The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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The Good, the Bad,and the Ugly

• The CAS Guide to Stellar PowerPoint Presentations

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The Good

• Keep it simple
• One word
• Or a small phrase
• Keep it legible
• White backgrounds
• Dark font
• No smaller than 24pt
• Keep it vivid
• Visualize with a picture

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The Bad

• Complex you dont want to overly bombard your
  audience with too much information on the slide.
• This is far more difficult to read that small
  bullet points would be. Dont depend on people to
  be able to take in all this text.
• Use bullets and make sure that you practice your
  presentation beforehand. You dont want to be
  reading from the slides. Keeping it short will
  discourage you from reading than in engaging your
  audience.
• Cluttered trying to fit too much information on
  just one slide will make it hard for people to be
  able to absorb all this information.
• You dont need to try to fit too much onto one
  slide. Make sure that your font is always greater
  than 24pt. That should naturally show you how
  much legible space you have on a presentation.
• You can try to divide the information up into
  different slides, which will help your audience
  visualize the information better with better
  organization.
• Text heavy your audience will appreciate using
  images such as charts or maps to convey some of
  the information that you are trying to give them
• Instead of writing out long sentences about the
  information that you pulled from a chart, show
  the chart instead.

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The Ugly

• This is everything that you could possibly do
  wrong with a presentation slide.
• You absolutely do not want to do this
• Please dont do this
• Have a dark textured background
• Have font thats light and hard to read.
• Not checking the punctuation at the end of your
  bullets to make sure that they are consistent
• Put text on top of a picture, no one can actually
  read that
• Also dont put too much inofrmaiton on a slide
• Dont forget to run spell check (look above)
• You need to try to organize your information
  instead of this non high-level bulleted mess.
• Dont put pronouns into your bullets, its not
  necessary
• Please be mindful of the fact that some people
  are also color-blind so red and green together
  are a terrible combination.
• Im sure no one actually does this to this extent

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Good Screen Shot

• Use speaker notes
• Print and rehearse
• Guide during presentation

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And Good luck!
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• Arlington, Virginia 22203
• www.casact.org