Presentations with PowerPoint

$$\text{Transition}=\text{between slides}\text{Animation}=\text{within a slide}$$

The four kinds of animation. Entrance — how an object arrives (Appear, Fade, Fly In). Emphasis — drawing attention to an object already visible (Pulse, Grow). Exit — how it leaves. Motion Path — moving it along a drawn route.

Controlling them. The Animation Pane lists a slide's animations in order, each set to start On Click, With Previous or After Previous. Transitions have a duration and advance either On Mouse Click or After a set time, and Apply To All gives the whole deck the same transition.

The one legitimate use worth naming: revealing a bulleted list one point at a time, so the audience attends to the point being spoken rather than reading ahead.

1. Normal view. The default working view: the current slide shown large for editing, a thumbnail strip of all slides at the side, and a notes pane beneath. Nearly all editing happens here.

2. Outline view. Shows only the text of the presentation, as a hierarchy of titles and bullets, with no design. The fastest way to draft content, reorder whole slides and promote or demote points, because attention is on what will be said rather than on how it looks. Typing a title and pressing Tab creates its bullets; Shift+Tab starts a new slide.

3. Slide Sorter view. Every slide as a thumbnail on one screen. Used for reordering by dragging, duplicating, deleting, hiding slides and applying transitions to several at once. It is also where the overall balance of the deck becomes visible — three slides of dense text in a row show up immediately.

4. Notes Page view. Each slide printed small at the top of a page with the speaker's notes below. Used for preparing and printing what the speaker will hold, as opposed to what the audience will see.

5. Slide Show view (F5). The actual presentation, full screen, with transitions and animations running. Shift+F5 starts from the current slide rather than the first.

Also: Presenter View. On a machine with two displays, the audience sees only the slide while the speaker sees the current slide, the next slide, the notes, a timer and the annotation tools. This is what makes the notes pane worth filling in.

Reading View runs the presentation full screen but inside a window, for checking it without leaving the application.

A slide master is the top-level slide that stores the design of the entire presentation — background, theme colours, heading and body fonts and their sizes, the position and size of every placeholder, bullet styles, and anything that should appear on every slide such as a logo, footer, date or slide number.

Reached by View → Slide Master. Beneath the master sit layout masters, one for each layout (Title Slide, Title and Content, Two Content), so a change can be made to every slide at once or to every slide of one layout.

Why it beats formatting slides individually.

1. One change updates the whole deck. Deciding that headings should be dark blue at $36$ pt means one edit on the master. Done slide by slide across forty slides it is forty edits, and one will be missed — leaving a single slide that visibly does not match.

2. Guaranteed consistency. Because every slide inherits its placeholder positions from the master, headings sit at exactly the same height on every slide. Text boxes drawn by hand differ by a few millimetres each time, so headings appear to jump as the slides advance. An audience notices this even without knowing why the deck looks unprofessional.

3. Elements appear automatically. A logo, footer or slide-number field placed on the master appears on every slide, including slides added later. Placed by hand it must be copied to each new slide, and will be forgotten.

4. Speed. New slides arrive already formatted. There is nothing to style, so the work goes into content.

5. Reuse. A master saved as a template (.potx) gives every presentation in a college or company the same appearance without anyone remembering the specification.

6. A safe route to changing the design. Applying a different theme restyles the whole presentation, because the content sits in placeholders that the theme controls. Content in hand-drawn text boxes ignores the theme and has to be reformatted by hand.

The underlying principle, the same one as styles in a word processor: put the content in the structure the software provides, and control the appearance in one place. Formatting each slide separately records how forty slides happen to look; a master records what the presentation is — and stays correct when it changes.

1. A slide is a signpost, not a document. Roughly six lines of six words. The slide carries the headings of what is being said; the speaker supplies the substance. Anything needing a paragraph belongs in the speaker's notes or a handout.

2. Font size at least $28$ pt for body text, larger for headings. This is not a style preference but a limit: smaller text cannot be read from the back of a room. If text must be shrunk to fit, the answer is less text or another slide.

3. Contrast decides legibility. Dark text on a light background, or light on dark. Mid-tone on mid-tone is unreadable when projected, however acceptable it looks on a laptop.

4. Prefer sans-serif faces. They hold their shape better than serif faces when projected at a distance.

5. One idea per slide. Two ideas need two slides. Slides cost nothing; a confused audience costs a great deal.

6. Prefer a picture to a table, and a chart to a paragraph. A column chart is understood in a second; the same figures in a table take half a minute; described in prose, they are not understood at all.

7. Be consistent, using the slide master. Headings in the same position, the same fonts and the same colours throughout. Inconsistency is the most visible mark of a hurried deck.

8. Use animation only when it has a reason. Revealing bullets in step with the speaker is a reason. Decoration is not. Excess animation lengthens the delivery and distracts from the content.

9. One transition, applied to all. A different effect on each slide looks accidental.

10. Number the slides, so a question can refer to one.

11. Never read the slides aloud. If the slide says everything the speaker is redundant; if the speaker says everything the slide should be shorter. The slide and the speech should complement one another.

12. Structure the deck. Title slide, then an agenda, then the content in sections, then a summary, then an invitation for questions. An audience that knows where it is follows better.

13. Rehearse with timings, and know how long the talk actually runs.

14. Check it on the real projector. Colours, contrast and aspect ratio all differ from a laptop screen. A presentation is judged on the wall.

15. Have a fallback. A PDF on a pen drive and a printed handout, in case the machine, the file or the projector fails.

The principle behind all of them: the presentation is the speaker, supported by slides. Every rule above follows from asking whether a choice helps the audience follow the person talking.