Every two weeks I take a slide that has been sent to me for a workshop or by a newsletter subscriber like yourself, and I do a “before” and “after” makeover on it. In today’s lesson, I will share two makeovers and what we, as presenters, can learn from them. Makeover #1 – The Never…
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.
Lesson 5 – Creating Effective Graphs that Audiences can Understand
A common message that we need to communicate is numeric data. Whether it is financial results, operational data or measurements of any kind, instead of placing a table of numbers on your slide, a graph is usually a better approach. In today’s lesson I want to share some tips on making a graph more effective…
Lesson 4 – The KWICK Method for creating persuasive visuals
After reviewing thousands of PowerPoint slides, I have concluded that there are four stages that presenters move through as they learn how to use visuals more effectively. First, there is the “PowerPoint as teleprompter” stage where the presenter writes what they want to say on each slide and reads it to the audience. Then there…
Lesson 3 – The importance of persuasion in making your presentation effective
I have come to the conclusion that every presentation is, at least in part, a persuasive presentation. In today’s lesson I want to share with you some of the key ideas on how we persuade others, so that you can keep this in mind when creating presentations that will be effective. Is every presentation really…
Lesson 2 – Clean Slide Design improves presentation effectiveness
A common complaint of audiences is that they can’t see what is on the slide because the color choice, font choice or font size is making the slides unreadable. These are all problems with slide design and in today’s lesson, we’ll cover some ideas that will help you create a design for your slides that…
Lesson 1 – A properly structured presentation is more effective
Research by Professor Richard Mayer shows that using a clear structure for a presentation improves audience understanding. A good structure is even more important for those who are not as familiar with your topic area, as it gives them context. Today’s lesson focuses on how we can structure our presentation and how the sequence helps…
Selected web links
Presentation Summit (www.presentationsummit.com) – A user conference, where people attend to learn how to use the software in better, more creative, and more efficient ways. Projector Central (www.projectorcentral.com) – Great site for information on data projectors PowerPoint FAQ (www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/index.html#ListOfLinks) – great FAQ on PowerPoint, more for power users Indezine (www.indezine.com) – good intermediate to advanced level PowerPoint site by…
Determining the goal of your presentation is hard; Issue #270 September 18, 2012
Presentation Tip: Determining the goal of your presentation is hard The foundation of every presentation should be a clear statement of the goal of the presentation. While I am sure you would agree with this, stating a clear goal is much harder than it seems. Don’t always assume that the first goal you come up with…
Full-day workshop for pension plan staff (September 16, 2013, Toronto, ON)
Customized full-day workshop for financial and other staff covering planning a presentation, creating effective visuals, and showing slide makeovers of their own slides to reinforce the ideas.
Listen to the word pictures you paint to determine visuals for your slides
One of the reasons that presenters don’t use visuals instead of text is because they don’t know what visual to use to explain the point they are making. Business professionals tell me all the time that they aren’t graphic artists or designers, so how can they come up with a visual? In my book “The…