You have a PowerPoint presentation completed. Maybe you’ll use it for your next webinar presentation or even speaking from the stage. Take a second and make sure that your PowerPoint contains these three very important components—a consistent look and feel from the master slide, a bullet drip layout, and title slides.
Most people don’t know that you can open up a PowerPoint presentation, go to “view Master Slide” and adjust the template that your presentation is based on. That means you can easily change the background image, colors, font size and positioning in one place and it will affect all of your PowerPoint slides at once.
The Master Slide is a huge time-saving tool to make sure that not only your title and content slides containing titles and bullet points all are the same but your title slides as well. While you’re in there adjusting the look and feel of your slides, make sure that they implement the bullet drip as well.
Here’s what a bullet drip is. If you have ever seen any of Armand Mo- rin’s presentations and he flips you to a new PowerPoint slide, he doesn’t just show you the title and all four or five bullets at once like most present- ers do. Instead, he shows you just the title and he talks about it. Then he hits a button and shows you just the first bullet point then talks about it. He shows you just the next bullet point – I should say the first two bullet points and talks about it. Then the next three bullet points and so on.
But the idea is that he is only showing you one component at a time to keep you from reading ahead. It makes it very easy to follow especially when you keep your bullet points short which means no complete sentences and you only have a handful of bul- lets on each slide.
Having this bullet drip helps make your presentation easy to follow but here’s one final thing you can do to make it even simpler. That’s adding a title slide. A title slide is a slide that just has a couple of words in giant text and nothing else. No bullet points, no diagrams, just a title. You don’t get points for making your presentation super complicated.
You get points for making your information easy to understand. Add in title slides every now and then to emphasize an important point and to give your viewers a break from taking notes or just understanding the information.
That’s what you should do when you put together your PowerPoint presentation. Use the master slide, deliver a consistent look and feel, use the bullet drip which means you go into the Master Slide, choose animations, custom animation, click on the area with the bullet points and choose to add an effect for entrance and the effect is called “appear” to allow the bullet points to drip down and add tile slides in between important points to give people a little bit of a break.
