Note: The results of the latest survey are available here. PowerPoint Tip: Results of the Annoying PowerPoint survey As I analyzed the responses and comments in the survey of “What annoys you about bad PowerPoint presentations?”, a clear theme emerged. Audiences are fed up with presenters who fill their slides with too much content and…
Author: Dave Paradi
Amazing pre-made animation effects; Issue #244 September 13, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Amazing pre-made animation effects At the end of this week I’ll be travelling to the Presentation Summit in Austin, Texas. It is the only gathering of presentation professionals and I look forward to seeing all of my colleagues and learning about the work they have been doing in the past year. One of…
How animating a graph makes it easier to understand; Issue #243 August 30, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: How animating a graph makes it easier to understand I spoke last week to a group of executives and one of the challenges that I saw in their presentations was the tendency to put spreadsheets on their slides when talking about financial topics. A graph is better than a spreadsheet to illustrate numeric…
Saving money on technology purchases; Issue #242 August 16, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Saving money on technology purchases According to retail statistics, this time of year is now more popular for technology buying than Christmas. The back-to-school purchases for those heading to high school or college/university often include technology such as computers, software, tablets, and smartphones. Our kids have been using PowerPoint in school since grade…
Presenting from someone else’s computer; Issue #241 August 2, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Presenting from someone else’s computer In my workshops it is common that participants ask about what they need to take into account when they must take their PowerPoint presentation to another computer on a USB drive instead of using a laptop. It may be that the room they are presenting in has a…
Breaking the habit of speaking to the screen; Issue #240 July 19, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Breaking the habit of speaking to the screen In the past, I have discussed the habit some presenters have of talking to the screen instead of the audience when using PowerPoint. In two previous newsletters (here and here), I suggest that the problem stems from presenters using the slides as speaker notes and needing to…
You need permission to use YouTube videos; Issue #239 July 5, 2011
One of the most frequent topics on the PowerPoint newsgroups and forums is how to include YouTube videos in a presentation. People find a cool video on YouTube and think it would be great in their presentation. In this article I’m not going to show you how to include a YouTube video in your PowerPoint…
Using a tablet or e-reader for Speaker Notes; Issue #238 June 21, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Using a tablet or e-reader for Speaker Notes One of the sessions I’ll be presenting at the Presentation Summit conference this September in Austin, TX is on the topic of being more environmentally friendly with our presentations. While PowerPoint presentations are seemingly all digital, they tend to generate a lot of paper with…
Editing old graphs in PowerPoint 2007/10; Issue #237 June 7, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Editing old graphs in PowerPoint 2007/10 One of the major changes between PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007 is the way that graphs are created. In PowerPoint 2003 and earlier versions, graphs were created by using a module called Microsoft Graph. Starting in PowerPoint 2007, you now use Excel to create graphs, which makes…
Why You Shouldn’t Use Google Images to Find Photos; Issue #236 May 24, 2011
PowerPoint Tip: Why You Shouldn’t Use Google Images to Find Photos In my workshops, whenever I speak about using photos in a presentation, someone always asks about Google Images. It is so easy to find pictures using the image search function of Google, why don’t I recommend it? Because in almost every case, it is…