Presentation Tip: Ten years of this newsletter Ten years ago, on February 26th 2002, I sent out my first newsletter. Today, I am sending you issue 255. What a journey it has been these last ten years. According to my records, over 13,500 people have been part of the newsletter list at one time or…
Author: Dave Paradi
Don’t start your presentation with credits; Issue #254, February 7, 2012
PowerPoint Tip: Don’t start your presentation with credits Last week in a coaching session a client asked, “What is the best way to start my presentation?” She said that she had tried different methods and didn’t feel that they were working as well as she wanted. This question reminded me of what Nick Morgan said…
Boring presentations are not the problem; Issue #253, January 24, 2012
PowerPoint Tip: Boring presentations are not the problem How many times have you heard that the problem with many PowerPoint presentations is that they are boring? This is a common refrain from the media and it used to justify why presentations should not use PowerPoint, or use some other hot presentation tool instead of PowerPoint.…
Effective dashboard slides; Issue #252 January 10, 2012
PowerPoint Tip: Effective dashboard slides At the start of the year many organizations are looking back to see how they did last year. They will use many different measures, and they may decide that they want to start tracking certain statistics that will make a difference in improving performance going forward. A common approach is…
Spreadsheets Don’t Belong on Slides; Issue #251 December 20, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Spreadsheets don’t belong on slides Frequently people tell me that financial presentations include a huge spreadsheet that has been copied on to a slide. The text and numbers are way too small and inevitably the presenter says, “I know you can’t read this, so I’ll read it to you.” Spreadsheets don’t belong on…
The audience wants the conclusion; Issue #250 December 6, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: The audience wants the conclusion In my survey this fall of what annoys audiences about bad PowerPoint presentations, the clear message you sent was that too many presentations suffer from information overload. Whether it is text, numbers, or a combination of both, the excessive information causes confusion and lack of action by the…
Creating universal icons; Issue #249 November 22, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Creating universal icons When creating visuals, it can be helpful to sometimes use icons to represent items generically, such as people, cars, or objects. You could purchase vector icons from a site like istockphoto.com, but you can usually create your own custom icon using the drawing tools in PowerPoint. PowerPoint MVP Sandy Johnson…
Three lessons learned from Pecha Kucha; Issue #248 November 8, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Three lessons learned from Pecha Kucha At the recent Presentation Summit, Ric Bretschneider did a session on Pecha Kucha, a presentation format that has gained a lot of followers in recent years. As part of his session, he asked a few people to volunteer in advance to demonstrate this technique. I was one…
Takeaways from the Presentation Summit; Issue #247 October 26, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Takeaways from the Presentation Summit Last month I had the privilege of speaking at the ninth Presentation Summit in Austin, Texas. It is the one time during the year that the presentation community gets together and shares ideas and best practices on creating and delivering effective presentations. In addition to being a speaker…
Adding crosshatching fills to graphs in PowerPoint 2007; Issue #246 October 11, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Adding crosshatching fills to graphs in PowerPoint 2007 When I was presenting a course for accountants in July, a number of the participants mentioned that starting in PowerPoint 2007, they had lost the ability to fill graph segments with crosshatch patterns. This is important when printing graphs in black and white since shades…