Organizing Presentations

Before you actually create a PowerPoint presentation, you should determine the presentation's purpose, organize your ideas, and establish the flow of what you're going to say. Essentially, you need to create an outline.

→ To learn some useful outlining techniques, see “Creating an Outline and Storyboard” in Chapter 22, “The Message—Scripting the Concept.”

PowerPoint offers four ways to create an outline. One of the easiest ways is to create your presentation using the Outline tab in Normal view. If you're more comfortable adding content directly to slides, your information will automatically be displayed on the Outline tab. Creating a presentation using the AutoContent Wizard is a good idea if you want to receive detailed content suggestions for a particular type of presentation; the wizard also creates a basic outline for you. And finally, if you already have an outline in another application, such as Word 2002, or just prefer working in this environment, you can easily import the outline into PowerPoint.

→ To learn what the AutoContent Wizard does, see “Using the AutoContent Wizard” in Chapter 2, “Creating a Basic Presentation.”

→ To learn how to import existing outlines, see “Working with Outlines Created in Other Programs” in this chapter.

As you create your basic outline, keep several things in mind:

• Start nearly every presentation with a title slide that introduces your topic and its presenter.

• Think of several main points to cover and design your presentation around those points.

• Try not to cover more than one main topic or concept in an individual slide.

• Remember that a PowerPoint outline is usually designed to accompany a verbal presentation. Keep in mind what you want your audience to see versus what you want them to listen to during your presentation.

• Keep bulleted lists balanced and consistent. For example, a single bullet on a slide doesn't really make sense; a list should contain at least two bullets. Too many bullets on one slide and very few on another also might not work well.

• Consider using a summary slide to summarize the points you made during your presentation and conclude it.