1. Don’t rely on your slides to be your pitch
People buy from people. Your slides should help you get your message across but they shouldn’t replace you as a presenter.

2. Plan carefully
Just as you would plan a report or a marketing activity work out not just what you want to say but most importantly what your audience are interested in hearing.

3. Use the master slide
Set up the master slide on your presentation first, once you have this it’s much easier to adjust all the slides at once, saving you time if you need to make changes to layout.

4. Don’t read out your slides
Your audience will listen to you so you don’t need to repeat what you are saying to them on your slides.  Put facts, figures, quotes, images and extra information on your slides instead.

5. Great photos
Save as JPEG files and RGB not CMYK colour. Most slides are 24cm x 18cm at 150 dpi so resave your pictures smaller to decrease the file size of your final presentation. Small presentations will run slide transitions faster.

6. Putting it on a CD/DVD
PowerPoint doen’t import audio and video files, it links to them on your hard disk. Keep them in the same place relative to your presentation on your CD to keep everything working.

7. Don’t overfill slides
Packing each slide full of information will overwhelm your audience, split your content over several slides in manageable chunks.

8. Set up time
Get to your venue early to set up your laptop, projector and screen. Testing your slides before your audience arrives will also help calm any nerves.

9. At the end…
Put your name, contact details and website on the final slide so that people can make a note of how to contact you without forming a queue to ask.

10. Use the notes facility in the print options to give your audience a copy of  your slides along with a space they can use to write notes while you are presenting, these can be a valuable aide-memoir for your audience.

What next? Create Design Studio specialise in producing PowerPoint presentation slides call 01962 737989 or email studio@createdesignstudio.co.uk for a free consultation.

The three simplest methods are to save your logo as either a JPEG, GIF or PNG file. GIF and PNG files can be saved without a background colour, but a GIF file is limited to only 256 colours, so logos with gradients or soft shadows may appear with bands rather than smooth gradients or shadows.

JPEG files do not have such a low limit on the number of colours they can contain, hence why they are the format of choice for photographs, but JPEGs cannot be saved with a transparent background.

Recent versions of PowerPoint, 2000 and newer, have a picture editing tool to allow you to set a single colour in an image to be transparent, so you can use this tool to remove the background colour of your logo. However it does not always produce satisfactory results with complex logos and you should also be aware that if the selected colour appears as part of your logo’s design it will be made transparent along with the background.

A little used format is WMF (Windows Meta File), unlike JPEG, GIF and PNG which are raster files (i.e. the files contain information about individual pixels), WMF is a vector file (stores information about objects e.g. circles, squares etc). When it comes to logos the WMF file three big advantages over the other formats:

1. Logos imported into PowerPoint as WMF can be resized without any loss in quality.
2. They have transparent backgrounds.
3. WMF files tend to be smaller than JPEG and PNG files.

Saving your logo as a Windows Meta File (WMF)

You cannot convert a JPEG, GIF or PNG into a WMF file, so you will need to go back to the original source file of your logo, provided that it was created in a package such as Adobe Illustrator or Freehand, you or your designer should be able to resave your logo as a Windows Meta File.

When saving your logo as a Windows Meta File, make sure you use the option to “save text as curves”, this will avoid any problems with non-standard system fonts that were used as part of your logo’s design.

Give it ago, having your logo in PowerPoint as a Windows Meta File (WMF) makes it much easier to use and gives you more flexibility when designing your presentations.