PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Winning Strategies for Power Presentations: Conversation with Jerry Weissman

    Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix and many others.Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO road show. 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 500 other IPO road show presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market.

In this conversation, Jerry discusses his new book, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations.

Geetesh: Your new book, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations explores presenter personalities–and their strategies to be convincing and persuasive. Please tell us more about your book.

Jerry: When My new book is essentially a playbook of case studies based on the fundamental principles in my three original books: Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy, and In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions. Taken together, the three offer a proven methodology to develop all the essential elements in any presentation: how to develop a crisp, clear and compelling narrative supported by simple PowerPoint slides; how to deliver that presentation with poise, assurance, and confidence; and how to control Q&A sessions. The case studies in my new book are from fields of communication beyond presentations such as books, films, politics, advertising, music, and sports The common elements in these fields, demonstrate the universal aspects of presentations.

Geetesh: The presenters profiled in this book include people alive and also others whom we only know through their books or recordings. How did you choose the 75 personalities for this book? What sets them apart?

Jerry: I chose a variety of communicators and writers who have eloquently expressed basic concepts that illustrate the fundamental principles of my presentation methodology. Their breadth: from diverse fields and from ancient times to the present demonstrate their universality.

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, Interviews, Jerry Weissman, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills

Indezine News: April 9, 2013

We start this issue with another set of pushpin graphics! Put these on four corners of your pictures, or just place one of them on the top center of your picture! We’ve combined all our pushpin graphic sets into one simple download now! Read our review about MagPointer — this is a fascinating PowerPoint add-in to try out, and makes it easier to present data heavy slides. Matt Carter is based out of the Northwestern part of the US, and he discusses his book, Designing Science Presentations — great if you work in science, medicine, research or related fields — but his book is essentially great reading for any PowerPoint designer. We continue with our tutorials on the new PowerPoint 2013 for Windows — also you’ll find ways to make your text stand apart in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. Enjoy this issue, and do send us your feedback!

Read all this and more in Indezine News.

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

Gridlines in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

PowerPoint’s gridlines help you position your slide objects more precisely — along with rulers and guides, gridlines let you position and snap slide objects in place so that you can easily line a set of slide objects uniformly. Gridlines are intersecting parallel and vertical dotted lines displayed on the slide forming almost a dotted graph-like mesh.

Learn about gridlines in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

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

Brainshark Sales Enablement Portal: Conversation with Andy Zimmerman

  Andy Zimmerman is chief marketing officer for Brainshark, Inc., a leading provider of sales enablement solutions. Brainshark’s offerings include Brainshark On-Demand — for turning PowerPoint documents into online and mobile video presentations — and SlideShark, the award-winning app for showing PowerPoints on the iPad and iPhone. Thousands of companies use Brainshark to improve the reach and results of their business communications, while dramatically reducing costs.

In this conversation, Andy discusses the Brainshark Sales Enablement Portal, which Brainshark is launching today.

Geetesh: Tell us about the new Brainshark Sales Enablement Portal, and who is this intended for?

Andy: The Brainshark Sales Enablement Portal is a new content management portal — designed for sales professionals and other audiences, including marketing teams and channel partners. The portal provides intuitive and central access to all the Brainshark video presentations and other content that these groups need.

As you know, Brainshark video presentations combine PowerPoint slides, voice narration, video clips, quizzes/interactivity, attachments and more. They can be viewed anytime, on-demand, from computers, smartphones or tablets. They’re trackable too, so when sales reps send a presentation out, they can see who viewed it, when and for how long — a major help when following up.

In addition to providing a repository of Brainshark presentations, the Sales Enablement Portal also houses content in other popular business formats, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and .PDF documents. As a result, users can quickly access all their important sales, marketing and training assets from a single, secure, searchable and mobile-optimized location.

This offering, part of our new Sales Enablement Suite, comes at a time when sales enablement — that is, helping companies prepare for customer interactions, engage with key audiences and advance sales opportunities — is becoming even more of a strategic priority among the C-suite. Analyst firm IDC reports that salespeople squander 7 hours or more each week (nearly a full workday!), looking for information to prepare for sales calls — and usually without success. In addition, only 10 percent of that information is made available in a useful format.

Geetesh: What can a user do with their presentation content, and any other content that’s already on the portal — can you share some scenarios?

Andy: Sure. In addition to serving as a content repository, the Sales Enablement Portal has a lot of other useful features. The portal provides permission-based access, meaning that you only see the content you’re intended to see. So, for example, if you’re accessing the portal as a sales rep, your view won’t be cluttered by irrelevant or sensitive materials intended for other audiences, like channel partners or executives.

Administrators can designate featured content to ensure maximum visibility and usage. The portal also provides powerful search capabilities and lets you filter results based on folder, topic, tags, and author. You can also sort by date, title, and content popularity.

Each individual accessing the portal can customize their experience, through the personal organization and “favorites” capabilities. So again, if you’re a sales rep, you might decide to organize content into your own easily accessible lists — designating content related to particular customers, verticals, products, sales stages and more. Lists can be changed or eliminated as your needs change, and you could tag sales presentations you access frequently as “favorites” for quick, anytime access.

Each piece of content you access is displayed within its own landing page, providing an easy glimpse at related presentations and other content. If permitted, you can share presentation links via email and social media, and comment on and rate materials too.

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: Andy Zimmerman, Brainshark, Interviews, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Text Transforms

Twisted or turned text? Is that real? Or is that even something that you would want in your PowerPoint slides? For the benefit of all purists here, we agree that such “arty” text has no place in real world slides. However there may still be scenarios in which you wished you could twist or turn your text! Most of the times, text is not decorated beyond applying some fills, or outlines, or some readymade WordArt Styles (Quick Styles). However, there are occasions when you want to create a quick logo, or even an attention grabbing text graphic — then you will find PowerPoint’s Transform effects for text very apt.

Learn how you can make your text arty by applying various Transform options in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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