Outstanding presentations!

Ellen FinkelsteinYou'll find free tips, techniques, articles, and tutorials here, all designed to help you succeed when you present. This blog gives you knowledge. I'm passionate about turning Death by PowerPoint into Life by PowerPoint. Discover books and courses to aid you in becoming an outstanding presenter. Find out more about consulting, training, webinars, and coaching on presentation skills and PowerPoint.

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Speaking Pro Central

Speaking Pro Central

What makes a successful sales presentation?

Do you give sales presentations? Perhaps you travel to prospective clients‘ offices and pitch a product or service. You may give webinars online to sell your wares. Another scenario: You invite people to your office and give them a presentation on what you offer.

Many products and services are sold via [...]

Create a changeable radial gradient background theme

I’ve mentioned before (here) that you can create a theme in PowerPoint 2007 that changes as you change the theme colors. This gives you lots of flexibility to create a great background in many circumstances. For example, you can change the background to the branding colors of a potential client is [...]

Create a Visual Summary Slide

When I do my webinars, I end with a summary slide to help the audience members remember what I’ve said. A slide with a list of bullet points won’t work very well, because text doesn’t jog the memory. So I use a visual summary slide. Here’s an example.

PowerPoint visual summary slide

Several [...]

Improve your slide design by trying layout variations

In my “Create an Outstanding Presentation” workshops and self-study course, I teach four layouts that always look good. I taught them again recently in a presentation skills class for college students.

I find that many presenters who create their own slides struggle with slide design. Not being artists, their efforts are clunky. They usually know this, [...]

Use PowerPoint as a graphics program

If you don’t know or have other graphics software, you can use PowerPoint — and many people do. It’s not high end, but if your needs are simple, the fact that you know and have it is a great plus. PowerPoint 2007 improved the graphics engine and you can add many more effects, such as soft edges, beveled edges, and soft shadows…

What I’d like to see in PowerPoint design in 2009

Olivia Mitchell, who writes the Speaking about Presenting blog, has organized a group blogging event on what we’d like to see in PowerPoint design in 2009. (And “design” rhymes with “2009!”)

Her inspiration was a blog post by Laura Bergells, called “PowerPoint, Propaganda, and You,” in which Laura talked about what she’d like to see in [...]

Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points

Cliff Atkinson sent me a copy of his latest book, Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate, and Inspire and I’ve finally finished it. (I’ve been updating my AutoCAD book and, due to deadlines, that has taken precedence.)

Cliff has come up with a complete and thorough system for creating presentations [...]

3 Components of an Effective Presentation

An effective presentation must get three components right:

Content
Design
Delivery

Each of these components has to be on the mark and they all have to work together, as well.

When writing your content, decide on two or three main points and make sure that everything else that you write leads to those points. Make your content logical, [...]

Animate a chart or table

You may find it useful to animate the elements of a chart or table. For example, you may want to discuss sales of one product throughout all the quarters of the year before going on to the next product. Or you may want to explain a table row by row.

To add animation to charts, follow [...]

Creating Soft Edges

If you use a busy photo as a background for your slides, text may not show up clearly. One way to improve legibility is to put the text in front of a separate solid background. You can fill in background of the text placeholder or add a separate text box or other AutoShape. You can [...]