Do you need to make good PowerPoint slides? Learn how to make a good PowerPoint with these 30 easy, quick PowerPoint presentation tips (plus 6 expert tips).
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Nov 29, 2023 • 24 min read This post is part of a series called How to Use PowerPoint (Ultimate Tutorial Guide).Here are 30 quick PowerPoint presentation tips to help you improve your presentations.
Plus, get PowerPoint tips on changing your slide design to make your content shine. We've even called on six presentation experts for their best tips.
This screencast is a speed round of my very favorite PowerPoint tricks. It's a great resource to learn how to make a presentable PowerPoint. I'll walk you through ten of my favorite PowerPoint tips and tricks to create a better presentation.
Keep reading for an illustrated version of these good PPT tips (and more) that you can use to improve your PowerPoint presentations. You'll see 30 of our favorite PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, including techniques to update slide master PowerPoint 2024 designs.
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A few tried and true tips can help you speed up your PowerPoint presentation design. Check out 30 of my favorite PowerPoint tips to do just that. Each of these give you PowerPoint slideshow help to create good PowerPoint slides:
If you're learning the top PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, you're probably asking yourself: how do I give a presentation that won't be forgotten?
We all want to be remembered. The best PowerPoint slideshow help to make a mark on the audience. There are tried-and-true ways to do just that, and expert Neil Tomlinson shares expertise on being remembered:
Get your main point into the presentation as early as possible (this avoids any risk of audience fatigue or attention span waning), then substantiate your point with facts, figures etc and then reiterate your point at the end in a ‘Summary’.
Also, don’t forget to practice your presentation. Go through your slide deck a few times to make sure you know it like the back of your hand when the big day arrives. Doing so helps you feel more confident. It'll reduce any anxiety and nervousness you might feel as the presentation day approaches.
What's the best way to rehears for a good PowerPoint? Here's one of the top PowerPoint presentation tips from expert presenter Sandra Zimmer:
Once slides are ready, practice one slide at a time aloud until you feel like you know it and like the flow of speech. Be willing to change anything that does not feel in flow. At the end of learning all your slides, practice the whole talk.
If you want even more great PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, check out the following post:
Let's say that you're a seasoned presenter with a pretty standard set of presentation topics. Maybe you're an expert in your field, and you're asked to give a PPT presentation frequently on similar topics.
That's the value of being an expert. You might have a standard spiel that you give your audiences, and your content won't totally change from one presentation to another. That's why it helps to make only slight tweaks to adapt your presentation to each audience.
Leading presentation expert Suzannah Baum offered up this advice:
Different audiences will have different needs and different challenges, which requires me to re-sequence the slides, or create new ones. I tend to do a lot of research on my audiences – via surveys, interviews, and conversations with the hiring manager – to help me better understand what information would be most relevant to them.
How do you adapt to your audience? Here are a few more tips:
Learn everything you can about your audience. Learning how to make a presentable PowerPoint is all about thinking of the recipient, not the presenter!
A PowerPoint presentation tip that'll make your slideshow more interesting and more engaging is to use a custom font.
Fonts set the tone for your presentation. So, when you use a premium font, you’re opting for a high-quality font while also adding a personal or creative touch.
When choosing a font, remember that you want everyone to read your text easily.
Reminder, Elements has tons of premium fonts.
One PowerPoint trick is to use contrast to make some of your text stand out or make it easier to read.
If you’re putting text over an image on our PowerPoint slide, you may need to use a white box with black text in it to make your text easier to read. You can also use contrasting colors to highlight important text.
Another PowerPoint tip is to avoid having too many animations or transitions.
When you've got too many animations, it can be distracting to the audience. It’s not only distracting, but it's unprofessional.
It’s best to stick to one or two animations throughout your presentation. Also, if you've got any animations in your presentation, make sure to test them to see if they work before presenting.
Include audio on a slide on PowerPoint to increase audience engagement. Audio can be anything from fun sound effects to interview clips. You can even add an audio clip of your voice.
Audio gives you a break from speaking while also engaging the audience. Envato Elements has hundreds of premium audio clips if you want to add some.
One PowerPoint tip and trick is to follow the rules of PowerPoint.
One of those rules is the rule of three. It's where you start by dividing your presentation into thirds. Everything should come in thirds, so if you use bullet points, you should only have three. If you use icons, you should only have three.
When things come in threes, it's easier to remember them. For more information, read this informative article:
Above all, consistently use custom PowerPoint themes. Microsoft has built-in themes that you can use for free, sure. But the premium themes that are on Envato Elements are a major step-up from PowerPoint's built-in themes.
When you subscribe to Envato Elements, you'll have access to unlimited downloads of all the PowerPoint themes. Right now, Envato Elements has almost 4,000 PowerPoint themes and that number is always growing. You'll learn tips for a good PowerPoint presentation by using the best templates.
