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The surest way to stifle an idea is to write a long-winded presentation deck about it. PowerPoint, Keynote, and Prezi are powerful tools, but the power comes in how they’re used. A weighty presentation deck can get in the way of the idea itself. The classic Mark Twain quote applies equally when writing a presentation — “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Born out venture capital work as a recipient of many of PowerPoint deck, Guy Kawasaki has been advocating the 10/20/30 Rule for a decade.
Your title slide sets the stage for your entire presentation. We all make instant judgments that either give us hope or lower expectations. Think of your title slide as the all-important first introduction. It’s a taste of things to come for the rest of your presentation. An exceptional title slide gives your audience hope that the presentation will be exceptional. Conversely, a poorly designed or low-quality title slide conveys a lack of attention to detail.
Your audience will mostly assume that if you rushed your cover, you rushed your entire presentation. Therefore, before you get up on stage to present, take the time to make sure your cover slide rocks.
If you have no idea where to begin creating a dynamic title slide, don’t worry. I have got you covered!
There are many ways go about creating your title slide. To give you a little slide inspiration, here are some PowerPoint title slide examples that look great.
Beware if you are still creating slides full of bullet points! Very soon, you will find audiences leave the hall in disgust or hold a placard in protest “No Bullet Points, Please.” Already you will find them moan in pain as soon as they see a bullet-ridden slide. That’s not surprising. The audiences are intelligent enough to know what will follow that boring slide on screen: a far boring talk with presenter reading the slides and audience figuring out whether to listen to the presenter or read the slides. Such is the bullet-point terror in the presentation world that cognitive psychologist Chris Atherton writes, “Bullets don't kill, bullet points do.” What are you supposed to do as a presenter then? All presentation experts will advise you to keep 1 message per slide. So if you have 6 bullet points on a slide, you can simply make 6 slides and save the audience a headache. But what if you do not want to follow this advice. What if you wish to keep those 6 bullet points on your slide. Perhaps you are not presenting your slides on a stage. You want to send the presentation as an attachment to one of your prospective clients. You would therefore need descriptive slides in such instances. Or maybe you have a slide full of steps and you do not wish the break the process into multiple slides that’ll make it complicated for you as well as the reader. What to do then?...
These 10 PowerPoint tips will save you time and have you creating presentations faster. These PowerPoint time-saving tips will cut your presentation design time
Via Baiba Svenca
According to one recent survey, the top two reasons why people loathe PowerPoint presentations so march are that "the speaker reads the slides" and uses "full sentences for text." By now everyone should know not to read whole blocks of text to audiences verbatim. But it’s not enough to just convert them to bullet points, then present slide after slide of those, either.
If you really want to engage your audience and enhance your message, you need to use PowerPoint to tell a story—and you need to tell it as visually as possible. The good news is that you don't need to be a professional graphic designer (or even necessarily hire one) in order to do that. What might not look particularly sleek or aesthetically compelling can still be effective. Here's how to use imagery to get your point across and maximize your narrative impact, even if you aren't the most visually minded person....
Below are three quick PowerPoint tip videos for upleveling your presentation template. How to Set Up a Grid System Grid systems are often used in print and online media to provide a consistent structure to visual communications. Utilizing a grid system in a presentation can allow elements to be displayed in consistent locations, facilitating the absorption of information. In addition, a grid can serve as a guide for employees creating presentations, helping them to know where to place design elements. This helps a company achieve a higher level of consistency between presentations and slides, giving an overall organization to the company’s visual communication. How to Set Up Color Chips in PowerPoint Color is a crucial part of a brand’s visual expression. A consistent treatment of your brand’s colors will help to make sure that people are able to “lock” their positive experiences to your brand’s specific visual cues. While many companies have corporate colors selected for various pieces of collateral, it is imperative that those same colors find themselves into the presentations, as often those presentations are used in key decision making engagements. Rather than simply trying to encourage people to use the right colors, update your template’s color palette so that the company’s colors are within easy access of each user by placing the colors in the presentation’s default color chips. How to Set Up Default Design Elements in PowerPoint In order for your employees to create presentation graphics that are on-brand, you need to provide them with tools which will facilitate this process. Often, when presentation templates are created, there are lots of example shapes, lines and other elements which people can use as starting points. But one easy way to help people create graphics that align with your look and feel is to set the default shapes, lines and text box formatting so that on-brand elements will be produced whenever a person generates a new shape, line or text box....
How to Start your Presentation or Story... Some recommend to tell the 'agenda' of the presentation right away. That might work is some specific situations (urgency)… But there's a better and much more effective way to start your story....
