When you are planning a web conference, and e-learning session or a sales presentation, you should always use a PowerPoint presentation, or other type of presentation, in order to give visual impact to what you are saying. Remember, even with a webcam and voice, you will always increase the impact of your message with an image, a display of what you are communicating or a simple bullet list of the topics treated. Here is how you can create a good presentation.

1. A few basic guides:

• The presentation should follow a natural sequence and follow an idea. Think about it as a conversation.
• Use only one idea per slide.
• The first slide should have the title of your presentation, as well as your name.
• The second slide should be a clear and simple introduction that will describe what you will present.
• Use a conclusion slide at the end to communicate what you want people to remember.
• Have periodic outline slides to guide the conversation to highlight where you are during the presentation.
  

2. How to ensure quality:

• Practice, Practice, Practice. The more you rehearse, the better it will be.
• Your speech should complement the information on the slides. Don’t just read.
• Be enthusiastic.
• Manage different tones: explain, ask rhetorical questions, act surprised, etc.
• Humor is very useful and it can warm up the atmosphere, prepare a couple of puns and jokes -but if you're not good with jokes, better avoid them altogether. Improvising humor is very dangerous, as it takes a lot of tact.
• Pause or slow down to give people time to think about the important facts.
• Plan and time your presentation and don’t go over the time.
• During the question period, listen to the questions very carefully. A common mistake is to not answer the actual question asked.

3. Deliver the content:

• Use short titles on your slides.
• Use uniform capitalization rules.
• Keep font and paragraph styles consistent through the presentation
• Put very little text on a slide
• Do not put useless graphics on each slide: logos, grids, affiliations, etc.
• Don't use small fonts.

IMPORTANT: Spell-check. A spelling mistake is an attention magnet.

4. Slide design

• Prefer an image to text to illustrate your message.
• Do not put in the figures with too many details that you will not explain.
• Color-code your information, but don't use too many different colors, and use high-contrast colors.
• A few real photos related to your subject can also create impact.
• Real photos are much more effective during the core of the presentation than during the introduction.
• Sometimes a matte pastel background looks much better than a white one.
• Use strong colors for important elements, and pastel colors for the unimportant elements.

5. The use of graphs

• Don't put useless information in result graphs
• Label very clearly the axes of the graphs. Explain the un-obvious ones.
• Use large fonts for labels; the default fonts in Excel are too small.
• Discuss the results numbers in detail