The reason that these themes are so useful is because they contain ideas. They're more than just a set of colors and font choices. Instead, they come loaded with ideas for slide designs. You can drop your own content in the placeholders to skip the hard work of recreating each presentation from scratch.
Illustrate your data with the use of charts and graphs. Not only will you be able to make your presentation more visually appealing, but you'll also help your audience remember the information better.
Many PowerPoint templates already include chart and graph elements. Easily customize them to make your data and stats more interesting and easier to understand.
Want to learn more about how to use data? Turn to expert Adrienne Johnston, a presentation professional:
When it comes to visualizing data in presentations, we have to remember that our audience does not need all the fine details of the data - they need the main takeaway and we need to make sure that's evident to them when looking at the slide.
Inside of PowerPoint themes, you'll find layouts, which are custom slide designs.
Most themes include a selection of content layouts that you can use as a starting point for your own slide designs. You can leverage slide master PowerPoint 2024 designs with the help of layouts.
Layouts are like a starting point for your PowerPoint presentation slides. They contain combinations of placeholders for text boxes, images, and more.
Instead of clicking and drawing individual objects onto the slide, use one of these layouts to start your slide off. It's one of the top PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks to save time.
When you're working with text on your slide, it helps to ensure that it aligns consistently. Keeping your text aligned in the same orientation really makes a slide look clean.
In the example below, I've basically got three text boxes:
Notice that all this text is aligned left.
Aligning text was the "aha" moment that I learned when I started studying slide design. It's one of those steps that makes a slide look much neater and professional, so keep it in mind when designing.
No matter how great your PowerPoint presentation slides look, you need to think about how your user will use the presentation file.
Any of these are likely scenarios if you're regularly sending presentations to other users:
In this case, my favorite tip is to export the presentation as a PDF. To do that, go to File > Export > Create PDF, and then save your presentation as a PDF.
This is sure to help most of your users see the presentation just the way you intended.
Many PowerPoint themes have more than one color scheme that you can apply to your presentation. On the Design tab, click on the drop-down next to Themes to try out a different color scheme.
Typically, these will restyle your entire presentation. Premium themes that you might get from Envato Elements, for example, may have many versions inside the original presentation zip file.
The slide master controls the design for your PowerPoint slide. Instead of making the same change to each slide, apply a change to a slide master. It'll affect all the PowerPoint presentation slides that use the same master.
It's ideal to apply a logo to the slide master itself, for example. This keeps the logo the same size and in the same position on each slide.
To do that, go to View > Slide Master. On the right side, you're likely to see a variety of slide masters that control designs for many slides. Drop the elements that you want to remain consistent onto one of the slide masters.
PowerPoint presentation slides look better when the objects on them are in line with one another. There's a certain visual rhythm that occurs when objects line up in the center or along certain boundary lines.
When you start dragging objects on your slide, you'll see guiding lines that pop up. These are very intuitive, and you'll likely notice that they help you line up your objects. You might seem them pop up when you've got a box that's equidistant between two other objects on the slide, for example.
This is one of the best tricks for improving the look of your PowerPoint slide. Spend some time making sure that your key elements line up cohesively.
Earlier, I mentioned using Envato Elements to grab PowerPoint themes. But there's more that comes with an Envato Elements subscription for presentations.
That includes a wide variety of stock photos, graphics, and custom designed fonts that you can use in your presentation. Instead of reusing the same stock photo or clip art, Envato Elements has everything you need to supplement a presentation.
Again, Envato Elements is the perfect subscription if you build presentations. It's a one-stop-shop that you can use to fill content.
There's nothing that makes an audience tune out faster than being overloaded with slide content. Sometimes we try to make so many points that the audience misses all of them due to information overload.
Less is truly more. When you cut the weaker points of your presentation, the audience's attention will follow your key points accordingly.
It seems like cheating, but one of the best steps that you can take for your slide is to simply reduce the number of items that are on it. Convert some of your typed points to things you'll speak verbally.
Remember: a PowerPoint slide deck is an aid, not the presentation itself.Sometimes, I find that my presentations are out of order. I might spend too much time explaining my decision before I get to the conclusion.
In these cases, I like to use Slide Sorter View to re-sequence the slides in my presentation. To access this view, go to View > Slide Sorter on PowerPoint's ribbon.
From Slide Sorter view, you've got a top-down view of all the slides in your presentation deck. It sometimes becomes obvious that the slides can be reordered into a better sequence from this view.
One of my favorite PowerPoint presentation tips is to complement your major points with a bit of animation. Using animation can bring a key point onto your slide with style!
Check out ten of the best PowerPoint tips for how to use animation from expert Sven Lenaerts below:
