Tips for the best PowerPoint presentations

Leave a reply

By Simon Jones

Simon Jones explains how to create effective slideshows in Microsoft’s market-leading tool – and keep your audience from boredom or nausea

When you’re designing a presentation, it’s tempting to make it as whizzy as possible. After all, PowerPoint offers plenty of fancy features, so shouldn’t you try to use them?

Actually, no – just because you can perform eye-catching tricks doesn’t mean you should. PowerPoint is a great presentation tool, but it’s too easy to go overboard by adding stuff that distracts from the message you’re trying to convey. The general principle when working with PowerPoint is definitely “less is more”.

Let’s take an example. The act of moving from one slide to another is called a transition, and PowerPoint lets you choose from many different effects. Some of them are subtle, but many are so garish that you risk frightening your audience right out of the door. Preview them all, then pick the one that best matches the message you want to convey, your company’s image and the audience that will see the presentation.

Continue reading →

7 Top Reasons Why Educators Need To Use Social Media:

Leave a reply

By Dean

There is one comment that my professor in Teacher’s College made over 20 years ago which I will always remember.  “You need to truly understand your students, where they are coming from and what interests them if you want to have any hope of reaching them.”  I believe that statement to be true in many ways.  If we truly want to excite and engage our students in learning, then we need to consider their interests, prior experiences and what ultimately motivates them.  While the answers to these questions will vary from child to child, there is one area of interest which is virtually unanimous…technology and the use of social media.  In fact, according to a relatively new 2013 survey from Pew Internet and American Life Project, together with Harvard’s Berkman Center, 95% of teen students use the Internet and 81% of them utilize social media sites. (1)  This is a number which continues to grow daily.  With these facts in mind, those in the education field should harness this unique force in order to benefit their students, schools and districts in general.

Continue reading →

Slide Design 101: The Rule of Thirds

Leave a reply

By Scott Schwertly on

RuleofThirdsI am often asked how one can make slides look more engaging and visually appealing. Today, I want to offer up one simple technique that does not require a background in design, or expertise at programs like Photoshop or Illustrator: the Rule of Thirds.

What is it?

Imagine splitting up your slide into 3 equal parts, both horizontally and vertically. You can then use this grid to place and align your subject matter, optimizing the visual experience. You can apply this approach both to how you view your slides moving forward as well as how you take pictures. It’s a simple technique that separates the professionals from the amateurs.

Here’s how you can use it.

Continue reading →

4 Steps to Finding a Speech Topic that Clicks

Leave a reply

By Michelle Mazur

“You can speaking on anything you like. I’m sure whatever you come up with will be great.” These words give you absolute freedom to say whatever you want. With absolute freedom comes absolute terror because now you have unlimited speaking topics!

Ahhhh! What’s a speaker to do?

Before I launch in, this post is meant for aspiring speakers, Toastmasters and students, those who have no clue what topic to choose for their next speech. It’s also for anyone looking for their next big speech idea.  I’ve been asked this question a lot lately via email – “How do I choose a good speech topic?”  I’ve even been asked, “What’s the best speech topic?”

Continue reading →

Four Presentation Myths and How you can Overcome them

Leave a reply

Do you enjoy speaking in front of an audience? More than likely you don’t. Glossophobia, or the severe fear of public speaking, is one of the most common phobias. Statistics say far more of us prefer death to giving a speech. Although you may not consider yourself a glossophobic, giving a presentation in front of an audience may still not be your idea of a fun day.

 

Continue reading →

How to Capture the Audience’s Attention

Leave a reply

Nothing can frustrate an audience more than listening to a boring or ‘bad’ public speaker.

One of the things that you should remember when delivering a presentation is that it is very easy to divert the audience’s attention. Once they find your presentation uninteresting, they will cease to pay attention to you. They will just let their mind wander or pay attention to something else.

It is your responsibility as a public speaker to avoid this.

Here are some tips on how you can grab the public’s attention when delivering your speech:

Continue reading →

How to View PowerPoint on Android Devices with Five Methods

Leave a reply

What do we usually do with Android smartphones/tablets in daily life? Take a call, text messages, send and check E-mail, and play games? How about dealing with working affairs on the go? Of course, we can also manage business with our Android devices since that all kinds of Android working-related apps have been developed on Google Play and some manufactories like Samsung have pushed off some unique android-based services to target business users!

We often use PowerPoint on the working, and If we can view PowerPoint presentation on Android smartphones and tablets, that will be more convenient and flexible for our life! However, Microsoft has no plan to develop Android version of Microsoft Office so far. So we have to figure out some alternatives to watch PowerPoint on Android! That is why this blog is written and we will share five methods to view PowerPoint on Android!

Continue reading →

Three Tips for Beautiful PowerPoint Presentations

Leave a reply

By Gcfelizabeth

Highlight large images

Many PowerPoint slides include placeholders for inserting images. Most of these placeholders are pretty small in comparison to the entire slide. While using these placeholders lets you place text alongside your pictures, it can also detract from the power of your images and make all of your slides look the same. If your presentation includes important images, try making them cover the entire slide. While you won’t be able to include very much text on those slides, displaying the right image can be an effective tool to reinforce an important point in your presentation. Plus, it just looks better, doesn’t it?

Continue reading →

Resetting a slide: A quick fix for awful slides

Leave a reply

By Ellen Finkelstein

Do you have to fix up slides that other people made a mess of? I do. For some reason, I get a lot of slides on which people ignored the Layout feature of PowerPoint; instead, they inserted text boxes anywhere on the slide—in a different location on each slide! Often, the first thing I do is to check the layout of each slide, change it if necessary, and reset the slide. Why is resetting so valuable? When you make changes on individual slides, PowerPoint remembers them. As a result, even if you change the layout, the changes remain. Often the best way to get such a presentation into shape is to reset the layouts. When you do so, PowerPoint moves the placeholders into the position specified by the slide master. On this slide, the title placeholder was probably in the original location, but the text placeholder that contains the bulleted text was centered. The slide has no alignment, so the eye has to move in a disjointed fashion. Talk about stress on the brain!

Continue reading →

The Art of Speechwriting

Leave a reply

 

By David Zielinski

Just because you are a good speaker doesn’t mean you are a good speechwriter. The advent of PowerPoint software has made the fully scripted paragraph an endangered species, replacing it with bulleted lists, catchy headlines and whiz-bang special effects. But good writing remains at the heart of good speechmaking, particularly when the intent is to inspire or motivate audiences. If you’re among the fortunate few, you may have staff speechwriters or communications experts to help you craft that spellbinding speech. But most of us aren’t that lucky, which means having to face down the terror of the blank computer screen on our own.

So what’s the key to writing a memorable speech that doesn’t lean heavily on PowerPoint for speaker support? We talked to some of the best speechwriters in the business – who between them have written speeches for U.S. presidents, cabinet members and CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies – about what it takes to write a speech that is music to the audience’s ears.

Continue reading →