how to do a college powerpoint presentation

How To Make A Good Powerpoint Presentation For College

If college presentations feel like navigating uncharted territory, fear not! Mastering how to make a good powerpoint presentation for college is like learning to steer a ship through turbulent waters—you need the right tools, strategies, and a touch of creativity. In this guide, we’ll delve into the secrets of creating an impactful presentation that captivates your audience while ensuring that your message bursts forth with clarity and professionalism.

• 1.1 Understand Your Audience: Tailoring Your Message
• 1.2 Craft A Clear Structure: Building the Foundation
• 1.3 Engage with Visuals: Painting a Picture
• 1.4 Keep It Concise: Focusing Your Message
• 1.5 Limit Text: Let Your Voice Shine
• 1.6 Choose Fonts Wisely: Clarity and Consistency
• 1.7 Utilize Color Thoughtfully: Enhancing Visual Appeal
• 1.8 Embrace Minimalism: Less Is More
• 1.9 Practice, Practice, Practice: Perfecting Your Delivery
• 1.10 Prepare for Q&A: Navigating Uncharted Waters
• 2 Final Thoughts on How To Make A Good Powerpoint Presentation For College
• 3.1 1. How many slides should my presentation have?
• 3.2 2. Can I use animations and transitions?
• 3.3 3. Should I memorize my entire presentation?
• 3.4 4. How do I handle nervousness?
• 3.5 5. Is it okay to use humor in my presentation?

10 Tips on How To Make A Good Powerpoint Presentation For College

Embarking on the journey of crafting a compelling PowerPoint presentation for college is like wielding a brush to paint an awe-inspiring masterpiece. Just as an artist blends colors to evoke emotions, you’ll learn to blend content, visuals, and delivery techniques to captivate your audience.

Its time to dive into the realm of presentation excellence, unraveling 10 essential tips that will transform your slides into a canvas of knowledge and intrigue. So, prepare to brush up your skills and let your presentation skills burst forth with brilliance!

Understand Your Audience: Tailoring Your Message

Imagine your audience as fellow travelers on a journey of learning. Just as a tour guide adapts their narrative to captivate their listeners, understanding your audience’s interests, knowledge level, and expectations is key. Are you presenting to peers, professors, or a mixed group? Tailoring your message to their needs is like choosing the perfect route to guide them through your presentation smoothly.

Craft A Clear Structure: Building the Foundation

A well-structured presentation is like a sturdy bridge, supporting your ideas as you guide your audience from one point to another. Begin with an engaging introduction that piques their interest, followed by the main points you’ll cover. Each slide should flow logically, much like stepping stones across a stream. Use headings and subheadings (H2 tags) to guide your audience, ensuring that your content is organized and easy to follow.

Engage with Visuals: Painting a Picture

Visual aids are like brushstrokes of color on a canvas—they breathe life into your presentation. Incorporate relevant images, graphs, and charts that enhance your message. Avoid overwhelming your slides with text; instead, use visuals to illustrate key points and concepts. Just as an artist selects colors thoughtfully, choose visuals that complement and enhance your narrative.

Keep It Concise: Focusing Your Message

In the world of presentations, brevity is your ally. Think of each slide as a puzzle piece; it should contribute to the bigger picture without overwhelming your audience. Use concise bullet points, avoiding long paragraphs. It’s like packing for a trip—select only what’s essential to ensure a smooth journey through your content.

Limit Text: Let Your Voice Shine

Too much text on a slide is like overcrowding a room—it leaves no space for your voice to resonate. Use your slides as prompts, not scripts. When you present, your spoken words should expand on the points highlighted on your slides. This engages your audience and ensures that your presentation remains engaging and dynamic.

Choose Fonts Wisely: Clarity and Consistency

Fonts are like the voice of your presentation—each one conveys a different tone. Opt for readable fonts like Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman. Use bold and italics for emphasis, but avoid excessive decoration that distracts from your message. Consistency is key, much like maintaining a steady rhythm throughout a musical performance.

Utilize Color Thoughtfully: Enhancing Visual Appeal

Colors are like the backdrop of your presentation—they set the tone and mood. Choose a color palette that’s easy on the eyes and complements your content. Bright colors can be attention-grabbing, while muted tones create a sense of professionalism. Think of color as the thread weaving through a tapestry, adding vibrancy and cohesion.

Embrace Minimalism: Less Is More

Simplicity is like a breath of fresh air in a cluttered world. Embrace minimalistic design by using ample white space and clean layouts. It’s like decluttering a room—each element should have a purpose, contributing to the overall aesthetic without overwhelming the senses.

Practice, Practice, Practice: Perfecting Your Delivery

Practicing your presentation is like rehearsing for a live performance. Familiarity with your content allows you to speak confidently and engage with your audience. Practice your pacing, intonation, and gestures to ensure that your delivery is natural and compelling. Invite a friend or family member to listen and provide feedback—it’s like having a test audience before the big show.

Prepare for Q&A: Navigating Uncharted Waters

Imagine the Q&A session as a roundtable discussion among explorers. Anticipate potential questions and prepare thoughtful responses. Just as explorers research their destination, gather additional information to address queries that might arise. This part of your presentation is like an interactive map—guiding your audience through uncharted territories of curiosity.

Final Thoughts on How To Make A Good Powerpoint Presentation For College

In conclusion, knowing how to make a good powerpoint presentation for college is a blend of strategy, creativity, and effective communication. Think of it as a voyage—your content is the ship, and your audience is the crew.

With the right tools, you’ll navigate through the waves of information, ensuring that your message reaches its destination with clarity and resonance. So, set sail with confidence, and let your presentation shine as a beacon of knowledge and engagement.

FAQs: Navigating the Presentation Seas

1. how many slides should my presentation have.

While there’s no fixed rule, aim for around 10-15 slides for a 10-minute presentation. Adjust based on your content and pacing.

2. Can I use animations and transitions?

Absolutely! Just ensure they enhance your content and don’t distract from your message. Think of them as subtle waves that guide your audience’s attention.

3. Should I memorize my entire presentation?

While memorizing can be helpful, focus on understanding your content. Use your slides as prompts and engage naturally with your audience.

4. How do I handle nervousness?

Nervousness is like a tide that comes and goes. Practice, deep breaths, and positive self-talk can help calm your nerves. Remember, a bit of excitement is natural—it shows you care!

5. Is it okay to use humor in my presentation?

Absolutely! Humor is like a lighthouse—it guides your audience through your content with a smile. Just ensure your jokes are appropriate for the context and audience.

Remember, your presentation is an opportunity to share knowledge and engage with your audience. With these tips in hand, you’re ready to embark on your presentation journey with confidence and flair.

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9 Easy Rules to Make a Good PowerPoint Presentation

Table of contents

• 1 How to Start an Excellent PowerPoint Presentation?
• 2 Tips On How To Make Your PowerPoint Presentation Perfect
• 3 9 Rules On How To Make A Great PowerPoint Presentation?
• 4 How to Make Your PPT Project Fast?

Today, regardless of whether you are in a school, college or university, a PowerPoint presentation is a common and widely-used method of engaging students and evaluating their knowledge and skills. This form of a multimedia project is multipurpose. With the help of a good PowerPoint presentation, a teacher or professor can not only make a lesson more interactive and engaging for the class, but also discover the knowledge and talents of his students. How to make a good PowerPoint presentation? Let's find out.

How to Start an Excellent PowerPoint Presentation?

Why do you have to do it? First, such projects are evaluated just like any other assignment, which means if you fail it, you get a low grade, and your overall academic performance drops. However, this is not the main reason. In addition, creating PowerPoint slides gives you many new useful skills and improve the ones you already have – you boost your critical thinking, research, and writing skills, not mentioning that you learn to use various techniques in your studies and gain some public speaking experience.

Thus, this task is useful in many different ways. Finally, it is fun! No one will argue that creating a PPT presentation is much more engaging and fun than writing a research paper of 10 or more pages! It is also a simple way to increase your grade. It is much easier to get an A for your presentation than to get a high grade for a thesis, which once more proves that this is a useful and important skill for all students.

How to make a great PowerPoint project? Although we have said that it is much easier than submitting a paper worthy of an A, you should not think that you will not come across certain challenges during this process. Keep in mind, that a good project delivers the necessary information to the audience, but the best PowerPoint presentations engage, impress, and stay in memory for a long time. Therefore, your main goal is to make it informative and interesting.

How to impress the class and your teacher? There are many factors that are going to influence the effectiveness and interest of your project, some of them are:

• High-quality content.
• Attractive visual files.
• Engaging files.
• Speaking confidence, etc.

There are many more PowerPoint tips to keep in mind. In this post, we will give you the top nine PowerPoint presentation tips that will definitely come in handy for every student or other people engaged in similar activities.

Tips On How To Make Your PowerPoint Presentation Perfect

How to make a good PowerPoint presentation for college? The process of making effective PowerPoint presentations is long and complicated. Luckily, we have tips and tricks that should help you with the outcome. Once you know these, you will see presentation slides as words, and you will develop your presentation skills in no time. At the same time, you can use these tips and tricks for any presentation, which is always a good idea. The design tips for effective PowerPoint presentation  can make a massive difference with your grade. Hence, they are important and beneficial. Once you know these, you can start creating a PowerPoint presentation. Let’s see tips and tricks that have a huge effect on the PPT process and PPT results.

Simplify The Words In any Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, there are a few seconds time a person can see the slide. It should contain simple words and short ones, so a reader can get only the most valuable information. This is essential when working with PPT. A good PowerPoint presentation will be visible and easy to understand within seconds.

Avoid Using All Capital Letters It looks confusing and won’t be seen in a good PowerPoint presentation. This is actually one of the PowerPoint design tips that have a huge role in all of this. You can add images on each slide, but make sure they don't interfere with the text. As always, know your audience first.

Light Text and Dark Background As you can see, this is a simple tip that has a huge effect. You can use dark text and a light background. The goal is the same. It should make the text more visible, and it is more important than the background. Use this for all lines of text, mandatory bullet points, and also key phrases.

Don't Use Text Fly-Ins These will not improve your presentation skills. The effects are not very amusing when you are discussing business, and they are something most people have seen countless times. It is one of the tips and tricks that is simple but works well with all PPT presentations and has a huge effect on the outcome.

Use HD Images You should only use HD images. These will make your slides look better and more professional. They can make any presentation so much better and more appealing. Use the best images you can find. Keep in mind that you must not use low-quality images at any point.

Avoid Using Animations The situation here is the same as with text fly-ins. These animations will get old fast, and they don't contribute to the overall value of your presentation. Keep things simple and easy. This is the best thing you can do and works well with any presentation and with any purpose. Check out professional presentations, and you will see no animations.

Don't Flip Too Much Your presentation should have a decent number of slides, but not too many. If you flip too much, you will lose the focus and attention of the audience. Just add all the facts and data you need and nothing more.

9 Rules On How To Make A Great PowerPoint Presentation?

There are many nuances to consider. However, there is no reason to deny that a student has to adhere to a few important rules in order to create a winning project, so here we have gathered all these rules for you! They will help you rock your PPT presentation! Besides, these slide tips can also come in handy for those students who are wondering how to write an essay with Google Slides themes.

1. Show your creativity

This is the first thing to keep in mind! A PowerPoint project is not about making it “right” or “wrong” – it is about showing your personality, so let your creativity out and try to surprise everyone with your unique artistic vision.

2. Add high-quality media files

It is not a secret that 90% of PowerPoint presentation's success is by graphics. This is the main thing that will attract your audience's attention. Therefore, you should always use high-quality pictures and videos, not mentioning that all files have to be relevant to your topic and also engaging (consider adding some unusual and fun graphics).

3. Don’t overload it with animation

Without a doubt, nice-looking transitions and animations between your slides attract more attention, but they may also distract your audience. Try to keep it simple and classy.

