PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Gradient Fill for Text

Text filled with a gradient can look contemporary and classic — or ghastly and gaudy! It all depends on the type of gradients you use for your text. There are some guidelines that will help you create great looking gradient fills for your text. Gradient fills look great as text fills only when your text is fairly large sized. Using more colors in the gradient fill may make your text distracting. Try to use the gradient colors which contrast with the slide background.

Learn how to add a gradient fill to selected text in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Fills, PowerPoint 2010, Text, Tutorials

Office Themes: XML Editing in Visual Studio

All the new Office file formats (post Office 2007) are XML based — and can easily be opened and edited in an XML editing program. We already showed you how all these files are a bunch of XML files contained in a ZIP file container within our Theme XML Files tutorial. Although it is easy to unzip the files and edit some code in a basic program like Notepad, you will need a better program that does not require you to unzip and edit all the time, and then zip it up again! Thankfully there are plenty of programs that allow you to edit these Office XML files — our favorite is Microsoft’s own Visual Studio. On its own, Visual Studio cannot open and edit Office XML files — but Microsoft provides a free add-in that plugs into Visual Studio and lets you edit the Office XML files.

Learn how XML editing is done within Visual Studio.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Themes, Tutorials

Kristin Thompson at the Presentation Summit 2012

After a photo session showing the events of the past three days, Rick handed over to Kristin Thompson, the keynote speaker for Wednesday morning. Kristin, who is based out of Portland, Oregon did a session that discusses memory power, and how it can help you get ahead in your life and career.

She explained that memory as a skill is not typically something inherited by your genes, but developed using techniques.

Kristin added that it’s important that you remember your talk when you have to do a presentation. If you are worried about remembering your talk, or speak in the wrong order — then you lose your confidence even before you begin your presentation.

Kristin explained that she was not always a memory trainer. She started as a sales and marketing coach — but she stumbled into memory training due to circumstances. She used to work as part of a sales team for almost a decade, and this involved so much training, strenuous hours, and plenty of travel. Sales was one of those things that you did, or did not — there were no half measures and a life in sales required sacrificing many of life’s small moments, and putting family life to compromise.

In 2007, Kristin decided to change her career so that she did not have to travel much. She then joined a personal development company — presenting to rooms of people so that she could sell training sessions. She realized that she needed a better memory if she needed to put information in her head and out of her mouth. And then she got pregnant! The doctor had some bad news — her child had only a 20% chance of survival. She fought this against all odds, and succeeded in a normal delivery — but with a huge stack of medical bills

Based on her own struggles to form a better memory, Kristin started a $99 dollar workshop — luckily she got 30 participants at first go, and then she never looked back.

Kristin involved the audience in a game to test their memory. She asked the audience to pick up 15 items randomly to create a list of words to remember. Here are the first 10 words that the audience chose:

1. Dog
2. Moleskin Journal
3. Broccoli
4. Beach Ball
5. Kayak
6. PowerPoint
7. Mountain
8. Exit Sign
9. Happy Hour
10. Car

So why did I not put up all the 15 words here? That’s because we only memory-tested the first 10 words to demonstrate memory retention skills. To make it easier for us to remember any list of 10 or less words, Kristin asked the audience to identify 10 parts of the human body, from the toe to above, and associate each word with a number.

1. Toes
   
2. Knee
   
3. Thigh
   
4. Rear
   
5. Lungs
   
6. Shoulder
   
7. Collar
   
8. Face
   
9. Head
   
10. Ceiling (or Sky)

Kristin then suggested we do two exercises:

1. Identify the numbers for the human body parts, and always remember them — it’s easiest to remember the numbers 1, 5, and 10 and what they associate with — the answers are Toes, Lungs, and Ceiling — then we can easily identify that 6 is the number after 5 (thus Shoulder comes above Lungs), and that 9 is the number before 10 (thus the Head is below the ceiling).
2. And then associate every word in your list with the number of the body part — so place a picture in your thoughts about a “Dog” licking your “Toes” — or of a “Car” suspended from the “Ceiling”. These pictures, when associated in the mind are not easily forgotten — so you can easily identify that Car was numbered 10 on the list since the Ceiling is numbered 10 on our remembrance list. Also a car suspended from the ceiling is a visual not easy to forget!

