PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Text Placeholders vs. Text Boxes in PowerPoint 365 for Mac

Before exploring the concept of differences between text placeholders and text boxes, let us start with these thoughts: Aren’t text boxes and text placeholders the same? Are they really different? And why should anyone bother even if they are different? All these are valid questions, and the answers to them form one of the most important foundations in learning to create more structured presentations in PowerPoint.

Learn about the differences between text placeholders and text boxes in PowerPoint 365 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 365
Tagged as: Mac, Office 2016, Office 365, Office for Mac, Outline, PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint 2019, PowerPoint 365, PowerPoint for Mac, Text, Text Boxes, Text Placeholders, Tutorials

True Cost of Presentations in Business Today: Conversation with Simon Morton

  
Simon Morton founded Europe’s leading presentation design company Eyeful Presentations in 2004. His goal was big but simple – support businesses to create more powerful, engaging and effective presentations that make the most of opportunities and deliver results. 12 years, thousands of presentations and millions of engaged audience members later, Eyeful’s mission continues. Simon’s book, The Presentation Lab continues to make waves and has been released around the world in 6 languages. He is globally recognized as a thought leader in the field of presentations and now dedicates much of his time to speaking, writing or coaching businesses on how to make the most of every presentation opportunity.

In this conversation, Simon talks about the true cost of presentations in business today.

Geetesh: Can you tell us more about this survey that explores the true cost of presentations in business, today? Also, tell us more about these costs, both measurable and hidden.

Simon: Hi Geetesh, thanks for the opportunity to talk about the survey. We’re really excited about it and it was prompted by Eyeful recognizing that we don’t really get to see all the presentations within our customers. Eyeful and companies like Eyeful get the great privilege of working at the high-profile end of presentations. People come to us when it’s a must-win bid or a high-profile conference. But, below that line, there’s a vast amount of presentations that are being created by marketing people, salespeople, admin people – day in, day out, across the world.

Now, there is some limited research into the cost of those sort of below the line presentations out there. One estimate from Microsoft states that $50 million a day is wasted in the creation of PowerPoint presentations. But frankly, there’s not much for us to hang our hats on. It doesn’t take much if you think about the cost of a salesperson, for example, creating their own content. We know a lot of them do that, and that’s a lot of wasted sales time and that itself is a massive cost to an organization.

So, we wanted to learn a little bit more about how people were doing it today; understand the scale of the inefficiency issue (if there is one) and then off the back of that, offer some ideas as to how people might be able to improve the efficiency of presentation creation across the business.

Geetesh: You mention that Eyeful will share these results as part of your Eyeful Insights program. Tell us more about this program.

Simon: Last year we pulled together a collection of thought leadership pieces and published them in our first Eyeful Insights journal, which was aimed very much at the C-suite. The articles are there to prompt and to spark debate at a very senior level within an organization. I’m delighted to say we’ve had some really interesting conversations off the back of publishing these articles. Things like presentation culture, the impact of multi-generational audiences, even the influence of political communication on the way that people present information internally, have been really well received.

This year we’ve continued with the journal and we are just about to launch our latest Eyeful Insights article. This relates to data within presentations; how to make the most out of data as part of your storytelling, how to prompt action and prompt discussion from your audience by delivering data in a visual and compelling way. So, we’re very excited about that.

And the next Insights article down the line will be around efficiency. So, our efficiency survey will provide a lot of the data that will underpin our findings and our recommendations to our readers. One of the things specifically with the efficiency Insights document is that we want to provide people with a blueprint to follow, which will improve the efficiency of presentations within our own organizations. That will be published in the next couple of months and if you’d like an early copy, please complete the survey. This survey closes very shortly, and by completing your details at the end of the survey, you will automatically get a copy of the article.

So, thanks again Geetesh, for allowing us to share some of the exciting things happening here at Eyeful and look forward to catching up with you very soon.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Eyeful, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentations, Simon Morton

PowerPoint and Presenting News: July 16, 2019

In this issue, we first look at how you can prevent losing your fonts, backgrounds, and colors when you change the Slide Size with some PowerPoint Themes. We also bring you several interviews with presenters from the upcoming Presentation Summit. This week, we feature John Baluka, Ric Bretschneider, and Richard Goring. While these interviews talk about their sessions, we also bring you tips and ideas from them that will help you today.

PowerPoint 2016 for Windows users can learn about Working with Custom Groups in Ribbon Tabs, Adding Commands to Custom Groups, Resetting, Exporting, and Importing Ribbon Customizations, Reordering and Removing Ribbon Tabs, Resetting, Exporting, and Importing QAT Customizations, and Working with RGB Colors. PowerPoint 365 for Mac users can learn how to Add Headers and Footers to Slides, Import Outlines, Work With Slide Numbers, and the Interface. And if that wasn’t enough for this week, make sure you do not miss the quotes, press releases, and templates released in the last week.

Stay informed about updated tutorials and happenings related to PowerPoint and presenting.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint

Presentation Gallery in PowerPoint 365 for Mac

When launched, PowerPoint 365 for Mac typically opens the Backstage view that contains the Presentation Gallery. The Presentation Gallery provides different ways to start your new presentation using a Theme, a recent presentation, a not-so-recent presentation, or even a blank presentation. These and other choices are explained in this tutorial.

Explore the Presentation Gallery in PowerPoint 365 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 365
Tagged as: Mac, Office 2016, Office 365, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint 2019, PowerPoint 365, PowerPoint for Mac, Presentation Gallery, Tutorials

Interface in PowerPoint 365 for Mac

When launched, PowerPoint 365 for Mac opens the Presentation Gallery. The Presentation Gallery provides several ways to start your next presentation using a Theme, a recent presentation, a not-so-recent presentation, or even a blank presentation. Once you make choices within the Presentation Gallery and click the Create button, you see the actual PowerPoint 365 for Mac interface.

Explore the interface for PowerPoint 365 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 365
Tagged as: Mac, Office 2016, Office 365, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint 2019, PowerPoint 365, PowerPoint for Mac, Tutorials