STEP 1: Deciding on what you Audience wants to learn
This is an important step because it is at this stage that you determine the main point that you want the recipient to carry home. This point should be identifiable and all other information you give in your presentation should support it. If it is an academic presentation, it should be equivalent of your thesis statement. If it is a business project, the main point will be the product or service that you are advocating for. Ensure you prepare for the content to use in your presentation.
STEP 2: Boiling down your Information
Some topics may be quite broad and thus you may have too much information to write about. However, you should try keeping only the information you cannot do without. Cut down large topics into small important bits. People nowadays consider graphs quite boring therefore in cases where there are graphs you could otherwise make a statistic so that your power point presentation stands out from others.
STEP 3: Planning out your Structure
Having boiled down your information to the important bits, you can now plan the structure of your power point presentation. You should not only outline your speech but also your slides. Supposing you are creating an academic presentation, just like an academic paper, it should follow the same structure by first introducing your main point, supporting the point with evidence and then finishing up with a short and concise conclusion. If it is a business power point presentation, the standard presentation structure begins with stating the problem, then you give your solution. You then move on to giving a business model and stating the technology or magic behind it. You then move on to identifying the marketing and sales options that you could employ and point out what the competitors use. Identify the team that you plan on incorporating and then produce a call to action.
STEP 4: Streamlining your Text
Power point slides should help raise the quality of your presentation and to achieve this, you should ensure that your slides do not just restate what you are saying since you should not be reading from your slides during your presentation. Reading from the slides distracts your audience from what you are actually telling them. This in mind, try to keep your text to the minimum and present it in a manner that is easy to read and simplified. You could consider using a bulleted list.
