PowerPoint Guidelines

2007 WV Envirothon

Current Environmental Topic

Fonts

Use common fonts like Arial and Times New Roman.

Use a large enough font size so text is easy to read.

Make sure you can see the text from the back of the room.

Backgrounds

Choose a background and text color with enough contrast so the text is visible.

Dark on Dark

Does not work

Light on Light

Does not work

Space

Don’t crowd the slide with too much text. Break up the text as bullets. The audience will not want to read slide after slide of too much text. And if they do try to read all the text, they won’t be listening to your presentation. Too much text on a slide is very trying on the eyes and overwhelming for your audience. Also do not read your slides, the slides are to reinforce your talking points.

Transitions and Animations

Stick with simple slide transitions and animations.

You don’t want to use up your presentation time on lengthy slide transitions and text animations.

You also don’t want to give your audience motion sickness from swirling text.

Saving the Show Part 1 Compress photos and embed fonts when you save the

slide show on a CD Rom.

Compress photos – go to “save as”…in the right hand corner of the drop down box click on tools…at the bottom of the drop down menu click on “compress pictures”.

In the window that opens, choose all pictures in the document, and click on OK.

Your pictures are now compressed in the Power Point.

Saving the Show Part 2 You should embed the fonts in your PowerPoint in case the

computer you develop your show on has different fonts from the computer you present your show on.

Go to “save as”…in the right hand corner of the drop down box click on Tools…and then “save options” and then choose embedded TrueType fonts.

Don’t use too many slides

One for each speaker

And maybe 2-3 more depending on need

Number of Slides

Practice

Practice, practice, practice…make sure everyone on the team knows how to advance and backup the slides.

Go over the timing of the presentation and advancing the slides.