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Slide show design guidelines

When you give a slide show, your content should be center stage. You want the tools you use, such as builds and transitions, to help you emphasize your points, not draw your audience's attention to special effects. If your audience is used to reading from left to right, design your build slides so your points fly in from the left. Then, when you want to emphasize a point, try bringing it in from the right. That change grabs the audience's attention and reinforces your point.

The same principle works with sound. An occasional burst of music or a sound effect during a slide transition or a build tends to focus the audience on the slide show. On the other hand, frequent use of sound effects tends to draw the audience's attention away from your main points. The pace of your presentation also affects how your audience responds. Go too fast and you exhaust the audience members; go too slow and you put them to sleep. Experiment with pacing before presenting your show to an audience by using the Rehearse New Timings option in the Slide Show dialog box (View menu).

While you rehearse your pacing, you also can scrutinize your slides' visual and informational impact. Too many words or pictures on a slide can be distracting. If you find yourself using too much text, try breaking one slide into two or three and then increasing the size of the font.

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