What is the 7 by 7 rule in PowerPoint
What is the 7 x 7 rule in PowerPoint? One powerful method for communication with your clients and colleagues is using PowerPoint presentations. The only problem that might arise is that if you don’t know how to handle PowerPoint presentations, you will lose your audience’s attention right after the first slide. The one thing that can help you in that regard is the 7 x 7 rule. Now let’s see what it is.
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How to apply the 7×7 rule in PowerPoint
When you follow the 7 x 7 rule, you ensure that each slide in your presentation has no more than seven lines, and each line has about seven words. The benefit of using this method is that you will ensure that your presentation remains comprehensible for your audience. If your slides and lines in them are too wordy, you will risk losing the audience’s attention.
Many might ignore the importance of the audience in making a presentation successful. If you cannot grab your audience’s attention, you will waste all the energy and time you have put into preparing your presentation, and any other value that your work might have will go unnoticed.
Even if you are an amateur, the 7 x 7 rule helps you overcome this mighty challenge. One of the most convenient and effective ways to make sure that you keep your audience’s attention is using the 7 x 7 rule. This rule means that you should have seven words for each line and seven lines for each slide. This rule is specifically helpful for informative presentations. There are other similar rules like the 6 x 6 rule or the 5 x 5 rule, but the 7 x 7 rule is particularly effective in presentations that deal with vast amounts of information.
1. Seven Lines per Slide
First of all, the 7 x 7 rule states that you should limit the number of bullet points or lines on a slide to a maximum of 7 (the title is not included). The seven lines on each slide must regard the core concepts of the presentation. This way, you will give your audience a detailed preview of your presentation’s information. If the numbers of your lines or bullet points don’t add up to seven, don’t panic! Because the end of this rule is to summarize the information as much as possible.
2. Seven Words per Line
The other part of the 7 x 7 rule requires limiting the number of words used in each line or bullet point limited to 7. To do so, you can use incomplete sentences and restrict your usage of connectives and pronouns. For the sake of an instance, instead of writing “the average cost of the Mediterranean shipments from the European Union to China is increasingly growing,” you can write “increasing growth of EU-china shipments costs.” The point of such limitations is that you only show keywords in the slides and elaborate on them while speaking.
Why follow the 7×7 rule of slides in PowerPoint ?
PowerPoint is still popular among organizations because of its user-friendly interface that helps presenters develop creative designs for their presentations. Another benefit of PowerPoint is that it saves you a lot of time on designing your slides.
The 7 x 7 rule for PowerPoint presentations has enabled a lot of presenters to come up with high-class presentations and save face. The first part of the 7×7 rule dictates that you only have seven lines in the text and focus on the core information concerning your presentation.
It must be mentioned that if you have less than seven bullet points or lines in your slides, you shouldn’t worry. According to professionals, the best thing to do is to focus on just one concept in each slide.
It would be best if you focused really hard on keywords and phrases since the audience is able to read faster than you can speak. In order to avoid boring your audience with your presentation, try to stay away from writing wordy sentences.
With the 7×7 rule, you would be able to get rid of all the trivial information and only use the best for your presentation. It doesn’t matter that you use the 6×6, 7x7m, or even the 8×8 rules for PowerPoint presentations. Just be sure to keep it as minimalist as possible.
You have the freedom to choose between any given combination of words and lines, but you shouldn’t forget that the only aim is to avoid having a wordy presentation. Just by omitting the unnecessary information on a slide, You can make your presentation more understandable.
You can manage your work with ease and comfort when you use the 7×7 rule of PowerPoint presentations. Another good thing about the 7×7 is that it is easy to use and wouldn’t cause any complications.
There is yet another benefit to the 7×7 rule, which is fixating your text’s alignment. The 7×7 rule helps guide you in your way towards a neat and eye-catching text for your presentation.
What is the end of the 7 by 7 rule?
We usually consider three primary goals for the 7×7 rule of PowerPoint, and you are expected to achieve these goals by following this rule. If you are trying to sell something by your PowerPoint presentation, your chances of selling the product will rise dramatically. If you are trying to inform your audience, you will make it more understandable for them.
These are the three primary goals of the 7×7 rule:
- Focusing the presentation on the topic.
- Increasing legibility and decreasing jumble.
- Keeping your audience in fascination until the very end.
Now, we will analyze each of these goals more closely and see how they are related to each other.
In this article, you found out what is the 7 by 7 rule in PowerPoint. Still need help with your doing PowerPoint?
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