However, there is also misleading information about layout and usage best practices. We’ve noticed that many PowerPoint professionals are providing one-size-fits-all best practices for how many words should be on a slide, font sizes, etc. One size doesn’t fit all, and you need to learn how to apply the correct best practices to the presentations you develop.

You need to have a solid understanding of the type of presentation you are producing (selling, teaching, introducing new concepts, influencing, persuading, obtaining a commitment, investment, status updates, etc.); who your audience is and what they are looking to gain from your presentation; the depth of detail that is needed (no more and no less); how large your audience will be; will there be handouts; and so on.

Once you have answered all of the presentation-defining questions, you’ll be better equipped to determine the best practices that will serve you and your audience best. For example,

1. A financial institution that presents earnings reports to small groups of its investors needs to provide a very specific amount of performance information, which will require a smaller font and greater detail – but this works.
2. A company introducing new procedures to its employees may wish to present the new expected behaviors to employees and provide handouts as a reference and to support the presentation messages. The handouts can contain more content than the presentation, so a larger font and scaled back content in the presentation is a good approach.
3. A speaker introducing an overview of a broad topic or a set of concepts can use the “minimal words/impactful images” approach to presenting. This approach is a much more effective way to engage an audience on an emotional or thought-provoking level and encourages retention by hooking the message to a well-chosen image.

Now imagine the financial institution (no. 1) using the no. 3 approach to bring its investors up to date on the status of their portfolios. Without a sufficient amount of supportive detail, the presentation may very well create distrust and frustration on the part of the investors. This is counterproductive for the financial institution, since they have a trust-based relationship with their investors.

You need to determine your own best practices in order to maximize the impact of your presentations.

One consideration that is not taken into account often enough is the availability of highly stylized, nonstandard fonts. Not all fonts are licensed to be embedded, embedded fonts increase the size of the presentation, and TrueType fonts present some issues. Highly stylized presentation templates often have beautiful, nonstandard fonts that contribute to the overall style in a meaningful way; but they don’t travel well unless they are embedded. If a company uses their highly stylized templates without embedding the fonts for presentations to large gatherings (seminars and conferences) where all presentations are managed by an IT team instead of the presentation owner, sends their documents to clients without PDFing them, or makes them available to others outside their company in any other way; the presentations had better have a standard font. More than likely others do not have the stylized font on their computer, so their computer will make font substitutions – text skewing is the result: text wraps differently, sizing is almost always off from one font to the other, text bumps into other elements on the slide, etc.

So when choosing a nonstandard font for your PowerPoint template, be sure it is available to embed and weigh the issues of having presentations with larger file sizes. This link will take you to a Microsoft article that walks you through the steps of embedding fonts. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826832

This Chart of the Month is a good example of a simple and elegant slide introducing a company. There’s no time for people to read a bunch of text, so text needs to be kept to a minimum. You may want to add a brief blurb, however – something that will help the viewer identify what your company provides or your motto. In this case, we may have wanted to place “Your presentation-development partner” or something long those lines in the upper region of the slide.

Choose photographs and images that provide insights into your company’s product/service offering. Be very selective and try to maintain a color scheme. If an image you want to use has disruptive colors, recolor it using the PowerPoint Picture Tools/Format/Recolor tool. The three arrows in the collage were very bright colors of red and green and didn’t blend, so we recolored it to the blue in the template palette. Then it worked fine with the other photographs.

This is a great addition to your slide cupboard. Enjoy.

There is a download containing two wave variations available for this Chart of the Month. Don’t forget to download this and use it the next time you wish to illustrate this concept.

Instead of the “10101010″ numbers, the words “data data data” could have been used just as effectively. Or if your transforming time into money, consider using a collage of clocks above the funnel and lots of dollar signs imported into an outflow shape below the funnel. So you see how this works.

When choosing your photographs, take into account the shapes of the inflow and outflow. Since quite a bit of the photograph will be eliminated when it is imported into the inflow/outflow shape, two types of photographs work best: 1) collages and 2) small subjects with lots of space around them.

