Author: Dave Paradi

Dave Paradi has over twenty-two years of experience delivering customized training workshops to help business professionals improve their presentations. He has written ten books and over 600 articles on the topic of effective presentations and his ideas have appeared in publications around the world. His focus is on helping corporate professionals visually communicate the messages in their data so they don't overwhelm and confuse executives. Dave is one of fewer than ten people in North America recognized by Microsoft with the Most Valuable Professional Award for his contributions to the Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams communities. His articles and videos on virtual presenting have been viewed over 4.8 million times and liked over 17,000 times on YouTube.

How to create a time scale in PowerPoint for timeline visuals, Gantt charts, and other time-based visuals

A timeline visual is a generic term used to describe any time-based visual. It consists of the time scale for the desired period of time and shapes or text that indicate the events during the time period shown. A Gantt chart is a specific type of timeline visual often used in project management. Here is…

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Why a shared PowerPoint or Google Slides file is a better whiteboard option in a Zoom meeting

One challenge of virtual and hybrid meetings has been collaborating with the other attendees. Instead of standing around a whiteboard in a meeting room, Zoom offers a whiteboard built into the meeting platform. I think you should use a shared PowerPoint or Google Slides file instead of the built-in Zoom whiteboard because a shared file…

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Are people multitasking during your virtual presentation? Yes. And here’s why that’s OK

According to a recent State of Virtual Meetings report from polly.ai, 43.8% of meeting attendees say they very frequently or always multitask during virtual meetings and an additional 40.3% multitask occasionally. That means that almost three-quarters of the attendees could be multitasking while you present! In the days of in-person meetings nowhere near that percentage…

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Process to reset Microsoft Teams that could fix problems you experience with Teams meetings

Teams is a great meeting and collaboration tool from Microsoft that many organizations are using as part of their Office 365 subscription. If you’ve had the experience where parts of the functionality disappear or the app acts strangely in a meeting, you may be able to fix it by resetting Teams. This won’t fix the…

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Present a PDF of your PowerPoint, GSlides or Keynote slides in Zoom, Teams, GMeet (Windows or Mac)

Why present using a PDF and not PowerPoint? If given the choice, I suggest you present using PowerPoint with your own laptop. You get all the advantages of PowerPoint and you are familiar with the setup. Unfortunately you aren’t always in a situation where this is possible. In a hybrid meeting setup you may be…

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11 ways to use PowerPoint to incorporate consultative selling in a virtual or hybrid sales meeting

Consultative selling is an approach that discovers the prospect’s needs before providing a solution (read more about the approach in this article by Hubspot). It involves asking questions to better understand the situation and the needs. The sales professional lets the prospect lead the conversation. I’ve used this approach in my business for years without…

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