Discover 3 reasons most presentations fail and 3 easy ways to fix them

I did a webinar for Brainshark.com and mybrainshark.com, a presentation-sharing website. It was called “3 reasons most presentations fail and 3 ways to fix them.” Over 500 people attended!

The 1-hour webinar included makeovers of slides that attendees submitted. You can watch the presentation for free here. Let me know what you think by [...]

Review of a new e-book: Visual Presentations

I recently received a free copy of a new e-book, Visual Presentations: Boring Slides to Visual Presentations in 3 Easy Steps, by M.S. Ramgopal.

The author owns a company, Metamorph Training, and has a website at www.Presentation-Process.com. He and his wife are experienced at helping people present more effectively and decided to write an [...]

5 great tools for presenters

Jon Thomas, in his blog, Presentation Advisors, has written a post, “My Five Favorite Free Presentation Design Tools,” and I thought I’d share them with you.

Compfight is a tool to search for images on Flikr. letting you easily find images that have Creative Commons or Commercial licenses. DaFont is a site for free [...]

Interview with Shai Schwartz of VisualBee, automatic PowerPoint design software

VisualBee was a Gold Sponsor of my Outstanding Presentations Workshop last fall. To bring you more information about this unique product, I interviewed Shai Schwartz, VP Creative & Marketing, of VisualBee.

Question: Please describe briefly what VisualBee does.

Answer: VisualBee is a Free PowerPoint 2007/10 plug-in that automatically designs presentations. VisualBee uses the existing [...]

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 presentations. Your success [...]

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 you give sales [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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… [...]