Remember that the autoshapes in PowerPoint cannot be rotated before importing a photograph. The photograph will come in based on the original orientation. Therefore, for example, the inflow graphic needs to be drawn.

See this FAQ to learn how to import photographs into shapes. How do I create photographs in different shapes from rectangular photographs?

Size the circles so that they are the same size as the bands and then layer then so that are all are visible. Move them behind the radar chart. Don’t worry that the radar chart’s grid lines have hard corners and the target background is comprised of circles. They still work together very well. When choosing your target colors, you can use the lighter hues from your color palette. Or, if you wish, you can use shades of gray or other complementary color. Just be sure that there is a lot of contrast between the data lines and the colors in the target.

The two charts are identical except that one uses the target-type graphic. You can see that they values are much more apparent with the targets. Consider using this device the next time you have to compare values and categories.

1. prevent documents from being overwritten with earlier versions
2. make it possible to determine the status of the document within the development process
3. order the documents within the project file
4. track the document down after it goes final.

Let’s look closer at what naming conventions accomplish.

1. Version control. In addition to making sure that a presentation-development process doesn’t splinter (two or more people working on the electronic master at the same time, which creates a double master – yikes), adjustments to the file title during the process prevents work loss. Work loss can be overwriting the current master with a previous version or vice versa. Either way, you want to protect the iterations of the document as it’s being produced.
2. Document status. Whether you’re producing a presentation all by yourself or as a team, it’s helpful to know the iteration number date for the presentation. If you’re producing the presentation with team members, it’s also helpful to know who last edited the presentation.
3. Finding the presentation. If a naming convention is used, the sequence of iterations can be easily seen and the most recent electronic version readily identified.
4. If your company has only one file server, tracking a document down is a relatively easy thing. If you have multiple offices, however, it may be helpful to include an office identifier to the naming convention.

What makes a good naming convention?

The number of identifiers built into a file name determine how effective it is to identify a document within a folder. For example, date, charge code, client name, person creating/editing document, version number/letter, date of presentation, etc. There are no character number limitations when naming a file, so you can contain as much information as believed useful. Most operating systems preview the first page of a document (and beyond) without opening it, so you don’t have to include the presentation title. This only comes into play when more than one presentation is developed for the same event, etc.

A sample naming convention: 11-0921-Partridge-abc123-0918C-kavBO.pptx

• The 11-0921 is the date of the presentation (all documents starting with that date are automatically filed next to each other in the folder, regardless of document type [Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Keynote, etc.])
• Partridge is the client name
• abc123 is the charge code
• 0918 is the date the edits were made
• C is the version of the edits made on a day when several iterations are created
• kav is the person who made the edits
• BO is the office acronym
• .pptx indicates the type of file (make sure your folders show the file extension for documents).

This is important. Notice that the constant information is placed at the beginning of the file name? You want the files in the folder to order themselves in logical groups. Therefore, it’s important that the order of the information in the naming convention be considered. The presentation date, client, and charge code all stay the same and will, therefore, group your files together. The first changing variable is the date of the edits and the version letters. You want the edit date and version letter to be the next element so that they order the files in the folder. The initials of the person editing and the office acronym won’t disrupt an orderly display of the file names if they are at the end.

This type of naming convention works well when presentations are filed in client folders. If you create a file architecture that is based on chronology (month and year, for example), then you may want to put the client name first so the files for a particular client are grouped together in the folders.

There are some companies that create a check-out/check-in folder within the file architecture. This folder is designed to keep employees from working on an electronic master simultaneously. Documents can be split into pieces and worked on by multiple team members, but the person who checked the document out has the responsibility for reassembling it and placing it back into the folder on the server so that the next review and set of edits can occur.

Naming conventions are important whether you work alone, as part of a team, or as part of a network of offices. Every office should adhere to the same naming convention so that there is a standardized method of identifying documents, tracking them down, pulling elements from previous presentations into future presentations, etc.