Here are a few random tips and pointers that will help you produce readable slides.

Try reading the slide from the back of the room

The No. 1 rule of creating readable slides is that everyone in the room must be able to read them. If you're not sure, there's one sure way to find out: Try it. Fire up the projector, call up the slide, walk to the back of the room, and see if you can read it. If you can't, you'll have to make an adjustment.

Remember that everyone's eyesight may not be as good as yours. If you have perfect vision, squint a little when you get to the back of the room to see how the slide may appear to someone whose vision isn't perfect.

No more than five bullets, please

Ever notice how David Letterman uses two slides to display his Top Ten lists? Dave's producers know that ten items is way too many for one screen. Five is just right. You may be able to slip in six now and again, but if you're up to seven or eight, try breaking the slide into two slides.

Avoid small text

If you can't read a slide from the back of the room, it's probably because the text is too small. The rule of thumb is that 24-point type is the smallest you should use for text that you want people to read. A 12-point type may be perfectly readable in a Word document, but it's way too small for PowerPoint.

Avoid excessive verbiage leading to excessively lengthy text that is not only redundant but also repetitive and reiterative

See? This heading would have been more efficient if it were, "Be Brief."

Use consistent wording

One sign of an amateur presentation is wording in bullet lists that isn't grammatically consistent. Consider this list:

• Profits will be improved

• Expanding markets

• It will reduce the amount of overseas competition

• Production increase

Each sentence uses a different grammatical construction. The same points made with consistent wording have a more natural flow and make a more compelling case:

• Improved profits

• Expanded markets

• Reduced overseas competition

• Increased production

Avoid clashing colors

The professionally chosen color schemes that come with PowerPoint are designed to create slides that are easy to read. If you venture away from them, be careful about choosing colors that are hard to read.

Watch the line endings

Sometimes, PowerPoint will break a line at an awkward spot, which can make slides hard to read. For example, a bullet point may be one word too long to fit on a single line. When that happens, you may want to break the line elsewhere so the second line has more than one word. (Use Shift+Enter to create a line break that doesn't start a new paragraph.)

Alternatively, you may want to drag the right margin of the text placeholder to increase the margin width so that the line doesn't have to be broken at all.

Web addresses (URLs) are notoriously hard to squeeze onto a single line. If your presentation includes long URLs, pay special attention to how they fit.

Keep the background simple

Don't splash a bunch of distracting clip art on the background unless it is essential. The purpose of the background is to provide a well-defined visual space for the slide's content. All too often, presenters put up slides that have text displayed on top of pictures of the mountains or city skylines, which makes the text almost impossible to read.

Use only two levels of bullets

Sure, it's tempting to develop your subpoints into sub-subpoints and sub-sub-subpoints, but no one will be able to follow your logic. Don't make your slides more confusing than they need to be. If you need to make sub-sub-subpoints, you probably need a few more slides.

Keep charts and diagrams simple

PowerPoint can create elaborate graphs that even the best statisticians will marvel at. However, the most effective graphs are simple pie charts with three or four slices and simple column charts with three or four columns. Likewise, Pyramid, Venn, and other types of diagrams lose their impact when you add more than four or five elements.

If you remember only one rule when creating your presentations, remember this one: Keep it simple, clean, and concise.