Best Practice for PowerPoint Slides

How to create presentations that are accessible and avoid technical issues in the session.

Best practice for PPT slides

How to create presentations that are accessible and avoid technical issues in the session.

Advice when creating PowerPoint slides for a Session

Use Arial font with a high contrast between text and background colours
Do not extend margins (keep default).
Do not use too much text on a slide (could get cut off). Create new slides instead.
Keep the file name short and use no special characters.
Keep below the single file limit of 60MB (best to keep as small as possible).
Do not include animations (these will not work in Collaborate as the conversion tool flattens the slides).
Do not embed video or audio files (as above these will not work when converted).
Do not include high-resolution images.

If you have animations, video and audio files which you would like to share you can do this by either sharing you PowerPoint through application share:

How to share a Power Point presentation (Class Support)

Or if the content is on a webpage through sharing audio and video streams:

Share videos from websites (Class Support)

Convert the PowerPoint to a PDF (Recommended)

To retain any specialist fonts used and non- standard content layouts, it is recommended you convert your PowerPoint to PDF, then upload the PDF file to Collaborate. Firstly, it will upload quicker than a PowerPoint file. Secondly, a PDF will not change when uploaded to Collaborate, it has already gone through the conversion process when created; therefore, you will know exactly what the slides will look like in the Collaborate session.

Please follow these instructions on converting a PowerPoint to PDF.

Save PowerPoint presentations as PDF files

Testing your presentation before the session

We advise you test uploading your presentation to Collaborate before the session so that you can take care of any issues that you may have. To do this you can create your own test session (or use the Course Room if you are using Learn).

Issues uploading your presentation

If you have any issues with uploading the PowerPoint file to the session, please follow this workaround advice:

Troubleshooting Presentations

If you require further assistance:

Contact the IS Helpline