DON'T USE ALL CAPS in titles or body text. One way people read is by recognizing the shapes of words. If words are all in caps, they are all shaped like rectangles, which make them harder to read - especially in body text. All caps also take up more horizontal space. Instead of all caps, use a larger size text, a different color, or a different font.

The 666 Rule (or, the Devil made me do it): No more than 6 words per bullet, 6 bullets per slide, or 6 word slides in a row. If you have more than 6 words per bullet, then it is not a bullet point - bullets should not be complete sentences. More than 6 bullets per slide and your audience will have difficulty reading the slide. Six word slides in a row means you've been talking for at least 10 minutes without a visual. You may be losing the audience's attention.

Use a title on all your slides. When a PowerPoint presentation is converted to web pages, the title is used in the navigation frame; if there's no title, it's difficult for your audience to follow the presentation.

Use bold and italic to emphasize text, not as the main text style. Bold and italic text is useful to make certain words stand out, but it's tiring to read an entire paragraph in bold or italic.

Use sans serif typefaces, like Arial, Helvetica, or Verdana for presentations - the serifs (little "feet" that hang off serif fonts, like Times) clutter the slide, making it more difficult to read.

Always use your software's alignment tools (center, right justification, custom tab stops), instead of lots of spaces and default tabs to align text.

Print out your slides and place them on the floor.

• Can you read them comfortably? If so, the font size is large enough for your audience to read comfortably.
• Do any of them look busy or jumbled? Maybe you have too much on one slide - consider dividing it into two slides.

Use JPG format for bitmap images embedded in a presentation, instead of BMP or TIF. JPG is a compressed bitmap format; converting your images to JPG, as well as cropping and resizing images in a graphics program, will reduce the file size of your presentation considerably.

Carefully double-check your slides for spelling and grammar errors, and remove extra spaces or hard returns.