PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 15, 2015

We first present an interview with Steven Memel, who through his The Science of Switching On program has helped in the development of top performers ranging from the silver screen to the corporate boardroom. We then talk to Dave Paradi about his ongoing 2015 Annoying PowerPoint Survey. We bring you interviews with celebrated speakers who will be part of the Presentation Summit in New Orleans later this month. This week we feature Keith Harmeyer and Taylor Croonquist.

We discuss connecting services to your Microsoft Account and also removing them — Flickr is used as an example in these tutorials. We also explore the Remove Background option in various versions of PowerPoint. Finally, don’t 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

Learn Sway: Text Cards

We have already explored how Cards in Microsoft Sway work similarly to Placeholders in Microsoft PowerPoint. While PowerPoint has just a handful of Placeholder types, Sway provides many more Card types. In fact, Sway has so many Card types that they needed to be placed within one of three categories. We will first look at Text Cards, the first of these three categories of Cards.

Explore how you can work with Text Cards in Microsoft Sway.

Filed Under: Sway
Tagged as: Cards, PowerPoint for the Web, Sway, Text, Tutorials

Outstanding Presentations 2015: Conversation with Matteo Cassese

Matteo Cassese is an interactive consultant and an entrepreneur passionate about innovation and technology living in Berlin, Germany. Before starting his consulting business, La Fabbrica della Realtà, in 2011, he has held technical and marketing roles in the internet, telecommunications and entertainment fields. His experience with presentations spans more than 10 years, where he has applied his skills to bigger corporations and startups alike. In January 2015 he has launched the Presentation Hero Academy.

In this conversation, Matteo discusses his upcoming webinar tomorrow, which he will present as part of the Outstanding Presentations 2015 series.

Geetesh: Tell us more about what you do — and also about how audience perceptions about visuals have changed/evolved over the years?

Matteo: Hello Geetesh, thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to be featured on Indezine. I have specialized in recent years in presentations, but my job is also helping multinationals and startups do their digital marketing right.

To your question! My favorite way of keeping an audience engaged and active is to enter into an agreement with them. This agreement is about mostly how much time you will use and how you will use it. I usually make sure that the audience in front of me knows who I am, what I am going to talk about and how my talk is structured in the first 60 seconds of the presentation.

This puts the audience at ease because they feel in control. They relax because they know what is going to happen next. That is just a first step, but indeed it’s an important one.

Geetesh: What will you speak about in your session as part of the Outstanding Presentations series – and what would be the takeaway for attendees?

Matteo: Let’s start with the takeaway: I want you to get out of my webinar knowing how every successful presentation, film or event follows a crystal clear, powerful structure that anyone can borrow and use for their own purposes.

After this 1 hour encounter, the attendees will all be able to create a great presentation with a powerful intro, a middle section that delivers value like a boxer delivers punches, and an ending that is unforgettable.

I am taking this advice from my Presentation Master Class that I deliver in companies worldwide and online at the Presentation Hero Academy. I’ve packed all the advice possible in these 60 minutes and I promise you will not have one dull second during the webinar.

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: Events
Tagged as: Interviews, Matteo Cassese, Outstanding Presentations Workshop, PowerPoint, Webinar

Working with Cards within Sway

You can create a new Sway from scratch, or you can also import existing files such as PowerPoint, into Sway. Then you can add various media elements within your Sway using the options explained in our Insert Options in Sway tutorial. Other than the Insert option, you can also work with Cards to insert various elements. So what is a Card? In Sway parlance, a Card is a container that contains text, images and videos.

Learn how Cards work within Sway.

Filed Under: Sway
Tagged as: Docs.com, PowerPoint for the Web, Sway, Tutorials

Remove Background from Pictures in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Do you want to remove a sky, a wall, any backdrop, or something else in a photograph so that the slide background shows through within those removed parts of the picture? The Remove Background option may be just what you need to remove the backdrop from an inserted picture in PowerPoint 2013.

Learn how to remove a part of your picture to make a transparent background in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Background, Design, Graphics, Office 2013, Pictures, PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials