Healthcare Literacy Training Workshop Pt 1-PowerPoint

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Effective Presentations A Toolkit for Engaging an Audience

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in partnership with The Network for Public Health Law

3. How Do I Make Effective Presentation Slides?

Slides are visual aids that help to communicate your key messages. Used correctly, they increase learning, clarify what you are describing, and engage the audience. They allow you to reach both visual and auditory learners. PowerPoint has become a mainstay of current presentations, but most people use PowerPoint (PPT) poorly. Your audience will appreciate the time you spend planning and developing dynamic and interesting visuals. They will also better retain the information—especially visual learners. By following the guidelines in this section, you’ll be able to make your slides look more professional in no time.

Slides are meant to enhance your oral presentation, not summarize it or serve as a transcript. Many people think slides should contain much of the text of their presentations so people can refer back to them, or use them as handouts. If that’s your intention, create handouts, which can have more detailed information—slides are not the right tool.

Slides are supposed to support the live presentation, nothing else. They are a visual prop, not the focus of the presentation. We tend to hide behind our slides because it is intimidating to present to people, but the focus of the audience should be on you with only occasional references to the slides for specific, identified purposes. TED Talks are an example of slides used effectively.

Composition

Slides are consistently over-filled. Everyone’s been to a presentation with slides that cannot be read, packed with graphs or text. These slides are not effective; they’re distracting. Instead of listening and learning, people are struggling to read. A few key points that frame your presentation might be helpful, but be sure the text is needed and not just distracting.

Slides should be simple. They should illustrate. Everyone loves images and visuals. In fact, slides have helped presenters reach more people with more information because people learn differently, and many people are visual learners. You can include diagrams rather than bullets to help explain what you’re saying in a different way. You can use high quality photos, images, or include videos. (A list of websites for accessing free, high-quality photos is included in the supplemental resources section of this toolkit). PowerPoint has enabled us to embed digital media into our presentations and create dynamic multimedia experiences when appropriate.

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Key Components

• Composition • Templates • Typography • Color • Presenting Data

Color

Color is an important aspect of slides because you can highlight crucial information, such as data or words you want to emphasize. Color also sets the mood for your presentation. Your organization may have a color palette already. If not, there are several considerations when selecting colors.

• What colors are associated with my organization or agency? If you’re presenting on behalf of a company, you’ll want to make sure the colors of your presentation reflect that.

• What are the appropriate colors for my industry? Environmental health, for instance, is strongly associated with greens and blues, reflecting their work with green spaces and clean water and air.

• If the top two considerations don’t point you toward color choices, you can think about the mood you want to set? The color wheel is broken down into the “cool” and “hot” colors. Reds and oranges are more passionate and blues and greens are more calming.

When you think about colors, it’s helpful to think about putting together two to three colors that will resonate throughout the presentation. Often, people choose complimentary colors on the color wheel because of the contrast they provide to each other (blue/ orange is one example, and many colleges and universities employ this strategy with color schemes like purple/yellow, etc.). These two colors will be the primary colors, but can be accentuated by grays or a secondary color scheme if mandated by a chart, graph or other visualization that needs color for differentiation. However, avoid using red against green to differentiate data or information (in a pie chart, for example) because about 10% of men are color blind and can’t differentiate red from green.

Typography

If you are going to have text on your slides, be consistent about the fonts you use. This is another “rule” that people have heard over and over, but haven’t had explained to them. It’s the same

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Color Complementary: colors opposite each other on the color wheel

Cool colors: Yellow to light purple, separated from warm colors on the above color wheel.

Warm colors: Green to purple, separated from cool colors on the above color wheel.

principle we discussed in the slide template section. Consistent typography gives the audience visual cues about how they’re supposed to interpret information. If the audience has to adjust to new typefaces, it takes time away from diving straight into the content. One font is sufficient for your slides. You can use color and text attributes, such as text size and color, to differentiate different types of content (header and body). Also, be sure to have the same font size and style for headers and content (e.g., Arial 36 point bold for headers and Arial 28 point for body).

Charts and Data

It’s often tempting to use slides to explain the information that is most technical, the most difficult to understand. Sometimes this is appropriate. Some types of information are best displayed and explained visually, but make sure that you have spent the appropriate amount of time thinking about what you want people to understand. If you’re going to put up a slide and say, “I don’t expect you to be able to see or understand all of this, but the important part is…” then only include the important part. Simplify.

If you put complex materials on the screen, people will try to decipher the material before you start talking and they may or may not listen to you as you speak—most likely not. Using overly complicated technical information to help explain your content might actually detract from your presentation.

Also think about the type of chart or graph that you include. Is it the best way to visually present this information? It may be what you put together for a report, but what is it that you want this audience to take away from this presentation? Is there a better way to visually show this?

PowerPoint has some chart and graph features built into the program, which are helpful for moving data from programs like Excel, but these built-in features have limitations. Don’t add drop shadows or make your charts three dimensional. It’s harder for the audience to correctly interpret the data and can be misleading. Presentation experts like Tufte and Duarte recommend getting rid of axis tick marks, and reducing the number of elements in a chart to the bare essentials. Getting rid of “chart junk” will help your audience easily read and understand your graphs. See the Before & After section for more examples of charts.

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The audience can more easily interpret the data in the bottom chart.

Simplify your charts and data by not using drop shadows or other features to make them look three dimensional.

Charts and Data

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Size and placement of text helps the audience prioritize the importance of the content. Is the decision citation more important than the quote?

Bold or italic would suffice; combining the attributes is rarely needed.

If you have several slides with the same title (What is the legal landscape?), you can make a section title slide rather than repeat on each slide.

Presentation Slides: The Before and After

The crucial concept, the court ruling about first amendment rights, is first. The quote from the decision is indented and bold, providing enough contrast to make the text stand out.

The template is divided into thirds. The image, which takes up one third of the slide, feels deliberate in its placement. The orange also ties in with the orange bar of the template.

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If you must have a lot of text, such as a definition, you can pare down the content to the essential idea, bold key concepts, and increase the line spacing to aid readability.

One point on the screen does not need a bullet point.

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Putting the bullets inside the state is a simple way to add visual interest and relevance to a slide.

There is too much text on this slide. In the presentation, there are several slides describing different states’ regulations. Putting each state on its own slide and reducing the text helps your audience focus on content as you present it, instead of reading ahead or getting lost and giving up.

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If pressed for time, you could summarize lengthier bullet points with a few key words. The last bullet point can quickly and easily be turned into a diagram.

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Reducing the amount of text and adding photos made the content easier for the audience to quickly scan and understand.

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The x axis is unnecessary since the information is repeated above each of the bars.

The tic marks do not add important information, so they are unnecessary. Slanted text can also be harder to read.

Different colors for the bars help the audience understand that these graphs are measuring different things.

If your presentation is easily divided into sections, you can signal to the audience when you are moving to a new section by adding a slide like this one, which indicates that now the speaker is moving on to health impact assessments.

Cropping photos and making them “bleed” to the edge of the slide can create more dynamic slides.

This template supports the subject matter of the presentation. The new, more efficient light bulb represents the concept of quality improvement.

Your title slide can use different font sizes to emphasize the topic. “It’s not another program” is a tagline and should be in smaller type.

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Presentation Slides: Inspiration

This presentation about tobacco laws used a strong visual element (the timeline) and ani- mation to share a story with the audience. This presentation highlighted the current issue being discussed on the timeline in white and the text would appear in the body. This allowed the audience to look at each element in the process, with the timeline consistently present to show them how the process evolved.

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