Chart hygiene

Here are some slide make over suggestions for messy PowerPoint presentations that do not require any changes to content. They fix basic graphical hygiene:

• Make sure all slides use the same slide master template: titles, page numbers, logos (if you want to use them), all sit in the same place
• Find/replace fonts: make sure all fonts in a deck are the same
• Create a frame of guides in the master slide and make sure all slide content fits inside the frame on each slide
• Apply a consistent color scheme to all the slides
• Eliminate italics
• Make sure that characters in the same box, paragraph have the same font size (huge differences are OK, but very small size differences do not look good)
• Un-stretch photos with the wrong aspect ratio
• Align and distribute slide elements where ever you can
• Play with line breaks and font size to avoid orphan words on a second line
• Remove multiple, overlapping "confidential" labels and page numbers from pages
• Draw a shape, set proper colors and fonts, and make it the default shape, delete the shape, repeat for a text box and a line

That was presentation make-over V0.1, the content might be bad, the layouts could be poor, but it will look organized.

If you have been working in my presentation app SlideMagic, you will have noticed that is almost impossible to make the mistakes I am correcting in the above.