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What goes in the heading area will be self-explanatory. You may not even need anything – in which case ignore the Click to add title text sitting there. That won’t be displayed in a presentation.
The standard layouts all provide lines of text with bullets. The bullets are easy to change but not very easy to get rid of! So, unless you really want to remove them, leave them alone.
The size of text may appear large but it is probably about the size you should use to ensure that people can read a slide at some distance away. Always type text into slides. Do not copy and paste text in. There are two good reasons for this: firstly, pasted text will often contain all sorts of weird formatting which may have been necessary in Word or on a web site but which simple doesn’t work on a slide and can mess up Master Slide changes or options for using Slide Designs later. Secondly, chunks of text in other types of documents will invariably be complete sentences or long paragraphs – fine for notes but not at all attractive as bullet points.
Your audience will never read large chunks of text on a slide. This is just bad practice – if you want to supply them with reading text then just hand it out or put it on a web site somewhere. You may wish to recite a few paragraphs, of course, but read that from your notes, not the screen.
The only exceptions to this rule might be where study of the actual wording of something like a government regulation or section from a publication is, itself, the point and displaying that is OK. However, the golden rule still applies: if text to be read at a distance doesn’t fit on the slide at font size of about 18 then it’s not suitable for a presentation slide. Use two slides or, preferably, make an effort to précis it.
Notes
A greatly under-used feature of PowerPoint is its Notes pane. Use View | Notes to display this (it appears below the slide). This is where you can put the full text of what you’re presenting and additional comments, links, references etc.
Although the popular handout is the six-pack, or the three mini slides + space for notes, the Notes pages can be printed and may provide a more detailed and legible resource for future reference. they do, however, require rather more work to produce and if you are just using PowerPoint to introduce a topic or facilitate discussion then they would not be appropriate.
One particular advantage of using Notes, however, is that just one slide is printed per page which tends to make you think about how necessary all those additional slides really are and, of interest to those concerned about minimising printing ink, this may make people think twice about whether they really need either to produce full colour slides as opposed to simple backgrounds or make users think a little about whether they really need to have a hard copy anyway.
Copying and pasting into the Notes panel is in order, by the way, and can often be a better solution than circulating a separate Word document.
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