A few tips for creating professional visual presentations

Microsoft Small Business - GUEST BLOG: 5 Tips on Creating Effective Visual Presentations Like a Pro

5 Tips on Creating Effective Visual Presentations Like a Pro

Here is a constant predicament for presenters - How can a topic be effectively discussed to an audience in such a way that they will be interested in learning more about the issue and actually be drawn to understand and remember what has been presented to them? Despite your best intentions, incorporating your entire monologue into numerous slides filled with bullet points does not help in increasing the audience’s interest and engagement in the presentation. Adding bar graphs and pie charts do not help as well. Understanding human nature points to one solution – visuals.

Communicating with pictures makes it easier for people to remember things that have been discussed with them visually. Studies done by Psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University have shown that people remember 80% of what they see and do, while only 10% is retained from what they hear and 20% from what they read. According to Psychologist Albert Mehrabian, an audience during a presentation absorbs 55% of the information presented through visuals, and only 38% of verbal and 7% of text.

Ideally, hiring a designer would be the best solution for having a highly engaging and effective presentation. A presentation created by a professional designer will guarantee a polished presentation that will help you, as a presenter, to capture the attention of your audience and successfully communicate your message. However, hiring a pro to do this may be too expensive for small businesses so here are some tips for achieving a visually engaging presentation without the additional costs.

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As someone who would like to become a Microsoft MVP one day, and knows that I need to get out from behind the keyboard and in front of people, presenting and sharing, to get there, these kinds of tips are those that I like to gather.

We all hate crappy presentations, so anything we can do to make them better is a good thing, right? Maybe just a few tweaks will take take your crap-tastic presentation to fantastic? (Well, we can always hope ;)