How to Deliver a Powerpoint Presentation
No matter where your engineering career takes you, you will need to clearly and concisely present your work to an audience. A poor presentation can make even the most impressive work fall flat.
Goal of this page
The goal of this page is to educate students how to organize information, assemble slides, and deliver a presentation to an audience.
Formulating the Presentation
The purpose of presentation slides is to accentuate and emphasize your talking points. It is primarily a visual aid, and should not distract the audience from the most important thing: what you have to say.
What you want to say: your goal for the presentation
You should be delivering your presentation to accomplish a goal. The goal depends on the situation:
At a conference, the goal is to share your new result and your interpretation of that result.
At a journal club meeting, the goal is to share a method, result, or theory that would advance the work being done in our lab.
At a progress report meeting, the goal is to share and explain your new scientific results, how they fit into your broader project, and what the implications are.
At an interview, the goal is to communicate that you have the skills and experience to run a research program and procure funding.
In any situation, your presentation should state the goal, provide evidence that supports your goal, then restate the goal and the broader implications of the work. My PhD advisor told me to "tell them what you're going to say, then say it, then tell them what you've said".
Only include in your talk information that directly supports your goal.
If your talk feels meandering, remove material. You do not need to include every idea you've ever had in every talk you give.
The goal of your talk is never to show how much work you've done or how smart you are. Do not include data from experiments that do not support your goal, lengthy mathematical derivations, or other content that could be skipped without affecting the narrative of your presentation.
Only after you have a goal and supporting information should you start making slides. Know that the slides are not the presentation, they are part of your presentation. You use them to take the listener by the hand and lead them from one concept to the next. Poorly formatted slides can cause you to lose your audience, so properly formatted slides are necessary but insuffient for a good presentation.
Slide Formatting
Use simple, contrasting colors that draw the eye without being distracting.
Black text on white is a classic for a reason.
More info on color-blind aware color palettes: https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/, http://people.apache.org/~crossley/cud/cud.html
Texture and patterns on the background are often distracting.
Use clean, professional fonts (Times New Roman, Calibri, Arial, Cambria, etc.).
Use minimal text with adequate spacing.
Too much text ends up looking like a block that the audience will try and parse instead of listening to you.
You need not write complete sentences.
A classic guideline is no more than 5 lines of text per slide. Use this as a goal rather than a hard and fast rule.
With adequate practice, a lot of text can be removed in favor of being spoken aloud.
Transitions between slides should be as simple as possible (i.e., no effects).
Transitions within slides (i.e., animations) should be used for pacing and emphasis.
The goal with animations is to direct the audience where on the slide you want them to be looking at a given time. This is particularly useful when discussing a figure or other complicated image to break it into more digestible pieces.
Slide Content
Show, don't tell, the audience what you want them to know
Include pictures and videos whenever possible
The ideal slide has a descriptive title and as few figures as possible.
Multi-element figures may be used if they help the audience understand the content (e.g., show the experimental setup, add a callout to indicate sensors, and then plot the data from the sensors).
If you present multiple elements at once, use animations to introduce it in "stages", with components appearing after subsequent clicks. Alternatively, add callouts that appear and disappear over the portions you want to emphasize.
Showing a complicated figure all at once will likely overwhelm the audience
Videos absolutely should be included in presentations.
If you are presenting your own work, include videos you have recorded.
If you are presenting someone else's published work, go to the journal and look for supplementary material or go to the author's website and look for videos, and cite the published work on the slide.
Ensure your videos will play smoothly within your presentation.
PowerPoint prefers .mp4 and .wmv videos. Try to convert videos into these formats.
Trim your video so it shows the important bit. PowerPoint includes a tool to do this.
Animated .gifs will also play in PowerPoint, which reduces the need for dealing with video formats.
To ensure your presentation does not lose track of the video file, try saving both files in the same folder before inserting the video.
If you are playing the presentation from a cloud folder or flash drive, definitely save all the files in the same folder and bring them with you.
If you find yourself describing an experiment, a machine, or an idea with words, create diagrams or screenshot useful figures from published papers (and then cite them on the slide). Show, don't tell, the audience what you want them to know.
