If you find yourself easily confused and distracted while making a presentation or have an unhealthy workflow that compromises creativity, the following are some of the habits that might be stopping you from making quick PowerPoint presentations that are impactful and aesthetically pleasing. 

Pasting Graphs and Texts as Images

As a presentation designer, it’s my responsibility to inform you that pasting text and graphs as images is the worst thing you can do for your presentation. It makes it impossible to edit the content that you have pasted. While it seems like something quick and easy, editing content will be tedious and will require that you design a new slide entirely later down the line. Pasting an image causes lossy compression of the file and the image gets blurry and difficult to read. If that’s not enough, formats as such are less appealing and engaging to viewers.

Improper Text Sizes

Apart from using mixed text sizes, using texts that are too large is also a problem for your PowerPoint design. To begin with, all text on your PowerPoint presentation should follow size uniformity. This means that general text size and style should remain consistent across all slides. This brings us to the question, what size to use? There is a very thin line between balanced text size and sizes that are too large. Consider using 16pt as the ideal text size. Anything below that will be hard to read. Even when using bigger fonts, be aware that there’s sufficient whitespace for clarity and to reduce clutter.

Adjusting or Deleting Placeholders

A characteristic of a well-constructed and balanced PowerPoint template is that all placeholders are positioned in a manner that looks consistent and professional. I must advise you not to move these placeholders, as it would affect the overall structure and PowerPoint design.

Deleting Animations

While the popular belief is that removing animations makes a presentation easier to present, I consider animations as a controlling factor to the story. It allows you to rightly guide your audience into the narrative and there is an element of surprise that keeps viewers engaged. A simple tip that will help you in presenting is to practice your deck with animations instead of without them. This helps you understand the flow and timing of each content piece. But, hefty transitions or cheesy transitions should be avoided, as it looks unprofessional. You can always replace them with a simple fade.

Using a Normal View to Present

The worst thing that you can do to a presentation is to present it in normal mode instead of slideshow mode. The issue with the normal mode is that slides are too small to read, there is too much happening on the screen and the viewers get distracted. Using a slideshow helps to isolate the slides from everything else so that both the presenter and viewer can be focused on the presentation

There are a number of other skills which can help you to design great presentations. You can learn them by visiting my blog or you can get your presentation made by contacting me through

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