Business English

kieszonkowy poradnik 

biznesowo-językowy

Creating a succesful
Powerpoint presentation

All clear 4

Words like bullets 5-7

Choosing the fonts 8

With flying colours... 9-11

A picture is worth ten thousand words 11-12

Slides in action 12

Leave a lasting impression 13

Vocabulary 15

Kieszonkowy poradnik biznesowo-językowy

Opracowanie: Bartosz Zieleźnik, Prochor Aniszczuk

Colorful Media ul. Lednicka 23, 60-413 Poznań

tel. 61 833 63 28, redakcja@business-english.com.pl

Zdjęcie na okładce: Andres Rodriguez

CREATING A SUCCESSFUL
POWERPOINT PRESENTATION

In the previous part of our guide, we have established that presenting is more than just displaying slides on a screen. There is no argument that a well-prepared speaker is a backbone of every successful presentation, but if the slideshow itself is boring or visually unattractive, even the best presenters have to struggle to keep their audience interested. In the second part of BEM’s guide to successful presentations we are going to focus more on slide design and we will show you how to create a perfect PowerPoint presentation.

Computer-made slides are ideal for everything from management meetings to academic lectures. Programmers like PowerPoint make running a presentation easy, but there are still some common mistakes that can trip up even the best presenter. Although PowerPoint is the most obvious choice for creating a slideshow, our guidelines can be easily applied to other software like OpenOffice.org or Google Docs.

All clear

While the age of the flip chart and transparent foil is well behind us, we have learnt quite a lesson from those days. Every presentation has its message to deliver and the aim of your visual aids is to help you get this message across. Slideshow is only a part of the whole process and reading it aloud is never enough. Ideally, your slides should only represent ideas and brief explanations of the main points, while the rest of the message is supplied by you.

slide:

Making your slides look smart

Many of the guidelines that apply to word-processing also work well with PowerPoint presentations. Don’t put too much text on them, and prepare the layout always keeping readability as well as aesthetic appeal in mind. Crammed slides do not look good and lead your audience into reading what’s on the screen rather than listening to you. For you it would mean reading the slide aloud, rather than using it as a visual aid.

When you want to use a downloaded text, be sure to remove the hyperlinks and edit the text so that it matches the colour,

font and size of your presentation.

TIP: Before copying a text from the Internet into your presentation, open a simple text editor (like Notepad in Windows or TextEdit in Mac OS)and paste it there first. This will remove most of the web formatting and unnecessary hyperlinks. Text copied from there will be much easier to adopt.

Words like bullets

Always consider that your audience will be looking at any one slide only for a few minutes so the information it contains has to come across clearly at first glance. A clean slide that emphasizes key points is more effective than the one that contains every word you intend to say. Instead of using long and complex sentences, try turning them into short phrases. Small chunks of text are also acceptable, especially when you are dealing with quotations, but the best thing to do is to organize your message into bullet points.

Try to limit any slide to four or five bullet points, each with a sentence or two of explanatory text. If a topic requires six or more bullet points, remove the additional text and offer it yourself. Keep the most important information at the top of the slide. Often the bottom portions of slides cannot be seen by audience in back rows. Remember that you don’t have to display everything at once. To keep your listeners focused on one thing at a time, try animating the text onto the slide, point by point.

slide:

Five rules for aesthetic presentations

No more than:

5 bullet points

5 words in the title

7 words in width

7 words in height

4 lines of quotation

If you want to include a quotation, remove irrelevant parts of it using […] and making important words and phrases stand out by using bold or italics.

slide:

Progress

[...] reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

TIP: If you need more points to cover a topic, re-structure the section into two slides, each with a smaller number of bullets. This way your audience will concentrate better on what you’re putting across.

VOCABULARY

adequate - odpowiedni

academic - akademicki

aesthetic - estetyczny

aloud – na głos

appealing - atrakcyjny

at first glance – na pierwszy rzut oka

backbone - podstawa

bold – pogrubienie

brief - zwięzły

bullet - pocisk

chart - tabela

chunk - fragment

to come across – natknąć się na

to come in handy – przydać się

complex - złożony

to cram – upychać

default - domyślny

design - projekt

to display – wyświetlić

to emphasize - podkreślić

entire - cały

to establish – ustalić

to expand on sth – rozwijać (np. temat)

explanation - wyjaśnienie

foil – folia

font - czcionka

guideline - wytyczna

hyperlink - hiperłącze

irrelevant – nieistotny

italics - kursywa

lecture - wykład

neat - schludny

obvious - oczywisty

opposing – przeciwny

to participate - uczestniczyć

to paste - wklejać

patterned - wzorzysty

to persist – upierać się

portion – część

punctuation - interpunkcja

to put across – przekazywać

question mark - pytajnik

quotation – cytat

range - skala

reasonable – rozsądny

to recap - powtórzyć

relief - odpoczynek

repetitive – powtarzający się

to reinforce - wzmocnić

remaining - pozostały

to require - wymagać

row – rząd

scheme - schemat

to shout - krzyczeć

solid - jednolity

slideshow – pokaz slajdów

to stand out – wyróżniać się

to stick to sth – pozostać przy czymś

to struggle - walczyć

to supply – zapewniać

tacky – tu: kiepski

to trip up – potknąć się

to tempt – kusić

transition - przejście

transparent - przezroczysty

visual aid – pomoc wizualna