The Ten Commandments of PowerPoint

1. Thou shalt not inflict pain upon thy viewers’ eyes: use a font color which contrasts nicely (consult a color wheel) with your background, avoid busy backgrounds, and don’t use black type on a white background
2. Thou shalt not create bullet points containing more than 4 words
3. Thou shalt not use type smaller than 18 point
4. Thou shalt not mix more than 3 fonts in a presentation
5. Thou shalt not have more than 15 words on a slide
6. Thou shalt not read your slides to your audience ( ! )
7. Thou shalt use pictures, illustrations, and graphs to help convey your message
8. Thou shalt tell stories to illustrate and bring your presentation to life
9. Thou shalt sit in the last row of the presentation room and view your slides, and smite anything which is illegible (if you’ve followed #’s 1-5, this shouldn’t be necessary!)
10. Thou shalt, above all, keep it simple

If you religiously (sorry, I couldn’t resist) follow these 10 guidelines, you’ll be on your way to the proper use of PowerPoint and presentations which are more visually appealing. See below for links to two related posts.