4. Choose a good theme

A well-planned visual theme will help you make your slides look organic and harmonic. However, do not use templates. Using common templates removes your personal touch from the work, and it becomes too vanilla and won’t be memorable.

5. Avoid providing too much text or bullet lists

Why does it matter? The main idea of pay for PowerPoint presentation is simplicity! This type of project does not have to be overloaded with text – this will be your function as a speaker to share more information with the audience, while your slides only have to contain the main points! Therefore, minimize the amount of text.

6. Try to read less

Another thing that contributes to the success of your presentation is your confidence as a speaker, which is not shown if you are reading from the slides all the time. One of the most important tips for a PPT presentation is to stay confident and do not use a written paper to read the whole text from.

7. Use of charts and diagrams

This is something you should use! Often, charts and diagrams can highlight or explain the message you are trying to deliver much better than any text, but you have to use them carefully to avoid common mistakes as inappropriate size, lack of consistency, etc.

This is one of the most significant PowerPoint design tips! Although choosing fonts may not seem like a big problem, an inappropriate font can ruin the whole impression of your work! Choose fonts that will be easy to read and would look harmonious in your presentation.

9. Less is better

There is a rule that can help you make a perfect presentation – the 10/20/30 rule recommends you to include not more than 10 slides in your project, limit the time of presentation to a maximum of 20 minutes, and use minimum 30-point font size to make it easy to read. You won’t make a mistake if you follow this rule.

How to Make Your PPT Project Fast?

Where to get great PowerPoint presentations? If you are still not confident in your abilities after reading our PowerPoint guidelines, it’s okay, and it is also fine if you just don’t want to bother yourself with a time-consuming task like this. You can enlist the help of professional writers here at PapersOwl !

Our team is ready to do its best to prepare excellent PowerPoint slides for you on any presentation topics for college students and of any complexity, and we can also do it promptly – even within a day or less. Why should you buy PowerPoint presentations online  from a professional? It gives you many benefits:

• You are avoiding common mistakes.
• You save time.
• You don’t have to work on an assignment that seems complicated or boring to you.
• You can hire a professional writer with an MA or Ph.D. degree to be assured of great results.
• You get a chance to boost your grades quickly and easily!

Another great news is that at PapersOwl, you can also use presentation writing services with college assignments on various subjects – therefore, by choosing PapersOwl once, you obtain a reliable friend for all times. We can tackle any task, and we guarantee that you will be satisfied!

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How To Make a Good PowerPoint Presentation for College

A must-unlock skill of every college student is creating PowerPoint presentations. Whether you’re a freshman, sophomore or senior, you’re sure to come across an assignment that requires you to create a PowerPoint presentation.

Creating PowerPoint presentations enables you to hone creativity, build public speaking abilities, improve body language and boost confidence. Those interpersonal qualities are required, not only in classes but also in workplaces.

1. Identify the key points

Before anything else, a good comprehension of the topic you want to deliver is necessary. Understanding your materials helps you be more confident when presenting and providing better slides.

Those who aren’t knowledgeable about the topic they talk about most likely put a long string of words, leading to wordy slides. However, if you comprehend the discussion well, you can put short phrases in bullet points.

2. Choose an interesting template

Never present PowerPoint with plain slides because it’s the first step to a boring performance. Besides, finding PowerPoint templates online is a piece of cake.

Many online platforms provide downloadable and free PowerPoint templates. Some websites to dive into are Slide Carnival, Powerpointify, Slides and AllPPT. They have various categories, such as education, technology, business, medical, etc.

Moreover, mind the background of your slides. You should use the same background for the entire slide. Ensure that your background and font color are in good contrast to present clear and readable slides.

3. Write impactfully

Now that you’ve decided on the points you want to deliver, put them into slides. Spread your points and use bullet points if possible. You can also mark some slides to add images , graphs or tables later.

There are rules of thumb that students must be aware of when creating PowerPoint presentations. The overall idea is to keep your slides concise. Here are some points worth taking notes on.

4. Add visuals

Create a good balance of visual aids and text on your slide. Commonly, a slide with a visual representation only carries one idea written in short. Consider some points below when embedding visual aids on your slides:

You can go to Unsplash and Freepik to search for free photos. Remember to add credit for your photos to inform audiences.

5. Edit and tidy up your slides

6. add transitions and do a final check.

Some recommendations include Fade, Push, Cut, Cover and Uncover. Consider using one type of entrance transition to begin each slide. Add emphasis transition to highlight crucial points, images or other elements.

Final Thoughts

Daniel reed, leave a reply, debt and dior: south korea’s advancing debt from luxury purchases, spanish rock band airú sparkles on their first u.s. tour, dark cafes and big yellow taxis—the everlasting world of joni mitchell, the latin lover is back and he has a “mustache goatee combo”, jujutsu kaisen’s gorgeous second season exacerbates ethical issues in animation.

Center for Teaching

Making better powerpoint presentations.

Print Version

Baddeley and Hitch’s model of working memory.

Research about student preferences for powerpoint, resources for making better powerpoint presentations, bibliography.

We have all experienced the pain of a bad PowerPoint presentation. And even though we promise ourselves never to make the same mistakes, we can still fall prey to common design pitfalls.  The good news is that your PowerPoint presentation doesn’t have to be ordinary. By keeping in mind a few guidelines, your classroom presentations can stand above the crowd!

“It is easy to dismiss design – to relegate it to mere ornament, the prettifying of places and objects to disguise their banality. But that is a serious misunderstanding of what design is and why it matters.” Daniel Pink

One framework that can be useful when making design decisions about your PowerPoint slide design is Baddeley and Hitch’s model of working memory .

As illustrated in the diagram above, the Central Executive coordinates the work of three systems by organizing the information we hear, see, and store into working memory.

The Phonological Loop deals with any auditory information. Students in a classroom are potentially listening to a variety of things: the instructor, questions from their peers, sound effects or audio from the PowerPoint presentation, and their own “inner voice.”

The Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad deals with information we see. This involves such aspects as form, color, size, space between objects, and their movement. For students this would include: the size and color of fonts, the relationship between images and text on the screen, the motion path of text animation and slide transitions, as well as any hand gestures, facial expressions, or classroom demonstrations made by the instructor.

The Episodic Buffer integrates the information across these sensory domains and communicates with long-term memory. All of these elements are being deposited into a holding tank called the “episodic buffer.” This buffer has a limited capacity and can become “overloaded” thereby, setting limits on how much information students can take in at once.

Laura Edelman and Kathleen Harring from Muhlenberg College , Allentown, Pennsylvania have developed an approach to PowerPoint design using Baddeley and Hitch’s model. During the course of their work, they conducted a survey of students at the college asking what they liked and didn’t like about their professor’s PowerPoint presentations. They discovered the following:

Characteristics students don’t like about professors’ PowerPoint slides

• Too many words on a slide
• Movement (slide transitions or word animations)
• Templates with too many colors

Characteristics students like like about professors’ PowerPoint slides

• Graphs increase understanding of content
• Bulleted lists help them organize ideas
• PowerPoint can help to structure lectures
• Verbal explanations of pictures/graphs help more than written clarifications

According to Edelman and Harring, some conclusions from the research at Muhlenberg are that students learn more when:

• material is presented in short phrases rather than full paragraphs.
• the professor talks about the information on the slide rather than having students read it on their own.
• relevant pictures are used. Irrelevant pictures decrease learning compared to PowerPoint slides with no picture
• they take notes (if the professor is not talking). But if the professor is lecturing, note-taking and listening decreased learning.
• they are given the PowerPoint slides before the class.

Advice from Edelman and Harring on leveraging the working memory with PowerPoint:

• Leverage the working memory by dividing the information between the visual and auditory modality.  Doing this reduces the likelihood of one system becoming overloaded. For instance, spoken words with pictures are better than pictures with text, as integrating an image and narration takes less cognitive effort than integrating an image and text.
• Minimize the opportunity for distraction by removing any irrelevant material such as music, sound effects, animations, and background images.
• Use simple cues to direct learners to important points or content. Using text size, bolding, italics, or placing content in a highlighted or shaded text box is all that is required to convey the significance of key ideas in your presentation.
• Don’t put every word you intend to speak on your PowerPoint slide. Instead, keep information displayed in short chunks that are easily read and comprehended.
• One of the mostly widely accessed websites about PowerPoint design is Garr Reynolds’ blog, Presentation Zen . In his blog entry:  “ What is Good PowerPoint Design? ” Reynolds explains how to keep the slide design simple, yet not simplistic, and includes a few slide examples that he has ‘made-over’ to demonstrate how to improve its readability and effectiveness. He also includes sample slides from his own presentation about PowerPoint slide design.
• Another presentation guru, David Paradi, author of “ The Visual Slide Revolution: Transforming Overloaded Text Slides into Persuasive Presentations ” maintains a video podcast series called “ Think Outside the Slide ” where he also demonstrates PowerPoint slide makeovers. Examples on this site are typically from the corporate perspective, but the process by which content decisions are made is still relevant for higher education. Paradi has also developed a five step method, called KWICK , that can be used as a simple guide when designing PowerPoint presentations.
• In the video clip below, Comedian Don McMillan talks about some of the common misuses of PowerPoint in his routine called “Life After Death by PowerPoint.”

• This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education highlights a blog moderated by Microsoft’s Doug Thomas that compiles practical PowerPoint advice gathered from presentation masters like Seth Godin , Guy Kawasaki , and Garr Reynolds .

Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story , by Jerry Weissman, Prentice Hall, 2006

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery , by Garr Reynolds, New Riders Press, 2008

Solving the PowerPoint Predicament: using digital media for effective communication , by Tom Bunzel , Que, 2006

The Cognitive Style of Power Point , by Edward R. Tufte, Graphics Pr, 2003

The Visual Slide Revolution: Transforming Overloaded Text Slides into Persuasive Presentations , by Dave Paradi, Communications Skills Press, 2000

Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck: And How You Can Make Them Better , by Rick Altman, Harvest Books, 2007

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Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

Presentation Tips For Students – Show And Tell Like A Pro!

Updated: June 19, 2024

Published: May 4, 2020

Giving a presentation to fellow classmates can be a bit daunting, especially if you are new to oral and visual presenting. But with the right PowerPoint tips, public speaking skills, and plenty of practice, you can present like a pro at your upcoming presentation. Here, we’ve laid out the best college presentation tips for students. And once you have one successful presentation, you’ll get better each time!

The Best Presentation Tips for Students

1. arrive early and be technically prepared.

Get to the room early and make sure you leave plenty of time for technical set up and technical difficulties. Have several backup drives (including an online version if possible) so that you are prepared for anything!

2. Know More

Be educated on more than just what you are sharing. That way, you can add points, speak candidly and confidently, and be prepared to answer any audience or teacher questions.

3. Share Your Passion With Your Audience

Connect with your audience by showing that you are passionate about your topic. Do this with the right tone, eye contact, and enthusiasm in your speech.

Photo by  Austin Distel  on  Unsplash

4. pace yourself.

When student presenters are nervous, they tend to speed up their speech. This can be a problem, however, because your speed may be distracting, hard to understand, and you may run under your time.

5. Rehearse Thoroughly

Don’t just practice, rehearse your college presentation. Rehearse the entire delivery, including standing up, using gestures, and going through the slides.

6. Show Your Personality

You don’t need to be professional to the point of stiffness during your college presentation . Don’t be afraid to show your personality while presenting. It will make your presentation more interesting, and you will seem more approachable and confident.

7. Improvise

You can’t be 100% certain what will happen during your presentation. If things aren’t exactly as you expected, don’t be afraid to improvise and run off script.

8. Pump Yourself Up

Get yourself excited and full of energy before your college presentation! Your mood sets the tone for your presentation, and if you get excited right before, you will likely carry that throughout and you’ll make your audience excited about your topic as well.

