PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Indezine News: Unwrapping PowerPoint 2013

Last week’s most eventful happening was Microsoft announcing a public preview for Office 2013, the next version of Microsoft Office. Predictably, this means a new PowerPoint version. Expectations are very high for the upcoming PowerPoint 2013 — and what you see in the public preview version is essentially what you will see in the final release. So for those of you who are expecting to send feedback to Microsoft based upon your opinion of PowerPoint 2013’s public preview, be aware that no new features will be added based on your opinion at this time. A public preview is something that gets released to iron out bugs and make users aware of an upcoming version — and nothing else!

If that sounded pessimistic, then it was not intended to. And that’s because there is so much to like about PowerPoint 2013 — in the next few weeks and months we will explore all nuances of PowerPoint 2013, and share them with you.

Read the newsletter here.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Reversing Motion Paths

Now that you have learnt how easy it is to add motion paths using presets, and to draw your own custom motion paths, it is time to start getting more familiar with some tricks used with Motion Path animations. The simplest motion path trick is to reverse the direction of your motion path — this option is very helpful if you want an object to animate using a motion path, and then animate the same object again from the end of the motion path back to the starting point.

Learn how to reverse a motion path’s direction in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Need for PowerPoint Training: Conversation with Joby Blume

  
Joby Blume is a Managing Consultant at BrightCarbon, a presentation agency operating from the UK and Singapore. Joby has been writing sales presentations for the last seven years, during which time he has helped clients to win billions of dollars of new business.

BrightCarbon specializes in creating compelling and persuasive sales presentations and Visual Conversations®, training salespeople to present effectively, and supporting clients with large pitches. BrightCarbon also delivers paid-for and free advanced PowerPoint training.

In this interview, Joby discusses the need for PowerPoint training.

Geetesh: Most PowerPoint users are self-taught, and their justification is that PowerPoint is a very easy program to use – do you agree with them? Please share your thoughts.

Joby: Sure, PowerPoint is easy to use without training — but people just use it in the worst ways imaginable. If all you want to do is use PowerPoint as a word processor, then it’s straightforward to open it up and start typing — just don’t ever use your slides for a presentation. There’s no point reading slides aloud to an audience — if they can read your message, they don’t need to listen too.

A lot of people have realized that really crowded, text-heavy slides don’t work that well, and are thinking more in terms of a Presentation Zen approach instead. Which makes perfect sense if you are designing slides for use on a huge stage, almost as a backdrop to a speech. Find a great photograph, insert it, and type a line of text over the top. But most presentations aren’t like that. We look at Steve Jobs and think that we want to deliver presentations the same way he used to, but conveniently ignore the fact that most of our presentations are in a small meeting room to six other people or a sales presentation to a skeptical audience. And we’re not launching a mobile phone to a room full of fans, we’re trying to explain business strategy, or medical diagnostics, or data, or something like that. So, even those people who try to do something better than typing six bullet points onto a slide are modeling the wrong behavior –- because they aren’t giving a speech with a pretty backdrop to a friendly audience.

One of the things that’s great about PowerPoint is that it can help presenters to explain complex ideas clearly. But to do that successfully, slides shouldn’t make sense on their own –- they should support a presenter. All those beautiful decks on SlideShare look fantastic, but they aren’t a presentation –- they are slides that make perfect sense without a presenter. So when a presenter comes to use them, what does the audience do? They just read the slides, and because they think that the most important information goes onto the slides, they feel that they can ignore the presenter. It doesn’t matter how beautiful slides are if they aren’t effective when used in a presentation.

A lot of people think they can use PowerPoint, but they never even thought about what makes an effective slide. PowerPoint might be easy to pick up and use, but it’s actually pretty hard to use well -– and it does tempt people to use it badly, with things like “Insert Text Here” encouraging the use of bullet points.

So, we think that PowerPoint should be used to show things that help to support what a presenter says, with images, graphs, diagrams -– all that sort of stuff -– but not to replace a presenter. To make slides that are highly visual, most people need a bit of help. Partly in visualization -– actually working out how to show their ideas, and then also in PowerPoint doing things like working with images, animation, graphs, groups, manipulating video, and so on. Most people don’t know how to do those things and need training.

Geetesh: You do training sessions on PowerPoint for free – why do you do these sessions, and what have your training experiences been like?

Joby: There are sort of two answers to this. The official one is that we’re on a mission to save the world from awful presentations, one master class at a time. By which I mean that we all actually care about helping people to deliver better presentations. So, we run advanced PowerPoint training sessions online, but also presentation skills sessions, and even sessions for those writing presentations. Some of our teams have been creating visual PowerPoint slides professionally for almost ten years –- so it’s quite easy for us to create training presentations, and to show people how we do things. We want to help, and so we organize the sessions.

We run two master classes each week, most weeks of the year. And as you say, the sessions are free, and we’re getting really good feedback. The classes are based on our advanced PowerPoint training and presentation skills training – which we deliver to companies in-house on a paid-for basis. But this way we can reach more people, and help save the world from awful presentations. All the thanks we receive makes us feel warm and fuzzy, and it works as great motivation.

The unofficial but honest answer is that we’re also trying to get noticed. We’ve all been working on presentations for a long time, but BrightCarbon is a relatively new company. So we want to start conversations with people, and the best way to do that is to openly share things that people find useful. So we share our knowledge via our master class events online.

The sessions are actually pretty good. It’s quite fast-paced, and of course, we don’t get time to answer every question we get asked or give personal support in the way we would for face-to-face training. We get a lot of people though, and the sessions are growing through word-of-mouth, so we must be doing something right. The sessions are aimed at people who already use PowerPoint, but who want to see what more is possible, and so far it seems like we’re pitching it right.

We use Brainshark to send out summaries to the people who miss the session, but the full content is only available to those who turn up. The numbers attending have been growing exponentially -– soon we’ll need to increase our capacity with our webinar provider – but we’re delighted people are finding the sessions useful.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

See Also: BrightCarbon (iPad Presentations): Conversation with John Bevan

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: BrightCarbon, Interviews, Opinion, PowerPoint, Training

Business Meetings Silhouettes for PowerPoint – 01

Do you want a visual of businesspeople in a meeting environment? And do you want this visual to be neutral? Then you should explore these silhouettes — when you are presenting to a multi-racial or an international audience, silhouettes are the best options to be used in the place of people’s pictures. Silhouettes are essentially outlined graphics with fills and effects applied which makes them neutral. Here are some Business Meetings silhouettes ready to use within your PowerPoint slides. The sample PowerPoint presentation that you will download contains these silhouettes in both black and white colors, within two separate slides. We have also included few more variations with some pre applied fills, styles and effects to help you to start with. You can use PowerPoint’s fills, lines, and effects to make these Business Meetings silhouettes look coordinated with your slides.

Download and use these silhouettes in your presentation.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Playing Video Across Slides

Do you want to add a video clip to your PowerPoint slide so that it continues to play across subsequent slides? This actually means that when you move from one slide to another, the video continues playing without any interruption. PowerPoint 2007, the version before PowerPoint 2010 provided you with the Play Across Slides option — but this has been removed in PowerPoint 2010 from within the interface — however, we found a workaround to get back that option, as explained in this tutorial.

Learn how to play a video clip across slides in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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