It may now be ‘old school’ but lets face it Powerpoint is a useful tool, we frequently want a stand alone rolling presentations for meditation, contemplation or to make a point [ LIKE THIS ONE ], as well as the obvious use to go along with a sermons.  Personally I would like to see more use of this tool but also for people to think ‘outside the bullet points’ but that’s for a different post…. recently I had to sort out a powerpoint for a few people both at work and church and was asked for some settings.  So I’ll start to put some tips here…

disclaimer – this is all just my opinion and in my experience if you disagree feel free to comment.

In this context I’m thinking about a series of pages with images taking all or sections of the page mixed with quotes, scripture, etc.

FONTS:

• avoid times / roman type fonts – anything with thick parts and thin parts to each letter as they are harder to read of a screen
• avoid comic sans at all times as it is almost as evil as cheese
• Use arial, calibri, candara type of thing – blocky
• Once you pick a font, stick to it for the entire presentation!
• Avoid obscure fonts or copy the fonts along with your presentation in case the machine you are going to use doesn’t have the same font.
• ALWAYS make your font SHADOW as this will help it pop out against the background.  The shadow is black by default so if it is white text on a black background you should probably change this to a light gray tone (white can be too much) or sometimes yellow gives a light glow.
• (almost) ALWAYS make your font BOLD.  In most cases the text being bold will help the reader, however I would say if it is a page full of text (say more than 80% of the page is text) then I think bold font makes it too busy and therefore difficult to read.
• text size – I’m not going to suggest a size as it depends on the context the presentation will be viewed, just remember how far away people will be from the screen.

It is worth messing about with your choice of font near the start of a powerpoint project, then once you have set up a text box on one slide you simply duplicate that slide or copy the text box to each new page then changing the text content while keeping the font settings.

It might also be worth mentioning here the layout of the text, in particular avoid placing text too close to the edge of the screen as depending on the output method this text might be lost or cropped.

IMAGES:

Another trick to help the text to stand out against an image is to use the format image properties:  right click on the image, choose format image then tweak brightness, contrast OR transparency till the text looks good.  You shouldn’t often need to change all of them or any of them by very much but it can help punch the text through the image.

SUBTLETY (no point?!):

A tricky one this, but in a lot of cases people have spent a lot of time in preparation trying to get everything to look exactly right, then when the presentation is played back onto an improvised sheet in a well lit room with an old borrowed projector the results aren’t as good as expected….  So, don’t try to be too subtle in the shades of colour, contrast between font and background as it will just be washed out unless projecting in ideal situation – so keep in mind how this will be displayed and if possible check everything (run through the full presentation several times) on the final setup well before you need to use it.

TRANSITIONS & ANIMATIONS:

Remember what these are for – these are to highlight that something is changing, to grab the viewers attention to show a change from one page to another or to show that something is being added to the page.  Often in the uses I am talking about here the desired effect it not to distract the users attention, so keep transitions and animations to a minimum and indeed once you pick on stick to it throughout the presentation.  For transitions I find that “random bars horizontal or vertical” work best for not distracting the viewer.

I’ve also used what I call ’stepped transitions’ to make the change between slides even more subtle.  What I mean by this is instead of fading out an image using a transition you can make a couple of copies of the slide, add a solid black box over the entire slide then make it, say 80% transparant on the first copy (thus darkening it by 20%) then, say 40% transparent on the next slide, then totally black on the next.  Using a transition between these therefore simply makes the same image/slide get gradually darker stepping down to black  rather than one transition to black.  Again this is old school as newer versions of Powerpoint (2007) have more control over speed of transition, but I still find it useful.

FILE VERSIONS & TRANSFER:

There are lots of versions of Powerpoint around now, you may not know what is on the machine you plan to use for the presentation (or that machine may let you down and you need to use something else).  So I would recommend saving the presentation in multiple formats….

• .pptx Powerpoint 2007 for Windows or Powerpoint 2008 for MAC (latest at the time of writing)
• .ppt for Powerpoint 97 – 2007
• .pps which is a powerpoint show file – this doesn’t need the powerpoint software to be on the machine in order to run the show (it is ’stand alone’) however this means that you can’t edit or change it once saved.

I would recommend saving it in all of these formats (and any other you can think of) especially if you don’t know the situation you will be using it in.

Hope that helps, I’ll aim to add more ideas and suggestions in the future.