9. Remember To Pause

Pausing not only only prevents filler words and helps you recollect your thoughts, it can also be a powerful indicator of importance within your presentation.

10. Create “Um” Alternatives

Try hard not to use filler words as they make you look unprofessional and uncertain. The best alternatives to “um” “like” and “so” are taking a breath or a silent pause to collect your thoughts.

11. Using Your Hands

Using your hands makes your college presentation more interesting and helps to get your points across. Point at the slide, use common hand gestures, or mimic a motion.

12. Eye Contact

Eye contact is one of the most important presentation tips for students . Many students are nervous, so they look at their notes or their feet. It is important that you show your confidence and engage your audience by making eye contact. The more presentations you give, the more eye contact will feel natural.

13. The Right Tone

The best public speakers vary their tone and pitch throughout their presentation. Try to change it up, and choose the right tone for your message.

Preparing an Effective College Presentation

1. open strong.

Grab your fellow students’ attention by starting strong with a powerful quote, intriguing scenario, or prompt for internal dialogue.

2. Start With A Mind Map

Mind mapping is literally creating a map of the contents of your college presentation. It is a visual representation and flow of your topics and can help you see the big picture, along with smaller details.

Photo by  Teemu Paananen  on  Unsplash

3. edit yourself.

Some students make the mistake of including too much information in their college presentations. Instead of putting all of the information in there, choose the most important or relevant points, and elaborate on the spot if you feel it’s necessary.

4. Tell A Story

People love stories — they capture interest in ways that figures and facts cannot. Make your presentation relatable by including a story, or presenting in a story format.

5. The Power Of Humor

Using humor in your college presentation is one of the best presentation tips for students. Laughter will relax both you and the audience, and make your presentation more interesting

PowerPoint Tips for Students

1. use key phrases.

Choose a few key phrases that remain throughout your PowerPoint presentation. These should be phrases that really illustrate your point, and items that your audience will remember afterwards.

2. Limit Number Of Slides

Having too many slides will cause you to feel you need to rush through them to finish on time. Instead, include key points on a slide and take the time to talk about them. Try to think about including one slide per one minute of speech.

3. Plan Slide Layouts

Take some time to plan out how information will be displayed on your PowerPoint. Titles should be at the top, and bullets underneath. You may want to add title slides if you are changing to a new topic.

Photo by  NeONBRAND  on  Unsplash

4. the right fonts.

Choose an easy-to-read font that isn’t stylized. Sans serif fonts tend to be easier to read when they are large. Try to stick to only two different fonts as well to keep the presentation clean.

5. Choosing Colors And Images

When it comes to colors, use contrasting ones: light on dark or dark on light. Try to choose a few main colors to use throughout the presentation. Choose quality images, and make sure to provide the source for the images.

6. Use Beautiful Visual Aids

Keep your presentation interesting and your audience awake by adding visual aids to your PowerPoint. Add captivating photos, data representations, or infographics to illustrate your information.

7. Don’t Read Straight From Your Notes

When you read straight from your notes, your tone tends to remain monotonous, you don’t leave much room for eye contact. Try looking up often, or memorizing portions of your presentation.

8. Avoid Too Much Text

PowerPoint was made for images and bullets, not for your entire speech to be written in paragraph form. Too much text can lose your adiences’ interest and understanding.

9. Try A Theme

Choosing the right theme is one of those presentation tips for students that is often overlooked. When you find the right theme, you keep your college presentation looking interesting, professional, and relevant.

10. Be Careful With Transitions And Animations

Animations and transitions can add a lot to your presentation, but don’t add to many or it will end up being distracting.

Public Speaking Tips for Students

1. choose your topic wisely.

If you are able to pick your topic, try to pick something that interests you and something that you want to learn about. Your interest will come through your speech.

2. Visit The Room Beforehand

If your presentation is being held somewhere outside of class, try to visit the location beforehand to prep your mind and calm your nerves.

3. Practice Makes Perfect

Practice, practice, practice! The only way you will feel fully confident is by practicing many times, both on your own and in front of others.

Photo by  Product School  on  Unsplash

4. talk to someone about anxiety.

If you feel anxious about your college presentation, tell someone. It could be a friend, family member, your teacher, or a counselor. They will be able to help you with some strategies that will work best for you.

5. Remind Yourself Of Your Audience

Remember, you are presenting to your peers! They all likely have to make a presentation too at some point, and so have been or will be in the same boat. Remembering that your audience is on your side will help you stay cool and collected.

6. Observe Other Speakers

Look at famous leaders, or just other students who typically do well presenting. Notice what they are doing and how you can adapt your performance in those ways.

7. Remind Yourself Of Your Message

If you can come up with a central message, or goal, of your college presentation, you can remind yourself of it throughout your speech and let it guide you.

8. Don’t Apologize

If you make a mistake, don’t apologize. It is likely that no one even noticed! If you do feel you need to point out your own mistake, simply say it and keep moving on with your presentation. No need to be embarrassed, it happens even to the best presenters!

When you smile, you appear warm and inviting as a speaker. You will also relax yourself with your own smile.

The Bottom Line

It can be nerve racking presenting as a college student, but if you use our presentation tips for students, preparing and presenting your college presentation will be a breeze!

In this article

At UoPeople, our blog writers are thinkers, researchers, and experts dedicated to curating articles relevant to our mission: making higher education accessible to everyone. Read More

College Presentation Masterclass: 8 Tips To Become a Star in 2024

Lindsie Nguyen • 07 April, 2024 • 8 min read

Making a presentation, especially a college presentation in front of hundreds of spectators for the first time, without thorough preparation can be a nightmare.

Do you want to assert your presence yet be too afraid to raise your voice in public? Tired of a conventional monologue presentation but have a few ideas of how to make a change and rock the room?

Whether running a classroom presentation, a big hall speech or an online webinar , get what you need here. Check these eight actionable tips on preparing and hosting your first college presentation as a student .

Table of Contents

• Know the Content
• Just Keywords and Images
• Wear a Confident Outfit
• Check Up and Back Up
• Let your Personality Shine
• Be Interactive
• Be Ready to Improvise
• End with a Bang

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Offstage Tips for College Presentations

The best college presentations start with the best preparation. Making , learning , checking and testing your presentation are all vital to ensuring it runs as smoothly as possible.

Tip #1 : Know the Content

Whether or not you're the researcher of the information, you're definitely the one conveying them to the audience. This means, first and foremost, you should put a lot of effort into deeply and extensively learning the content of the presentation .

The audience can tell if you haven’t made reasonable preparation for the session, and don’t forget, you may later get asked tons of questions from other students and professors. To prevent embarrassment in both cases, gaining a thorough knowledge of the topic is an obvious, but a hugely valuable asset to your performance.

This is something that really just comes with a lot of practice . Practice with the words written down to start with, then see if you can transition to reciting them from memory. Try in controlled and uncontrolled settings to see if you can control your nerves and remember the content in a pressured environment.

Tip #2 : Just Keywords and Images

As an audience member, you wouldn't want to be flooded with hundreds of words of text with no clearly stated point and no visualized information. The most powerful presentations, according to the 10-20-30 rule (as well as anyone who's been to a decent presentation), are the ones from which the audience can extract the biggest learnings from the most straightforward slides.

Try to deliver your information within 3 or 4 bullet points per slide . Also, don't shy away from using as many topic-related images as possible. If you're confident in your speaking ability, you could even try using just images on your slides, and to save all your points for the speech itself.

A helpful tool to create these simple and easy-to-follow slides is AhaSlides , which is available for free!

🎉 Check out: 21+ Icebreaker Games for Better Team Meeting Engagement | Updated in 2024

Tip #3 : Wear a Confident Outfit

A trick to boost your sense of security and confidence is to get yourself a neat and tidy outfit which suits the occasion. Creased clothes mostly drag you into an embarrassing situation by shifting the attention of the audience away from your speech. A shirt and a pair of pants or knee-long skirt instead of something too fancy would be a rational choice for your first presentation at college.

Tip #4 : Check Up and Back Up

There was a time when it took me 10 minutes to fix an incompatible HDMI hook-up during my 20-minute presentation. Needless to say, I was hugely frustrated and couldn't deliver my speech properly. Last-minute IT troubles like these can certainly happen, but you can minimise the risk with proper preparation.

Before you launch into your presentation, spend a good amount of time double-checking your presentation software, computer and projector or virtual conferencing platform. With them checked, you should always have backup options for each so it's extremely unlikely you'll be caught out.

Remember, it's not just about being and looking professional; having everything under control from the start of your college presentation is a huge boost to your confidence, and ultimately your performance.

Onstage Tips for College Presentations

There's only so much you can do in terms of preparation. When it comes to the big crunch , it pays to know what to do when all eyes are on you.

Tip #5 : Let your Personality Shine

Most people either worry that they're over the top with their energy, or that they're not interesting enough during the speech.

I'm sure you've already checked out a few TED videos to learn how to start your first college presentation from professionals, but the key here is this: don’t try to impersonate others on stage.

If you do, it's more visible to the audience than you think, and it reeks of someone trying far too hard. This is easier said than done, of course, but try to be yourself on stage as much as possible. Practice in front of friends and family to see which elements of a speech you're naturally the best at.

If you struggle with eye contact but excel in using your hands to illustrate points, then focus on the latter. Don't pressure yourself to be fluid in every department; just isolate the ones in which you're comfortable and make them the star of your show.

💡 Want to know more about body language ? Check out the dos and don'ts of presentation body language .

Tip #6 : Be Interactive

No matter how engaging you find your content to be, the strength of your presentation is often judged by the reaction of the audience. You may have memorised every word and have practised dozens of times in a controlled setting, but when you're on that stage in front of your schoolmates for the first time, you may find your monologue presentation to be more of a snoozefest than you thought.

Let your audience have a say. You can make a presentation far more engaging by putting in slides to which the audience is asked to contribute. A poll , word cloud , a brainstorm , a spinner wheel , a fun quiz , random team generator ; all of them are tools in the arsenal of a fantastic, attention-grabbing, dialogue-creating presentation.

Nowadays, there's interactive presentation software that is proving a huge step up from traditional PowerPoints . With AhaSlides you can use slides that encourage your audience to respond to your questions using their phones.

Tip #7 : Be Ready to Improvise

Lady Luck doesn't care how much time you spend rehearsing your first college presentation. If the audience starts getting bored and you haven't got any interactive slides up your sleeves, then you might find it's necessary to improvise.

Whether this is a joke, an activity, or a segue into another section - it's really your choice. And although it's great to improvise when need be, it's even better to have these little 'get out of jail free' cards ready for if you feel you need them in your speech.

Here's a great example of a presentation about improvisation that also uses improvisation.

Tip #8 : End with a Bang

There are two key moments that your audience will remember more than any other in your first college presentation: the way you start and the way you end .

We've got a whole article on how to start your presentation , but what's the best way to end it? All presenters would love to finish in a flurry of energy and rapturous applause, so it's natural that it's often the part we struggle with the most.

Your conclusion is the time to bring all of the points you've made under one roof. Find the commonality between them all and emphasise that to drive your point home.

After the standing ovation, it's always a good idea to have a live Q&A session to clear up any misunderstandings. Presentation legend Guy Kawasaki claims that in a 1-hour presentation, 20 minutes should be the presentation and 40 minutes should be the time for the appropriate Q&A tool .

🎊 Check out: 12 Free Survey Tools in 2024 | AhaSlides Reveals

Lindsie Nguyen

Public Speaking Trainer. ESL Teacher. Quiz Nut.

Tips to Engage with Polls & Trivia

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Simple Steps to Make a PowerPoint Presentation

Last Updated: July 23, 2024 Fact Checked

Creating a New PowerPoint

Creating the title slide, adding a new slide, adding content to slides, adding transitions, testing and saving your presentation.

