The cost of a poor PowerPoint presentation is staggering. Ian Parker in The New Yorkermagazine states that according to Microsoft estimates, there are more than 30 million PowerPoint presentations made each day. If we assume some relatively conservative meeting parameters of four people per presentation, a half-hour presentation on average and the wasted time due to…
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.
Five Tips to Make PowerPoint Sales Presentations More Effective
It is almost expected today that you will use PowerPoint in sales presentations. It can be used to add visuals to the message and it can be an easy way to create a leave-behind handout or e-mail the presentation to others later. But too often sales professionals aren’t as efficient as they want to be…
Presentation resource: History of PowerPoint
A couple of weeks ago Geetesh Bajaj interviewed one of the founders of PowerPoint, Robert Gaskins, on the 25th anniversary of the software being released. It is a great interview and it includes a link to download a book by Mr. Gaskins on his memories of bringing PowerPoint to life. Read the interview here.
How to Use Screen Shots in Documents or PowerPoint Presentations
One of the elements you will want to include in a document or presentation is a “picture” of a screen from the Web or an application. It shows exactly what you are talking about, and in this case a picture can be truly worth a thousand words. The problem is how get the screen shot…
Five Common Problems With Poor Display of PowerPoint Presentations
Has this happened to you? You connect your laptop to the data projector, fire it up and sure enough the image is displayed on the screen … but … it doesn’t look very good. It is either fuzzy, hard to see, or missing some of the lines. Before you get that panicked feeling, check these…
Overview of Using Copyrighted Material in Your Presentation
Many presenters use copyrighted material in their presentations, but not everyone understands how to use it properly. This overview is intended to help you identify when you may want to seek more advice on using a copyrighted piece of work. This is not intended to be a legal opinion and you are advised to seek…
When Should You Use PowerPoint?
When I was speaking to a group of keynote speakers at a professional speakers convention on the topic of when PowerPoint should be used, many people found the ideas I shared helpful, so I thought I would share them with you in this article. As I explained to the group, I think you can see…
Using Animation and Slide Transition Effects on PowerPoint Slides
Adding movement to your slides through the use of animation or slide transition effects is risky. Movement distracts the audience from your message. Here are suggested approaches for using animation and slide transitions in a professional presentation. Animation Effects A number of organizations have “banned” animation and animation has a poor reputation amongst many presenters…
Six Common Problems With Displaying Your Presentation
Too often, we plug all of our computer presentation equipment in, fire up our presentation and … we don’t get what we expected. It might be that we can see our presentation on our laptop computer, but the screen or projector won’t show the presentation. Maybe we see the presentation on both our laptop and…
Using Graphs and Tables on Presentation Slides
When presenting ideas that include references to data, it can be helpful to make the point using a graph or table. These visual methods can make the point much stronger than simply describing the data. While they can be powerful methods, they also have the potential to ruin a presentation if they convey the wrong…