Here’s some more help from Kristin — she said that the real trick is to remember is three Ps:

1. Picture
   
2. Place
   
3. Possess

Here are some thoughts from Kristin:

Stress is a memory killer.

Memory has nothing to do with your brain — it is a lack of strategy. The strategy you need is called the “internal cheerleader strategy”.

Your memory works in pictures.

Kristin Thompson is the creator of the Presentation Memory Power and Command Any Room programs. Kristin left her successful media sales career to be a mom and learned to leverage her expertise and create a full-time income while working part time. Kristin now teaches others how to turn their missions and messages into new clients and higher visibility.

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: PowerPoint, Presentation Summit

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Format Text Dialog Box

We have already explored how you can format font styles to make your text bold, italicized, underlined, etc. Beyond these basic offerings, PowerPoint 2010’s Font dialog box offers some advanced format options for selected text. Other than these options, you will also find the other font options like font type, font size, color, etc. within the Format Text dialog box. In this tutorial, you will learn how to summon the Format Text dialog, and how you can work with the font formatting options within this dialog box.

Learn about various Font options available within Format Text dialog box in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Carmen Simon at the Presentation Summit 2012

Carmen Simon‘s session on attracting attention was the keynote for Tuesday morning. Although she used the term “seduction” a lot during the session, what Carmen actually meant was seduction of another kind — to be used in scenarios related to both personal and business lives. So why did she use the term “seduction” rather than just “attraction”? That’s because Carmen was inspired by a book called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

After reading the book, Carmen became intrigued by the concept, if only for “research” reasons. According to Carmen, Neil Strauss, the book’s author applied the principles he explains to 13,000 people of varied races and nationalities. In fact, when he applied these principles for a year, he ended up collecting 2000 phone numbers!

Other books Carmen mentioned include Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden and Influence
by Robert Cialdini. She also noted with interest how Brad Pitt performed in Meet Joe Black and also Pierce Brosnan’s act in The Thomas Crown Affair.

Seduction in the conventional sense may be a culmination of an activity — but culmination may be something different too — such as gaining a phone number or selling a phone! In each case, you must make adjustments to your personality. Carmen added that Survival of the Smoothest is always assured — she also mentioned that Religion, life, politics, and presentations are all pickup.

Whatever your pickup or seduction tricks may be, it is important that you use proper sequencing during the entire act, and all these three concepts must be utilized in this exact sequence:

Attract
Build Comfort
Seduce

Carmen then had some volunteers demonstrate the art of seduction. Two men wooed a woman to get her phone number. And a man and woman both tried to sell an “iPhone for the second hand” to a business prospect. All these demonstrations invoked plenty of laughter from the audience.

Carmen then emphasized that whatever we may do to seduce a prospect, we must open our act in either of these ways:

1. Be Direct,
2. Be Situational,
3. Be Indirect (camouflaged, and thus spark curiosity).

The result of your seduction act must be so that you end up teaching your prospects something about themselves. Remember, also that “everybody loves themselves.”

Here are some more thoughts from Carmen:

• Use value-demonstrating techniques
• When you use the word “because”, you put things in a frame and add legitimacy.
• When you don’t use the word “because”, it might mean that you don’t have the time or interest in the person you are talking to.
• Don’t do what everyone else does. Ever.
• Give them a reason to continue the conversation. What is your conversation piece?
• Screen them as much as they screen you.
• Be picky — picky people are winners.
• Always leave them better than you found them.
• The not-successful ones are the ones that open up the room and say here I am. The successful ones are the ones that open up the room and say here you are.
• If you know where to stop, you can go anywhere.

Here are some screening questions:

• Is there more to you than meets the eye?
• Are you a passionate person?

There are a lot of people but I am impressed by your intelligence and energy, the little things that make you unique.

Carmen Simon is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and founder of Memzy, a company that uses brain science to help corporations create memorable messages. Carmen’s most recent book, “Impossible to Ignore: Create Memorable Content to Influence Decisions,” has won the acclaim of publications such as Inc.com, Forbes and Fast Company and has been selected as one of the top international books on persuasion. Carmen holds two doctorates, one in instructional technology and another in cognitive psychology. Carmen speaks frequently to corporate, academic, and government audiences on the importance of using brain science to craft communication that is not only memorable but sparks action. After all, what’s the use of memory if people don’t act on it?

You May Also Like: An Interview with Carmen Simon

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: Carmen Simon, Events, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit