You’d love to have video clips in your sales presentations, but you’re worried about the cost of producing and editing videos and how they become out of date almost immediately. You are also unsure of how you can integrate them seamlessly into your presentation so they work every time. This article shares best practices for creating and…
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.
Use a Venn diagram to show overlapping relationships
One of the types of visuals that I review in my workshops is the Venn diagram. These diagrams were created in 1881 by John Venn as a way to represent relationships in the branch of mathematics known as set theory. The basic Venn diagram used in presentations shows two partially overlapping shapes, usually circles or…
Creating a Sales Video in PowerPoint
You would love to have a video of your products or services, but creating a video is very costly and once created, it is hard to customize for each client situation. Is there any way to easily create a video substitute that can be customized for each client, but doesn’t cost a lot to produce and…
Using Clip Art/Photos on Presentation Slides
The most common slide element used after text is a graphic, usually a photograph or a vector drawing. The old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words” and it is true. Just make sure that the thousand words being spoken by the graphics you use on your presentation slides are words that will…
Presentation Lessons from Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”
Whether you agree or disagree with the viewpoint of former Vice-President Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” presentation and movie, as a presenter there are some key lessons you should take away from a presentation that has become more popular than almost any other presentation in recent memory, even winning an Academy Award. Lesson 1: Visuals…
Using Audio and Video on PowerPoint Slides
More and more presenters want to add audio and video segments to their presentation slides to increase the impact that their message has – and even if you aren’t wondering how to do this, you probably want to know if it is worth it. Any item on a presentation slide should be there for one…
Using crosshatch fills in PowerPoint 2007 graphs
In PowerPoint 2007, the ability to fill a column, bar, or pie wedge with a crosshatch pattern was removed. That feature is very useful to many people who need to print graphs in black and white. If you print a graph filled with different colors on a black and white printer, the shades of grey…
Protecting Slide Content
If you create PowerPoint presentations that others deliver, you may need to create the slides in such a way that the presenter cannot change the slide content. One industry that this is particularly important in is the financial services industry. When the corporate marketing department creates slides depicting performance of investments, it is very important for…
Presentation Xpert Newsletter September 12, 2012
Dave article on limiting the amount of data in financial presentations was published in the Presentation Xpert newsletter here.
What is the REAL Cost of Poor Presentations?
We have all seen them – poor presentations. The ones where the PowerPoint slides were unreadable, the presenter stood facing the screen and read each slide as it was displayed and there was no clear message or point to the time spent. These presentations are frustrating to watch, but more importantly cost organizations a huge…