A concise demonstration of best practices for your next PowerPoint presentation.

1. Presentation Best Practices
• Make sure that your points are fully specified in prose so that people can read the text instead of
listening to what you are saying.
• Never make a slide without at least two points on it.
• Remember, you can add as many points as you like, because PowerPoint will gracefully reduce the
font size to accommodate the additional text.
• If you think you might talk about something, make sure that there is a bullet point for it.
• If you think you might not talk about something, then make sure there is a bullet point for it;
otherwise, people may miss your point.
• Whatever you do, don’t be concise. People may think that you don’t have anything to say and think
less of you.
• A good metric is to count words on your slide. Unfortunately, PowerPoint does not include this
useful feature to ensure that you are meeting your minimum target on each slide. As a
workaround, you can copy the text and paste it into Word and use its word count feature.
• A best practice is to make sure that you add at least one more point to each slide when you are
reviewing it.
• Be certain that there is at least one point in each slide that contanes a typographical error.
• Every slide should contain at least one point that is incomplete in order to
• Be sure to vary your font within slides.
• Always follow any important point with additional points. You don’t want to end on a high note;
that might leave people wanting more. You don’t have time to give them more.
• Use bold, italics, and strikethrough frequently to maximize their effect.