PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Sam Horn at the Presentation Summit 2013

Sam Horn, well known as the Intrigue Expert delivered the first keynote session for this year’s Presentation Summit on Monday morning.

She started with three questions we all need to ask ourselves:

1. Are you eager to get up in the morning?
2. What are you good at that you can point at?
3. How do you know that you are making a difference?

Here are some thoughts shared by Sam:

• If you have answers to all these questions, the “light” is probably on in your eyes, and you are in the state of “SerenDestiny”.
• It is not enough for the light to be on in your eyes, you must make the light go on in the eyes of the others.
• Keep your eyebrows raised up to show intrigue. Knit your eyebrows to show confusion
• What are the three “did-you-know” questions that the decision makers don’t know — and you know. Frame your “did-you-know” questions based on these thoughts:

The size of the market

The scope of the solution

The importance of cost

• Use the word “imagine” often in your narrative — your audience will pay more attention, and they will no longer check emails, or do something else. They now have your attention.
• Make sure your content is such that your audience is smarter than what they were 20 seconds ago.

Sam then involved the audience in an interactive exercise and asked them to first imagine a situation about which they need to convince a decision maker — here are the steps for this exercise:

1. What is the situation?
2. Who is the decision maker?
3. What do I want the decision maker to do?

Here are some more thoughts from Sam:

• What are the three eyebrow up questions you have to do for the decision maker. Start with “Did you know……?”
• Never ask a person, “What do you do?” Ask them instead, “Can you give me an example of what you do?”
• The empathy telescope says “We can put ourselves in the shoes of one person, we cannot put ourselves in the shoes of thousands”.

Sam Horn has a 25+ year track record as a communication strategist with international clients that include Cisco, Fortune 500 Forum, MPI, Intel, NASA, and Four Seasons Resorts. She has authored five books and has been interviewed as a media resource on every network and in every major city. To learn more, visit her site.

Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Presentation Summit

Nudge and Move Shapes in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Nudging a shape or any other slide object is essentially moving it just a wee bit, preferably using the arrow keys on your keyboard rather than the mouse. The Move option is different from a Nudge — it is more of a super-nudge, and you can also use the mouse to move rather than just nudge. PowerPoint provides more than one way to nudge or move any selected shape or slide object.

Learn how to nudge or move shapes in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2013, Shapes, Tutorials

Sticky Tape for PowerPoint – 02

These “sticky tape” graphics have polka dot patterns and are already placed in PowerPoint slides – just copy them and paste within your slides to create a look that makes a picture, shape, or anything else appear as if it has been stuck on a surface, board, or wall with tape! These ready-made sticky tape segments are already within PowerPoint slides — and have been provided in 10 different colors – and all colors have various transparency variations.

Download these sticky tapes, and use them in your slides.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Design, Graphics, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Hiding Chart Series and Categories

In PowerPoint 2011, the entire data that shows up on your chart in the form of series and categories is stored within an Excel sheet. These series and categories may show up on your chart in different ways — sometimes as an individual column or a set of columns within a column chart. For some charts, this data may also be represented as values or a legend. However, almost any chart type — even if it is not a column chart compares a set of values. Once you delete any of these values, they no longer show on your chart — so the level of comparison reduces. However deleting is not always the best option, especially if you want to retrieve those values later whenever required. The solution is to temporarily hide values you no longer need — and then unhide as and when you want to expose those values.

Learn how to hide Series and Categories for charts in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Charting, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Group, Ungroup, and Regroup Shapes

So, what exactly does grouping mean? And what is ungrouping and regrouping going to do further? The moment you select a slide object such as a shape on a PowerPoint slide, you will see some selection handles — this indicates that the shape is selected. Select another shape while the first one is still selected and you see two sets of selection handles. If you need to similarly select many shapes on a slide fairly often, this sort of selection may become cumbersome — and waste so much time. In that case, it’s best you select all the shapes you need to work with, and then combine them into one “group”.

Learn how to group, ungroup, and regroup shapes in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2013, Shapes, Tutorials