PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Text Fills

Most of the time, text in PowerPoint is filled with either black or white, or any color that contrasts with the color of the slide background — this color info is contained within the Theme applied to the presentation. There may be times when you want to change this default text fill to some other particular color. Or, perhaps you applied a WordArt Style to your text — and you are happy with everything else within that WordArt Style except the text fill. PowerPoint’s Text Fill option provides you with plenty of fill options for your text — fill options include solid colors, gradients, textures, and also pictures.

Learn how to change the fill for the selected text in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Chris Bliss at the Presentation Summit 2012

Rick Altman officially opened the Presentation Summit 2012 today. After reminiscing about all the PowerPoint Live and Presentation Summit events over the last decade, he handed the stage over to Chris Bliss, a well known comedian to present Monday morning’s opening keynote.

Chris has had millions of views for his YouTube video, and he has spoken at TED.

Chris started by saying he was a little uncomfortable doing a comedy session on Monday morning at 8:30 am — he stressed on how communication is important, and how story-boarding and language can be so useful.

Chris spoke about his experience reading a translated book, which was actually better than the original title. Chris was fascinated enough by the translator, Gregory Rabassa — to find out that he actually had written his own book that deals with translation. Here’s a quote from the book:

Every act of communication is an act of translation

Chris talked about his younger years in the colorful sixties, when he performed as a juggler, traveling cross country as the opening act for a band from Oregon. His father wasn’t amused when he quit college. After twelve years, Chris became the self proclaimed “world’s best juggler”. He then spent his next 12 years as a comedian — for corporate clients, big events, and everyone else.

Here are some quotes from Chris’ keynote:

Be aware of the self interest of the person you are communicating with. Only then you will be able to grasp your responsibility.

Successful communication depends on your ability to respond, and for the other person to respond back to you.

Comedy functions as an information delivery system — it has an edge because it deliberately uses misdirection.

The physical release of laughter releases endorphins in your brain — and reduces your defenses.

Through laughter, walls turn into windows.

Comedy’s use of misdirection allows it to be powerful.

A perfect punchline has few equivalents of powerful communication.

Humor is inherently wild — the individual whom you provide humor to can go and spread it out — this has worked much before the age of social media.

The viral power of humor to spread so fast is second only to drugs.

Viral appeal of a joke with a great punchline can have a great influence on your audience.

If we want to make a better world, take out a little time every day and think funny.

Comedy is a form of ultimate aggression.

Comedy can sometimes be a form of cruelty — so never hurt the powerless, and never tell a joke that can get your legs broken (or get you physically hurt).

The most unexpected lesson of comedy is the appreciation of free expression.

The funniest countries are the freest countries.

The freer you are to make mistakes, the more you will learn — freedom shortens the learning curve.

Chris also provided this quote:

The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom, for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough

— William Blake

A fresh and captivating voice in the tradition of American satire, Chris Bliss is one of the top comedians in the United States, having appeared with Jay Leno, David Letterman, and on Good Morning America. His keynote addresses mix humor, passion, and perspective, all into one compelling message for those who owe their livelihood to better communication.

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

New SlideShark Features: Conversation with Lisa Johnson

Lisa Johnson is vice president of SlideShark marketing for Brainshark, Inc. Brainshark’s cloud-based software lets users create online and mobile video presentations – using simple business tools like PowerPoint and the phone or computer microphone — and share and track their content. Brainshark is also the creator of the free SlideShark app for viewing, presenting and sharing PowerPoints on the iPad and iPhone.

In this conversation, Lisa discusses new SlideShark features — including integrations with Box and Dropbox, and the ability for users to turn their iPhone into a remote control for presentations.

Geetesh: SlideShark’s new integrations with Box and Dropbox let users access presentations stored on these cloud services and present them via SlideShark — can you tell us more about these integrations, and how they will be useful for on-the-road presenters?

