Your project status presentations are important messages that you need the project team, resources, sponsors, customers, and others to understand and take action on. Too often, project status presentations contain PowerPoint slides full of paragraphs and complex visuals that leave the audience confused. If your presentations aren’t as clear and compelling as you want them…
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.
Updating the three “Tell Them” statements; Issue #291 July 23, 2013
There is a classic piece of advice that many presenters have heard when thinking about how to structure their presentation. The advice is to: “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” I think this advice is outdated and in this article I’d like to…
Next steps for more effective presentations
Yesterday I wrapped up your seven day e-course on creating more effective PowerPoint presentations and I just wanted to drop you a quick note on next steps you can take. If you missed any of the lessons, you can access all of them using this link. How do you take your learning about effective presentations…
Lesson 7 – Delivery Tips
Up to now, our lessons have focused on planning your presentation and designing the slides that you will use. Unfortunately, if you don’t present the slides well, the effectiveness of your message suffers dramatically. In today’s lesson, I want to share some tips on delivering PowerPoint slides in a way that is smooth and seamless…
Lesson 6 – Using Photos and Images
A photo is one of the first types of visuals that many presenters use. It could be product photo, team photo, technical drawing, or any other image that illustrates what you are speaking about. It is easy to insert a photo on a slide and in this lesson I will share where you can find…
Lesson 5 – Best Practices for Graphs
Graphs are a great way to show numeric information visually. They aren’t the best visual in every situation, but I find that more presenters could use graphs instead of copying tables from Excel on to a slide. In today’s lesson I want to cover some best practices when using graphs in PowerPoint. Create graphs in…
Lesson 4 – Designing slides so they are easy to see
One of the common complaints of audiences is that they can’t see what the presenter has put on the slide. Either the colors don’t show up easily, the font is hard to read, or the text is way too small to read. If the audience can’t see the information on your slide, they can’t understand…
Lesson 3 – Planning your slides
Once you have decided on what information you will include in your presentation using the ideas in the first two lessons of this e-course, you can then decide how to support your message with slides. Presentation software, whether it is PowerPoint or any other software, is only a tool you can use to create effective…
Lesson 2 – Reduce Information Overload
What is the biggest issue in presentations today? According to the audiences I survey and the participants in my workshops, it is information overload. Presenters put too much information in their presentations, which overwhelms and confuses the audience. Mistakenly, presenters think that more detail is better, when what the audience really wants is to hear…
Lesson 1 – Creating a Presentation Outline
Too many presenters start creating a presentation in one of the two following ways: a) they sit down at their computer, open PowerPoint, and start creating slides, or b) they open a past PowerPoint presentation, copy some of the slides into a new file, and hope to add new slides that will complete their message.…