PowerPoint Tip: Visual Slide Definition This past week I created a new definition of a visual slide that captures where my position is different from some others. Here is my definition: “A visual slide is not the absence of text; it is the presence of a visual that encourages a conversation with the audience.” Now…
Author: Dave Paradi
Starting with a standard set of slides speeds presentation creation; Issue #144 October 2, 2007
PowerPoint Tip: Standard Set of Slides One of the ways to spend far less time creating PowerPoint presentations is to create a standard set of slides to draw on when creating your presentations. Why is this such a good idea? Let me share why I use this technique to drastically cut down on the time…
Issue #143 September 18, 2007
PowerPoint Tip: Throw out some slides Like most professionals, you are an expert in your field and you are asked to speak on the same or similar topics frequently. To save the time of recreating all your slides from scratch, you have a file that you usually use and it works pretty well. Let me…
Issue #142 September 4, 2007
PowerPoint Tip: Ideas from 5,000 years ago We can learn valuable lessons from how humans communicated 5,000 years ago. At that time, formal written language was not well established, so how did people communicate? They used pictures and stories. They drew a picture on a cave wall and told the story of what was depicted,…
Issue #141 August 21, 2007
PowerPoint Tip: Create a custom image As we start to move towards using more visuals in our presentations, we have the desire to create better and better graphics. And this is good, as long as better does not mean more complex. We need to keep them simple and meaningful for the audience. Does this mean…
Issue #140 August 7, 2007
PowerPoint Tip: The Value of Preparing Early When you travel, it is almost inevitable that you will see someone working on their presentation in the airport waiting area or on the airplane. Inevitably, they will get off the plane, jump into a rental car and drive to a meeting room where they will present that…
Issue #139 July 24, 2007
PowerPoint Tip: How Many Features Do You Need To Know? Recently we had a family picture taken on my wife’s side of the family. We assembled at her parent’s house and a photographer we know, Larry, came to take the picture outside. Everything went exceedingly well – the weather was perfect and smiles abounded. After…
Use a map to show geographic relationships; Issue #138 July 10, 2007
PowerPoint Tip – Why Not Use a Map? If you have geographic based data to present, it is important to organize it into a logical manner for the audience. Usually this means organizing it left to right in west to east order so that the data on the slide is the same order as the…
Issue #137 June 26, 2007
PowerPoint Tip – Research on Slide Titles In the newspaper recently I saw a short mention that a study was done recently that showed that a sentence as a title of a PowerPoint slide was found to be more effective. So I did the research and found the paper that this report was based on.…
Four tips to make it easier when collaborating on the creation of a presentation; Issue #136 June 12, 2007
PowerPoint Tip – Collaborating on Presentations In my consulting work, I get a chance to collaborate on developing presentations with people in many different geographic locations. Sometimes it is face-to-face and other times it is done virtually. Collaborating on presentations instead of doing it yourself is becoming more common. Today I have some tips for…