How to Make Better Project Presentations with Slides

Small changes can greatly improve the quality of your presentation, at work or at school.

Most of us have had to go through oral presentations at some point in our lives accompanied by a visual or audiovisual aid. For a good handful of decades now, both at the teaching and professional level, it has been very common, if not indispensable, to practice the practice of presentations with Microsoft's powerpoint platform or, more recently, Prezi. At the Heart of the matter, this tool is a great explanatory support for our lectures and presentations.

However, many students and teachers admit to having serious difficulties in making a good presentation, and those who are already accustomed to the use of these technologies do not always use them optimally. This is due to the ability to synthesize that is required to tell a better story to the target audience, to not leave out the most important ideas or topics and other issues that we often do not think about. In this article we will focus precisely on how to improve our presentations in talks in front of an audience or in project presentations..

How to improve a project presentation with slides

Here are some points to improve your next presentation.

1. An introduction with a hook

In our first slides, we must correctly introduce the subject to be dealt with, expressing it in a direct and clear way. In addition to naming the authors involved in the project and giving a title that summarizes the main idea of the project. a title that summarizes the main idea of what you are going to seeIf after the first minute you have not yet said exactly what the presentation is about and why it is interesting, it is likely that the audience's attention will drop considerably.

2. Consistent use of colors

Remember that visual impact is very important. Choosing colors and tonalities well helps to give meaning and coherence, besides having aesthetic values. The size of the font and its style is also very important, as well as the degree to which it contrasts with the background of what is seen. In this sense there are no magic formulas: it is necessary to think about the surface on which these images will be seen, the distance at which the audience will be, and the way in which the whole will look.

It is important not to use any photograph as a text background, unless the text has very little color variability and the part to be read has a very homogeneous tonality that contrasts with the letters..

3. Quality images

The graphic support with quality illustrations or photographs gives a lot of life to a presentation, although it is not recommended to be it is not advisable to be obsessed with including many of them, since, besides wasting time, saturating everything with them will probably be too distracting.It is important that these images are not pixelated and that they are not too large or too small. It is important that these images are not pixelated and that they do not interfere with the rest of the content, overlapping.

4. Size of the parts of the slides

It is surely one of the pillars of a good presentation. The size of the slide is important, both in its content and in its decoration. Normally the title is made in large letters, and the points to be explained should be sentences of no more than two lines. Remember that we have to be brief but concise.

5. Emphasis on what is important

The slides are a support, and we should not rely on everyone in the audience to examine them in detail. to understand what we are saying in the presentation. When a piece of information is relevant, we must highlight it visually, either with bold letters, with the size of the font or directing the attention of the rest using graphic elements in the periphery.

6. Time limit

To improve our Power Point or Prezi presentation, or even PDF, we have to be scrupulous with time. The time limit necessary to explain each of the slides. The ideal is not to dedicate more than one minute to each one of them, unless it is a question of explaining each slide.unless it is a "slide-directory", a "map" to understand a good part of the content of what we explain in the presentation.

In addition, taking into account the time will help us to ensure that the minutes we dedicate to each of the sections correspond to their real importance, without creating imbalances.

7. Attractive narration

As we have pointed out above, the simple fact of using visual support for a presentation responds to the need to make a session much more didactic than a traditional presentation or class. Therefore, we must make an effort to keep the attention alive, making what we say go hand in hand with this philosophy.

Without going overboard with informality, we could offer a narrative through metaphors and anecdotes with which the audience can identify, although the amount of this element should correspond to the subject matter. should correspond to the subject matter and the nature of the project being presented.. In a presentation where the stakes are high, it is good not to detract from the seriousness of the event, so one or two of these references is normal, while if it is a classroom or workshop presentation, more can be included.

Keep in mind that the more narrative the presentation is, the easier it will be to attract attention and communicate clearly. This means that we must avoid limiting ourselves to "describing" a set of concepts that we want the audience to understand: what we have to do is to explain a story that, regardless of whether it is simpler or more complex, must have an introduction, knot and denouement. In this way, the overall message we want to give will be easier to understand and, as people will be less lost, they will remember better what we say.

8. Bibliographical references

It is the finishing touch to a good presentation, so you should never forget this section. Some users often overlook the referential element, the sources consulted or the bibliography used, which serves to support our message.. Adding in the last slide the recommended books, the articles consulted and the support websites from which resources have been extracted project a very professional image of our work.