Organizing the presentation
When you are presenting research, you are often following a manuscript-like structure: Title, Introduction, Background, Methods, Results, and Discussion. You want to give the work a narrative, for example, how you got the idea for the project, how you solved the problems therein, what you found, and what it all means. The best presentations are those where the audience leaves thinking they are smart because they understood it all.
If your project has a wide scope, e.g., during a thesis/dissertation proposal, you may wish to deviate from this traditional structure a bit, e.g., by giving each experiment its own methods-results-discussion loop, in series with the others. But even in this case, the basic structure remains.
Introduction
First, the listener needs some context for the content. They need to have some idea what question the study addresses, what other people have done, and why the study took the approach it did. Think about the Introduction as taking the audience from thinking about anything to thinking about your topic of interest. It also gives the audience a broader reason to care about what you have to say.
Example:
Slide with image of a city "Agriculture is critical for our way of life. Planting and tending to crops has directly supported the establishment of permanent settlements, cities, and civilization around the world."
Slide with images of mechanical reapers and fertilizers "Mechanization of agriculture in the 19th century led to a revolutionary boom in food output, leading to rapid population growth. The Green Revolution in the mid-20th century multiplied this growth further. While these changes have been a blessing, they have also been a curse; if these systems fail, billions of people will starve. This motivates the continued advancement of agricultural technology to increase humanity's food security."
Slide with image of tractor driving through a crop field "One way to increase food security is to make better use of land for farming. Currently, crops are planted in long rows, with wide gaps for tractors to drive along. These gaps are wasted space in that they cannot be used to grow food. Over time, these gaps become compacted into ruts by heave equipment, further decreasing arability. These ruts also draw water away from crops, where it evaporates in the sun, wasting precious irrigation. Furthermore, these types of fields can only be grown on flat terrain, because farm equipment is top-heavy, to ensure it can drive over top of crops. If we rethink farm equipment, we could rethink the farm itself, enabling denser planting of crops and farming on hillsides, which are commonplace in West Virginia."
Slide with computer rendering of a proposed robot in a crop field "This presentation will discuss the application of large legged robots to the future of agriculture. Such robots eliminate the need for ruts between rows of crops, effectively doubling arable land overnight. These robots do not compact the soil in the same way, because they can step in a different area each time they pass over a row of crops. Furthermore, because they can adjust their posture as they walk, they can traverse hillsides easily to till and weed mountainsides in a way that was previously impossible."
This introduction is not thorough or academic, but it creates a narrative that hooks the audience and makes them care about the subsequent research. You must not assume your audience is present because they want to hear about the project, for its own sake. You must instead motivate the presentation.
Also note that the written descriptions above are not meant to be read like a script. They are what I would say if I were delivering the presentation.
Outline
Your talk may be facilitated by giving the listener a roadmap of where you’re going before you jump into the details by listing an Outline of your presentation. This way, the audience are not surprised by anything they will see later on. Typically, this will be a simple, bulleted list of the presentation sections. However, if your talk follows a traditional structure, or if you find that an outline breaks the flow of your presentation, you may omit it.
Background
You must give the listener Background about what other studies have been conducted in this area, the narrative thread that ties them all together, and what motivated the study you are presenting.
This requires that you cite other studies and include figures from those, too.
Shoot for 2-5 slides with one study on each slide. If you cannot explain the strengths and limitations of the study you are citing, read and study it until you can. Or ask your labmates or Nick. You should not simply be listing what has been done previously; you should contextualize the information for the audience.
Methods
Your presentation must describe the Methods of the study. Photos, figures, and videos are necessary.
If you are presenting a particular study because of one specific method they use, provide as many figures, photos, and videos as you can. Ensure that you understand the method thoroughly enough to explain it to the group.
Results
After the methods, your presentation must describe the Results of the study. Again, photos, figures, and videos are necessary.
If a particular result does not make sense to you, that's ok; note that in your slides. If you state that something seemed wrong or perplexing, then the audience can follow; if you become confused and stumble over the results in the moment, the audience becomes confused, too.
Discussion
Your presentation should address the Discussion of the study. In particular,
Summarize the study and the takeaway message.
