The best PowerPoint Presentations grab your attention from the get-go, hold your engagement, and leave you feeling that you’ve learned something. A sign that you’ve just delivered a great presentation is if you hear members of your audience chatting about what you’ve just said as they leave the room. But how do you get to that point? Strong visuals, great graphics, and even animation or video can help (especially if you employ great presentation designers), but the very best presentations can pack a punch without a single graphic. The secret is the structure.
Five top tips for organising a presentation structure
1. Work out what’s most important first.
Lots of presentation structure advice will tell you to write a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes they’ll call it an introduction, main section and conclusion. But actually this approach carries the greatest risk of putting your audience to sleep. A better structure will grab their attention with the most important point at the beginning. The likelihood then is that they will want to hear you out. But even if they do drift off somewhere in the middle, you will have already got the most important message across.
So your first step is to work out what you main message is. You can do this by listing every point you want to say, an outline of everything you want your audience to know. From this list pick the most important point. This might be the objective of the presentation or it might be a headline grabbing fact.
Your business wants to double its customer base in the next ten years. This presentation will show you how. Every business in our segment has experienced sluggish growth, or even insolvency over the past ten years. How will we buck that trend?
2. List what you want to say and put it in a logical order.
Once you have your most important point highlighted, you can put the other things you want to say in a logical order. This is important because our brains love order. If your presentation flits about in terms of its messaging, it might be hard to follow. You may find that you have several things to say on specific subjects. Put these together in sections or chapters as this will help support comprehension.
3. Think about a table of contents.
A list of contents is a great way to manage expectations and help the audience understand your messaging. But don’t just slap one on your presentation without considering your audience first.
Do use a table of contents if your PowerPoint is designed to be read. For example, if your PowerPoint Presentation is shared remotely with your audience, where they have control over the speed and order that they access slides, a contents page will help them navigate it.
Do use a table of contents if your presentation is longer than about 20 minutes and contains more than 20 slides. A table of contents near the beginning of the presentation will help you manage expectations. This is particularly helpful if your presentation has breaks, because you can point out that you will focus on area A for a set period of time, after which there will coffee before you focus on area B.
- Business failures among our competition
- Reasons for failures
- Where we can make a difference
- Five steps for success
- How we will start
Don’t use a table of contents on shorter presentations delivered in person. A logical structure, with a clear headline on each page will be enough. Add in a list of contents to a presentation less than ten pages in total and it could come across as repetitive. This will at best risk being boring and at worst could be seen as patronising.
4. Think about your conclusion.
Notice we said conclusion, not summary. The idea is that your audience understands that the presentation is coming to an end, it is concluding. It’s your chance to emphasise the most important takeaway. This might be a big reveal. It might be a call to action. Or it might be a repetition of your first headline grabbing fact.
This is not to say that a summary is bad. In fact, it might be vital, especially for a big presentation that imparts a lot of information. But imagine a presentation that says: we are going to learn this today, then lists that in a contents list, then presents the learning, then summarises the learning again. In effect, this presentation says the same thing four times over. So have a think about what would work best as an ending for your presentation. Would it help your audience to have a quick recap, or would it be more impactful to end with an inspirational call to action?
5. Think about the clock.
Many of us will be given a length of time for our presentations. Whether this is a 15- minute slot among other presentations, a standalone 30 minute session or a whole day training doesn’t matter, the trick is to fit what you need to say into the time you have been given to say it.
A good guide is to allow a minute or so per slide. So if you have a 20-minute slot, aim to have 20-25 slides. If you have far more to say than can be accommodated by that length of time or that number of slides, go back to your list and pick the top 20 to 25 most important points to share. Or pick one chapter for this presentation and negotiate extra slots for your remaining chapters.
How to build a PowerPoint Presentation
Once you know what you want to say, have put it into a logical order and have worked out how many slides you will need, you can start building the presentation. It’s always a good idea to structure a PowerPoint presentation while in the editing mode. To do this efficiently, go to the ‘View’ tab and select ‘Outline View’. It will show you the title and main text section for each slide, and let you edit the text, while also providing an overview of the presentation’s content.
TIP: You can also use the Outline View to select a section of bullet text and promote it to slide titles, and vice versa. To do this, right-click on a relevant piece of text or title and select ‘Promote’ or ‘Demote’.
How to arrange multiple slides into sections
If you are developing a large PowerPoint presentation, it’s best to organise it by clubbing multiple slides together into sections that can be easily collapsed and expanded, whenever required.
- To create a new section, go to the list of slides, and right-click on the slide from where you want a new section to begin.
From the drop-down menu, select ‘Add Section’ and assign a name to the section.
- To re-order the sections, right-click on the section name and click ‘Move Section Up’ or ‘Move Section Down’.
- To expand or collapse a section, click on the icons for the same on the left of the section name.
TIP: You can also access these settings by going to the under the ‘View’ tab and choosing Slide Sorter.
How to create a well-organised table of contents
- Go to the title slide or a blank slide and insert the table of contents.
- Switch to ‘Outline View’, right-click on the outline pane, and click ‘Collapse’. Then, click ‘Collapse All’ to display only the titles.
- Select all the slide titles, copy them, and paste them on the desired slide.
- Select the title of the first slide and right-click on it. Then, click on ‘Link’.
- In the window that opens next, select ‘Place in This Document’ (from the left-hand menu), select the corresponding slide for the selected title, and click OK.
Repeat this procedure for the remaining titles and link them to the corresponding slides.
How to end your PowerPoint presentation
You’ve delivered a knock-out presentation. You held the room in your hand as they listened
attentively to every word. The slides flowed in a cohesive way. And now you have reached the end. What should your last slide look like?
Your last slide should be determined by the content and tone of your presentation. If it is important for your audience to remember who you are and have a way of contacting you in the future, your last slide should show your name, position and contact details. This could be an email address or phone number, or you could use a QR code that gives your audience the opportunity to access and save your contact details with a single click.
If you want to encourage debate or give your audience the opportunity to ask questions at the end of your presentation, you can indicate that it is now time to do so with a slide that simply says: Any questions?
If you want your audience to remember a key fact above all others, end your presentation with this fact. This should be a repetition of earlier in your presentation – ideally the first fact you mentioned. Its inclusion again at the end is an invitation for your audience to remember what is most important.
How to write and present PowerPoint slides
So, you’ve worked out what you want to say, you’ve put this into order and nailed the opening and closing slides. But what should you put on the main body of the presentation and what is the best way to present the slides? (Hint: don’t read out the slides themselves).
We’ve put together all you need to know about writing the presentation and presenting the slides in our blogs, Tips for Writing a Presentation Script, Six Essential Skills for Pitching Success, and How to Avoid Using Filler Words in Your Presentations.
These are top tips on how to write your own presentation. But you can also engage a professional copywriter to take your information and make it sing (in the way you want it to, as per your brief and brand guidelines). And remember our most amazing actors and presenters learned their craft – with the majority learning how to hold a room at stage school. Public speaking is a skill that you can learn too, which is why we offer presentation coaching.
Get in touch to find out how our team of writers and experts on public speaking could help you create and deliver high quality, professional presentations.
