Think of a computerized slide show - a presentation - as a foreign-language movie. You want to focus on the actors and the action. The more you can follow by looking at the screen and listening to the sounds and voices, the more you will enjoy that movie. If you have to focus on those subtitles all the time, you'll miss the action.

Good subtitle translators know this. For this reason, they frequently sacrifice accuracy for brevity.

Presentations should be created with the same guidelines in mind. They should have a minimal amount of text, so that the audience can concentrate on the graphics and the speaker. It is very important to minimize distractions in a presentation.

One good way to eliminate text is by presenting simple graphs, charts, or diagrams. If you're an experienced lecturer, then you might want to imagine the material that you would have drawn on a flip chart during your lecture. Flip charts rarely include text - except for some key words. They do have illustrative examples that help the audience remember what you are trying to say.

The presentation program should include those illustrations. You'll be able to make them look much more pretty than in your flip chart, but the idea is the same. Those key words will also be in the presentation - and they might be the only text you will need. Key words remind you of what you want to say, so that you don't have to refer to your notes. However, they don't replace you, as the speaker, and they certainly should not replace what you have to say. The focus of attention in those presentations remains the speaker, not the presentation.

Click here for an article about presentation slide backgrounds. This link will be ready soon.

Click here for the first article in this series about presentation graphics.

Click here for an article about colors. This link will be ready soon.