PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Reduce Stress and Save Time

By Claudyne Wilder

One of my clients’ major issues is time or lack of it. They have to prepare between presentations. Needless to say, this causes stress. Consider the following scenario.

Ginger has a presentation to give to new customers. She was told about it last week. She worked on it to the detriment of a critical project, even practicing out loud the night before the talk. She gives it and feels successful. But she has some revisions to make before sending it to the customer.

At the same time, she has to prepare a talk next week to division managers about her project (the one she has been neglecting). Now she has two presentations to work on simultaneously, one to revise and the other to create from scratch. She has no time to rehearse for the second talk and feels nervous. She doesn’t sleep well. Although acceptable, she feels tired, overworked, and frustrated. But today she’s got to revise the first presentation.

Image: Yay Images

Yes, it’s stressful to be constantly getting over one presentation while preparing for the next. There is no one solution. The best way to reduce stress is to analyze the way you go about creating presentations and figure out where you can save time. If you don’t use the following strategies, then you are probably taking twice as long as you need. Use them, save time, reduce your stress level, and get more work done. And you’ll never give a mediocre presentation again!

1. Create a PowerPoint file for each type of presentation. For example, create a project update file with all the slides set up exactly as you need them. Then you just need to put in your new content.
2. Learn to use the Slide Master. It’s the best time investment you can make. People waste hours creating every slide themselves rather than inserting a slide from the Slide Master that already has a layout. Pay someone to explain how to use it and to create several Slide Master looks you can use over and over again.
3. Keep a file of artwork, tables, images, and shapes. I am not talking about looking at other presentations for ideas every time you are preparing a talk. I am talking about a file with all these images in the right background and color scheme. You open the file and choose several to use.
4. Know how to use PowerPoint effectively so you can save even more time. Taking a PowerPoint class may not help you that much. You need a class on how to create a presentation using PowerPoint.

  Claudyne Wilder is a guest lecturer at conferences, business shows, and corporate events. She is the creator of three presentation seminars: The Winning Presentations Seminar, The Winning Presentations Sales Seminar; and Creating PowerPoint Presentations That Get Your Point Across. She offers The Winning Presentations Seminar publicly about six times a year. She also licenses this seminar to companies and consultants to teach.

Do visit Claudyne’s site at Wilder Presentations to learn more.

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: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Claudyne Wilder, Guest Post, Opinion, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Drawing Connectors

Connectors are lines that link different shapes or any other slide objects, and yet they are somewhat different from conventional lines because connectors, as the name implies stay connected to the shapes they are linked from. You have already learned about connectors and the types of connectors in previous tutorials — in this tutorial, you will learn how you can draw connectors that link shapes. Although we use shapes as examples in this tutorial, you can attach a connector to any other slide object using the same process.

Learn how to draw connectors in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Sign Up for Windows Rights Management

Microsoft has been providing a permissions system based on their Information Rights Management (IRM) concept for several years now, but with Office 2010 (including PowerPoint 2010), this whole concept has been implemented so intuitively that almost anyone can use IRM for their PowerPoint presentations and any other Office documents. Depending upon which version of Windows you use, you may need to download and install a Windows Rights Management module unless you use Windows 7 — if you use the latter configuration, the entire IRM implementation process is painless. If you use an earlier version of Windows, such as XP or Vista — then you might have to download and install a small WRM client that takes a minute or two.

Learn how to sign up for Windows Rights Management in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

iPad Presenting 09: Picture Slides on the iPad

One of the many ways in which you can adapt your PowerPoint slides to an iPad-friendly format is by converting all your slides to pictures. This approach will work well for slides that have no animation or multimedia, and the good news is that great presentation slides can be created without animation or multimedia of any sort!

The bad news is that this is a one-way street, and if you want to make any changes to your slides, you will have to edit your original presentation and convert the slides again to individual pictures.

Figure 1, below, shows the 16-slide presentation we started with. These are all slides from a Photo Album presentation, and each slide has a photograph and caption. Your slides may be like more conventional PowerPoint slides, but it does not matter because the process for all types of slides is the same.

Figure 1: All slides ready to be exported from PowerPoint

To convert your individual slides to pictures in PowerPoint, you summon the Save As dialog box and choose JPG or another graphic format as the file type. We have instructions on exporting your slides as PNGs in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows, and the process works the same way to export JPGs in any PowerPoint version on both Windows and Mac. You will ultimately end up with plenty of pictures that are suffixed with their original slide numbers. The first slide in your 16-slide presentation will be named Slide1.JPG. The last slide will be named Slide16.JPG. Of course, you may not have 16 slides, that’s just the number of slides that we started with, as shown in Figure 1, above.

At this time, it is a good idea to rename your first 9 slides so that Slide1.JPG now reads Slide01.JPG, as shown in Figure 2, below. You can click Figure 2 to see a larger view of the screenshot.

Figure 2: JPGs exported from PowerPoint

Thereafter place these slides in a folder that is indexed by iTunes. To learn more about how iTunes indexes picture folders, search the term add photos to iTunes library on Google. Depending upon which version of iTunes you are using, or if you use Windows or a Mac, the process may differ. Apple also has a great tutorial called Syncing Photos using iTunes.

The next time you sync your iPad (both iPad 1 and 2) with iTunes, the slide pictures will be copied, and available within your iPad’s Photos app.

Once you have synced your iPad, launch the Photos app on the device to see if all your slides have been imported as pictures. Also, make sure that they are sequenced in the order you want to show them as slides, as shown in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3: Your slides on the iPad

Thereafter, you can show these picture slides off your iPad. Moving on to the next slide is as easy as moving on to the next picture. And since the Photos app is AirPlay aware even on iPad 1, you can use it with an Apple TV or even a VGA cable connected to a projector! This may not be the most elegant way to transport your PowerPoint slides to an iPad, but it does work!

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Filed Under: iPad Presenting
Tagged as: iPad, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Types of Connectors

We explored what Smart Connectors are in a previous tutorial — to paraphrase again, Smart Connectors are type of lines with special “smart” characteristics that connect one slide object to another. Move a slide object which is connected to a Smart Connector — the Smart Connector automatically resizes and reorients itself to stay connected. In this tutorial, we will explore the various types of Smart Connectors. PowerPoint 2011 provides three types of connectors — you will learn more about them in this tutorial.

Learn about different connector types in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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