One of the biggest obstacles I hear to creating visuals instead of text on PowerPoint slides is that people don’t know what visual to create for the point they are making. They think that you need a degree in graphics or need to be a really creative person to come up with the appropriate graphic…
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 from 5,000 years of visuals
We can learn valuable lessons by studying how humans communicated 5,000 years ago. At that time, formal written language was not well established, so how did people communicate? They used pictures and stories. They drew a picture on a cave wall and told the story of what was depicted, whether it was hunting, family relationships…
Creating a style guide to keep the look of slides consistent in an organization
Many of you will be familiar with the idea of using a template to give your slides a common look. A Master Slide (in combination with a Theme in PowerPoint 2007 and later) sets the background color, text colors and fonts and any branding on the slide. This way, every slide has a consistent look…
Best Practices for Delivering Sales Presentations on the Web
In a previous article I focused on some best practices for designing a presentation to be delivered via a web conferencing system. In this article, I want to cover some best practices for delivering that presentation. If you haven’t been involved in designing and delivering presentations over the web yet, it is an important skill…
Best Practices for Designing Sales Presentations To Be Delivered over the Web
If you haven’t delivered a sales presentation using a web conferencing service like GoToMeeting or WebEx, you will soon. Travel budgets are being cut and you will be holding more initial meetings virtually instead of in person. But a presentation you would give in person won’t always work well when delivered over the web. This…
Going Green with Electronic Presentation Handouts that Attendees can Take Notes on
A lot has been reported recently in the press about making meetings greener by eliminating handouts for presentations. The suggestion is that handouts should only be available as a downloadable PDF file to save the paper wasted when too many handouts are printed or people don’t take them after the presentation. I agree that we…
Best Practices for Increasing Interaction During Sales Presentations
One of the major mistakes that sales professionals (and presenters in general) make is to view the presentation as a lecture instead of a conversation. It’s not usually an intentional mistake, it’s just how we have always seen it done. A lecture is a one way imparting of information and is usually boring. A conversation…
How to check your presentation outline with your boss before spending time creating slides
Has this happened to you? You get a request from your boss to present on topic X. You spend hours doing research, creating slides and go in to present. You don’t even get to slide three and he stops you. “This isn’t what I was looking for”, he says. He angrily tells you what he…
Five Ways to Transform Your Overloaded Text Slides
The most common complaint of audiences about PowerPoint presentations is that the slides are loaded with text and the presenter simply reads their slides to the audience. In the presentations I review, I see this all the time. I am not suggesting that you should never use text, because I think text is essential to…
Best Practices for Creating Handouts for a Sales Presentation
When you present to a prospect or client, should you leave a handout of your presentation? Only if you want them to remember what you said. A handout allows your audience to take notes on points that are important to them. It also gives them something to show others who will be involved in the…