PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint: Changing Fills and Outlines of Charts in PowerPoint

PowerPoint provides several chart types to choose from, and even allows the user to customize the look of any chart by changing the fills and outlines. To start with, the default fills and outlines that PowerPoint uses for charts can be a little uninspiring — so in this tutorial, you’ll learn how you can change the fills and outlines of a data series within a chart.

Follow these steps to learn more.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2003
Tagged as: Charting, PowerPoint 2003, Tutorials

Presentation Summit 2010: Conversation with Rick Altman

Rick Altman, a presentation consultant based out of Pleasanton, CA, USA is well known as the host of the annual Presentation Summit and has a strong sense of the needs of the presentation community. He has also authored books on PowerPoint.

In this conversation, Rick discusses the upcoming Presentation Summit being held in San Diego this October.

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Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: Interviews, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Live, Presentation Summit

PowerPoint and Medicine, Design in Samsung Medical Center, Korea: Conversation with Sang-Eun Lee

Sang-Eun Lee graduated with Master of Arts from the School of Arts in Korea, and works in the areas of medical illustration and photography for the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, Korea. She is a PowerPoint power user who uses a variety of advanced features for creation of Samsung Medical Center Template Designs, Q&A slides, and other stuff. Her projects are used by doctors for oral presentations or posters at symposiums, scientific lectures, learning books, and theses. Her activities in the hospital have been considered very valuable and important to over 7000 staff personnel, including doctors. She has been awarded as a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional) since 2009.

Geetesh: Tell us a little about your work using PowerPoint in the medicine sector.

Sang-Eun Lee: I create engaging and attractive slide decks with my medical knowledge from experiences in the hospital. The results are considered good enough to be used at external seminars and internal staff meetings. Many colleagues and faculty members (doctors) show strong interests in my lectures during the community seminars and have requested me frequently to help out with their work.

I use combination of PowerPoint and other applications to create digital illustration projects. I do use professional illustration software as well but have found that by using PowerPoint, I can quickly and easily help communicate accurate information during doctor’s visits.

Let me share this project which shows my workflow of creating medical illustration using PowerPoint.

1. The medical staff brought me a video of a procedure that needs to be translated into illustrations. The illustrations are to be included in a video that will be submitted to a spring seminar in ophthalmology. As I watch the video, I save out the parts that I need to illustrate (see Figure 1).


Figure 1: Saved pictures collected from a video clip

2. I then sketch a simple thumbnails on paper to get a feedback from medical staff to ascertain that I have got the accuracy, and areas that need to highlighted right (see Figure 2).


Figure 2: Preliminary sketches

3. Finally, I draw this content using PowerPoint’s drawing tools, referencing both sketch and video often in the process. Once this goes through an editing process, it can be used for slide show with animation if required to maximize the visual content we already have as a presentation (see Figure 3).


Figure 3: Sequenced visual content

Geetesh: What’s different in the way that the folks in the medicine industry use PowerPoint, compared to how the business people use it?

Sang-Eun Lee: Both business people, and the medical industry share the commonality that they both use PowerPoint as a visual tool for creating presentations such as visual-heavy report materials, effective multimedia enabled materials, various drafts for internal and external use, etc.

However, using PowerPoint graphic tools to create mimetic diagrams and drawings of up-to-date medical information that the medical staff includes in their journals and presentations has been appraised as a new application of PowerPoint by audiences from around the world. This was obvious during this year’s Microsoft MVP Global Summit’s MVP presentations.

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: Interviews
Tagged as: Design, Interviews, Medicine, PowerPoint

SmartDraw 2010: The Indezine Review

Visual content often scores higher than pure textual content — and this has been proved by several scientific studies and surveys. Yet it is not always easy to create and use visual content in slides, documents, or even web pages because the tools required in creating such content typically involve a long learning curve, and familiarity with some new terminology. Our review product, SmartDraw 2010 overcomes these limitations and allows normal office people to create good looking and effective business graphics. How does it fare?

Read on.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Graphics, PowerPoint, Review, SmartDraw

102 Tips to Communicate More Effectively Using PowerPoint: Conversation with Dave Paradi

Dave Paradi is the author of The Visual Slide Revolution and 102 Tips to Communicate More Effectively Using PowerPoint. He helps presenters communicate more effectively by using persuasive PowerPoint presentations. He has published over 200 issues of his bi-weekly newsletter, produced more than 45 slide makeover video podcasts and appears in media regularly. His web site is ThinkOutsideTheSlide. In this conversation, Dave discusses his new book.

Geetesh: Tell us more about your new book, 102 Tips to Communicate More Effectively Using PowerPoint.

Dave: The idea for the book came to me last summer when I was speaking at a conference in New Orleans. I noticed that many presenters were looking for quick tips that they could use to improve their presentations. They don’t have the time to attend a multi-day course and don’t want a thick technical manual. Participants in my workshops would tell me afterward that it was the tips that I shared that would make the biggest impact. So I decided to look at what I shared in my workshops and through my writing, and collect the tips that people found the most helpful. I focused on those tips that would help presenters communicate more effectively since that is what the goal of any presentation should really be – effective communication of our ideas. I’ve organized the tips into categories: Structure, Slide Design, Slide Content, Delivery, and Handouts. Each tip is practical and easy to apply so presenters can make immediate improvements to their presentations. I’ve set up a special web page for readers to download sample PowerPoint files that illustrate some of the tips. That web page also has links to all of the web sites I refer to in the book. There is virtually no overlap with my previous book “The Visual Slide Revolution”, which focuses on my five-step KWICK method for creating persuasive visuals. Presenters can benefit from both books to create more effective PowerPoint presentations.

Geetesh: If there’s just one thing I ask you to explain what PowerPoint designers can do to make their slides communicate better, what would that be?

Dave: My perspective has always been what works for audiences, and my advice would be to remember to focus on what the audience needs for this presentation. Too often I see elements added to slides for a pure design purpose. The element does not add to the audience’s understanding of the message. Prof. Mayer’s research tells us that anything we add to a visual that is not directly connected to our topic will cause confusion and reduce the understanding of the audience. I would remind designers to ask whether that gradient fill, the reflection of the photo, or the complex diagram created in a graphics program is being added to make the message clearer, or is it really being added because it is “cool.” As I say in my workshops, “clear” comes before “cool” in the dictionary and it should be the same when considering our slides. Seek to be clear first, instead of trying to be cool.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Books, Dave Paradi, Interviews, PowerPoint