google slides presentation

google slides presentation

Creating an Engaging Google Slides Presentation

1. Introduction

In today’s workplace, presentation skills are always a necessity to get your point across to teams, whether it be to present new ideas or to present on what direction of a project a team is headed. Google Slides is becoming a powerful presentation tool, part of the G Suite offered by Google Cloud. Google Slides Presentation is an extremely easy platform to use and it can help you create and edit a presentation easily and collaborate with a team. It’s essential nowadays for companies to be just as effective when delivering content in a meeting room, online, or during video calls. Google Slides offers a more accomplished feeling than just showing text. From its creative themes, transitions, embedding diagrams, photos, or YouTube clips, it can really captivate an audience of any level. This guide will share some tricks and concepts that will help you get your point across using Google Slides and captivate an audience. Highly crucial to creating a good presentation is ensuring it is clear and easily readable by the audience. This guide will include various beginner to advanced level editing options in Google Slides. It will also cover concepts linked with the execution of presenting a slide show or providing information to any level of audience. No matter the kind of presentation, whether it be directed towards an educational lesson or a business proposal, it’s greatly important to be prepared. The better the preparation, the more the presenter will be able to captivate the audience. This guide covers some tricks and systems for preparing for a Google Slides presentation.

2. Designing an Eye-Catching Title Slide

Title slides are often overlooked as a starting point when planning presentations. Transitions, animations, and design are primary factors to focus on when creating an engaging slide. Each of these factors plays a crucial part in making sure your presentation comes across as professional. During this tutorial, we are going to explore using custom animation to create a title slide for your presentation. This method is often overlooked due to the fact that it’s much easier to stick with the standard layout. Using custom animation gives you the freedom to do whatever you want with your title slide. Although the term “custom animation” may sound a bit daunting, you’ll find that it is actually quite simple. Another great advantage to this method is the fact that your animation can be saved and used for future title slides. This will save you lots of time in the long run.

3. Organizing Content Effectively

Always do your organizing before you express your thoughts in a presentation. This phase is all about featuring what needs to be featured and hiding what doesn’t need to be seen. There is often a lot of content that goes into a presentation, some of which isn’t important to explain in the slides themselves. Extra facts that the viewers might ask about or information that adds to your delivery can be hidden in the Speaker Notes. This will keep your presentation looking sleek and engaging without overcrowding the slides. Always keep slide titles and topics broad and to the point to avoid confusion about a slide’s purpose. Advertisements usually try to make everything look as appealing as possible. This is to keep people interested and always wanting more. This same concept should apply to how you order your slides. Think of it as storyboarding, you want smooth transitions between each slide topic and you want the viewer to follow without getting lost or bored. This may not always be the case with certain presentations, but it’s important to consider how engaging your audience is and if they are listening at all times. Always maintaining a suitable level of formality or informality with the content depending on the audience is also important. This ensures your content is mainly comprehensible throughout while avoiding confusion with a change in style. Finally, if you are in a group, color coding slides to the creator can better help avoiding mix-ups with content and who is talking about what.

4. Enhancing Visual Appeal with Graphics and Media

Avoid Comic Sans. A much loved and much hated font, it is not really suitable for the text in a presentation. Any message you present is more credible in a different font. Comic Sans is a very informal font – sometimes too informal. Depending on your audience it may be completely unsuitable.

The clip art available in most software application packages is often overused. Try to avoid clip art or at least edit it in an image editing application to make it less recognizable. This is a good opportunity to get your audience to associate the new image with your presentation or topic. If your image is a diagram, it would likely be more effective for you to create it yourself or edit an existing one so as to represent the exact data you wish to present.

When creating or editing graphics to be used in a multimedia presentation, remember the following guidelines.

In earlier section, we discussed on how colors are crucial in presentation design and compliment the ‘blank canvas’ concept. This section will discuss on graphics, sound and video. These 3 media are powerful tools to make an impact and make a multimedia presentation into a dynamic one. However, these media can also ruin a presentation if overused, inappropriately used or used to compensate for a poor presentation.

5. Delivering a Powerful Presentation

If you do have to present your slides live, it’s certainly worth thinking about deviating from the slides now and then. If you export your presentation as an HTML file, you can open it in your browser and access it like a normal webpage while still being able to play videos and access external hyperlinks. Alternatively, you can simply press the ‘B’ key while presenting a slideshow to black out the screen, allowing you to talk about something not on the slides.

Powerpoint presentations are unfortunately reminiscent of school and university lectures, and as soon as you load up your slides, you will largely lose your audience. If your situation allows it, it might be worth considering not using Google Slides to present your idea. If your presentation is aimed more at a public audience as opposed to a client, you may prefer to take screenshots of your slides in Slides and create a video on YouTube. Here you can talk over your slides and still manage to keep your audience engaged. YouTube is well-marketed, and people are aware that they can pause, rewind, and fast-forward videos, so they may find they have more control over the presentation.

A great presentation in Google Slides can often make or break you. Your slides can be fantastic while you are creating them, but eventually you will have to present them. With that in mind, it’s important to ensure your presentation is engaging and well presented.