| ******************************************************************* Dave Paradi's PowerPoint Tip Issue #155 March 18, 2008 Published & Copyright by Dave Paradi of ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com Circulation 8,533 ******************************************************************* Please forward this newsletter to executives and professionals who want to create PowerPoint presentations that sell their ideas, products or services more effectively. If this newsletter has been sent to you by a friend, sign up to get your own copy at http://www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com/newsletter.htm . ******************************************************************* In this issue: Have you had a good first quarter? PowerPoint Tip - Video Best Practices Best of the Blog - Limiting Slides is Not the Answer Dave's Travel Schedule ******************************************************************* Have you had a good first quarter? We are closing in on the end of the first quarter and how has it been for you and your team? Filled with awesome visual presentations that sold your products and services to many new clients? Or struggling with the same bullet paragraph filled slides that leave prospects confused? E-mail me today to book your customized workshop that will have your sales team delivering customized visual presentations that lead to more sales. ------------------------------------------------------------------- PowerPoint Tip: Video Best Practices This past week I posted a new article on the web site about best practices when using video clips in sales presentations. It doesn't matter whether you are selling an idea to your boss or selling a multi-million dollar package of products and services to a client, video can be a great addition to your presentation. In the article, posted on the site at http://www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com/articles/videoinsales.htm I talk about four best practices that you should follow when adding video to your PowerPoint presentation. In the newsletter today I want to expand on a few of the ideas I shared. In the article I talk about how one of the easiest ways to capture your own video is to use the video mode of your digital camera. It used to be that there was only one video mode, but most cameras today have multiple settings. The question is, What resolution should you use? The best compromise between quality and file size is usually 640 x 480, known as VGA resolution. It looks good when projected and keeps the file size to a reasonable size. The other video file parameter you may need to know about is the frames per second, known as fps. The highest quality that is normally used is 30 frames per second. Some computers will have trouble reliably playing this rate in a PowerPoint presentation. So I suggest you use 10 frames per second because it still provides great quality (only trained video professionals can tell the difference) and plays better in PowerPoint. When looking at video quality, you can't judge the quality by playing the video file in a media player. PowerPoint has more going on when it plays a video and what runs smoothly in a media player may not run as smooth when played on a slide. Test it on the slide to get a true idea of how it will look. The single biggest problem with most videos not shot by professional videographers is the low lighting levels. Low light will make a video clip look dim and hard to see, especially when shown through a projector. If you are shooting a video, add lighting to make the people in the video look better. One easy way to add a lot of light is to use work lights from a home improvement store. These provide a lot of light and cost under $100 usually. If you'll be regularly creating video clips, this is a good investment to get better quality video clips. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Best of the Blog - Limiting Slides is Not the Answer Recently I have heard of more and more organizations that have tried to solve the problem of poor, confusing presentations by restricting the number of slides that a presenter can use. The idea is that by using fewer slides the message will be clearer. In most cases, this is exactly opposite to the reality. When limited by a certain number of slides, most presenters don't rethink their message and pare it down to the core, they simply jam more information on to the slide. What results is an even more cluttered slide that causes more confusion for the audience. When you start creating persuasive visuals, you will end up with more slides, but the presentation will be much clearer because each slide is only making one key point. This allows your audience to absorb the point before moving on to the next slide. An experience not too long ago is a good illustration. When I finished a recent three hour session, one of the participants came up and we started chatting about the number of slides. I wanted to find out how many slides she thought I had used. She gave me a number. In reality, I had used five times that number of slides! She was surprised, but agreed that because of the way the slides were designed, it did not feel like it was a ton of information being dumped on her. When it comes to the number of slides in your presentation, the commonly used business phrase of "less is more" is often not true. Other recent blog posts at http://pptideas.blogspot.com : Get up and running with PowerPoint 2007 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dave's Travel Schedule I work with business people who struggle with the effectiveness of the PowerPoint presentations they use to sell ideas, products and services to other business people. My research based PowerPoint Presentation Effectiveness System helps my clients achieve greater productivity and deliver presentations that close more sales. You can save money by booking me to speak to your organization or conference when I am close to your area for other clients. Here's where I will be in the next few months: March 29 - Grand Rapids, MI April 2 - Chicago, IL (tentative) April 4 - Toronto, ON (tentative) April 28 - Toronto, ON May 3 - Chicago, IL May 9 - Ottawa, ON June 9 - Ottawa, ON (tentative) August 1-5 - New York City September 21-24 - San Diego, CA September 26 - Cincinnati, OH E-mail me at Dave@ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com to discuss how my Think Outside The Slide(tm) sessions can help your organization be more productive and improve communication throughout the organization. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Privacy Policy: I will never sell or distribute your e-mail or information to anyone. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Need articles for your newsletter? 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