Interactive PowerPoint | How to Make One in 3 Easy Steps (+Free!)

To make PowerPoint interactive, you need to add polls, word clouds, or quizzes to get your audience excited and involved in your presentation.

A PowerPoint presentation with interactive elements can result in up to 92% audience engagement.

This interactive PowerPoint guide will help you make one easily and 100% free.

Overview of Interactive PowerPoint

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Creating Interactive PowerPoint in AhaSlides
• Creating Interactive PowerPoint within PowerPoint
• 5 Tips to make an Interactive Powerpoint
  • Tip #1 – Use an Ice Breaker
  • Tip #2 – End with a Mini-Quiz
  • Tip #3 – Try Variety
  • Tip #4 – Space it Out
  • Tip #5 – Allow Anonymity
• AhaSlides Alternatives
• More Interactive PowerPoint ideas
• Frequently Asked Questions

Creating Interactive PowerPoint in AhaSlides

You can import your PowerPoint presentation in one go to AhaSlides. After that, fit it with interactive slides in which your audience can contribute to a spinner wheel, word clouds, brainstorming sessions, and even an AI quiz!

🎉 Learn more: Extension For PowerPoint

Here’s how it works…

How to Create Interactive PowerPoint

Creating Interactive PowerPoint within PowerPoint

Don’t want to switch tabs? Easy! You can create fun interactive experiences within PowerPoint using the AhaSlides add-in.

Here’s how to make it:

How to Create Interactive PowerPoint

Still confused? See this detailed guide in our Knowledge Base.

5 Tips for Making a Great Interactive PowerPoint

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 word cloud slide to ask them ‘How do you say hi in your native language?’. When the audience responds, the most popular answers will appear larger.

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

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.

Tip #3 – Try Variety

Let’s face facts. Most presentations, through 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 brainstorm, visualise data in a word cloud and so much more.

Check out how a variety of interactive slides could work for your presentation. Click below to dive into an interactive presentation on AhaSlides 👇

Tip #4 – 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.

Tip #5 – Allow Anonymity

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.

Of course, you can add more slides to PowerPoint, PowerPoint quizzes, Q&A slides in PowerPoint or Q&A images for ppt… in any way you like. But, it would be much easier if your presentation was on AhaSlides.

Were you 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 unlimited 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.

Or, be inspired with our interactive PowerPoint templates for free!

Frequently Asked Questions