PowerPoints are awful. Long and uninteresting, they are the corporate drone of visual media—synonymous with endless meetings, academic conferences, and corporate retreats. For graphic designers, however, slide-based presentations like PowerPoint are synonymous with "client decks," and they're necessary for pitching a design to a client or potential client. These are not your typical boardroom slide show presentations. They can be impeccably designed and visually engaging because, if done right, they'll persuade the client to go the direction the designer wants. Presentations can be a designer’s best tool for selling an idea. Admittedly, it’s not graphic designers' favorite part of the job, but there is a lot that others can learn from how they do it. We asked five designers from four top studios and agencies for tips on creating slide-based presentations—whether on PowerPoint, Keynote, or some other program....
Want your next Powerpoint presentation look like it was constructed and delivered by a pro? Here are 15 ways to create effective PowerPoint presentations.
Via Daniel Watson
According to Buffer, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. And if you need any more evidence to convince you visuals are essential to your content marketing, just consider all these stats.
But honestly ... who's got time for all that? And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly have a degree in graphic design, or the budget to hire someone who does. So, what's a design-impaired marketer to do?
Luckily, over the past couple years, we've been on a mission at HubSpot to make visual content creation much less of an obstacle for the average marketer. How, you ask? Templates, my friends ... templates. And what's great about these templates is they're all built for software you probably already have on your computer: PowerPoint. I'm going to walk you through all the visual content marketing templates we have available for free to download, and show you how we've used them ourselves to create awesome visuals right in PowerPoint....
Microsoft has released Social Share, a free plug-in for PowerPoint that lets you share your slides to Facebook and Twitter as images or video.
The tool lets you share individual slides as images and your entire presentation as a photo album.
If you like, you can package your entire deck as a video. This keeps your transitions and other animations intact.
The plug-in also adds a pane to PowerPoint, where you can see comments people leave on your shared presentations without leaving the app....
PresentiGo is a lightweight, effective tool for marketing and sales people that enhances your PowerPoint presentations with features like 3D, interactivity, animations and improves the team’s productivity and slides performance, based on real-time data and user feedback.
Via Baiba Svenca
Microsoft has enhanced each version of PowerPoint with killer features and visual elements like templates and themes. However, the inbuilt themes and stock templates may seem inadequate for some users.If you’re among those users looking beyond the routine, then we have a list of resources that will add visual flair to your slideshows without pinching your pocket....
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A study from Harvard’s Decision Science Laboratory uses brain science to explain why we prefer certain types of presentations over others.
Via Ana Cristina Pratas
The web is full of beautiful ideas and services. Ludus is the first one to provide an easy way to gather them all in a single place.
Via Baiba Svenca
We, the digital natives, are visual learners. We prefer to watch a video tutorial rather than go through a PDF document, prefer an infographic over a bullet-point article and a picture quote over a text quote. Several sources claim that the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. Studies prove our visual memory is also far superior to auditory one. We are able to recall only 10-20% of a spoken lecture but 65% if the lecture is visual and verbal. These claims become all the more worthy of our attention if the reports of human attention span shrinking to just 8 seconds- below that of goldfish- are true. What does this mean for your presentations? Make the most of the power of visuals! Wait, you must be asking “Where do I put all the text?”. First of all, try to brutally cut down the word count on your slide. Keep ONLY the most important words on the slide (we have to free up space for visuals!). Now what? Now, get ready to turn those slides into a visual masterpiece with these 11 hacks
Lemme guess: you are looking for the best PowerPoint presentations to inspire you. You know, the ones that’ll get your creative juices flowing and break out of your comfort zone. The ones that will: Give you ass-kicking PowerPoint design ideas, tips and resourcesTeach you the fundamentals of marketing so you can bring more sales to your businessHelp you become smarter, or more productive, in just a few minutes...
Someone once told me that most PowerPoint presentations have neither power nor a point. I cannot recollect, in 30 years of work, a single PowerPoint presentation I saw or gave that altered the course of anything. Yet in meeting after meeting around the world, PowerPoint is the medium of choice. In fact, according to Microsoft, there are over 30 million PowerPoint presentations given every day.
When someone chooses to use PowerPoint or any other slide deck program, the choice has consequences. It establishes a power structure that is less relevant in today’s networked world, with the subject matter expert speaking at the front of the room and the audience passively receiving information. It keeps teams indoors, in closed rooms, in a seated position for prolonged periods which, as Mayo Clinic reports, increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and shortens life expectancy. And, most unfortunate, PowerPoint places technology at the center of the room with a heavy weight toward text, charts, sound bites, and bullet points.
