Most presenters don’t use a structured approach to planning their presentations. They start by grabbing slides from presentations they and their colleagues have done in the past. They try to organize these slides into a coherent message and struggle to do so. The result is often an overload of information that doesn’t flow well. The…
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.
Lessons for presenters from MOD Pizza; Issue #392 June 27, 2017
In February when my wife and I were on vacation in Tucson, AZ, someone recommended that we check out a restaurant nearby called MOD Pizza. Whenever you can get a recommendation from a local person, it usually works out well. This was no exception. We ended up going twice while we were in the area.…
Group text in shapes instead of bullets; Issue #391 June 13, 2017
Make groups of text visual by putting them in shapes
New York Cash Exchange Conference (May 31, 2018; New York, NY)
As part of the conference, Dave will be presenting a session on effectively and efficiently presenting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Get more details and register for the conference here.
Design advice corporate presenters can ignore; Issue #390 May 30, 2017
I am friends with many professional presentation designers. They do great work. If you want to hire a presentation designer, check out the Presentation Guild at www.PresentationGuild.org. These professionals understand the needs of corporate presenters. Why do I recommend these professionals and not just any designer? Because there is advice from some designers that you…
Alternative to Excel conditional formatting; Issue #389 May 16, 2017
Excel has a great feature called conditional formatting that can save you time in making the results of analysis more visual. In particular, Excel can automatically add an up or down triangle to cells depending on their value. This makes reporting on the difference between a current and previous period value more visual. Here is…
Philadelphia AFP Conference (May 8, 2018; Philadelphia, PA )
As part of the conference, Dave will be presenting a session on how to prepare and deliver Board ready presentations. Get more details and register for the conference here.
Comparing to two standards; Issue #388 May 2, 2017
Use a column with two dashed lines to compare a value to two standards
Showing the components that add up to a total; Slide Makeover #87
Use a Steps to a Total graph to visually show components instead of a spreadsheet.
Minnesota AFP conference (April 24, 2018; St. Paul, MN )
As part of the conference, Dave will be presenting a session on effectively and efficiently presenting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Get more details and register for the conference here.