PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Ten Easy Topics for Pecha Kucha

We have so many interactive and communicative visitors on Indezine.com. They get in touch via email, or the feedback forms, or via our chat applet, and even through our LinkedIn and Facebook communities. One question that has come up often is about topics for Pecha Kucha presentations. So I decided to do something about these questions by writing this post about easy topics for Pecha Kucha presentations.

See Also: 10 Tips for Pecha Kucha | Pecha Kucha Questions

Let’s start with wondering about why do readers ask for topic ideas? Why not choose something that’s close to their heart or something that inspires them? That’s because Pecha Kucha presentations are not your typical PowerPoint slide decks. In fact, there’s no rule in Pecha Kucha that dictates you must use PowerPoint. As long as you have twenty slides, it does not matter if you are using PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, Google Slides, a PDF, or even a program that advances photographs. Just remember that these presentations are limited to twenty slides that show up for only twenty seconds each. And the presenter must speak all along, while the slides are showing and changing.

The second reason people ask for topic ideas is that this might be their first Pecha Kucha presentation, and they are not sure what will work, and what won’t.

Yes, it is a good idea to use a simple topic, and it helps if the topic is something you are excited about. The Pecha Kucha site says, “The key to a great presentation is to present something you love.”

But what are simple topics, that excite you, and are interesting to your audiences? Of course, if you already have a topic, you need not read further, but if you are still looking for ideas, here are ten easy topics that you can use for your Pecha Kucha presentations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Ideas, Pecha Kucha, Presentation Skills, Presentations, Ten

No Fill for Shapes in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac

Whenever you insert a new shape into a PowerPoint slide, it is filled with a solid color by default (or the default fill may be different depending on the Theme applied to your presentation). Most of the time, you may leave that unaltered, but there may be times you want just the outline to be visible. This sort of outlining focuses the part of the picture that has to be highlighted. It is in scenarios like these where it can be useful to learn how to remove any fill.

Remove fill from shapes in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Fills, Mac, No Fill, Office 2016, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint for Mac, Shapes, Tutorials

PowerPoint and Presenting News: July 31, 2018

We first feature Simon Morton from Eyeful Presentations who talks about the amazing Eyeful Insights Journal that his agency released this year. Read (or view) his interview to know about new trends in the world of presenting. Our next post goes back fourteen years, because this post is so popular! We completely updated How Do I Hide the Navigation Buttons That Appear in PowerPoint’s Slideshow View?, and you can find three ways to achieve this task, and please do leave your comments! We also bring back Cliff Atkinson’s guest post from 2004, in which he explains why the price that every organization pays for bad PowerPoint is incalculable.

PowerPoint 2016 for Windows users can learn about Working with Guides, Using Dingbats and Other Characters as Bullets, and Importing Pictures for Bullets. PowerPoint 2016 for Mac users can find out more about Shape Fragment and Shape Intersect commands that let you create new shapes from existing PowerPoint shapes. 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

Shape Subtract Command in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac

PowerPoint lets you change the appearance of merged shapes. However, don’t assume that just because this is so easy-to-use, the end results won’t be seriously impressive. Together, there are five options that let you merge shapes, and we have already explored four of them. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how you can use the Subtract option to subtract one shape (or even multiple shapes), from the first selected shape.

Learn how you can use the Shape Subtract option in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Mac, Merge Shapes, Office 2016, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint for Mac, Shapes, Tutorials

Eyeful Insights Journal: 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 Eyeful Insights Journal.

Eyeful Insights Journal – Part 1

Geetesh: What does the Eyeful Insights Journal contain?

Simon: So, the Insights book… It’s a bit of a first for us. We’ve shared loads of information previously with people, and I think we’ve gained a bit of a reputation for doing that; through our blog, through white papers, through even our Presentation Lab book. This is a very, very different document. It’s a hard copy, quite sort of hefty piece of work, and it’s designed as much as a coffee table book as anything else.

The insights in here are focused at addressing some of the loftier topics that are impacting leadership presentations more than anything. It talks about a whole host of different things; from inspiration that we can get from how politicians engage audiences, and how leaders might be able to engage their audiences using some of the tips and tricks through there, all the way through to recognizing that a lot of leadership presentations now, and communication generally, is talking to a multi-generational audience. Our audiences have actually changed quite dramatically in a very short period of time. And that, in particular, is a theme that runs all the way through the Insights book, from the technology you might employ, through to how you might structure a story and certainly focus on things like a strong call to action.

Geetesh: Who is the Eyeful Insights Journal intended for?

Simon: It’s intended for a very specific audience, we’re aiming it at senior leadership teams. It’s a relatively short run and we have a list of names that we’re sending or handing these books over to, either within our current client base or people that we’ve identified as either really driving things forward in the way that they communicate with their audiences or, frankly, are in need of some support. So, what we did is we went out to the business and got experts in those different areas to write articles that would offer real insights and ideas and innovation to prompt leaders to deliver their communication in a different way.

Geetesh: What is the purpose of the Eyeful Insights Journal?

Simon: The purpose of this is to prompt change at a very senior level within organizations. We recognize that one book is not going to do it, so this is the first of an annual Insights book that we will be sending out to handpicked senior leaders. Those handpicked senior leaders may be within our own current client base or people that we believe would benefit from working with Eyeful. The senior leaders will prompt or will be the source of what we call the Presentation Culture within an organization. So, if your senior leader is a poor user of presentations; if they have no structure, if their messages are unclear and fuzzy, if they use technology ineffectively or clumsily, that has an impact on how the entire organization engages with that type of technology.

What we want to do is to prompt from the top of the business a different way of looking at communication. And that, fundamentally, is what this book is there to act as a catalyst for that change.

Eyeful Insights Journal – Part 2

Geetesh: What is in the first edition of the Eyeful Insights Journal?

Simon: I have to say, it’s chock-a-block with some really interesting articles, some of which we were quite tempted to hold off until next year. But we didn’t, because we recognize that actually our sector and presentations generally are moving at such a rate that the content that’s in here is relevant this year and who knows what the bigger impact will be next year.

So, this edition talks about things like multigenerational audiences and how, as leaders, people need to recognize that they are dealing with quite a broad church of audience members and they need to be able to engage with them in different ways, but consistently across the entire area.

We look at the way that politicians have been able to engage audiences in ways that we’ve never dreamt of, just five years ago. And that’s had some major impact in the world that we live in today.

We look at ideas and concepts like TED, the things you can take from TED and should be taking from TED, but also the things that may not apply specifically to your form of communication.

We look at design, we look at technology, there’s a whole host of different approaches that we want to just, as much as anything, spark a conversation and the discussion at that very, very senior level. Harvard Business Review recently highlighted that business communication is an imperative, a leadership imperative. So, you need to be able to communicate very, very clearly with your audience and we hope this book is going to be the catalyst for people rethinking that engagement.

Thank you, Geetesh

You May Also Like: Eyeful Presentations Launches Eyeful Insights Journal

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

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