For what purposes and applications is a PowerPoint presentation with slides suitable? You will learn this in this step.

PowerPoint presentations are both a scientific blessing and a curse: they accompany almost every presentation at talks, conferences and lectures, but are often poorly implemented and therefore more of a hindrance. However, well-designed presentation slides can effectively support a presentation and help to communicate complex issues: they illustrate abstract content, offer a visual structure, direct attention and supplement an otherwise purely oral presentation with multimedia elements. They provide orientation as to where we are in the presentation and reiterate the essential information.

You should use presentation slides precisely as such support. They do not usually have to stand on their own, nor do they have to reproduce the complete content of the presentation in detail. In contrast to a scientific poster or handout, not everything has to be contained on one slide, but the content can be distributed and portioned over several slides. If a slide contains too much information at once, it not only appears overloaded and becomes difficult to read, but it also distracts from the presentation instead of effectively supplementing it.

Accordingly, slides are not suitable for content that goes beyond the presentation. If you put content on the slides that does not occur in the presentation, the audience can either listen to you or read the slides, but not both at the same time. Slides should therefore meaningfully accompany the content of the presentation and not provide additional material that interferes with the presentation. In contrast to posters or handouts, presentation slides are not suitable for the audience to work through the content at their own pace and in any order, but they are bound to the content of the presentation.

A successful PowerPoint presentation supports your talk and allows you to make complex content visual. You will learn in this chapter how to best design presentation slides for this purpose.