General Presentation Guidelines

There are five general guidelines you must remember when creating PowerPoint presentations, they are:

• Do not use capital letters extensively. Using Caps Lock when typing content makes it harder to read for people. Instead you can use Bold, Italic or Underlined text to make sections stand out.
• Do not use more than six bulleted references per slide. If you do, slides can be harder to read and may also have a lengthy narration that can lose the audience's attention.
• Standardize your font. You should have no more than two font types in your whole presentation (one for titles and one for content).
• Keep image files small. When inserting images into your presentation, make sure you have saved them as either jpeg, jpg or gif. These image types are smaller than bmp or tif and will allow you to transfer the presentation faster.
  Also, you can compress the pictures from inside PowerPoint. To do this:
  1. Right-click any image in your presentation and choose Format Picture.
  2. A dialog box will open, look for the button titled Compress, and click it.
  3. Fill out the options so they look like the picture below.
     
  4. Click Ok, and your images are compressed.

Printed Presentation Guidelines

If you know that your presentation is going to be printed, then you should do one of the following:

• Create your presentation with a white background and black font. Although it might not look as nice when being presented, it will print nicely and not take a lot of ink.

OR

• Create a PDF version of your presentation specifically for printing. This allows you to create your presentation the way you like, but also provides a printable version. You will need to have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer, then do the following:
  1. Create and save your PowerPoint presentation.
  2. Now select File from the top menubar, and select Print.
  3. Select Adobe PDF from the printer selection at the very top of the dialog box.
  4. In the bottom left you will see "Print what:", select Handouts.
  5. Under the "Print what:" option is a "Color/grayscale:" option. Select Pure Black and White.
  6. Now your print dialog box should look like this,
  
  If so, click the Ok button.
  This should create a PDF document with all your slides in it for people to print.
• Instruct people who will be printing your presentation to do exactly as in the above picture, except select their printer instead of Adobe PDF. This will make the presentation print without the background colour (or image) and in black and white.