Powerpoint tips

No utilizo Powerpoint muy seguido. Algunos tips robados de algún lado:

A good powerpoint presentation is better than a beamer presentation, but a beamer presentation is better than a bad powerpoint presentation...Keynote is probably the best presentation tool but not too common in academics.

You're probably best off just creating your own template. You can spend 6 hours looking at templates and compromising on one you don't quite like, or you can spend 3-4 hours designing one you really think works well for the information you wish to convey. Once designed, you would ideally never need to edit the slide layout or font sizing for standard slides.

- Use one or two mellow colors with only basic shapes/lines to highlight the sections of the slide itself (most templates, especially anything with an image in the background, are far too noisy)
- Leave lots of room for the body of the slide
- Keep your titles 1 line long in a 26-34 pt fontsize, keep the font & size constant for all slides. This restriction makes writing slides harder but makes for a better presentation.
- For text slides, keep the first two indentation levels of the body of the slide the same size on every slide. If you have to go to a third indentation level, that can be one size (2-4pt) smaller.
- For empirical slides, you may wish to crate a special template page with a footnote area for describing the tables in the slides. This will standardize presentation and ease the transition between slides.

When creating tables, make them in Excel first so they look really clean.
- Sub-tip on this: Fill the cells with a white background and draw your own borders for the table.
- Sub-tip two: It's often easier to print your Excel table to a .pdf document and copy/paste the table in from the .pdf.
- Sub-tip three: Don't copy tables from your paper, they are not formatted for slide presentation and look stupid when they don't fit on the page properly.

White Space is your friend. It's amazing how well white space can separate two sections. My exception to standardization is that I often add little bits of white space between major points on the slide by including a blank line in 4-8 point font size. This helps fill out the slide more uniformly and suits my aesthetic sense.

Custom animations muck up the presentation of any math, instead set up the animation manually by splitting the slide into multiple slides and using the slide transition rule to do the animation. This process is tricky (b/c your deck includes the same text on multiple slides) and should be the last thing you do before a presentation to maintain consistency. On the upside, it provides a good way to walk through your talk the night before the presentation and is something you need to do to create a pdf version of your presentation (which is what you should be talking from, anyway).

Anonymous (www.econjobmarket.org)