Back to (PowerPoint) School: Tips for Improving Your PowerPoint Presentation Design Skills

It’s September again and that means back to school.

Here we take you to the PowerPoint classroom to help you bone up on your presentation design skills and, in the process, improve workflow.

At eSlide, we believe your PowerPoint presentation design skills are an important tool for you to have at the ready. Once these skills are in place, accessing them will become second nature, allowing you to spend more time developing fantastic content and less time wrestling with PowerPoint.

So, to help you improve your skills, this month we give you some of our top PowerPoint presentation design tips:

Copy and Paste a Formatting Style: Shift+Ctrl+C or V

The fastest way to copy and paste the formatting style of an object, character, bulleted list, or paragraph is to select the item with the style you want to copy and press the SHIFT+CONTROL+C keys. Then select the item you want to paste the style to and press the SHIFT+CONTROL+V keys.

Take Control of Chart Axes Labels

Ever wish you could force a PowerPoint chart axis label onto two lines? You can make the year appear underneath the month by opening the chart data sheet, placing your cursor in front of the year and typing ALT + RETURN. In the data sheet, the year will move to the next line; but more importantly when you return to the chart, you’ll see the label has followed suit – making the labels easier to read and the chart more useful. (This works for all data labels, not just dates.)

Simplify Charts to the Extreme

Make your important information stand out by simplifying your chart to the extreme. Start by deleting all unnecessary information and emphasize your main point(s). When it comes to deciphering charts, psychological studies show that the brain cannot differentiate between objects of more than FIVE without actually thinking (five lines, five colors, etc.) If you have a chart with a bazillion lines and colors in it, you might want to consider consolidating the lower priority information into an “other” legend category, or muting their line colors. Also, removing unnecessary “automatic” chart elements like leader lines, gridlines, tick marks and axis labels helps increase visual clarity as well.

For an Instant Design Upgrade, Try the Doughnut (Skip the Pie)

A simple way to upgrade your slides is to switch from pies to doughnuts. A doughnut chart presents the same data as a pie, but the hollow center makes it lighter visually and gives you more room for labels and other information. The center is a great place to put the title of the chart, a total, or even an N value.

 How To Fix Mysterious Shrinking Text

The culprit here is a setting applied to the text box object. Often PowerPoint defaults to SHRINK TEXT ON OVERFLOW. Which means the more you type, the smaller your text becomes – and nothing you specify about font size will change the actual size of the text. We find this feature to hurt more than it helps. To remove it simply RIGHT CLICK on the offending text box and select FORMAT SHAPE. In the dialog that opens, click TEXT BOX from the left-hand menu and then select DO NOT AUTOFIT in the Autofit settings.

For more PowerPoint presentation design tips, join one of our regular e-training sessions.

Coming soon…

As its Halloween next month, we’ll look at something really frightening…final revisions in the run up to a big presentation. We’ll look at how you can organize those last few hours of work and how to prevent the chaos.