Have you ever been asked to do a powerpoint presentation and not known where to start? And how many of us have experienced the, “oh no, not powerpoint again!?!?!?” when the screen flickers on up front.
Honestly, I think powerpoint is a necessary evil at times, and can be enjoyable, effective and fun. Personal experience led me through a season of regular, if not daily interaction with powerpoint - building, critiquing and participating in presentations using the latest and greatest version from the big M.
Whenever I am asked to do a powerpoint or to give some tips, I always start with the “7 Deadly Sins of PowerPoint” as presented at a Pastors Conference. These tips and various others can be found many places online. Here is a good print version for you to have on hand.
Here are the 7 sins and my take on how to get it right and “encourage your audience to focus on your message and learn more”.
Terri Lackey and Steve Williams
The 7 Sins, condensed
Deadly sin # 1 – Too little contrast
Tim - rule of thumb, stick to colors which you find in good print. Black on white or light blue background. Be creative - but forget that people need to be able to read it and you lose the point 
Deadly sin # 2 – Too many colors
(for text and objects) Tim - the idea here is consistency. If the font changes color on each slide, and the background every other, we all get lost trying to mentally adjust. A good theme might have up to three different colors.
Deadly sin # 3 – Too much text
Tim - I have to leave this point as is - uncondensed. This is the #1 offense in my book. There is very little “power” in a slide with too much text. If you read nothing else - read this one!!
Too much text makes a slide look cluttered and hard to read. “Use the five and 10 rule. Limit each slide to about five lines of text that can be read in about 10 seconds. Six lines are okay, seven if you have to … but when you get beyond that you have too much text.” Williams said if the presentation requires more text, automate the text so it doesn’t come on the screen at the same time. Present part of it on half the slide, giving the viewer time to read it, then put the remainder up on the bottom half of the slide.
Deadly sin # 4 – Text that is too small
Tim - rule of thumb I have found is 20 or 22 point font. 18 point is the smalllest you should ever go.
Williams advised. “If in doubt, make it larger.”
Deadly sin # 5 – Too many bullets
Tim - outlines are great for speakers, and help listeners to a certain extent too. If it is not broken up and the speaker is actually reading the bullets word for word - anticipate snoring! More bullets can = less retention 
Deadly sin # 6 – Too many transition effects
Tim - Transition effects are great. I always use them, they keep the slide to slide display interesting. Use them, but only choose a two or three effects for the whole presentation. maybe the first five slides one effect, the next five another, and so on.
Deadly sin # 7 – Using boring slides
Tim - I have seen some great presentations. Good factors the great ones have: surprize, graphical taste, simplicity. The best presentations I can think of, the presenter never told me he was using “powerpoint”, scarcely looked at the screen, made good eye contact with the audience and was relaxed - even if the powerpoint quit. Now that is something for me to shoot for
This is just a crumb at the edge of the PPT muffin. There are many others to be found, tested and proven wrong. Do you agree with these? What do you think is the most offensive way to do powerpoint? The most effective way?
Tim Griffin