How To Create A Slideshow: A Tutorial

Are you making your slideshows all wrong? Not all high schools teach the basic rules of how to make a presentation. This means you could be breaking all the rules, and not even know about it. Whether you’re still in high school, in college, or going into the workplace, here are the rules on how to make a good slideshow.

• DO NOT use full sentences. You want to verbally explain each bullet point, not put it all on the slide show. Putting full sentences not only looks blocky and is harder to read, but it also means your audience will be too focused on reading your slides, rather than listening to you. You want to be explaining each bullet point. If you were to do a slideshow on Taylor Swift, instead of writing “Taylor Swift released her first album ‘Taylor Swift’ in 2006, at the young age of sixteen,” you may want to simply put “‘Taylor Swift’ released in 2006.” Because you are not using full sentences, you do not use periods either. If you use a period in a slideshow, something has gone wrong.
• DO use bullet points. There is a time and a place for bullet points, and 99% of the time, that is on slide shows. There are a few times that you might make an exception to this, but these are rare. If in doubt, use bullet points. Paragraphs are hard to read and take attention away from the person speaking.
• DO NOT exceed 3 or 4 bullet points per slide. You also do not want to exceed about 15 words per bullet point.
• DO make sure your audience can read your slides. This typically means you don’t want your font to be any smaller than 18 point font. You may be able to read your 14 point font just fine on your computer, and maybe if you’re in a small room, your audience will be able to as well, but unless you’re presenting in a box, don’t make the font any smaller than 18. The eyes of your audience will thank you.
• DO NOT use bright colors. Colors in small accents or photos on the slide is okay, but you don’t want to make that your background color or your font color. It’s distracting, and can cause headaches and eye strain. You also want to ensure that your font is a color that can be seen over the background color, and that it doesn’t blend or clash too much so that it doesn’t hurt anyone’s eyes.
• DO use uniform fonts throughout the whole slideshow. Your titles on every slide need to be the same font, your bullet points need to be the same font. They also need to be the same size and color. Do not exceed three fonts when making a slideshow (i.e. title slide, title of each slide, body of each slide). Using too many fonts is distracting and makes the slideshow look busy and oftentimes, unprofessional.
• DO NOT leave any mistakes in your slideshow. You need to proofread your slides. Typos are more obvious on slide shows, can be distracting, and take away from how professional your slide show feels. You don’t want to be talking about “Taylor Sift,” instead of Taylor Swift, after all.