This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Darlene Antonelli, MA . Darlene Antonelli is a Technology Writer and Editor for wikiHow. Darlene has experience teaching college courses, writing technology-related articles, and working hands-on in the technology field. She earned an MA in Writing from Rowan University in 2012 and wrote her thesis on online communities and the personalities curated in such communities. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 4,341,816 times. Learn more...

Do you want to have your data in a slide show? If you have Microsoft 365, you can use PowerPoint! PowerPoint is a program that's part of the Microsoft Office suite (which you have to pay for) and is available for both Windows and Mac computers. This wikiHow teaches you how to create your own Microsoft PowerPoint presentation on a computer.

How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation

• Open the PowerPoint app, select a template and theme, then like “Create.”
• Click the text box to add your title and subtitle to create your title slide.
• Click the “Insert” tab, then “New Slide” to add another slide.
• Choose the type of slide you want to add, then add text and pictures.
• Rearrange slides by dragging them up or down in the preview box.

Things You Should Know

• Templates make it easy to create vibrant presentations no matter your skill level.
• When adding photos, you can adjust their sizes by clicking and dragging in or out from their corners.
• You can add animated transitions between slides or to individual elements like bullet points and blocks of text.

• If you don't have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription, you can use the website instead of the desktop app. Go to https://powerpoint.office.com/ to use the website version.
• You can also use the mobile app to make presentations, though it's easier to do this on a computer, which has a larger screen, a mouse, and a keyboard.

• If you don't want to use a template, just click the Blank option in the upper-left side of the page and skip to the next part.

• Skip this step if your selected template has no themes available.

• If you're creating a PowerPoint presentation for which an elaborate title slide has been requested, ignore this step.

• You can change the font and size of text used from the Home tab that's in the orange ribbon at the top of the window.

• You can also just leave this box blank if you like.

• You can also click and drag in or out one of a text box's corners to shrink or enlarge the text box.

• On a Mac, you'll click the Home tab instead. [1] X Research source

• Clicking the white slide-shaped box above this option will result in a new text slide being inserted.

• Title Slide
• Title and Content
• Section Header
• Two Content
• Content with Caption
• Picture with Caption

• Naturally, the title slide should be the first slide in your presentation, meaning that it should be the top slide in the left-hand column.

• Skip this step and the next two steps if your selected slide uses a template that doesn't have text boxes in it.

• Text boxes in PowerPoint will automatically format the bulk of your text for you (e.g., adding bullet points) based on the context of the content itself.
• You can add notes that the Presentation will not include (but you'll still be able to see them on your screen) by clicking Notes at the bottom of the slide.

• You can change the font of the selected text by clicking the current font's name and then clicking your preferred font.
• If you want to change the size of the text, click the numbered drop-down box and then click a larger or smaller number based on whether you want to enlarge or shrink the text.
• You can also change the color, bolding, italicization, underlining, and so on from here.

• Photos in particular can be enlarged or shrunk by clicking and dragging out or in one of their corners.

• Remember to keep slides uncluttered and relatively free of distractions. It's best to keep the amount of text per slide to around 33 words or less. [2] X Research source

• Slide content will animate in the order in which you assign transitions. For example, if you animate a photo on the slide and then animate the title, the photo will appear before the title.
• Make your slideshow progress automatically by setting the speed of every transition to align with your speech as well as setting each slide to Advance . [3] X Trustworthy Source Microsoft Support Technical support and product information from Microsoft. Go to source

• If you need to exit the presentation, press Esc .

• Windows - Click File , click Save , double-click This PC , select a save location, enter a name for your presentation, and click Save .
• Mac - Click File , click Save As... , enter the presentation's name in the "Save As" field, select a save location by clicking the "Where" box and clicking a folder, and click Save .

Community Q&A

• If you save your PowerPoint presentation in .pps format instead of the default .ppt format, double-clicking your PowerPoint presentation file will prompt the presentation to open directly into the slideshow view. Thanks Helpful 6 Not Helpful 0
• If you don't have Microsoft Office, you can still use Apple's Keynote program or Google Slides to create a PowerPoint presentation. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

• Your PowerPoint presentation (or some features in it) may not open in significantly older versions of PowerPoint. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 2
• Great PowerPoint presentations avoid placing too much text on one slide. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

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• ↑ https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=DBDCE00C929AA5D8!252&ithint=file%2cpptx&app=PowerPoint&authkey=!AH4O9NxcbehqzIg
• ↑ https://www.virtualsalt.com/powerpoint.htm
• ↑ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/set-the-timing-and-speed-of-a-transition-c3c3c66f-4cca-4821-b8b9-7de0f3f6ead1#:~:text=To%20make%20the%20slide%20advance,effect%20on%20the%20slide%20finishes .

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How to Prepare an A+ College PowerPoint Presentation

Guest Writer

• Published on August 25, 2022

Table of Contents

How do we Prepare an A+ College PowerPoint Presentation?

College students have myriads of assignments, and creating a perfect PowerPoint Presentation is one of them. It is one major assignment that drops your grades if not properly done. PowerPoint isn’t only useful for college students. It is also an essential skill in the professional world. It boosts your critical thinking and writing skills. The experience in creating college PowerPoint presentations develops your public speaking. Also, you need to be painstaking in preparing your presentation. It should be engaging enough for your audience. 

However, college Presentation slides are much better and easier to do than research works. It is an engaging and more fun task to do aside from research. You can consult a PowerPoint writing service. You can consult a PowerPoint writing service if you don’t know the appropriate way to do it, you can consult a PowerPoint writing service . They write to ensure all the rules and guidelines in your slides are met. They make sure the font size and color align with your concept. You do not have worries aside from you doing a thorough practice for your assignment. 

Although, it is much easier than a research paper. You will still be faced with some challenges. To scale through that, this piece gives the necessary to make you do it like a professional.

Tips on how to prepare a college PowerPoint presentation

These tips entail steps to make a good PowerPoint Presentation for College. You must follow these actionable steps in detail to create a winning proposal. 

1. Research the topic

You must conduct in-depth research before you start your college ppt. If it has the necessary sounds, but the information isn’t worthwhile, it’s more like you haven’t done anything. Make sure you do research on your local libraries, the internet, and any other source you can get vital information. 

2. Keep track of the information

Make sure your researched information is presented orderly. Know which information is meant to come first and which to come last.  You need to organize the information you’ve gathered for your topic. In every piece of information you gather, consider your audience. Know if it will resonate with them and answer your topic appropriately. 

See also: The Ultimate Guide to 20 Introduction Ideas for Presentation That Work

3. Be creative about your presentation

The main reason you’re saddled with the responsibility of creating a PowerPoint is not to be either right or wrong. Regardless, you must be creative about it. Create unique designs that’ll surprise everyone and mesmerize your instructors. To ensure creativity, you may decide to choose a design template. Also, an important tip that’ll make it creative is to choose a theme that connects to the idea you want to translate. It should suit your topic and be attractive to your audience. 

4. Add high-quality fonts and media

It should have a decorative theme that’ll make it enticing to your audience. Any font you intend to use should match college or professional use. Graphics plays a significant role in your college PowerPoint Presentation. Good graphics make your content relevant and engaging.

See also: PowerPoint Night Ideas to Try That Will Steal Audience’s Attention

5. Stuck to one or two colors

Don’t over-decorate your PowerPoint; else, it’ll look unprofessional. You are expected to choose colors that’ll make it organic and harmonic. Using 2-3 colors all through your topic will create harmony. Also, Dark fonts should be used on light backgrounds and vice versa. It’ll make it look simple yet classy. 

6. Limit your sides and cut too many texts

Too many texts in your presentation will kill the attention span of your audience. A PowerPoint is meant to be catchy and brief. It requires your hard work to achieve. Wordiness will only ruin your professionalism. Add statistics, facts, charts videos, s, and pictures. Be concise; it goes a long way to determine if your audience will listen to your topic or not. Charts and diagrams will enable you to explain the points you intend to deliver without the slides being too clumsy for your audience. They are much better than texts in your slides, but you must be creative. If not properly done, you might make mistakes. 

See also: You Won’t Be Able to Memorize Your Presentation Material in 2022

7. The less the slide, the better it is

You don’t have to include too many slides in your presentation before considering it worthy of a college assignment. Make sure you don’t include more than 19 slides in your project. The presentation time should not be more than 20 minutes. Anything more than that will bore your audience. Also, your font size should be much easier to read. A 30 font size is much better for easy readability.

8. Highlight your keywords

The necessary keywords should be in bold fonts or texts. This will help keep your audience focused on your piece. It’ll make it easier for them to catch a glimpse of the main idea. You can have a peek here at how to determine your important keywords.  You can choose a contrasting color to highlight the most important element of your topic. Apart from the fact that it attracts viewers’ attention, it’ll also ensure they remember the core fact of your presentation. 

See also: 20 Books about Presentation Design

9. Be consistent with transitions

Transitions make your slides attractive. You are open to variants of transitions you can use. You should avoid overusing a transition or changing transitions. It’ll distract your audience. To make your transition catchy and attractive, stick to one or two.

10. Practice your presentation

College ppt presentations require grit and hard work, and you need to practice to perform better. Rehearse and run the few slides from time to time. Make sure you can easily turn in the videos in your slides without delay. You should also practice how to switch slides. It’ll make the presentation as smooth as possible. 

See also: The Effectiveness of MS PowerPoint: Take Your Presentation to the Next Level

It is a true story that we must prepare a college PowerPoint Presentation to get an A+. Not only is it beneficial to you as a student, but you also get to utilize the knowledge in your professional life. These tips are easier to know and use. If you utilize them properly, your presentation will be hitch-free. It will also enable you to create an amazing and persuasive PowerPoint. Also, you should know that you can consult a professional to help you if you find it difficult to achieve. 

Let’s visit RRPicks to download free PowerPoint templates . But wait, don’t go anywhere and stay here with our RRGraph Design  Blog  to keep up-to-date on the  best pitch deck template  collections and design advice from our  PowerPoint experts .

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How to Present a Presentation in Class?

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We all have given presentations at some point in our lives. But for students, presentations play an important role, be it during a seminar or an important event. If you are wondering how to present a presentation in class, then don't worry; this blog will help you stand out in the classroom. Stick to the end to understand how to present a presentation in class and make an everlasting impression on your audience. Let's get started!

What is a Presentation?

In simple terms, a presentation is a way of communicating an idea to an audience by speech, slideshow, or other visual aids. Presentations are used in academic settings like colleges and schools and even professional settings like the workplace. An effective presentation should be well-structured, engaging, and tailored to the needs of the audience. It should include an introduction, a main body and a conclusion, as well as nonverbal cues like body language and tone of voice.

Components of a Presentation

Your final grade isn't based just on a few multiple-choice exams. Instead, it will combine assignments, exams, and presentations. This is why you need to know how to give a presentation in class if you want good grades at the end of your semester. To know how to give a good presentation, you first need to know exactly what goes into making a presentation. This will include two main components - a visual element and a spoken element.

Visual Elements

An essential aspect of how to present in class is visuals. If you're wondering how to create a presentation for the class that your peers and professor will love, here are a few important tips on how to give a presentation in class:

1. Keep it Brief: Most well-made presentations can convey all the information you need in around 10-15 slides. 

2. Use Minimal Text: Don't overcrowd your slides with information. If people are too busy reading, they won't pay attention to what you're saying. 

3. Use Relevant Images: Your PPT's visuals should be catchy, but remember that they all need to serve a purpose.

Spoken Elements

‍ Spoken elements are the next essential thing in presenting a presentation in class. Most students have trouble with the spoken part of their presentations. If you want to know how to give a presentation in class that'll get you good grades, your speech needs to be well-polished. 

How to Start Your Presentation?

If you want to know how to give a presentation in class as a student, you must first learn how to write a good speech.

1. Use a Good Hook: The start of your speech should get the attention of your audience right away and pique their interest. 

2. Use Some Humor: Speeches are a way for you to showcase some personality. A spoken assignment gives you the freedom to be a little creative and better engage your audience.

