PowerPoint Tips Blog

Get a designer look with abstract images to create backgrounds for slides and shapes

By Ellen Finkelstein

You can use abstract images to create interesting, textured backgrounds for slides or shapes. For example, Nancy Duarte’s signature slide uses a textured image background. You can see an example here. Here’s an example, using abstract images as a fill for the shapes of a diagram. First, you have to find an abstract image. That’s fairly […]

Creating and using a strong call-to-action slide

By Ellen Finkelstein

At the end of a presentation, what do you want your audience to do? You should know! I often see presenters make similar mistakes at the end of their presentation: They don’t have a call-to-action slide at the end They have a call-to-action slide but follow it up with a “Questions?” slide, so that the […]

3 ways to use images

By Ellen Finkelstein

From my perspective, you can use images on a slide in 3 ways: As a background, behind text: The purpose is to make a slide that is essentially all text look better As a supplement to text: The purpose is to help people understand and remember the text As the main focus of the slide, […]

Interview with Barry Shore on the Joy of Living

By Ellen Finkelstein

Barry Shore is here to show you how to live with joy and without stress. He had been studying joy for many years and then suddenly became a quadriplegic due to a rare disease. After months in the hospital and a long recovery, he is now a paraplegic and can function with some help. Yet […]

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Use icons to create a list

By Ellen Finkelstein

Research shows that people pay more attention to images than to text, but sometimes you want people to focus on the text, not on an elaborate or complex photo. A nice compromise is to use icons and they are VERY common on slides these days. PowerPoint 365 includes icons in its collection of images (choose […]

3 techniques for putting less text on your slides

By Ellen Finkelstein

You probably know that creating slides with lots of text on them is a sure sign of “Death by PowerPoint.” Even if your content is valuable and interesting, the text makes it LOOK boring. Also, research has shown that images attract more attention. So the solution is almost always to replace text with images and […]

Interview with Alfred Poor: Better Online Presentations

By Ellen Finkelstein

Alfred Poor is an expert in helping speakers and companies create successful online events. His years of experience as a keynote speaker and event producer have led him to become a consultant for those who need to pivot to online communications yet don’t want to either waste time and money on expensive equipment or learn […]

Making text stand out with text formatting techniques

By Ellen Finkelstein

A presentation style that’s sometimes called the Takahashi or Lessig method, involves putting just a word or two on a slide, usually with very large text. The text is used as a prompt, but also as a graphic. I wrote about it in a short post from 2004, You can create stunning slides using large […]

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Choosing a platform for your online course

By Ellen Finkelstein

When you’re ready to get your knowledge out to the world with an online course, you have many decisions to make! An important one is which platform you’ll use. The platform houses your course content. The platform is sometimes called a Learning Management System (LMS), but in truth, you may not even need an LMS. […]