Have you ever attended a presentation at work? I’d say the chances are pretty high since there are over a million presentations given every day in corporate America.

What can be done to help make your presentation stand out among the all the rest? If you’ve decided to go ‘digital’, you’ve made a good start. But it’s not enough just to create a PowerPoint presentation on a laptop computer. It’s too easy to create a high-tech — yet boring — laptop presentation.

In the article titled PowerPoint Presentations - Before You Begin, I said you should have two basic goals in your digital communication:

1. Get the audience’s attention.
2. And then keep their attention.

I’d like to provide several suggestions for making your PowerPoint presentation more effective in communicating your intended message.

Why pick Microsoft PowerPoint software in the first place? It’s arguably the best tool for creating a digital presentation. At least that’s what 85% of the presentation marketplace thinks. I particularly like it’s cross-platform capabilities: I can create on a Macintosh system and present on a Windows system.

Once you’ve decided on PowerPoint, you’ve got to consider your basic presentation design. The most common problem I see is making the design too complicated. You need to envision the person who will be giving the presentation in the actual environment. For example, you can spend lots of time thinking about whether the background detail should be black, blue or green — only to discover that they all look like the same color once the image is projected on a screen in a well-lit meeting room. Start with a simple, high-contrast design.

After you decide on a basic design, you’ll create the actual slide content. Each slide should attempt to communicate a single message — without using too many words. Think of an outdoor billboard rather than a printed brochure.

If you’re just learning PowerPoint, you may still be thinking only in terms of print medium. If you do, you’re may miss some of the differences in a purely digital presentation. For example:

Kerned Type. Unfortunately, you can’t kern type in PowerPoint. I’m not sure why, but Microsoft has never provided much in the way of typographic controls in their software.

Smooth Type. Even though you can’t kern your type, you can still make it look smooth on the screen. Make sure you have software installed to anti-alias your fonts — like Adobe Type Manager (ATM). Anti-aliasing is a technique that makes curved and slanted character shapes appear smoother on the screen by inserting pixels of intermediate shades of color along the character edges.

Leading. PowerPoint supports adjustments in leading. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t call it leading — it’s called ‘Line Spacing’ just to confuse you.

PowerPoint Tip:

To automatically start a QuickTime movie on a PowerPoint slide, click on the inserted movie and pick 'Custom Animation' from the Slide Show menu. Click on the 'Timing' tab and then Animate automatically after zero seconds. Your digital movie will start as soon as the slide is displayed.

Interactivity. You don’t have to think of your presentation only as a sequential slide show. PowerPoint gives you tools to jump from one slide to any other slide. For example, you might use this technique to create a starting menu of options that allows the presenter to pick which parts of the presentation to view. Don’t force every viewer to watch slides 1-24 if they are only interested in slides 25-30.

Multimedia. You may want to consider including a digital video clips to entertain or explain. For example, if you want to teach someone how to chop an onion, it would be easier to demonstrate the process in a short QuickTime video clip rather than just describe the technique in words.

Finally, getting and keeping your audience’s attention is always a challenge. If you have any suggestions from your own experience, please e-mail them to me at mbeato@beato.com.

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