Have you ever been in the middle of a meeting and been absolutely bored with the presentation being shown? The presentation slides are all over the place, and you barely retained any information from them.

Well, you are not alone. 

Most often, presentations become an endless list of slides that make your presentations bland. According to a survey, 76% of professionals prefer face-to-face meetings. Presentations can be used to make these meetups more engaging and interesting.   

After all, presentations are an essential component of running an organization. It allows you to share information about a business with various stakeholders. With presentations, you can provide brief, to-the-point information with the help of graphs and images in a highly compact slide deck.  

Is it possible to create presentations for every occasion from scratch? After all, it would be a time-consuming activity and take you away from other essential tasks. 

This is where presentation templates save the day.  

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What are Presentation Templates?

A template is like a mould or a pattern that can be replicated to create something else. Similarly, presentation templates are a series of pre-designed slides that can be used to create your business presentations aligned with your brand. 

The templates are designed to keep your brand at the forefront. The idea is to standardise the colours and fonts to ensure symmetry in every presentation. However, you need to ensure that the circumstances align with the usage of templates. They may be situations where using a standardised template might be a deterrent in building new business relationships.  

Since the presentation templates already contain graphics and text boxes and are brand aligned, it is simply a matter of modifying the elements to match what you want to present. Ideally, you should have your design team create a set of multiple slide decks with different patterns on each slide. You can also ensure that each team in the company has a few templates targeted toward their end goals. 

For example, the finance team would be creating budgets and financial statements. A PowerPoint template with helpful graphs and headings would help present financial information in a simple manner. It can also help to use a few standard image icons to be more succinct. 

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Source: 24Slides

Presentation templates are not just slide decks. You can create templates for newsletters, opt-in emails, brochures, infographics and any other repetitive content. 

The templates in your digital library can help present you as a brand-conscious entity with an effective marketing strategy. The templates can be as big or small as you like as the situation demands—the critical point is to provide all necessary information in small, bite-sized pieces. 

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 Source: Slidesmania

Why Is It Efficient To Use Presentation Templates?

PowerPoint tends to get a bad reputation as they are often associated with computer projects you had to do during your school days. 

However, over the years, PowerPoint has become more evolved from sticking together small files made using clip art and animation sounds.

Templates, if created with form and function, have the potential to reduce your presentation efforts by almost half. With the right template, adding the necessary text to the placeholder boxes and filling up graphs with the necessary comparisons is simple. You use presentations to convey the right information to the right people at the right time. Business presentation templates are created with the intention of standardising information spread. You can ensure that you populate the slides with relevant information depending on your audience. 

Because Less Is More

In the early days of PowerPoint, the idea was to stuff each slide in a presentation with vast amounts of text. Nowadays, the presentation deck is a supporting prop. The slides contain brief but essential cues the presenter takes to expand on a topic. The presenter needs to capture the audience's attention, which is impossible if they are distracted by text-heavy slides from the slide deck.

‍Minimalist Presentation templates with just the branding and easy-to-edit blocks can make presenting complex ideas simple and easy.

Because It's Faster

With templates, you no longer have to add text boxes or adjust the font and size of words. You also don't need to choose which images and elements you need to add to the presentation. If you create templates specific to each department for any meeting, the time taken to create a presentation from scratch is reduced significantly. 

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Because Branding Is Critical

Brand identity is one of the essential components of establishing yourself in the industry. Since brand identity makes you recognisable to your audience, every communication within and without an organisation needs at least an element consistent with your overall brand. So, while creating templates, use brand colours and logos consistently on every slide. Even if it's small, a distinct logo has the chance of making you immensely memorable. 

Source: Researchgate

Because Consistency Is A Key Element 

Your company may have created tons of presentations over the years. As you look back and remember, would you like to see templates that look organised and consistent or ones that look disorganised with random colours and images? Since they are a piece of your organisation's history, clean and neat presentation templates would make it look sophisticated and neat. 

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When is it a good idea to use templates?

Presentation templates allow you to be creative while creating your presentations. 

The main idea behind creating presentation templates is uniformity in creating and sustaining company brand identity and being quick in creating required slides. Here are a few situations where using templates during your presentation would be beneficial. 

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Educational Presentations

In an educational setting, whether university lectures or even online courses, you need your audience to understand your presentation. Not only does the presenter need to be knowledgeable about the topic, but the slides you use should provide adequate information to students. 

You can have slides to outline your overall topic, provide simple instructions to the students, provide topics for group discussions, and even conduct quizzes.

Source: Canva

Board Meetings

Board meetings are the place where you make decisions based on the information presented. These decisions may have an impact on the overall operations of an organisation. Therefore, the information needed to make smart decisions must be short and clean. In addition, since many board meetings are helpful for a financial year, presentation templates can reduce stress during presentations. 

Source: Slidebean

Webinars

Webinars are interactive online seminars broadcast to a specific group of people who have registered for the same. Webinars are digital events that an organisation can host to add value to their brand. Rather than create new slides or presentations for every event, the company can create webinar templates and use them when needed. 

Since you are providing information to your audience, you can use webinar presentation templates to modify the information or update data in the slides before every event. 

Source: Pinterest‍

How To Create The Best Presentation Templates

By Understanding Your Target Audience

Before you start creating templates, you need to understand your audience. For example, a serious shareholder meeting differs from an employee induction presentation. The latter requires a more serious tone, which can be fun.

