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Tips For Computer Projected Presentations

Font Size
Here is the most important tip of all.....font size.....make it BIG!!!! Your text can not be too large! For projected presentations, a good rule of thumb is to stand about 5 feet from your computer monitor. If your presentation is not easily read, your font size is too small. Make an extra slide if you have to. It doesn't cost anything. The quickest way to lose an audience is to make them strain to hear or to see a presentation. The size of this text is 14 points. A good starting point would be 35 points or larger for a title and 25 points or larger for text. Remember, your text can not be too large!

Graphs and Charts
Use a thick brightly colored line for your graphs and charts. Use no more than three lines in a graph or chart. More than three lines will result in using colors that do not contrast and instead, run together. Red, blue and yellow are excellent color choices for lines on a graph.

Graphs and Charts
Some graphs and charts will have too much information for them to be easily read on a large screen. If they contain important information that your audience needs to know, you might consider providing them with a hardcopy or handout.

Small or large audience?
A presentation that you showed to six people sitting around a table in a small office is not necessarily going to make a good transition to large screen projection. Go back and edit. Enlarge what needs to be enlarged, delete what needs to be deleted and update what needs to be updated.

Slides are free!
Use as many as you need to create an easy to read and easy to understand presentation.

Font color
Use contrasting colors for background and text. That green background and blue text may look pretty on your computer monitor but it will not make a good transition to large screen projection. It will be difficult to read and you will lose your audience.

Simple fonts
Stay away from fancy scrolled and scripted fonts. Today's video projectors are good, but still have limitations. You will be better served using fonts that are blocked. Like arial or a font similar to the one used on this page.

Italicize only for emphasis
This goes back to avoiding fancy fonts. They are too hard to read on the large screen. However, italicizing a word, phrase, or a quote is not going to slow your audience down that much. Just use it sparingly. Also, some fonts make the transition to large screen better than others. Try different fonts.

Bullet or outline only your high points
Don't put your entire speech on your presentation slides. An entire speech on presentation slides is not only boring, (you know what the presenter is getting ready to say), it is hard to read.

Video playback
When giving a computer presentation, don't use your computer as a video playback deck. It is growing popular to insert an AVI, MPG, or video clip into presentations. What you usually end up with is a choppy piece of footage the size of a postage stamp that is not in sync with the audio. If your video is important enough to be a part of your presentation, use the proper playback medium. (Beta, VHS, Mini DV, etc.)

As stated at the top of this page, these tips are basics. Each presentation is different. Requirements will be different for an audience of 100 as opposed to an audience of 1000.

Feel free to call us with questions regarding your particular presentation. We will be happy to assist you. If you have any presentation tips you would like to pass along, email them to us and we will include them in our next update!