How to Make an Interactive PowerPoint (1-Minute Easy Guide!)

A PowerPoint presentation that goes the extra mile with interactive elements can result in up to 92% audience engagement. Why?

Take a look:

The real question is, how do you make your PowerPoint presentation interactive?

Don't waste more time and jump straight into our ultimate guide on how to make an interactive PowerPoint presentation with easy and accessible steps, plus free templates to deliver a masterpiece.

Encourage Audience Participation

Your PowerPoint presentation can't be truly interactive without audience interaction. Of course, cool effects and animation (which we will address later) can make your slides more visually appealing, but to make eyes glued to the screen and to make a truly impactful PPT presentation, you will need them to be involved every step of the way.

Audience engagement is often achieved through two-way activities such as live polls, quizzes and live Q&A sessions during the presentation. Here's how it works...

1. Add Polls and Quizzes

Are you thinking about complex triggers and animation to create a quiz on PowerPoint? Cross that out because, with just one simple PowerPoint add-in, you can add interactivity in 1 minute.

Here, we will use the AhaSlides add-in for PowerPoint. It's free, has a big library of ready-to-use templates, and offers a plethora of interactive activities to do with your audience like different types of quizzes, image polls, word clouds, Q&A, or rating scales for easy surveys, and is compatible with both PowerPoint for Mac and PowerPoint for Windows.

Below are 3 easy steps to integrate AhaSlides with PowerPoint:

How to Use The AhaSlides PowerPoint Add-in in 3 Steps

Step 1. Create a free AhaSlides account

Create an AhaSlides account, then add interactive activities such as poll or quiz questions beforehand.

Step 2. Add AhaSlides on PowerPoint Office add-ins

Open PowerPoint, click 'Insert' -> 'Get Add-ins', search for AhaSlides then add it to your PowerPoint.

Step 3. Use AhaSlides on PowerPoint

Create a new slide in your PowerPoint and insert AhaSlides from the 'My Add-ins' section. Your participants can join through the invitation QR code when you present using their phones.

Still confused? See this detailed guide in our Knowledge Base, or watch the video below:

Expert Tip #1 - Use an Ice Breaker

All meetings, virtual or otherwise, could be done with a quick activity or two to break the ice. This could be a simple question or a minigame before the real meat of the meeting gets underway.

Here's one for you. If you're presenting to an online audience from all over the world, use a multiple-choice poll slide to ask them, 'How's everyone feeling? When the audience responds, you can see the sentiment going up or down in real time.

💡 Want more icebreaker games? You'll find a whole bunch of free ones right here!

Expert Tip #2 - End with a Mini-Quiz

There's nothing that does more for engagement than a quiz. Quizzes are greatly underused in presentations; flip the script to raise engagement.

A quick 5 to 10-question quiz can work at the end of a section to test what your audience has just learned, or as a fun sign-off at the end of your interactive PowerPoint presentation.

On AhaSlides, quizzes work the same way as other interactive slides. Ask a question and your audience compete for points by being the fastest answerers on their phones.

Expert Tip #3 - Mix Between a Variety of Slides

Let's face facts. Most presentations, through a lack of creative thinking, follow the exact same structure. It's a structure that bores us senseless (it even has a name - Death by PowerPoint) and it's one that could really use a kick of variety.

There are currently 19 interactive slide types on AhaSlides. Presenters looking to avoid the dreaded monotony of the standard presentation structure can poll their audience, ask an open-ended question, gather ordinal scale ratings, elicit popular ideas in a brainstorming session, visualise data in a word cloud and so much more.

Did you know that you can convert a PDF document to an AhaSlides quiz for knowledge testing? Try out this cool feature right now👇

2. Host a Question and Answer Session (Anonymously)

Have you ever wondered why you're getting muted reactions even with a premium presentation? Part of the social psychology of crowds is the general unwillingness, even amongst confident participants, to speak up in front of others on a whim.

Allowing audience members to anonymously respond to your questions and suggest their own can be a great remedy for that. Just by giving your audience the option to provide their names, you'll likely receive a higher level of engagement from all types of personalities in the audience, not just introverts.

💡 Add a Q&A slide to your PPT presentation using the AhaSlides add-in.

3. Ask Open-ended Questions Throughout Your Presentation

While quizzes are fun, how about trying something that's less competitive while still encouraging audience members to think critically?

Scatter open-ended questions throughout your presentation and let participants share their ideas. It challenges people to think deeper and get their creative juices flowing. Who knows, you might spark some great ideas by letting the audience share their perspectives too.

💡 Add an Open-ended question slide to your PPT presentation using the AhaSlides add-in to let everyone share their thoughts anonymously.

Besides PowerPoint, Google Slides is also a fantastic tool, right? Check out this article if you’re wondering how to make Google Slides interactive. ✌️

Use Animations and Triggers

Using animations and triggers is a powerful technique to transform your PowerPoint presentations from static lectures to dynamic and interactive experiences. Here's a deeper dive into each element:

1. Animation

Animations add movement and visual interest to your slides. Instead of text and images simply appearing, they can "fly in", "fade in", or even follow a specific path. This grabs your audience's attention and keeps them engaged. Here are some types of animations to explore:

• Entrance animations: Control how elements appear on the slide. Options include "Fly In" (from a specific direction), "Fade In", "Grow/Shrink", or even a dramatic "Bounce".
• Exit animations: Control how elements disappear from the slide. Consider "Fly Out", "Fade Out", or a playful "Pop".
• Emphasis animations: Highlight specific points with animations like "Pulse", "Grow/Shrink", or "Color Change".
• Motion paths: Animate elements to follow a specific path across the slide. This can be used for visual storytelling or emphasising connections between elements.

2. Triggers

Triggers take your animations a step further and make your presentation interactive. They allow you to control when an animation happens based on specific user actions. Here are some common triggers you can use:

• On click: An animation starts when the user clicks on a specific element (e.g., clicking an image triggers a video to play).
• On hover: An animation plays when the user hovers their mouse over an element. (e.g., hover over a number to reveal a hidden explanation).
• After the previous slide: An animation starts automatically after the previous slide has finished displaying.

Space it Out

While there's certainly a lot more room for interactivity in presentations, we all know what they say about having too much of a good thing...

Don't overload your audience by asking for participation on every slide. Audience interaction should just be used to keep engagement high, ears pricked up, and information at the forefront of your audience members' minds.

With that in mind, you might find that 3 or 4 content slides to each interactive slide is the perfect ratio for maximum attention.

Looking for More Interactive PowerPoint Ideas?

With the power of interactivity in your hands, knowing what to do with it is not always easy.

Need more interactive PowerPoint presentation samples? Luckily, signing up for AhaSlides comes with free access to the template library, so you can explore lots of digital presentation examples! This is a library of instantly downloadable presentations chock full of ideas for engaging your audience in an interactive PowerPoint.

Frequently Asked Questions