3. Complement your Visuals: Your speech needs to be informative and convey all the information you worked so hard to prepare. 

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Now that you have a fair understanding of a good presentation, we'll give you some tips on how to present a presentation in class that will help you make an impact and earn you the highest grade. Here are some tips on how to present in class that you can use before the big day:

1. Introduce Yourself

It's a given that when you begin a presentation, you must introduce yourself with your name and offer a little background information to the audience. You can tell a bit about yourself and what your presentation is about. This will help you establish yourself as an expert in your domain.

2. Build Rapport with your Audience

The next step in preparing a presentation in class is building a good rapport with your audience. Be yourself and genuinely try to connect with your audience. Research what the audience wants, smile often, and look at your audience while speaking. If there's time before your presentation, engage them in small talk.

3. Know your Content Well

The next essential point on how to do a PowerPoint presentation for class is understanding your content well. You must have a good understanding of the content that you are presenting. If you don't understand what you're trying to say, how will your audience? Test out your presentation on some friends to ensure that your content is understandable to someone who isn't too familiar with the topic, so you can ensure that your classmates and professor can easily understand your content. 

4. Start with a Story

The presentation starting lines for students should always start with a short story to make it more interesting and relevant to your audience. This is the next important thing on how to present a presentation in class. Try to keep the story short, under one minute, and use humour or thought-provoking ideas. A personal touch to the story can enrich it, too.

5. Organise your Presentation

Organising your presentation is also an essential element of giving a good class presentation. Make sure to put short and minimal content in your presentation and add good visuals, too. If you want to know how to give a presentation in class that will get you an A, remember to create a well-structured presentation and use it to know about these best PowerPoint presentation tips .

6. Engage your Audience

Keeping the session interactive is another essential part of presenting a presentation in class. Keep your presentation engaging by asking questions, conducting a fun activity, sharing examples related to your topic, or using humour to make your audience interested and attentive. 

7. Speak Slowly and Clearly

While you're giving your speech, make sure that you speak slowly and clearly; it's the next important thing in giving an excellent presentation. When nervous, people tend to speak fast. Speaking slowly and clearly allows you to be more audible to your audience.

8. Manage your Time

Managing your time is an essential aspect of presenting in class. Understand the time you require to present and adjust the length of your content accordingly. You can do this by practising multiple times while keeping track of your time. Try to avoid an incomplete and rushed presentation. Instead, aim to have a concise and well-delivered one.

9. Create a Visually Appealing Presentation

The other important thing about preparing a PowerPoint presentation for class is making the most of visuals. Visual aids like slideshows, charts, and graphs should be used strategically to reinforce the main points, engage the audience, and improve the presentation's delivery. Avoid cluttering your slides with extra information.

10. Maintain Good Eye Contact with the Audience

Another important aspect of giving a presentation in class is maintaining eye contact. Good eye contact will help you build rapport with your audience, improve your concentration, become more confident, and facilitate engagement.

11. Dress Properly

Your appearance has a huge impact on the audience's perception of your presentation. Make sure that you are dressed appropriately, your outfit is comfortable and doesn't distract the audience from your message. So make sure of the dressing part on how to present a presentation.

12. End on a Strong Note

Ending your presentation on a strong note is also an essential part of the presentation process in class. In the end, summarize everything, address everyone's questions, if any, and thank your audience.

13. Seek Feedback

The next essential thing about presenting a presentation in class is seeking feedback. It is always a good practice to ask for feedback from your professor or classmates. It helps identify areas that you can improve upon for future presentations. It also shows your open-mindedness, as you are open to constructive criticism of your work.

Your presentation will be as perfect as our accommodation!

Class presentation ideas for students.

If you're wondering how to present a presentation in class, but the typical PowerPoint slides and speech combination seems to be boring, there are a few different presentation styles you could try on how to present a presentation in class:

1. Video Presentation

A video presentation is a great way to pack as many visuals as you want into your presentation while still keeping your audience engaged. If you really want to go all out, you can even try out some timed speeches to complement specific parts of your video. 

2. Interactive Presentation

You can fill your presentation with short quizzes or audience opinions to get the entire class involved in your presentation. This could be a fun way to lift everyone's spirits and ensure your presentation stays in their minds even when they leave the classroom. 

3. Prop-filled Presentation

If you want to go the extra mile, you can bring in physical visual aids, another essential thing in how to do PowerPoint presentations in class to supplement your presentation. Incorporating props into your presentation shows an extra level of planning, creativity, and effort that your audience will appreciate. 

Public Speaking Tips on How to Present a Presentation

So, your speech is written, and it's great! But that's only half the battle—your delivery is just as important. If the thought of public speaking makes you feel weak in the knees, try these public speaking tips on how to present a presentation as a student, another essential thing for students to know about how to do a presentation in class. 

1. Record Yourself Practising

On how to present a presentation in class, the first tip is to record yourself. Listening to yourself speak helps you better understand where you can improve your delivery at different points. Once you know how you're going to sound in front of an audience, you can take the pressure off your final presentation.

2. Practice in Front of Friends & Family

The next tip on how to present a presentation in class is by practising it. To get comfortable with the idea of speaking in front of a crowd, practice with your friends or family. The people closest to you are often your harshest critics, so if you can handle them, you can handle anything.

3. Prepare for the Worst

When thinking about how to give a presentation in class, always be prepared for the worst. Preparing for the worst is an important part of presenting in class. Try to keep a backup in mind in case anything goes wrong, like the audio not working or the slides stopping.

4. Breathe and Do a Self Talk Before the Presentation

Next on how to present in class, is doing deep breathing exercises and talking to yourself before a presentation. Say motivating and inspiring things to yourself, or you can do mantra-based rituals where you can say things like "I'm here to give, not receive." Do use these tips on how to calm down before a presentation .

5. Memorise Key Points

Most people fear getting up on stage and forgetting everything they have prepared. To ensure that doesn't happen, memorize the key points related to your whole content. This is another essential tip on how to present a presentation in class.

Things to Avoid While Presenting a Presentation in Class

Now that you know what you should do, here are a few things you definitely should NOT do. If you want to know how to give a presentation in class, do not make these rookie mistakes while you're presenting.

1. Reading from your Slides

Professors have to see dozens of students' presentations every day, and the last thing they want to see is a boring presentation with someone reading off of their slides. So, the first thing to avoid on how to present a presentation in class is reading from slides. Slides are a visual aid and should NOT be used as cue cards.

2. Avoiding Eye Contact 

Make as much eye contact with your audience as possible. This is an essential part of giving a presentation in class. Do not look at your shoes or keep glancing at your slides. Maintaining eye contact shows confidence and will keep your audience engaged in your speech.

3. Speaking Too Fast 

The next thing to avoid when presenting in class is speaking too fast. Don't rush through your words because that will make you come across as underconfident and reduce your volume. Keep a consistent pace throughout, and you'll get through your speech in no time!

4. Exceeding Time Limit

Don't exceed your time limit. Another thing to avoid when doing a PowerPoint presentation for class is overextending yourself, as people might have other things to attend to. Also, sitting too long through a presentation may cause your audience to lose attention.

5. Overcrowding PPT with Text

The next thing to avoid when presenting in class is making your PPT verbose. Too much text makes your presentation look bad, and your audience might have to put in a lot of effort to read the content.

That was our detailed guide on how to give a presentation in class as a college student. We know we've packed in a lot of information, but if you break everything down step by step, it's all incredibly simple. If you follow all our tips on how to present a presentation in class, we can ensure that you'll give a killer presentation! Also, check out the top 8 presentation tools for students.

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How to Make an Educational PowerPoint Presentation Quickly + Video

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What do you do when you need to share your knowledge with an audience? One of the best ways is to build a PowerPoint presentation for teaching . Use it as a supplement when you're speaking.

It's often said that people have different learning styles. While some learn best by listening, others are visual learners. Other learners love trying hands-on exercises to learn the concept at hand. The best part of an effective presentation is you can combine all these into one package.

PowerPoint has carved out its place as the go-to presentation software for its ease of use. And when you're scrambling to quickly put together a presentation about education, you need all the help you can get to focus on the content instead of the slide designs.

In this tutorial, I'm going to share my techniques for building an education PowerPoint presentation . Even if you're a PowerPoint rookie, you can create a professional and informative education presentation.

Download Our Free PDF eBook on Making Great Presentations

Before you read on, we want to make sure you know about this resource. It'll help you write, design, and deliver the perfect presentation.  Download our Free eBook:  The Complete Guide to Making Great Presentations .

How to Make an Educational PowerPoint PPT Presentation Quickly With Templates (Video)

Are you ready to start your next educational PowerPoint presentation? Get a head start on your next education presentation with the tips and steps in the short video below:

Do you want to learn even more about creating presentations on education topics? Keep reading for a step-by-step guide with additional information and tips.

1. How to Write an Educational Presentation

Start by spending some time writing and planning the content for your presentation about education. It's hard to start with a blank slate for building an education PowerPoint presentation, but it helps if you can break down what you need to do with an easily repeatable set of steps.

Let's talk about key steps you can take to make writing a presentation feel more manageable:

Step 1. Set a Learning Objective

Every well-written educational presentation starts off the same way: by setting a goal for it. You need to set a learning objective,  the goal of what your audience will know after they've seen the presentation.

If you don't have a targeted goal for your education PowerPoint presentation, it's likely that your points will wander away from the central idea. Setting a single, focused learning objective helps ensure that everything you write supports that central idea.

Setting a learning goal and keeping it in mind helps ensure that your presentation has a tight focus.

There are many types of presentations, like persuasive, decision-driven, introductory, and informative (educational). The objectives that you set for these presentations are different because they each have different desired outcomes.

Here are some examples of three different learning objectives that would feel appropriate for an educational presentation:

• This presentation will teach the audience the basics of personal finance and how to start investing.
• The audience will learn how to write their first line of Javascript code.
• The presentation will share the latest techniques for performing employee performance reviews.

Write out your learning objective so that you'll keep it in mind while writing the rest of the presentation about education.

Step 2. Write an Outline for Key Ideas

If the learning objective is the destination for what you want to accomplish, an outline is the roadmap that helps you make sure you arrive at the goal. Each of the points in your outline should be a supporting idea for the learning objective.

You don't have to use a complex tool to write an outline. In fact, a simple tool is better for drafting out these rough ideas in outline format.

I like to think of each of the outline points as key ideas for reinforcing the learning goal. Each of them should be different in some way.

Step 3. Build Supporting Points

Now, it's time to reinforce these key points by adding supporting points. These are just the details that illustrate the key ideas.

In my outlines, these are ideas for how I might teach the key ideas. One bullet point might be "chart that shows the power of compounding growth over time," for example. I usually put a second leave in the outline for each of the supporting points.

Remember that we want to teach concepts through a variety of lenses that accommodate different learning styles. You could use a second-level bullet point for a visual approach to teaching (charts and graphs), and a separate bullet point for an idea on an audience hands-on method to learning the idea.

2. Elements for Education PowerPoints

After you firm up ideas for the content that you'll include in the presentation on education, it's time to open PowerPoint. Start building the education PowerPoint presentation educational slides that support you while speaking.

So, what if you need to prepare a presentation for your classroom or audience, and you don't have the time to build out the presentation from scratch?

In this tutorial, I'm going to use an educational PowerPoint template from Envato Elements. Elements offers unlimited downloads for a flat rate monthly fee. That includes more than 800 Microsoft PowerPoint templates. Use it to get a major head start.

Sure, PowerPoint has some built-in themes. But Microsoft's approach to custom themes is just different combinations of font styles, color schemes, and background images. The themes that Elements offers include pre-built slide designs that you can drop your own content into. These education PowerPoint presentation slides help you overcome the work of starting with a blank slate each time.

In this tutorial, I'm going to work with Envato Elements' presentation template titled,  Education PowerPoint theme .  The structure and simplicity of this theme makes it ideal for building an educational presentation theme.

If the template I selected isn't quite your style, don't miss out on the rest of Elements educational templates . Each of these pre-built presentations has plenty of ideas for building out an effective presentation on education PPT.

3. How to Build an Educational Presentation

Let's walk through building an educational presentation that'll drive knowledge to an audience. 

We're going to build a presentation that familiarizes an audience with the basics of personal finance. This fictitious slide deck will stress the importance of how you handle your finances. It'll also educate the audience on how to get started. 

Step 1. Introduce Yourself and the Subject

If someone has shown up for your presentation on education PPT, they likely have an idea of what it's about. But you can't guarantee that. So, it's important that you set the stage for the key ideas.

It's also important that you introduce yourself. I'll usually try to include at least a brief one-liner that establishes my knowledge on the subject.

For this slide design, let's start off with slide 2 in the Education deck. This has a placeholder for a professional image. If you've got one of yourself available, it's great to replace the placeholder with a self-image to personalize it.

Step 2. Give the Presentation About Education a "Why"

You're always competing for the audience's attention. An important part of building an educational presentation is capturing that interest near the outset.

To establish and hold that attention, you've got to show the audience the potential of following your advice and techniques.

Let's use slide design 6 for this purpose. A bit of inspiration sets the stage for the audience to soak up your advice in the rest of the presentation.

One of the other benefits of using Envato Elements is that you've got access to a huge library of stock photos. Instead of scouring the web for an image that you can use or paying to license one image after another, an all-you-can download subscription to Elements gives you access to the entire library.

In this case, I jumped back to Elements and pulled a stock photo selection for inclusion in the slide deck. 

Step 3. Share Techniques and Tips for the Topic

I like to think of this education presentation as the meat of the matter. You've set the stage, created a sense of importance. Now, the audience needs ideas on what the steps are that they can take to succeed.

In the screenshot below, I've customized slide design 10. This includes four easy steps, illustrated by arrows to show a progression of the needed steps.

Plan on building out several education PowerPoint presentation slides to explain the key learning steps. This is one example of using a slide in the Education deck to drive your concept.

Step 4. Teach With Visualizations

For the visual learners in the audience, it helps to have a chart or graph that illustrates the concept at hand. You might have the most eloquent speaking points in the rest of the presentation, but a well-made chart could be the key to driving your point home.

In the screenshot below, I generated a chart that shows the power of compound interest. I used slide design 24, which already had a placeholder for a graph that I modified with my own data.

Step 5. Finish By Asking for Action

After you've spent the presentation sharing your advice and information, ask for an action from the audience. 

In our case, the best step is to ask the audience to start budgeting to manage their finances. A simple, clean slide design that focuses on a single line of text is ideal for that.

Let's use slide design 31 to illustrate this concept. It's a great example of how you can take a slide that's for one purpose and easily transform it into an entirely different usage. I deleted the map graphic and increased the font size to make an impact.

These are a few of the education PowerPoint presentation slides that you might want to build, but they showcase how easy it is to get started.

5 Great PowerPoint Educational Presentation Tips

Now that you know how to make an educational PowerPoint presentation, here are a few more tips. They'll help you make the most out of your presentation and your chosen PowerPoint template. 

1. Customize Your Presentation With School Colors

A great way to make your presentation about education more custom is to use your school colors. Use them as accents to highlight heading elements or in charts, graphs, buttons. 

2. Use Animations Carefully

Animation and slide transitions can add interest to your presentation. But avoid using them for each slide. Instead, save them to transition between different sections of your presentation. 

3. Use Visual Aids

Make it easy for your students to follow along by adding plenty of visual elements throughout your presentation about education. This includes charts, graphs, photos, infographics, and other infographic elements. 

4. Focus On One Topic Per Slide

Avoid having many ideas on one slide. This will overwhelm your audience. It'll also increase the likelihood of them zoning out instead of listening to what you've got to say. 

5. White Space Is Your Friend

Leave plenty of white space around various presentation elements. This will make it easy for your audience to focus on your presentation, not to mention you’ll avoid your presentation looking cluttered. 

Find More Great PowerPoint Templates: 5 Top Designs

Envato Elements has plenty of education PowerPoint templates that you can download and use to create a stunning presentation quickly. What’s more, download as many templates as you want and use them in as many presentations as you want. 

Look at some of our best education PowerPoint templates that we've got available.

1. Edumode - Education PowerPoint Template  

The Edumode is a modern and vibrant PowerPoint presentation. Use it for teaching. There are plenty of custom icons and infographic elements that you can use to create an engaging presentation about education.

Use this template for any class or subject. Once you download this template, you’ll find over 40 unique educational slides designed in widescreen format as well as world maps. 

2. Education PowerPoint Presentation Template  

This colorful education presentation is a great choice if you’re making a presentation for a younger audience. The template has many educational slides and over 1000 custom icons that you can use in your presentation. The template is also fully animated and was designed in full HD resolution.

3. University and Education PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template is a great choice to create a presentation for high school or university students. It's got a clean and professional design with over 90 unique educational slides. You’ll also find:

• 110 color schemes, 
• slides designed in two aspect ratios
• hundreds of resizable vector elements

4. Education PowerPoint Template

Try this PowerPoint template if you’re looking for a versatile template with a clean and minimal design. This template comes with five premade color schemes and over 150 slides based on master slides. You’ll also find resizable vector elements and picture placeholders for easy editing.

5. Education PowerPoint Template  

Use this versatile template for any type of educational presentation or business presentation. It comes with 10 master slides and five premade color schemes that you can use as a starting point for your designs.

To see even more educational PowerPoint template examples, be sure to check out our related roundups: 

Learn More About How to Use PowerPoint

One guide that I recommend to anyone who wants to learn Microsoft is our roundup, The Ultimate Guide to the Best PPT . This tutorial is like a roadmap for learning PowerPoint and using all the features in combination to build the perfect presentation.

Already checked out that guide? Don't miss out on these other top tutorials below to refine your PowerPoint skills:

Grab This eBook on Making Great Presentations ( Free Download )

We've got the perfect complement to a professional PowerPoint template. It'll help you learn how to write, design, and deliver great presentations.

Download  The Complete Guide to Making Great Presentations  now for FREE with a subscription to the Tuts+ Business Newsletter. Get your ideas formed into a powerful presentation that'll move your audience.

Create a Great Educational PowerPoint Presentation

In this tutorial, we tackled how easy it can be to build a presentation to educate an audience with PowerPoint using pre-made Elements slide decks to quickly build a presentation. 

How do you build out your own educational PowerPoint presentations quickly? If you've got any tips that would help your fellow Envato Tuts+ readers learn the app, please share in the comments section below.

If you’re working on a presentation for your class, stop by Envato Elements and sign up. Download as many education PowerPoint templates as you want. Edit them to suit your needs, and you're done. Elements also provides top teaching resources , study tools , and online teaching templates .

Also, don't miss checking out on top presentation themes on Envato Market if you want other slide designs to try out. Why not get started on your next educational PowerPoint presentation today?

Editorial Note: This tutorial was originally published in February of 2018. It's been updated to include new information—with special assistance from Brenda Barron a nd a video from Andrew Childress . 

How-To Geek

8 tips to make the best powerpoint presentations.

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Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs, Sheets, Slides: Which Is Best?

Mozilla reveals thunderbird appointment, a free scheduling tool, free your music from the cloud with volumio pi, quick links, table of contents, start with a goal, less is more, consider your typeface, make bullet points count, limit the use of transitions, skip text where possible, think in color, take a look from the top down, bonus: start with templates.

Slideshows are an intuitive way to share complex ideas with an audience, although they're dull and frustrating when poorly executed. Here are some tips to make your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations sing while avoiding common pitfalls.

It all starts with identifying what we're trying to achieve with the presentation. Is it informative, a showcase of data in an easy-to-understand medium? Or is it more of a pitch, something meant to persuade and convince an audience and lead them to a particular outcome?

It's here where the majority of these presentations go wrong with the inability to identify the talking points that best support our goal. Always start with a goal in mind: to entertain, to inform, or to share data in a way that's easy to understand. Use facts, figures, and images to support your conclusion while keeping structure in mind (Where are we now and where are we going?).

I've found that it's helpful to start with the ending. Once I know how to end a presentation, I know how best to get to that point. I start by identifying the takeaway---that one nugget that I want to implant before thanking everyone for their time---and I work in reverse to figure out how best to get there.

Your mileage, of course, may vary. But it's always going to be a good idea to put in the time in the beginning stages so that you aren't reworking large portions of the presentation later. And that starts with a defined goal.

A slideshow isn't supposed to include everything. It's an introduction to a topic, one that we can elaborate on with speech. Anything unnecessary is a distraction. It makes the presentation less visually appealing and less interesting, and it makes you look bad as a presenter.

This goes for text as well as images. There's nothing worse, in fact, than a series of slides where the presenter just reads them as they appear. Your audience is capable of reading, and chances are they'll be done with the slide, and browsing Reddit, long before you finish. Avoid putting the literal text on the screen, and your audience will thank you.

Related: How to Burn Your PowerPoint to DVD

Right off the bat, we're just going to come out and say that Papyrus and Comic Sans should be banned from all PowerPoint presentations, permanently. Beyond that, it's worth considering the typeface you're using and what it's saying about you, the presenter, and the presentation itself.

Consider choosing readability over aesthetics, and avoid fancy fonts that could prove to be more of a distraction than anything else. A good presentation needs two fonts: a serif and sans-serif. Use one for the headlines and one for body text, lists, and the like. Keep it simple. Veranda, Helvetica, Arial, and even Times New Roman are safe choices. Stick with the classics and it's hard to botch this one too badly.

There reaches a point where bullet points become less of a visual aid and more of a visual examination.

Bullet points should support the speaker, not overwhelm his audience. The best slides have little or no text at all, in fact. As a presenter, it's our job to talk through complex issues, but that doesn't mean that we need to highlight every talking point.

Instead, think about how you can break up large lists into three or four bullet points. Carefully consider whether you need to use more bullet points, or if you can combine multiple topics into a single point instead. And if you can't, remember that there's no one limiting the number of slides you can have in a presentation. It's always possible to break a list of 12 points down into three pages of four points each.

Animation, when used correctly, is a good idea. It breaks up slow-moving parts of a presentation and adds action to elements that require it. But it should be used judiciously.

Adding a transition that wipes left to right between every slide or that animates each bullet point in a list, for example, starts to grow taxing on those forced to endure the presentation. Viewers get bored quickly, and animations that are meant to highlight specific elements quickly become taxing.

That's not to say that you can't use animations and transitions, just that you need to pick your spots. Aim for no more than a handful of these transitions for each presentation. And use them in spots where they'll add to the demonstration, not detract from it.

Sometimes images tell a better story than text can. And as a presenter, your goal is to describe points in detail without making users do a lot of reading. In these cases, a well-designed visual, like a chart, might better convey the information you're trying to share.

The right image adds visual appeal and serves to break up longer, text-heavy sections of the presentation---but only if you're using the right images. A single high-quality image can make all the difference between a success and a dud when you're driving a specific point home.

When considering text, don't think solely in terms of bullet points and paragraphs. Tables, for example, are often unnecessary. Ask yourself whether you could present the same data in a bar or line chart instead.

Color is interesting. It evokes certain feelings and adds visual appeal to your presentation as a whole. Studies show that color also improves interest, comprehension, and retention. It should be a careful consideration, not an afterthought.

You don't have to be a graphic designer to use color well in a presentation. What I do is look for palettes I like, and then find ways to use them in the presentation. There are a number of tools for this, like Adobe Color , Coolors , and ColorHunt , just to name a few. After finding a palette you enjoy, consider how it works with the presentation you're about to give. Pastels, for example, evoke feelings of freedom and light, so they probably aren't the best choice when you're presenting quarterly earnings that missed the mark.

