PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Hyperlinks for Action Buttons

After learning how you can insert Action Buttons and what the default behavior for each Action Button is, let us now move on to more detailed techniques on working with Action Buttons. Each Action Button has a default action associated — this typically is a hyperlink to some other slide in your presentation. You can change this link, or even add another link such as a link to your web site, another document, and more.

Explore options to add and edit hyperlinks from Action Buttons in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Book Review: How to Give a Great Presentation by Nick Morgan

There is a new trend with eBooks. They are getting smaller all the time! Typically, eBooks were just electronic versions of regular books that had a hundred pages or more and needed more than a day or two to read, especially if you had other full-time work to take care of. Now, eBook authors have realized that it’s no longer necessary to take a concept that fits into 16 pages and extend it to an entire book. So, you get eBooks that are direct in their approach, get straight to the point, and you learn something new within an hour! Also, the fact that you can start reading the book as soon as you buy it, and then you can act upon what you learned from the book soon after you read it!

Nick Morgan‘s new book, How to Give a Great Presentation fits the description in the preceding paragraph. It is compact, and direct in its tone. Nick starts by looking at how typical users assemble rather than create slides, He stresses the importance of a clear point of view about what message the presenter wants to get across to his or her audience. What I liked most about this book is that you can actually read the entire book if you need to create and deliver an important presentation tomorrow, even if it takes an hour to read this book, and even if you have already read it before, the amazing advice in this book may be quickly forgotten unless you read it often! Talking about forgetting, this is what Nick says in the book:

Neurological studies show that we only retain about 7 ideas at a time, and once you tell us the eighth, we forget the first one. Imagine how little we retain of a series of 30 PowerPoint slides with 10 bullets per slide, and lots of sub-bullets.

Here are a few more sentences that I marked in this book:

The reason your sentences should be complete, declarative ones is that they force you to take a stand. Far too often, people headline their PowerPoint slides with titles like “Outlook,” and forget that no one but themselves knows what that outlook is. That makes presentations fuzzy, unclear, and hard to follow. Writing a complete sentence will fix that problem.

Armed with the outline, you’re ready to power up PowerPoint. This step is very simple: one slide per sentence. Put the sentence at the top of the slide, then add a picture (or a graphic) that reflects the emotion, people, places, or actions involved. Real photography, or good stock photography, is always better than clip art, which looks amateurish. Avoid bullet points on your slides – instead, put those in the speaker notes if you don’t want to forget some crucial detail. Keep the slides for pictures and headlines.

This book is available as an Amazon Kindle book, ans also on iTunes and Barnes & Noble as a Nook Book, and it costs only $1.99. It’s worth much more than that!

You May Also Like: Public Words: Conversation with Nick Morgan | Nick Morgan at the Presentation Summit 2011

Filed Under: Books
Tagged as: Book Review, Nick Morgan, Presentation Skills

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Align Shapes to the Center of the Slide

You have learned to align shapes in PowerPoint 2011 — for alignment to work at all you need to have multiple shapes or other slide objects selected so that they can align to each other. However, you may want to align just one shape (or even a group of shapes) to the exact center of the slide. Fortunately, that is as easy to achieve as well.

Learn how align a shape to the center of a slide in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Air Display: Conversation with Dave Howell

  Dave Howell is the founder of Avatron Software, the mobile app developer that created Air Sharing, Print Sharing, and Air Display. Before starting Avatron, Dave was a senior engineering manager at Apple, where he worked on the Pro Apps and Productivity Apps teams. Dave has Computer Science and Music degrees from Case Western Reserve University and a Cornell MBA.

In this conversation, Dave discusses using their Air Display product to use an iPad as a presenting tool.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Dave Howell, Interviews, iPad, Keynote, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills

Microsoft Office for Free?

We all realize that nothing is really free in today’s world, yet we all look for free stuff all the time. Well, maybe we were partially wrong when we said “nothing is free,” because you can get a free, or at least a cheaper copy of PowerPoint and Microsoft Office. When we say free or cheap, we do not refer to bootlegged copies, but genuine, original software. Here are some options for you to get a free or cheaper copy of Microsoft Office.

Learn how you can get a free or cheaper copy of Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: Free, Microsoft Office, Office 365, PowerPoint