Rising Scholars

On Using (and Not Using) PowerPoint

Creado por Barbara Gastel | Dic. 15, 2013

Hello again. I hope you’re doing well.

As mentioned in an earlier post, last month I attended the American Medical Writers Association annual conference. Two sessions that I attended were about giving presentations. Here are some points from those sessions.

The first session on giving presentations focused largely on designing and using PowerPoint slides. For text in slides, the speaker recommended using sans serif typefaces such as Tahoma, Verdana, and Calibri.

The speaker also warned against having too much text per slide. She recommended having 6 or fewer bullet points. She also suggested limiting the title of each slide to 6 or fewer words.

In addition, the speaker provided keyboard tips for giving PowerPoint presentations:

  • To make the screen go black, hit the letter b. To return to the presentation, hit the letter b again.
  • To make the screen go white, hit the letter w.
  • To use Presenter View, go to Slide Show and select Use Presenter View. You then can see your notes on the presentation, but the audience can see only your slides.

The other speaker on presentations said to avoid PowerPoint or use very few PowerPoint slides, because people understand less and retain less if they try to read and listen at the same time.

I appreciated this advice somewhat, because many speakers use too many slides or overly crowded slides. I think, though, that text slides can be helpful, especially when some attendees can read a language better than they can understand it spoken.

Until the next post—

Barbara

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