Lisa: Sure. As you know, our award-winning SlideShark app lets users view, present and share PowerPoints on the iPad and iPhone. We continually introduce new features, with the goal of making it as easy as possible for mobile business professionals and individuals to interact with and deliver high-impact PowerPoint presentations on-the-go. Now, as more and more people rely on the cloud for storage, these new integrations give SlideShark users instant access — all within the app — to their PowerPoint files that are stored in Box and Dropbox.

As a first step, users must link their SlideShark account with their Box and/or Dropbox accounts. Then, right from within the SlideShark app on their iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, they can instantly click to select the PowerPoint file(s) they’d like to import into SlideShark. From there, they can view the PowerPoint presentations on their iOS devices with fonts, graphics, animations and colors intact. They are also able to take advantage of all of SlideShark’s features — including the Laser Pointer and Presenter Mode, as well as the ability to connect to TVs and projectors — to deliver truly powerful presentations. For sales professionals, especially, the combination of easily accessing content from the cloud — together with the ability to present PowerPoint the way it was meant to be seen on iPads and iPhones — is a real game-changer, and is the true definition of mobile sales enablement.

Geetesh: You’re also announcing the ability to use an iPhone as a remote for an iPad-led SlideShark presentation — tell us more.

Lisa: We’re so excited about this feature and think our users will be too. In fact, it’s something they have asked for. This feature will help mobile professionals be even more agile and effective when delivering presentations. Here’s the gist of it: when delivering presentations from their iPad, users can now use SlideShark to wirelessly link their iPad with their iPhone — turning their iPhone into a remote control. They can use the iPhone to control, advance and jump to specific slides, which is especially useful when iPad content is being projected onto a larger screen. In that case and with their iPhone in hand, users have more freedom to roam while delivering presentations — all while navigating content in an easy, discreet manner.

We’re glad to be continuing to support our users in their mobile presentation needs, and look forward to hearing what they think, as user feedback continues to play a key role in our product roadmap. Thanks for the opportunity to discuss these new features, Geetesh — it’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Brainshark, Interviews, iPad, iPhone, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Crash Courses at the Presentation Summit 2012

The annual Presentation Summit started yesterday with the evening reception, and a staff event later. The actual sessions only start tomorrow on Monday. Today, being Sunday was the day for extra sessions (called optional crash courses). These crash courses are more detailed than the typical conference sessions, and also have fewer attendees—thus almost anyone who attends these sessions gets one-on-one attention from the speaker. These extra sessions are charged over and above the conference cost and are certainly worth attending if you can arrive a day earlier. This year, there were three extra sessions.

Note that some of these sessions happened simultaneously so I could only attend part of those sessions. Here are some thoughts on all three sessions:

Being Heard in a Sea of Voices by Jim Endicott

The Art of the High Stakes Presentation

Jim Endicott introduced his session by announcing that this was going to be an accelerated version of the longer sessions that Jim’s company Distinction Communication does for their clients.

Jim reminded attendees that we are all constantly running for the time and attention of busy people in the audience. If you cannot hold the attention of your audience for the first 10 minutes, then you certainly cannot hold it for another 15 minutes or more.

He added that Our experiences are not full of horrible presenters, but full of average presenters whose one message blurs into his or her another message. You need to be heard in a sea of voices.

Jim said he was taking on the role of being a personal trainer to this audience, and asked them a question:

How do you want to be perceived?

Audience responses ranged from being perceived as authentic, treated as an expert, getting approachable, to being perceived as engaging and effective. Jim suggested that the audience could go through all these qualities, but unless presenters create an outcome, it would not be worth their audience’s time. So maybe being able to make an influence is the key. The most important characteristic for making an influence is to be “passionate” — if you are not excited about what you are talking about, then your audience has no reason to resonate with that passion.

Jim then highlighted a few figures:

• 86% agreed that communicating with a solid level of clarity and confidence directly impacts my career and income.
• 59% agree that they receive “little” or “no” personal feedback about their presentations.

And here are some thoughts from Jim — the words may not be exactly the same as what he said:

Can feedback take you to next level, or does it keep you where you are? Does your perception of feedback result from your colleague saying that your presentation was awesome? And then would you proclaim that the feedback from your audience was amazing?