It's also worth mentioning that you don't need to use every color in the palette. Often, you can get by with just two or three, though you should really think through how they all work together and how readable they'll be when layered. A simple rule of thumb here is that contrast is your friend. Dark colors work well on light backgrounds, and light colors work best on dark backgrounds.

Spend some time in the Slide Sorter before you finish your presentation. By clicking the four squares at the bottom left of the presentation, you can take a look at multiple slides at once and consider how each works together. Alternatively, you can click "View" on the ribbon and select "Slide Sorter."

Are you presenting too much text at once? Move an image in. Could a series of slides benefit from a chart or summary before you move on to another point?

It's here that we have the opportunity to view the presentation from beyond the single-slide viewpoint and think in terms of how each slide fits, or if it fits at all. From this view, you can rearrange slides, add additional ones, or delete them entirely if you find that they don't advance the presentation.

The difference between a good presentation and a bad one is really all about preparation and execution. Those that respect the process and plan carefully---not only the presentation as a whole, but each slide within it---are the ones who will succeed.

This brings me to my last (half) point: When in doubt, just buy a template and use it. You can find these all over the web, though Creative Market and GraphicRiver are probably the two most popular marketplaces for this kind of thing. Not all of us are blessed with the skills needed to design and deliver an effective presentation. And while a pre-made PowerPoint template isn't going to make you a better presenter, it will ease the anxiety of creating a visually appealing slide deck.

• Microsoft Office

6 Tips For Giving a Fabulous Academic Presentation

6-tips-for-giving-a-fabulous-academic-presentation.

Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California

January 11, 2022

One of the easiest ways to stand out at an academic conference is to give a fantastic presentation.

In this post, I will discuss a few simple techniques that can make your presentation stand out. Although, it does take time to make a good presentation, it is well worth the investment.

Tip #1: Use PowerPoint Judiciously

Images are powerful. Research shows that images help with memory and learning. Use this to your advantage by finding and using images that help you make your point. One trick I have learned is that you can use images that have blank space in them and you can put words in those images.

Here is one such example from a presentation I gave about immigration law enforcement.

PowerPoint is a great tool, so long as you use it effectively. Generally, this means using lots of visuals and relatively few words. Never use less than 24-point font. And, please, never put your presentation on the slides and read from the slides.

Tip #2: There is a formula to academic presentations. Use it.

Once you have become an expert at giving fabulous presentations, you can deviate from the formula. However, if you are new to presenting, you might want to follow it. This will vary slightly by field, however, I will give an example from my field – sociology – to give you an idea as to what the format should look like:

• Introduction/Overview/Hook
• Theoretical Framework/Research Question
• Methodology/Case Selection
• Background/Literature Review
• Discussion of Data/Results

Tip #3: The audience wants to hear about your research. Tell them.

One of the most common mistakes I see in people giving presentations is that they present only information I already know. This usually happens when they spend nearly all of the presentation going over the existing literature and giving background information on their particular case. You need only to discuss the literature with which you are directly engaging and contributing. Your background information should only include what is absolutely necessary. If you are giving a 15-minute presentation, by the 6 th minute, you need to be discussing your data or case study. At conferences, people are there to learn about your new and exciting research, not to hear a summary of old work.

Tip #4: Practice. Practice. Practice.

You should always practice your presentation in full before you deliver it. You might feel silly delivering your presentation to your cat or your toddler, but you need to do it and do it again. You need to practice to ensure that your presentation fits within the time parameters. Practicing also makes it flow better. You can’t practice too many times.

Tip #5: Keep To Your Time Limit

If you have ten minutes to present, prepare ten minutes of material. No more. Even if you only have seven minutes, you need to finish within the allotted time. If you write your presentation out, a general rule of thumb is two minutes per typed, double-spaced page. For a fifteen-minute talk, you should have no more than 7 double-spaced pages of material.

Tip #6: Don’t Read Your Presentation

Yes, I know that in some fields reading is the norm. But, can you honestly say that you find yourself engaged when listening to someone read their conference presentation? If you absolutely must read, I suggest you read in such a way that no one in the audience can tell you are reading. I have seen people do this successfully, and you can do it too if you write in a conversational tone, practice several times, and read your paper with emotion, conviction, and variation in tone.

What tips do you have for presenters? What is one of the best presentations you have seen? What made it so fantastic? Let us know in the comments below.

Want to learn more about the publishing process? The Wiley Researcher Academy is an online author training program designed to help researchers develop the skills and knowledge needed to be able to publish successfully. Learn more about Wiley Researcher Academy .

Image credit: Tanya Golash-Boza

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50 Creative Ideas to Nail Your College Presentation

We’d be willing to bet that most college students enjoy presentations about as much as they like their 7am class. Whether they’re designing them, or in the audience, there are likely a million and one things they’d rather be doing (like napping in their dorm room). In fact, 79% will say that most presentations today suck. And 35% of millennials say that they will only engage with content they feel has a great story or theme. With a reputation like that, it’s no wonder students avoid presentations at all costs. 

As a result, many will end up procrastinating, losing sleep over choosing a topic, and piecing a deck together at the last minute. According to research, 47% of presenters put in more than eight hours into designing their presentations. You do the math. Eight hours at the eleventh hour equals an all-nighter.

Luckily, that doesn’t mean the final product has to be a poorly thought-out frankendeck. 

Creative presentation ideas for college students

A lot can ride on a class presentation. It might be your last project at the end of the semester that determines the fate of your final grade, or maybe it’s a group project that counts for half of your participation in the class. Whatever the stakes are, we’re here to help you nail your next college presentation.

Pick the right topic

Before committing to your topics for presentations in college, you should consider things like what excites you, what you’re knowledgeable in and what you’d be interested in learning more about, books or movies that inspire you, world events, buzz-worthy pop culture, and what topics relate to your class course. How can you apply these things to your next class presentation?

You’re in college, so it’s very likely that your classmates will be sleeping, or staring out the window, while you’re presenting at the front of the room. To keep them engaged, make it interesting with these unique college presentation ideas.

College presentation ideas

• The evolution of a specific product— like the cell phone
• A presentation on your favorite celebrity
• A history of the most influential presidents of the United States
• How modern medicine is made
• The highest paid [BLANK] in 2021
• A how-to presentation on something you’re passionate about— like building cars
• A book that you think should be made into a movie (and why)
• Your favorite cultural recipe
• Who built the Sphinx of Egypt
• Social media now and then
• Shakespeare’s hits and misses
• Debunking a conspiracy theory
• Unexpected traditions
• Who invented the SAT, and what is it?
• The most popular travel destinations for young adults in their 20s
• What is van life anyway?
• How is education different now than it was in the ‘70s
• How to live a more sustainable life
• The evolution of humans
• The history of the Internet
• Is organic really better?
• How to get the most out of an internship
• What employers are actually looking for on your resume, and how to write one
• Everything you need to know about global warming
• The top places with the most expensive cost of living in the United States
• The rise of TikTok
• What is influencer marketing and why is it so important?
• Classic movies that should be cancelled in 2021, and why
• Is eating vegan really better for your health?
• Are aliens real?
• Everything you need to know about the Big Bang Theory
• Why streaming services are the demise of classic cable
• Marijuana then and now: the process of getting it legalized
• 15 Memorable things about [blank]
• A comprehensive timeline of feminism
• Is print— newspapers, magazines, books— dead?
• The easiest foreign language to learn on your own
• The best life hacks I learned on TikTok
• What does white privilege mean to millennials and Generation Z?
• Understanding finance for young adults 101
• Everything you need to know about life after college
• The difference between electric cars and gas cars
• What is artificial intelligence anyway?
• How thrifting can help the environment
• The evolution of presentations: from caveman to TedTalks
• Applying your degree in real life
• The origins of your favorite music genre
• Everything you need to about becoming a surgeon
• The life cycle of [blank] 
• Life without technology: where would we be without modern technology?

Make it beautiful

You have your topic, now what? Did you wait until the absolute last second to get started? Here’s the good news: no need for an all-nighter. Beautiful.ai can help you nail your college presentation in a pinch. The ease of use, and intuitive controls, help you create something brilliant in minutes, not hours. Start inspired with our inspiration gallery of pre-built templates and customize them to fit your content.

It’s important to connect with your audience on an emotional level, so make sure to pick trendy colors, modern fonts, and high-quality visual assets to compliment your presentation and evoke emotion. Engage your audience (especially your professor) with dynamic animations, or videos, to help control the narrative and direct their attention to the key takeaways. 

Pro tip: use the shareable link to share your deck out with classmates, teachers, or social media friends after class. 

Jordan Turner

Jordan is a Bay Area writer, social media manager, and content strategist.

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Basic tasks for creating a PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint presentations work like slide shows. To convey a message or a story, you break it down into slides. Think of each slide as a blank canvas for the pictures and words that help you tell your story.

Choose a theme

When you open PowerPoint, you’ll see some built-in themes and templates . A theme is a slide design that contains matching colors, fonts, and special effects like shadows, reflections, and more.

On the File tab of the Ribbon, select New , and then choose a theme.

PowerPoint shows you a preview of the theme, with four color variations to choose from on the right side.

Click Create , or pick a color variation and then click Create .

Read more: Use or create themes in PowerPoint

Insert a new slide

On the Home tab, click the bottom half of  New Slide , and pick a slide layout.

Read more: Add, rearrange, and delete slides .

Save your presentation

On the File tab, choose Save .

Pick or browse to a folder.

In the File name box, type a name for your presentation, and then choose Save .

Note:  If you frequently save files to a certain folder, you can ‘pin’ the path so that it is always available (as shown below).

Tip:  Save your work as you go. Press Ctrl+S often or save the file to OneDrive and let AutoSave take care of it for you. 

Read more: Save your presentation file

Select a text placeholder, and begin typing.

Format your text

Select the text.

Under Drawing Tools , choose Format .

Do one of the following:

To change the color of your text, choose Text Fill , and then choose a color.

To change the outline color of your text, choose Text Outline , and then choose a color.

To apply a shadow, reflection, glow, bevel, 3-D rotation, a transform, choose Text Effects , and then choose the effect you want.

Change the fonts

Change the color of text on a slide

Add bullets or numbers to text

Format text as superscript or subscript

Add pictures

On the Insert tab, select Pictures , then do one of the following:

To insert a picture that is saved on your local drive or an internal server, choose This Device , browse for the picture, and then choose Insert .

(For Microsoft 365 subscribers) To insert a picture from our library, choose Stock Images , browse for a picture, select it and choose Insert .

To insert a picture from the web, choose Online Pictures , and use the search box to find a picture. Choose a picture, and then click Insert .

You can add shapes to illustrate your slide. 

On the Insert tab, select Shapes , and then select a shape from the menu that appears.

In the slide area, click and drag to draw the shape.

Select the Format or Shape Format tab on the ribbon. Open the Shape Styles gallery to quickly add a color and style (including shading) to the selected shape.

Add speaker notes

Slides are best when you don’t cram in too much information. You can put helpful facts and notes in the speaker notes, and refer to them as you present.

Click inside the Notes pane below the slide, and begin typing your notes.

Add speaker notes to your slides

Print slides with or without speaker notes

Give your presentation

On the Slide Show tab, do one of the following:

To start the presentation at the first slide, in the Start Slide Show group, click From Beginning .

If you’re not at the first slide and want to start from where you are, click From Current Slide .

If you need to present to people who are not where you are, click Present Online to set up a presentation on the web, and then choose one of the following options:

Broadcast your PowerPoint presentation online to a remote audience

View your speaker notes as you deliver your slide show.

Get out of Slide Show view

To get out of Slide Show view at any time, on the keyboard, press Esc .

You can quickly apply a theme when you're starting a new presentation:

On the File tab, click New .

Select a theme.

