The secret to great presentations: its not about the software | Macworld

Good presenter advice for users of presentation software – remember the message, focus on the audience, and keep it simple:

All things being equal, simple text and images are the way to go. Text-heavy slides, complex images, cutesy animations, flashy transitions, and other such embellishments are more of a distraction than an aid. You don’t want your audience to say, “Wow, what great Keynote skills that presenter had!” You want them to remember what you said.

So I recommend choosing an uncluttered, high-contrast theme such as Gradient or Showroom in Keynote, or Twilight or Clarity in PowerPoint and, where practical, limiting each slide to a single element such as an image, graph, quote, or question. Select visuals that support, explain, or clarify what you say. They’re on the screen to help your audience understand and remember your talk, not to serve as cues or reminders of what you want to say—that’s what Presenter Notes are for in Keynote or PowerPoint. In Keynote, you may need to choose View > Show Presenter Notes to see the area at the bottom of the window where you can enter them. In either app, these notes appear on your Mac’s screen during a presentation only when your presentation is on a secondary display.

I use the Gradient theme (if it was good enough for Steve Jobs….) but find for some policy messaging hard to boil it down to three bullets (five more doable, ideally single line in large font.

The secret to great presentations: it’s not about the software | Macworld.