PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

The Storyteller’s Secret: Conversation with Carmine Gallo

    Carmine Gallo is a communication coach for the world’s most admired brands. He has helped transform the storytelling culture at Intel, Coca-Cola, LinkedIn, Chevron, and many others. He is an Emmy award-winning journalist, Forbes .com columnist, and popular keynote speaker on the topic of leadership and communication.

In this conversation, Carmine discusses his new book, The Storyteller’s Secret.

Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the idea, and the motivation that inspired your new book, The Storyteller’s Secret?

Carmine: I believe that storytelling is everything in today’s world. Storytelling is the one skill that helps you stand apart in the age of automation. Storytelling is what makes a PowerPoint really sing. Storytelling is the secret to career advancement, social media success, selling products, building brands and launching movements.

I didn’t go looking for the topic; it found me. I’ll tell you exactly when I knew I had to write the book. I was invited to speak at a conference held by the billionaire venture capital investor Vinod Khosla. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Tony Blair, Marc Benioff were also speaking. I began to question why he had invited me. “All of you are brilliant, which is why I invest in you,” he told the young CEOs gathered in the hall…”but few of you know how to do storytelling.” That was the ‘aha’ moment.

Geetesh: Although The Storyteller’s Secret is not a storybook, it does hold a reader’s interest in the same way as a gripping story. And that brings me to the real question. Most people relate a story to a work of fiction, but what about stories that are not fictional? Do these non-fictional stories exist, and if they do, can they help communicate better?

Carmine: For our purposes ‘storytelling’ means using the components of narrative to sell your idea. Ideas that catch on are wrapped in a story. For example, one of the greatest corporate storytellers of our time was Steve Jobs. His presentations were more like performances/plays than a typical presentation. He introduced villains, heroes, characters, props, entertainment.

The other day I had lunch with a venture capital investor for a prominent firm. “I’ve seen 2,000 presentations but I can only remember about 10 of them, and those all had personal stories in them.”

You see, people don’t want to buy a product as much as they want to buy into a story. For example, why does Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz always tell the story of growing up poor and struggling as a youth when his father was injured at work? They had no health insurance and it was hard on the family. Schultz uses the story to explain the ‘why’ behind the company’s initiatives such as providing health care for all employees. Stories inform, illuminate and inspire. Tell more of them!

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: Books, Carmine Gallo, Interviews, Presentation Skills, Storytelling

Reuse Slides in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Reusing your existing slides can be a great help: first you need not recreate stuff you already have and secondly you are saving so much time that you can use more effectively to practice your presentation! Having said that, always start by creating an outline of your presentation. This is important because it gives you an opportunity to plan your slides all over again. Thereafter, reuse any existing slides. PowerPoint provides a quick command that locates specific slides, and enables you to add it to the active presentation. While this process works the same way in all versions of PowerPoint, there are small interface changes — in this tutorial, we’ll show you how to reuse slides in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Learn how to reuse slides in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Reuse Slides, Tutorials

PowerPoint and Presenting News: February 9, 2016

We first show you what happens to all the feedback that PowerPoint users send to Microsoft. We then bring you several resources for free images and textures. Don’t you want to have tabs in your slides? Take a look at our Feature List Layouts to understand this concept better. And, then you will learn how to create Star Wars Credits style animations in several versions of PowerPoint.

PowerPoint 2016 for Windows users can learn about changing Slide Layouts, the Live Preview feature, and switching views between open presentations. PowerPoint 2013 users can explore hyperlinks for Action Buttons. Finally, do not miss the new discussions and templates of this week!

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

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

Compare Presentations Manually in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

While PowerPoint does have an option to automatically compare presentations, sometimes doing this comparison manually can be actually more effective, especially when you have fewer changes in the first place. You can place both presentations side by side and compare individual slides.

Learn how to compare presentation slides manually in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Compare, Interface, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Tutorials, View

Share Options in PowerPoint for iOS – iPad

Once you create a presentation on PowerPoint for iPad, or even if you open an existing one from a cloud location, you will then be able to share it with others right inside PowerPoint. So how do you do that?

Learn about sharing options in PowerPoint for iOS – iPad.

Filed Under: iPad Presenting
Tagged as: iPad, PowerPoint iPad, Share, Social Media, Tutorials