Explain the impact of this study, that is, what questions in the literature it addresses and what future studies may result.
Explain the limitations of this study, that is, what questions could not be addressed because of the experimental design, underlying assumptions, or other issues.
This does not mean waxing at length about every shortcoming you see! If you're presenting your own work, doing so hurts your authority as the presenter and hurts your work's impact. If it's somebody else's work, you may offend them by being too negative. This can seriously hurt your career, because these may be the people who review your next paper or grant proposal.
Finally, during lab meetings, please add some questions for discussion. The goal of the lab meeting presentation is to stimulate conversation.
Connect the study to the work being done in our lab.
Suggest methods, tools, or techniques that our lab could use or improve upon.
Question the authors' interpretations of their results.
Delivering the presentation
The text of the presentation is not the presentation. The text on the slide should only serve to give the audience a skeleton of what you will be saying. It is an organizational tool and a visual aide, not content to be delivered verbatim.
Here are some do's and don'ts for delivering a talk:
Practice, practice, practice
If you have not rehearsed your slides aloud two or three times, you are not prepared for your talk. The only way to uncover problems with the flow or level of detail of the presentation are only clear once you deliver them out loud.
This time also allows you to ensure that all of your transitions, animations, and videos are working as intended.
Do not read directly from your slides
If you are directly reading the slides, there is little difference between you presenting and the audience reading your slide deck on their own time. It is not a productive use of anyone's time, and suggests to the audience that you are unprepared.
If you find yourself reading from your slides, you may try removing detail from the slides or spend time considering how you want to expand on the slides' content. You can also include more detailed text in the notes on each slide for your view only.
Diversity of word choice is interesting and keeps the audience engaged. For example, if a bulletpoint on your slide reads "Calculate inertia and damping of the motor", you could say "Next, I needed to experimentally determine the mechanical properties of the actuator". Both say the same thing, but now the words you speak have added something new to the presentation.
Stand confidently and deliver the information calmly.
Talk to the room, not to your lectern. Glancing at your notes/slides is fine, but ensure that the majority of the time you are looking at the audience.
Try to keep tabs on the speed at which you are speaking, and slow down whenever possible.
If you find yourself using lots of filler words like, "um" or, "uh" as you speak, slow down and take a breath. Those are generally times when your brain is trying to catch up.
Take pauses for breath. This allows everyone a moment to consider the content before continuing. Between slides is the ideal moment for this.
Avoid/minimize nervous ticks like playing with your hair, wringing your hands, biting your nails, etc. If you do them too often, it will distract from the presentation.
The more thoroughly you understand the work and the more you have rehearsed your presentation, the calmer and more confident you will feel.
Practice verbal transitions between slides
This greatly helps flow the presentation together and keep everyone engaged and on the same page
For example: "So with this slide we established X. Now we will further explore Y and Z on the next few slides."
Do not apologize for yourself or for your work
Though it might feel polite to apologize for technical difficulties or other issues, it really just hurts your appearance as a confident authority figure on your topic.
You must stay within the time limit provided
Going over time by more than 5 minutes (or less for short talks) is disrespectful to your audience and the organization that has allowed you to speak. Nobody likes when a talk goes long.
When you rehearse your talk, pay attention to the clock! PowerPoint automatically times you in the "presenter mode" window. Use this tool!
If you are consistently over time after several practice runs, you must cut something to fit the time. This content does not have to just be deleted! Put it at the end of the presentation in a "Supplemental Slides" section. That way if someone has a question about that information, you can pull up the slide and look like a pro.
Whenever you address a question, take a moment to stroke your metaphorical beard and formulate a meaningful answer.
It is ok for you to say, "I don't know." However, that should never be the end of your remark. There are ways to state you don't know something that make you look confident and thoughtful, and even turn the question around to the asker. Some examples are:
"Hmm, I hadn't thought about that. That's a good suggestion. Do you have any recommendations for literature I could read to learn more about that?"
"That isn't something we had considered in the present work, but we will keep it in mind for future studies."
This helps you obtain new resources to learn from and discourages bad-faith questions from the audience.
Never apologize for not knowing something.
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