Many of my clients have found that slides can get pretty busy, especially in the editing phase. They want to find a better way to manage design elements and text to ensure they develop a balanced presentation. An easy way to give yourself some breathing room is to reduce the magnification of your slide to [...]
Great Handouts Should Support your Branding
Handouts are an opportunity to expand upon and reinforce the key points of your presentation. Did you know that you can design your handouts to include your logo, tagline, and other important information by formatting the Handout Master? In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, click on the View tab and under the Presentation Views section click [...]
Did you know that your slide number is adjustable?
Have you ever had to weave your slides into a larger presentation or prepare handouts as a component of a larger printout? For example, if you are following a 30 slide presentation by someone else you may want or need to start your slide show with slide 31. We often need to adjust the numbering [...]
Did you ever wonder how to hide the popup menus when presenting in PowerPoint?
In all my years as a presentation consultant I have yet to see a presenter make use of the popup menu button that appears in the bottom-left corner of the presentation screen. In fact I would argue that it can be distracting and at times obscure your content. Fortunately, hiding it from your audience is [...]
Creating hyperlinks that open instantly during a Slide Show
Have you ever experienced that moment when you think your computer has frozen because your hyperlink was sluggish to respond during a slide show? Here is a quick fix to avoid that uncomfortable feeling. Prior to the start of the slideshow, open the host application of the file that will run when the hyperlink is [...]
Keep reference data close at hand while you design your slides
If you find yourself frequently referencing outside data while you create your PowerPoint slides (such as content located in a Word* document, Excel* workbook, or even another PowerPoint presentation), you may want to consider linking to your slide with an unobtrusive custom icon. First navigate to the slide your working on in Slide or Normal [...]
Quickly select multiple objects on a slide
Many slides contain a combination of text boxes, shapes and graphs to create a comprehensive mosaic of information. Later we may want to revisit and update this complex slide. Most PowerPoint users know how to select all the objects on a slide from the menu by choosing Edit | Select All. Did you know that [...]
Make sure the audience can read your slides
Slides are intended to be visual aids therefore it is crucial that your audience can actually see the content. This may seem obvious yet so often we are presented with slides that are difficult to read – especially in larger venues. A paper out of UCLA suggests some “Font Basics(1)” to consider when developing slides. [...]
Cropping an image to focus the audience’s attention
Visuals are a fundamental method of engaging your audience. Images need to be relevant, well positioned by the presenter and of course clear and of high resolution. Sometimes we need to crop a photo or image to focus the audience’s attention. Ideally images should be manipulated with software such as Photoshop – however the reality [...]
Add Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story to your reading list
The first (and often skipped) step in any presentation is to define communication objectives. Skipping this step often leads to content oriented presentations that fail to resonate with the audience. To better appreciate why it is so important to rise above this common faux pas I suggest the book Presenting to Win: The Art of [...]
