give presenters great tips about what to do and what to avoid, and how to do both, people just don't seem to get that, if used the wrong way, a PowerPoint is completely ineffective. I thought that the advice given in the "Top Ten Slide Tips" was very useful, and I completely agree with all of it, especially because it stresses the importance of simplicity in presentations. Personally, I'm a huge fan of simple, to-the-point PowerPoints, and as soon as things get convoluted, I tend to lose my focus, because there's just too much going on for me to focus on what the presenter actually wants me to see. So, out of my love for simple presentations, I'm going to list five things it's important not to do when creating a PowerPoint:

1. Limit the use of transitions (or even better, avoid them completely!). I have never understood the fascination with making a slide checker in or out, or having each individual letter spin in on a slide (which takes forever!). I mean sure, it's fun to play around with on your own time, but no one wants to sit there and wait for your slides to show up. It's quicker and less distracting to your actual point to just change slides without the extra show.

2. The "Top Ten Slide Tips" suggest not using more than 6 words on a slide, and I couldn't agree more. Though it sometimes is necessary to use a few more than 6 words, keeping them to a minimum is helpful in that it prevents you from reading straight off your presentation (another major don't) and that it prevents your audience from being overwhelmed by all the words on the screen. I actually had a professor read through all my slides before I gave a presentation to make sure that none of my slides had more than 10 words this summer, and the result truly was a much cleaner-looking presentation.

3. As I said above, reading off of your slides is BAD. We've all had that professor who thinks its important to read every word off of the presentation, and we all react the same way-why are we wasting our time looking at this if he(or she)'s just going to read it to us anyway? It's boring and it creates a negative response from your audience, which is never good.

4. Don't crowd your slides with animations. True, a wisely chosen animation can really add to a presentation, but if it's just there too look cool, its probably just distracting from the point you're trying to make. If you're talking about how important the structure of a protein is for how it reacts (pardon yet another chemistry reference, I'm a nerd, what can I say) putting an animation that shows a rotating three-dimensional model of the protein on your slide is great. It demon states visually what would be much more difficult to put into words, and it's really much simpler. However, an overly colorful spinning shape in the corner of a slide just distracts from the point, and, honestly, it just looks tacky.

5. Last but not least, as has been said many times before, don't be afraid of white space. Really. There's nothing wrong with having a presentation that doesn't have a multicolored, matching background, or words and pictures all over it. Personally, I find it much easier to focus on the important material if there isn't a ton of extra "stuff" in the presentation. White space makes it obvious whats important, while having lots of extra designs, pictures or words makes it unclear what the main point actually is.