Guidelines for Presenters and Authors:
Preparing your Slide Decks and Papers
Guidelines for Preparing Slide Decks for Presentation Sessions
Template
Draft your slide deck using this PowerPoint template that TAC provides for the convenience of conference presenters. Presenters may use their own organization’s template, but it must follow TAC’s guidelines.
Title Slide
Must include:
- Title of presentation
- Presenters’/Authors’ full names, titles and organizations
- “For session: [session name]”
- “2026 TAC Conference & Exhibition, Winnipeg, Manitoba”
Formatting Requirements
- Software: Use PowerPoint (Widescreen format 16:9).
- Slide count: Presentations are limited to a maximum of 25 slides; exceeding this limit is not allowed.
- Fonts: Use only one of these fonts: Aptos, Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, or Tahoma.
- Conference logo: If you wish to include the TAC Conference logo, contact
Designing your Slides
- Limit each slide to one main idea.
- Limit text on each slide, using no more than seven lines double-spaced.
- Headings: Use headings and sub-headings of different sizes to create a visual hierarchy and help the audience follow along.
- Visuals: Use photographs, charts, and graphics to complement your verbal presentation. Ensure tables and figures are labelled and legible. Leave some surrounding white space.
- Effects: ‘Builds’ that lead the audience through a slide one point at a time can be effective. Other animations and transitions are not recommended and should generally be avoided. Videos must be embedded in the presentation file; linked videos may fail to play or play poorly.
- Structure: Objectives are clear and linked to the conclusions, methodology is sound, conclusions are supported.
- Neutrality: Content does not promote proprietary products or services, the author’s employer or other commercial entity.
Permissions
Authors are responsible for obtaining permissions from employers, clients and partners to disclose presented information, and for securing any necessary clearances from copyright holders.
References
Material not original to the slide deck must be properly referenced by author’s name, source, publisher and date on the slide where the material is located.
Saving your File
Submit the PowerPoint presentation using TAC’s file naming convention: Session code_presenter last name+first initial_presentation title_version#.pptx