When I helped start a social innovation organization called Civilla, in partnership with Adam and Lena Selzer, we gave ourselves an operating constraint: There would be no PowerPoint. None.
But saying no to something is easy. Figuring out what takes its place is harder....
When James Thompson started his job as Diageo CMO, he tallied the number of presentation slides he was exposed to in his first two months of meetings. The final count — more than 12,000. I read in AdAge that he started a PowerPoint ban in some Diageo meetings to “just talk to me please” and help convey that the team doesn’t have to be “totally buttoned-up all the time.” “It stops conversation. It makes people feel secure the’ve communicated what they wanted to. But, in fact, it doesn’t move anything on … We just want people to be at their best, and that is usually when they are able to think and respond and build rather than sell.” Marketers as a general rule suffer from PowerPoint-itis. We tend to use presentation slides as a crutch. As soon as we have a marketing idea, we rush to create a lengthy PowerPoint or Keynote or Prezi about it. Rarely do we have a meeting without a slide deck. As a result, business conversations turn into dueling sales pitches. Of course, PowerPoint-itis is not the fault of the tool. It’s how we habitually use presentation software in a way that gets in the way of communicating ideas....
AA voice narration in a PowerPoint 2016 presentation is sophisticated indeed. A self-playing, kiosk-style presentation can be accompanied by a human voice such that the narrator gives the presentation without actually being there.
To narrate a presentation, a working microphone must be attached or built in to your computer. You record the narration for slides one slide at a time or all at one time, and the recording is stored in the PowerPoint file, not in a separate audio file.
The best way to record voice narrations is to do it on a slide-by-slide basis. You can record across several slides, but getting your voice narration and slides to be in sync with one another can be a lot of trouble....
The best designers in the world are not only known for their amazing designs, but also for their inspirational and motivational quotes about design.
Many of the lessons they teach can, unsurprisingly, be directly related to PowerPoint design!
If you need some inspiration and guidance for your next PowerPoint presentation, look no further:
We have compiled a list of 20 of the BEST inspirational quotes about design that relate directly to PowerPoint.
After each designer’s quote, we’ve given a short explanation of how it relates to your presentation, and what you can do to make it amazing....
Converting PowerPoint presentations into video format is a great way to give your speech extra engaging power. Here’s a quick tutorial to get you started.
Via Baiba Svenca
Tufte writes, “Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest amount of time with the least ink in the smallest space.” These are words to live by for the slide designer.
I thought I would share five lessons I’ve learned from Tufte over the years that could easily contribute to more effective presentations.
While he emphasizes simplicity and clarity in his graphics, he focuses on the importance of balance and complete, accurate presentation of information. This allows the audience to form opinions and make informed decisions about what they see....
At a glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Sway is a new tool that lets users string together images, text, and bullet points in a visually arresting way. In other words, Sway creates presentations, much like PowerPoint. It’s even part of the Microsoft Office suite, having just shed its "Preview" designation after 10 months of private and public testing.
But as Pratley points out, Sway isn’t meant for the same exact audience as PowerPoint. It’s a much simpler program, with far fewer controls, and most of its formatting is automatic, so each Sway can adapt to any screen size on a PC, tablet, or phone. The fact that you can’t tweak things down to the individual pixel, as with PowerPoint, is by design. "Anything where you’re building a complicated layout, that’s really a PowerPoint scenario, and not a Sway one," says Pratley, who is Sway’s founder and general manager.
(Microsoft isn't the only company taking this approach, as Sway is competing with other new-age presentation tools like Prezi andHaiku Deck.)
Sway also diverges from Microsoft’s traditional approach to developing software, especially Office. Instead of building most of the product and collecting a bit of private feedback before launch, Microsoft asked users to get involved early on, giving them a fairly minimal product and adding feature requests over the preview period.
The approach is reflective of a company that wants people to feel warmer and fuzzier about its products. Sway is unlikely to be the last example of Microsoft working this way—even if it sometimes means telling people that they’re wrong....
In fact, according to Buffer, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets. And if you need any more evidence to convince you visuals are essential to your content marketing, just consider all these stats.
But honestly ... who's got time for all that? And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly have a degree in graphic design, or the budget to hire someone who does. So, what's a design-impaired marketer to do?
Luckily, over the past couple years, we've been on a mission at HubSpot to make visual content creation much less of an obstacle for the average marketer. How, you ask? Templates, my friends ... templates. And what's great about these templates is they're all built for software you probably already have on your computer: PowerPoint....
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Don't let PowerPoint or Prezi squash your ideas and creativity reminds Tom Fishburne.