6 tips for polishing up your PowerPoint presentation!
A professional presentation can have a lasting impression on your clients and stakeholders so here are our six favourite tips for polishing up your PowerPoint:
1. Position your elements correctly.
It’s important to align your images and text boxes to make your slides look neat and tidy. The trick is to hold down “Ctrl” while you use your arrow cursors to line up each element with precision. Turn on gridlines for the best accuracy. To re-size each element simply hold down “Shift” and tap the cursor keys.
A nice shortcut for lining up elements is to use the Align function. Select the elements you want to tidy up (use Ctrl+click to select multiple elements) then click the Arrange dropdown on the Home menu tab. Under the Align submenu, you’ll find options to align the tops, middles or sides of the selected objects.
2. Embed all fonts.
It’s frustrating when your fonts don’t show correctly when you play the presentation on a different computer. Sometimes this throws off the positioning of your text and makes it look very unprofessional. To make sure this doesn’t happen, go to File | Options, open the “Save” pane and tick “Embed fonts in the file”. It’s best to embed all characters, even if you don’t plan to edit the presentation.
3. Compress all pictures.
Before sending a large presentation by email or sharing it online, you may want to reduce its file size. Click “Compress Pictures” under the Picture Tools | Format menu. The “220ppi” setting may save the space you need, so try this before reducing the resolution any further.
4. Set up your presentation to play automatically
You can make your presentation start automatically as soon as you double-click on its icon. Save the file as a PowerPoint Show (PPSX), not the default Presentation (PPTX) format. You can still edit a PPSX file by opening it in PowerPoint.
5. Blank the screen during pauses
If you don’t want to draw your audience’
6. Use your mouse as a laser pointer
In PowerPoint 2010 and 2013 you can draw attention to a particular part of a slide by holding down Ctrl then clicking and dragging the mouse: this activates PowerPoint’s “laser pointer” feature. To hide the pointer, simply let go of the mouse button. You can change the colour of the pointer by clicking on the Slide Show tab then “Set Up Slide Show”.