PowerPoint Slide Content

        Open up PowerPoint, and you get a whole... blank... screen.  Kind of intimidating, isn't it?  What the heck do you put on that slide - or for that matter, all the subsequent ones?  Where do you even start?  Well, after you've determined that you should Use PowerPoint for your presentation, and chosen a Style for your slides, here are some pointers for your slide content:

• What Can't Be Said - PowerPoint is best for things that are difficult to communicate verbally.  This includes processes, concepts, mechanisms, structures, heirarchies, photographs, any kinds of graphs... There's a lot of stuff out there!  See the examples below, for a "process" and a graph that do a good job of communicating things that would be longer and more difficult to merely verbalize...

• Bring the Audience Closer - When applicable, it's great to let an audience more fully appreciate a topic by bringing it closer to them.  This mean showing photos, playing sounds or videos.  This is especially important in vacation or venue presentations, where judgments or opinions will be based on as close an experience as possible to actually being there.

• Things NOT To Do - There are a LOT of things that PowerPoint can do that should really never be done.  Clip Art is perhaps the most abused - cute little clipart really does nothing for your speech.  In fact, it can severely distract the audience and undermine your credibility - and it almost NEVER adds any value to the speech.  Don't use it.  Other things to avoid:  sounds, annoying transitions, animations (unless they're illustrating something useful), endless lists of bullet points, and charts of raw data - unless they have information specifically "called out" on them, as shown below.