PowerPoint Online

Storyboarding Your Online Presentation

Creating an online PowerPoint presentation on a topic that has a lot of information can be a daunting task. If your presentation is not clear, concise, and sequential in the way the information is presented, your audience will quickly lose focus and attention. A good online PowerPoint presentation has a clear introduction, quality content, and a strong conclusion that reiterates the points made throughout the presentation.

Starting your presentation and putting down your ideas in a train-of-thought fashion, will likely create a disorganized mess that will take a while to order into a good, comprehensible presentation. Instead of starting directly with your slides, try “storyboarding” your introduction, main points, and conclusion on paper so that you have a clear outline to follow when you begin creating your online PowerPoint presentation in PowerPoint. Storyboarding is used in movie making to outline and order the scenes to make a clear and enjoyable movie. Likewise, storyboarding your PowerPoint first, will help you think structurally about your presentation.

For critical presentations, I typically use a large white paper and pencil and actually sketch out my ideas for not only content, but design, slide order and images and effects that I might use. During the storyboarding process I am able to see the entire presentation from a bird’s eye view and can make drastic changes that might take a while to edit if I had already created the actual slides. This process helps me create a presentation with content that naturally flows into the next slide and makes for a cohesive presentation that will keep my audience interested and focused.