Thread by @dsquintana

People love hating on PowerPoint presentations. But the problem isn't with PowerPoint, it's with presentation delivery.

Here are a few tips on improving your next PowerPoint presentation [THREAD]

Great presentations tend to include these three elements: They're clearly communicated, contain eye-catching images, and tell a compelling story

1. Great presentations are clearly communicated

Following these eight principles can help your audience retain more information. These principles are outlined in this excellent paper frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

1a. Discriminability

Use clear and large typefaces that can be distinguished from the
background.

Seems like a no-brainer, but people make this mistake ALL THE TIME

1b. Perceptual organisation

Don't let your message get lost in a busy slide

1c. Salience

Guide the audience to the most important elements of your talk - what are the main ideas you want them to walk away with?

1d. Limited capacity

Read each slides out loud. If it takes you longer than 30 seconds, there's too much text and your audience will probably switch off.

1e. Informative change

Don’t mix up your fonts or colours, *unless* you want to indicate change

1f. Appropriate knowledge

It’s better to *slightly* underestimate your audiences’ familiarity with your topic.

1g. Compatibility

TIP: Do a google image search for inspiration (e.g., line chart)

1h. Relevance

Reverse engineer the audience’s goals, and your goals. Consider what the audience wants from your talk, and what do you want from the audience, then prepare your presentation accordingly

2. Images

When it comes to finding great images for your presentation, you'll need high quality images, from a good database, that are also happen to be free.

Unsplash.com fits the bill, with FREE high-quality images, and a good search function

3. Telling a compelling story

You know who tells good stories?

Pixar. They tell great stories

Despite releasing almost 20 films, their stories tend to follow the same formula...

Here's an example from my own work of how you can apply the Pixar story-telling formula to your presentations

As we all know, some experiments don't work. I'm definitely not saying you should gussy up ambiguous results or p-hack your way to a conclusion. But even null results can form a compelling story.

Most research tends to follow a "hype cycle", so identifying where you research lands on this cycle can also help you frame your story. For more on hype cycles in research, check out this paper ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27651096

Now, a few practical considerations....

- Use a 4:3 slide size
- Avoid complex transitions/animations
- Make your Powerpoint in PowerPoint (don't convert from Keynote)

Don’t expect that you’ll have access to ‘presenter view’ for your notes. If you think you will, but then find out you don't, this can REALLY throw you off. Do what you can to not rely on notes.

Finally, share your slides online.

@OSFramework is a great option, that's where I posted the slides for the presentation this thread was based off osf.io/y8xfa/ (PDF and .PPTX).

You can also post a screencast on @YouTube, like I did here