PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint and Presenting News: July 5, 2016

We first look at Presentitis, a serious, slide-related stress disorder that is also the name of a site of the same name. Robert Befus of SlideSource talks more about Presentitis. Kurt Dupont discusses Dynamic LIKES, an add-in from PresentationPoint that lets you promote your Facebook page on your PowerPoint slides, continuously updated. Motti Nisani discusses the new Android app for emaze, an online presentation platform. Jerry Weissman then explores the single most important factor for persuasion in a guest column.

PowerPoint 2016 for Windows users can learn about aligning shapes, manipulating shapes by dragging yellow handles, Smart Lookup, duplicating shapes by dragging, and selecting/deselecting shapes. Finally, do not miss the new press releases and templates of this week.

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

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

Rotate Text 180° within Shapes in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

If you have worked aplenty with text in PowerPoint, you must be aware that you cannot rotate text within a shape by 180°. What’s surprising is that you can rotate text by 90° and 270° within a shape, but not by 180°! But why would you need upside-down text that is rotated 180°? Many users do need this upside-down text to explain advanced concepts.

Learn how to rotate text 180° within a shape in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Rotate, Shapes, Text, Tutorials

Select and Deselect Shapes in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

PowerPoint 2016 for Windows expects you first to make a selection, and then the do something such as clicking a button to perform an action for the selected slide objects. If you cannot select an object, then you cannot modify it at all. Although this tutorial explains how you can select shapes on a slide, the process works the same way for any other slide object.

Learn how to select and deselect single and multiple shapes in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Selection, Shapes, Tutorials

The Single Most Important Factor for Persuasion

By Jerry Weissman

An indisputable fact of life in every company, every industry, every vertical, every geography, is that salespeople sell features when they should be selling benefits instead. This mistake is also chronic in presentations because presenters too often focus on their own message to the exclusion of their audiences, causing them to think: “Why should I care?” or “It’s all about you!”

Politicians fall into the same trap. A recent scientific study about persuasion in the political arena found that each side of the political spectrum tends to appeal only to the principles of their base and not to those of the opposition. Doing so not only fails to move any voters beyond those who are already committed, but it also drives the wide wedge in our polarized country ever deeper.

The latter problem is the equivalent of a presenter from a startup company pitching for financing only from an existing investor, or a salesperson selling only to existing customers. The salesperson thus gives up the possibility of gaining a new client or, better still, capturing a competitor’s customers.

One of my clients, a senior executive at a major telecom equipment company, learned that a potential client company he was pursuing decided to go with a competitor. He asked the client for one more chance to pitch. He began his presentation by complimenting the clients on their choice, listing the positive features of his competitor’s product. Then he stopped and said, “But…” and proceeded to list how his own company’s product features would better serve the client’s requirements. That’s a double down of the benefits.

He won the deal.

The authors of the scientific study described how politicians could double down their benefits in a recent New York Times article:

Clearly, tailoring benefits to each unique constituency produces a greater impact. This same approach is applicable to anyone attempting to convince anyone else to act; to vote, to buy, to invest, to approve, even to donate. Understand your audience. Who are they? What do they want? What are their fears, concerns, and hot buttons? Whether you are a salesperson, a presenter, or a politician, make your answers to those questions an integral part of your message.

If politicians were to do that, it just might begin to bridge the gaping chasm that is now dividing our country.

    This blog post by Jerry Weissman was first published on his site at Forbes. He has written five books on presentation skills. His most recent, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations, published by Pearson, is available now from Amazon.

Jerry is among the world’s foremost corporate presentation coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, RingCentral, Mobileye, OnDeck, CyberArk, and many others.

Jerry founded Suasive, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco IPO roadshow. Following its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco’s Board of Directors, attributed “at least two to three dollars” of the offering price to Jerry’s coaching. That endorsement led to more than 600 other IPO roadshow presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market.

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: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, Opinion, Presentation Skills

Dynamic LIKES: Conversation with Kurt Dupont

  Kurt Dupont, based out of Belgium heads PresentationPoint, a company that creates several amazing PowerPoint add-ins. After his Computer Science studies, Kurt started with Andersen Consulting (Accenture nowadays) in Brussels. After three years he moved to the Brussels Airport Terminal Company that runs the Brussels airport – this last placement inspired the start-up of Take-off (now known as PresentationPoint) in 1998.

In this conversation, Kurt discusses Dynamic LIKES, an add-in that lets you promote your Facebook page on your PowerPoint slides, continuously updated.

Geetesh: Kurt, tell us more about Dynamic LIKES – what motivated you to create this add-in that displays Facebook likes on a PowerPoint slide?

Kurt: Thanks Geetesh. You know that PresentationPoint stands for dynamic PowerPoint presentations. So no static text in text boxes on our slides. No. Dynamic information, that is linked to a data source and gets updated whenever you open a presentation. Or when you run the slide show, then the information could be updated every second or minute.

Next to database information about production and sales figures, we wanted to have something on social media. People, organizations, and companies want to get as many people to “Like” them as possible to send their pictures, stories, and news. Nowadays this is often done via a hand-written paper or flyer, and that does not get the attention it needs.

Geetesh: Can you share some real world scenarios where Dynamic LIKES can be used? Also, can Dynamic LIKES be used along with your other add-ins on the same slide?

Kurt: Imagine that you are running a shop. You use a computer screen or television, connected to a computer. The brightness of a television, the animation of slides and shapes, are a real eye-catcher for your audience. On your PowerPoint slides, you can add your opening hours, running promotions, upcoming events, announce holidays etc.

You just add one more slide to promote your Facebook page. Put on the thumbs-up icon of Facebook and your Facebook address or URL. You can even use a Quick Response (QR) code to let people scan the Facebook URL.

When they are on your Facebook page, they just have to like it to subscribe to news and promotions. On your slide, you display the number of likes in real-time. And whenever someone likes your page, this number is automatically incremented. The person that liked your page will feel accepted with this positive feedback on the screen. This is a motivation for others to test this out!

And to answer your other question; Yes, Dynamic LIKES works fine with our other PowerPoint add-ons. Next to the number of Facebook likes, you can e.g. display real-time RSS news and weather information of your city.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Dynamic Likes, Facebook, Interviews, Kurt Dupont, PowerPoint, PresentationPoint