People just tell us what we want to hear rather than tell the truth — so personal authenticity is at a low ebb.

This session is not about being perfect, but try a few things that will make you a better presenter.

Note: The above description goes into the first 15 to 20 minutes of Jim’s session — the entire session spanned 4 hours.

PowerPoint Survival Skills by Rick Altman

Jumpstart Your PowerPoint Fundamentals

Rick Altman explored several PowerPoint survival skills that most PowerPoint users should be aware of—even before they use the program for the first time. One of his skills discussed the use of bullets and how you can easily remove them altogether to add clarity to your slides.

He showed some examples of slides created by typical PowerPoint users and how removing bullets could make the slides look better and more readable. Rick demonstrated how PowerPoint 2010 removes the indent altogether when you remove a bullet from any paragraph—and that’s good. While exploring bullets for individual paragraphs is a possibility, Rick explained how you can remove bullets easily and globally by making changes to the Slide Master, and its individual Slide Layouts.

Once you are in Slide Master view, you can easily rename the Slide Master or individual Slide Layouts. Rick explored how you cannot delete a Slide Layout that is in use by existing slides—a great thought by Microsoft. Rick then added that he personally prefers to modify and retain only the Slide Layouts that you need. Once he was done deleting the Slide Layouts he never used, Rick ended with 5 layouts:

1. Title Slide,
2. Title and Content,
3. Title Only,
4. Blank, and
5. Two Content

He added that the better housekeeping you do, the simpler and better your results are going to be.

Getting back to bullets, Rick first made a copy of the layout he was going to edit. Then he edited the copied layout so that this had no bullets. So, the 2 layouts with bullets (Title and Content, and Two Content) had alternative layouts without bullets.

Now it was easy to just change the layout for a hundred slides rather than removing bullets, one slide at a time! What’s more—you could also get back bullets the same way.

Note: Rick demonstrated many more tips and tricks, and the entire session spanned 2 hours.

Taming Templates by Echo Swinford

Survival Course on Templates and Themes

Echo’s session was about PowerPoint templates and themes. She explained the concept of Theme Colors that influence the fills, lines, and text that shows up within the Shape Styles gallery.

She suggested that the first thing you do when you create a template is set your slide size. You decide whether you want a 4:3 (standard) or 16:9 (widescreen) slide format. The former slide is 10 x 7.5 inches and the latter is 10 x 5.63, which means that the latter is actually smaller in area than the former! You can actually get around this limitation easily by using a Custom size option and setting that to 13.33 x 7.5 inches. Being aware of 16:9 is significant since the upcoming PowerPoint 2013 defaults to widescreen 16:9 slides.

Echo then explored Theme Colors again and showed how these color values influence colors in all slide elements such as tables, SmartArt, charts, etc.

To create your own Theme Colors set, Echo showed how she uses two PowerPoint add-ins. These are ProTools Color Picker and Shyam Pillai’s Color Swatch which make the task easier.

She then explored Theme Fonts. You can use any available Theme Fonts set, or create your own. If you choose the latter option, you’ll need to select a Heading Font and a Body Font.

Theme Effects were explored next. These impact all styles such as Table Styles, Chart Styles, Shape Styles, SmartArt Styles, etc.

Note: Echo explored many more template options — the entire session spanned 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Presentation Summit

PowerPoint Concept Slides: Segment Hexagon

A hexagon is a polygon with six equal sides – our Segment Hexagon graphic contains 6 equal triangles. This concept slide is a part of our Segment Polygons series, which provides several other segmented polygons for you to use. This Segment Hexagon graphic can be used to depict a “six-in-one” or “one-for-six” theory or relationship. In the example slide, we have used pictures of flowers to fill all six segments of the hexagon – try and use pictures that have a common theme to achieve synergy in your slide’s message. Each individual segment is a separate shape, so you can edit it as required using the shape editing options in PowerPoint.

Download and use these slides in your presentations.

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