About me

Ellen FinkelsteinMy goal is to help you succeed when you present by giving you knowledge. I'm passionate about turning Death by PowerPoint into Life by PowerPoint. You'll find free tips, techniques, articles, and tutorials here. At the E-store find books and courses to aid you in becoming a great presenter. On my About page, learn more about consulting, workshops, training, webinars, and coaching on presentation skills and PowerPoint.

Join the Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint!

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My Social Media Pages

  • Government slides are the hardest to make visual, but I did a few today. It IS possible! 3 days ago
  • What's a good resource for info on inexpensive lighting for webcam videos & videocasts? Both lights themselves and how to set them up? 3 days ago
  • Tip for sales presentations-find out what's really bothering the decision maker. It may not be what you expect. 3 days ago
  • Just posted link: 89% of employers want colleges to place more emphasis on oral & written communication. http://bit.ly/brCUt6 5 days ago
  • Just posted update to an old tip: Creating JPEG & PNG files from AutoCAD dwgs. Many ideas from contributors! http://budurl.com/hjsb 6 days ago
  • #oscars It looked like they were doing it in Las Vegas 1 week ago
  • Register for free mini-course in presenting: From Death by PowerPoint to Life by PowerPoint http://bit.ly/589yGb 1 week ago

Featured in Alltop

Featured in Alltop

Speaking Pro Central

Speaking Pro Central

New webinar coming up; previous one available as a recording

The next webinar is Slide Design for Non-Designers. I love this topic, because it’s close to my heart—I’m definitely not a designer. Yet I can create stunning slides (or so people tell me).

My story is that my slides used to look awful. After some painful feedback, I read books and studied slides that I thought [...]

New webinars based on your requests!

A couple of months ago, many of you responded to my survey asking what type of resources you wanted. It was clear from the answers that certain topics were most valuable to you, so I’ve created 5 webinars on those topics.

Moreover, you can get all 5 for the price of 4, which is $98. To [...]

Please join me in the Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint!

As you may know, I’ve launched a new web site, www.tellnshow.com, and with it a new project – the Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint. This post is especially to those of you in the presentation/speaking community, but anyone can participate. Since you help people improve their presenting and speaking and I know you’d like to [...]

Thoughts on why bad presentations don’t go away

In the Presentation Advisors blog, there’s a post called, “Audience Members are from Venus, Presenters are from Mars,” which explains some of the frustrations that presentation consultants and experts experience. Basically, if you ask the general public (audiences) what is bad about most presentations, they know. But presenters (who are obviously sometimes audience members) seem [...]

My training webinar: Present interactively-your audience expects it!

Today I conducted a training webinar on presenting interactively. I loved the topic and enjoyed myself quite a bit! Here’s what I covered:

Why interactivity is necessary in today’s world: people are no longer willing to sit passively and take in information. They’re used to gaining knowledge interactively on the Internet, choosing what they want to [...]

Join the Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint!

My new Campaign Against Death by PowerPoint aims to improve presentations skills and reduce the suffering of audiences. Instead of waiting for presenters to wake up and read the good advice of presentation experts, I want to harness the audience. The campaign lets the audience fight back—and help presenters.

To do your part, take 4 simple [...]

Top takeaways from the PowerPoint Live conference

The first part of this post is here.

Cliff Atkinson’s keynote empowered us to be evangelists for better presentations: better results, a better story, better graphics (in that order). He gave suggestions for presentation professionals who need to convince presenters to improve their presentations:

Improve the core template
Provide before and after examples
Educate
See the story beneath the bullet [...]

Back from the PPTLive conference!

This year, PPTLive was in Atlanta. I’m still processing all that I heard and learned. Overall, it was a great conference, as usual. My husband wonders how I can learn anything more about PowerPoint, but I can. And I learn best practices, design principles, and new concepts. I’ll be posting tips that I learned over [...]

Free teleseminar

I’ll be giving a free teleseminar on Tuesday, August 18th at 12N PT/1PM MT/2PM CT/3PM ET. The topic is: Top 10 Mistakes Professionals Make that Hurt Their Career!

Workshop: Create an outstanding presentation! Coming June 15-17!

On June 15-17, in Fairfield, Iowa, I’ll conduct an intensive 3-day workshop that will not only teach you the presentation skills you need, but give you time to practice and get feedback. It’s a rare opportunity.

You’ll gain the ability to:

Use the persuasive model to organize your talk and obtain action from your audience
Create visuals [...]