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By Using Less Text And More Visuals

Make sure your presentation templates can help support the presenter's talk. If you have too much text in your slides, the audience’s attention is split between the slides and the presenter. Nowadays, you also have AI that can turn your text into images. Using this software, you can explain long lines of text with an apt image. Make sure the message of the slides resonates with the presenter's words.

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By Using Appropriate Graphs 

Graphs and other charts can help show data clearly and engagingly. It is also surprisingly easy to understand correctly created graphs. While creating templates, once you know your audience, you can choose to add graphs to support your arguments. For example, you can use graphs in board meetings or finance team meetings to show the additional income or sales between two or more years.

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By Choosing The Right Colors And Font

While establishing your brand identity, you may have chosen a few colours to represent your overall image. Make sure you use these colours judiciously while creating templates to put your mark on them. Use the brand's logo on every slide - this ensures that you provide consistent design and visuals at every presentation. 

The font and size you use should also be neat. For example, you cannot use Comic Sans in a professional presentation. Instead, use a neutral font and size for easy readability by your audience. 

Things To Keep In Mind While Creating Presentation Templates

Now that you know the critical elements to create a perfect presentation template, here is what you need to ensure it goes into every slide.

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Keep It Simple

Presentation templates need not be overly complicated and filled with various text boxes,  images and graphs. Instead, add images that will add value to your presentation and choose minimal text. A former employee of Apple, Guy Kawasaki, initiated the 10-20-30 rule while creating a presentation. 

According to him, your presentation needs no more than ten slides to convey your idea. The presenter needs to present for no more than 20 minutes. Although it may seem like very little time, 20 minutes is enough to convey the main points you are presenting. This allows you to cut out unnecessary fluff and retain the key elements. The 30 in his rule pertains to the font size. According to Guy, once you use the initial two rules, a 30-point font size allows you to maintain the readability of information on each slide.  

You can use this rule to create presentation templates for most situations. 

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Emphasise Key Points

While creating a slide deck, make sure you use colours and quotes to emphasise a point truly. This allows you to make sure the audience understands your point of view. Ideally, try to use highlights that are not jarring and do not make your presentation look chaotic. 

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Use White Space Strategically

Powerpoint templates need white space to bring notice to your actual content. Don't fill up blank spaces in a slide with too much text or visual content. Let the absence speak. Create your templates so that every slide has adequate white space. 

Use Infographics, Images And Charts

Depending on the audience for your presentation, choose to create templates with infographics or graphs. The necessary information can be quickly filled in for ease of presentation. 

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Resources To Help You Create Your Templates

Books To Help Create Amazing Presentation Templates

While getting your presentation templates done through professional companies is efficient, you may have to shoulder the work yourself due to budgeting issues. 

If you cannot hire designers to create your templates, you need to know how to create your templates. For example, you need to utilise colour judiciously, maintain consistency in creating slides, and even choose the right typography. Here is a list of books to help you design your elegant-looking templates.

1. The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams

The author has been in the design industry for two decades and has experience guiding non-designers to create beautiful, professional-looking designs. In addition, the book guides you in choosing colours, fonts, and other helpful tips to create any digital copy. 

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2. Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice! by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

While creating templates, the book helps you understand how to capture your audience’s attention and choose the proper graphs to present information. The book also helps you use storytelling to create attractive templates. 

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3. Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations by Scott Berinato

Before starting your templates, you need to visualise your presentation. Having a rough idea about how you want your template to look can help you create better templates. 

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4. How to Design TED Worthy Presentation Slides: Presentation Design Principles from the Best TED Talks by Akash Karia

Ted Talks require the speaker to deliver their presentation in 18 minutes or less. In this book, presentation design for templates is documented by studying the presentations from the more popular Ted Talks.  

If you want more hands-on experience creating presentations, here are a few sites to help you design templates. 

_{Microsoft PowerPoint}

The OG application was what every student learned to make presentations in schools. As a response to heightened competition, Powerpoint has become more efficient. The application has thousands of presentation templates for several occasions. Choose the right one for your meeting.

Keynote

Keynote is Apple’s response to Microsoft Powerpoint. Although its entrance was later in the game, Keynotes is holding fast to the number one place where it is tied with Powerpoint. Keynote makes it easy to create templates and presentations, including directly exporting to Youtube. Like all Apple apps, Keynote easily syncs up with any device that it is accessed on. 

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Google Slides

This app is another option for creating great presentation templates for any digital copy. Google Slides can be used directly on the web browser without needing to download any app separately. Google slides can also access online templates you can utilise for your use.

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Canva

Having come into its own in the last decade, Canva is the ultimate tool non-professional designers can use to create presentations and templates. Its simple pick-and-drop option makes creating templates for any digital content extremely easy. 

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Let Us Help Build Your Template Library (Conclusion)

It’s 2023 soon, and we are in the midst of a digital transformation. As a result, it has become more critical than ever that you have several templates for digital communication. Whether it is stakeholders, customers, or even employees, a standard template can help you communicate better and put your thoughts across clearly. 

At INK PPT, our job is not only to help you create unique presentations. We can also help you build a presentation kit. Filled with unique brand-specific presentation templates, we ensure that even your last-minute presentations are striking and informative. 

With strategic images and graphs, we help you create a template library that can be used for any occasion. For example, in employee induction seminars, team meetings, and board meetings - you will never feel the pressure of creating slides.

Do you want us to help you get the presentation ready? Leave us your contact information, and we will get back to you soon to create a unique template library for your business.