Read more:  Apply a design theme to your presentation

In the slide thumbnail pane on the left, select the slide that you want your new slide to follow.

On the Home tab, select the lower half of  New Slide .

From the menu, select the layout that you want for your new slide.

Your new slide is inserted, and you can click inside a placeholder to begin adding content.

Learn more about slide layouts

Read more: Add, rearrange, and delete slides

PowerPoint for the web automatically saves your work to your OneDrive, in the cloud.

To change the name of the automatically saved file:

In the title bar, click the file name.

In the File Name box, enter the name you want to apply to the file.

If you want to change the cloud storage location, at the right end of the Location box, click the arrow symbol, then navigate to the folder you want, then select Move here .

On the Home tab, use the Font options:

Select from other formatting options such as Bold , Italic , Underline , Strikethrough , Subscript , and Superscript .

On the  Insert  tab, select  Pictures .

From the menu, select where you want to insert the picture from:

Browse to the image you want, select it, then select Insert . 

After the image is inserted on the slide, you can select it and drag to reposition it, and you can select and drag a corner handle to resize the image. 

On the slide canvas, click and drag to draw the shape.

Select the Shape tab on the ribbon. Open the Shape Styles gallery to quickly add a color and style (including shading) to the selected shape.

A horizontal Notes pane appears at the bottom of the window, below the slide.

Click in the pane, then enter text. 

On the  Slide Show  tab, select  Play From Beginning .

To navigate through the slides, simply click the mouse or press the spacebar.

Tip:  You can also use the forward and back arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate through the slide show.

Read more:  Present your slide show

Stop a slide show

To get out of Slide Show view at any time, on the keyboard, press Esc.

The full-screen slide show will close, and you will be returned to the editing view of the file.

Tips for creating an effective presentation

Consider the following tips to keep your audience interested.

Minimize the number of slides

To maintain a clear message and to keep your audience attentive and interested, keep the number of slides in your presentation to a minimum.

Choose an audience-friendly font size

The audience must be able to read your slides from a distance. Generally speaking, a font size smaller than 30 might be too difficult for the audience to see.

Keep your slide text simple

You want your audience to listen to you present your information, instead of reading the screen. Use bullets or short sentences, and try to keep each item to one line.

Some projectors crop slides at the edges, so that long sentences might be cropped.

Use visuals to help express your message

Pictures, charts, graphs, and SmartArt graphics provide visual cues for your audience to remember. Add meaningful art to complement the text and messaging on your slides.

As with text, however, avoid including too many visual aids on your slide.

Make labels for charts and graphs understandable

Use only enough text to make label elements in a chart or graph comprehensible.

Apply subtle, consistent slide backgrounds

Choose an appealing, consistent template or theme that is not too eye-catching. You don't want the background or design to detract from your message.

However, you also want to provide a contrast between the background color and text color. The built-in themes in PowerPoint set the contrast between a light background with dark colored text or dark background with light colored text.

For more information about how to use themes, see Apply a theme to add color and style to your presentation .

Check the spelling and grammar

To earn and maintain the respect of your audience, always check the spelling and grammar in your presentation .

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Turn presentation slides into a study guide in PowerPoint

january 9, 2024

by Ivana Okaro

Hi there! I'm Ivana Okaro, a student and content creator who’s passionate about sharing study tips that boost productivity and help students shine. Today, I'm excited to walk you through a cool and useful trick: turning a Microsoft PowerPoint deck into a helpful study guide. This technique is perfect for anyone who uses PowerPoint or wants to learn.

Why start with a presentation?

When we think about creating study guides, we might be tempted to create one from scratch. But here's an idea: Why not start with a PowerPoint presentation instead?

More specifically, why not start with your instructor’s lecture slides? (It’s common for professors and teachers to email these out to students after the lecture is over. If yours doesn’t, ask!). These presentations are often packed with essential information, carefully curated by educators or subject matter experts, and organized in a way that’s logical and easy to follow. They also tend to have a clear beginning, middle, and end, providing a cohesive narrative that can really help with understanding and recalling information. They've done the work to structure the learning for you, and that's something you can leverage. Let’s explore how to turn these presentations into a study guide that's tailored just for you.

Step 1: Get started with PowerPoint

Open your presentation: Open PowerPoint and choose the presentation you want to work with.

Switch to Outline view: In the upper tab, navigate to View and select Outline . This mode strips away images and videos, leaving you with just the text from your slides. It’s super handy for focusing on the key points and getting a big picture understanding of the structure.

Step 2: Edit your outline and add helpful points

Add subpoints: Notice a missing detail? Want to add a helpful example from lecture? Easy fix. Click on the slide in the outline and press enter. This creates a new slide. Now, navigate to Home and select Indent More , and add your point. Or, simply hit tab on your keyboard to indent and create a subpoint.

Collapse for a clearer view: If you’re working with a large presentation, you might find yourself wanting an even briefer outline. Right-click on a slide and select Collapse to hide the details, showing only the slide titles. For an even broader overview, select Collapse All . To see the details again, right-click and choose Expand or Expand All .

Step 3: Print or save your study guide

Printing your outline: Once your outline looks just right, you can print it directly. Select Print , and under Layout , choose Outline . This will give you all the key points in a neat, condensed format.

Saving as a PDF: Prefer a digital copy? Save your outline as a PDF so you can easily review the material when you’re on-the-go.

And there you have it: Your very own class slides, transformed into a compact study guide. This PowerPoint hack lets you leverage a familiar tool to create a structured, information-rich, and personalized study companion. And it just might transform how you interact with information and engage with your study material.

Best of luck with your exams!

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How to use Microsoft PowerPoint

Creating a successful slideshow is no small task. So, if you’re new to Microsoft PowerPoint, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the features and tools you need to build a presentation.

How to create a slideshow

How to add a slide, how to insert slide elements, how to use different views, how to add speaker notes, how to start and end a presentation.

We’ll guide you through the process of creating a PowerPoint slideshow by adding slides and elements as well as how to present the show when you finish. These basics are just what you need as a beginner and should get you off to a terrific start with PowerPoint.

Note : The information in this tutorial applies to PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 on Windows. While you may see variations in features or menus, most PowerPoint versions have the same basic options.

When you open the application, you can create a new blank slideshow or use a built-in PowerPoint template . To best familiarize yourself with the application and the items we’ll walk through here, select a Blank slideshow on the Home screen and follow along.

Next, you’ll want to name and save your presentation file. Select File > Save or Save As name the file on the right, choose a location for it, and select Save .

Be sure to continue saving your slideshow regularly as you work on it by selecting Save in the Quick Access Toolbar.

A blank presentation in PowerPoint starts you off with a main slide. You’ll notice a text box at the top for the title and one beneath for the subtitle. Simply click inside these boxes to enter your text.

While it’s good to get in the habit of using title slides like these to begin future presentations, you’ll also need to know how to insert the additional slides.

Go to either the Home or Insert tab and open the New Slide menu in the ribbon.

Choose the layout you want to use for the new slide. You’ll see several options that include placeholders, which is handy for popping in what you need like text, lists, or images.

Once the slide appears, click inside a placeholder to add the necessary elements.

Continue to insert as many slides as you want the same way.

Along with using the placeholders on the slides, you can add your own items. This is helpful if a slide doesn’t contain the number or type of placeholders you need.

Add a text box

One popular slide element to add is a text box, which is just like the title and subtitle boxes on the title slide. With it, you can insert and format text as you wish.

Go to the Insert tab and select Text box in the Text group.

You can use your cursor to draw the size of the box you want or simply click the slide and begin typing inside the box.

To format the text in the box, select it and go to the Home tab. Use the options in the Font section of the ribbon to adjust the style, size, color, or emphasis.

Specific to PowerPoint on Windows, you’ll also see a floating toolbar appear near the text that you select. This toolbar contains the same features as on the Home tab along with additional options.

Add images, shapes, and icons

Because a slideshow is a visual tool, you’ll likely want to add photos, illustrations, shapes, or icons to slides.

Go to the Insert tab and open the Pictures , Shapes , or Icons menu.

• Pictures : Pick an image from your device, one of the stock images, or an online picture and select Insert .
• Shapes : Pick a shape from the menu and use your cursor to draw it on the slide.
• Icons : Search or use the categories to find the icon, select it, and click Insert .

Once you insert one of the above on your slide, you’ll see the corresponding tab appear to format the object. For pictures, you have a Picture Format tab, for shapes, you have a Shape Format tab, and for icons, you have a Graphics Format tab.

You can use the tools in the ribbon to do things like change the color, add a border, align or rotate the object, and resize it.

Add audio or video

Another useful object to add to your slides is an audio file or video. You can then play the sound or video clip during your presentation.

Go to the Insert tab and open the Audio or Video menu.

• Audio : Pick an audio file to add to PowerPoint from your device or record audio on the spot.
• Video : Pick a video to embed into your presentation from your device, one of the stock videos, or an online video and select Insert .

Like with images and shapes, you’ll see tabs appear to format the file you insert. For audio, you have an Audio Format tab, for video, you have a Video Format tab, and for both types of files, you have a Playback tab.

Use the Format tabs to adjust the color, add a border, or apply an effect and the Playback tab to set a fade in or out effect, loop the playback, or play it in the background.

You can take advantage of different views in PowerPoint for accomplishing various tasks. This is helpful for seeing all of your slides in a grid, viewing a notes page, or working with an outline.

Go to the View tab and you’ll see the options in the Presentation Views group.

• Normal : Use this to create and edit your slides.
• Outline View : Use this to work with an outline of your presentation. Each slide is numbered with a hierarchy of slide elements.
• Slide Sorter : Use this to see your slides in a grid format for an overall slideshow view.
• Notes Page : Use this to view your presentation with notes — this is where you print a PowerPoint presentation with notes .
• Reading View : Use this to play your slideshow in the same window without entering full-screen mode.

Use the tools in the Show section of the View tab to display a Ruler , Gridlines , or Guides . These items can help you line up your slide elements.

You can also select the Zoom and Fit to Window options in the Zoom section of the ribbon to get a better view of slide items or the overall slide.

Presenting a slideshow is similar to giving a speech where you may want to use speaker notes. Like note cards, you can add notes to each slide in your presentation. When you present the slideshow, only you can view your notes; your audience cannot see them.

Select Notes in the Status Bar at the bottom of the PowerPoint window or go to View > Notes .

Add your notes in the section that appears below the slide.

You can use the options in the Font section of the Home tab to add emphasis or create a list.

For more detail, check out our how-to for adding notes in PowerPoint .

When you’re ready to present your PowerPoint slideshow or to see it as your audience will, you can start the presentation anytime.

Go to the Slide Show tab.

To display your speaker notes and a dashboard of controls while you present, check the box for Use Presenter View in the Monitors section. Then, select the monitors for the slideshow display and presenter view using the Monitor drop-down menu.

On the left side of the ribbon, pick From Beginning or From Current Slide per your preference.

When the slideshow starts, you’ll see what your audience sees on one monitor with Presenter View on the other. This is a super helpful way to present your slideshow because the Presenter View window provides you with controls.

If you’re unable to use more than one monitor, you’ll also see controls on the bottom left of the slides.

In the Presenter View window, you’ll see the current slide on the left with the controls beneath and the next slide on the right along with your speaker notes.

To use a control, hover your cursor over each button for a brief description.

From left to right, you can choose a laser pointer or pen, see all slides in a grid, zoom in on the slide, display a black screen, turn the subtitles or camera on or off, and view additional options like changing the subtitle settings or ending the presentation.

To stop presentation mode, press your Esc key, select End Slide Show at the top, or use the three dots to choose End Show .

While this beginner’s guide to using PowerPoint should get you off to a great start creating and presenting your first slideshow, there’s plenty more to learn. Check out how to use Presenter Coach for rehearsing your presentation and best practices for making awesome PowerPoint slides for tips and suggestions.

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