by Leigh Goessl

Created on: February 21, 2010   Last Updated: April 21, 2012

PowerPoint presentations are a great way to augment a speech, lecture or other presentation. If done properly, the visual appeal of slides may help keep an audience captivated and engaged in any type of presentation being given.

The key to a successful PowerPoint presentation is to be able to enhance your talk without distracting the audience. A good PowerPoint presentation needs specific elements to succeed. It also means knowing what kinds of mistakes to avoid.

If you want to make a dynamic PowerPoint presentation it is a good idea to learn how to avoid these mistakes before putting your slides together and showing them to your audience. You want to get it right before they go on display.

Here are a few tips on how to avoid the pitfalls of a PowerPoint presentation.

• Keep a uniform look

One of the biggest pitfalls people fall into when creating a PowerPoint presentation is not keeping a uniform look throughout the slides. While it is fun to mix it up and design different slides, a professional PowerPoint presentation is best presented by keeping it simple.

The design of the individual slides is crucial. It is important to pay close attention to layout, typeface, graphics and choice of words and ensure they all have a uniform look. Since all of these come together to create a slide, if any of these items are too intricate or busy-looking, this will be distracting to the audience and chances are they'll have some difficulty focusing.

Using multiple styles of typeface, font and graphics will come across as looking amateurish, but a nice uniform look will do wonders for the slide-show.

• Poor choice of colors

Readability of slides is an important concern. When designing slides, it is best to avoid using bright and/or other hard to read colors because this is difficult for an audience to read and will come across as annoying, hence the speaker loses the listener's attention.

• Acronyms

Unless it is known for sure an audience is extremely familiar with the topic and well versed in the acronyms in the particular industry or professional circle, it is best to avoid using acronyms. If a presenter must use a particular acronym because it is prevalent in the topic, this should be explained thoroughly in the initial introduction.

• Too much text

Another snag that presenters frequently make in PowerPoint presentations is place too much text jammed into each slide. The point of a slide-show is to enhance a talk, not replace it. Each slide should briefly

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