Presentation Skills Part 2 – Building Slides

I created this presentation as part of an in-house training program.  It’s an adaptation of an email series that was used to promote a book “Beyond Bullet Points” and uses real-life examples of presentations I was involved in at the time.  I’ve blurred out some of the content to protect the confidential content, but I think the points are still clear.  Hope you agree!

Presentation Skills Part 1 – Planning & Organizing

This is a presentation I created based on a course I took by Rogen Si.  I have sketched this out so many times for so many people I’ve lost count.  It’s such a successful approach – I use it all the time for all kinds of presentations.

Learning to Use PowerPoint

Long ago and far away I taught myself how to use PowerPoint. I had a lot of help, from the Teach Yourself Visually book series. I won’t tell you which version of PowerPoint I learned on, because I honestly don’t remember. I think it was back when it had that annoying paperclip helper that everyone wanted to just go away. Good news is that the paperclip seems to be long gone from PowerPoint, and more importantly an up to date version of this great book is still kicking around.

Unlike a class, by using a book like this, you can learn at whatever pace you feel most comfortable. I actually taught a class for a wordprocessing program one summer and I can tell you, going too slow is just as annoying as going too fast.

And unlike fumbling around, hoping you’ll figure PowerPoint out through trial and error, you can get a TON of time saving tricks using a book like this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shown someone how to do something more efficiently/effectively in PowerPoint and they practically kissed me!

So, if you’re looking for a good way to get started with PowerPoint, do yourself a favour and pick this book up. Of course, if you’d like a little help turning your PowerPoint into a thing of beauty, well you know who to call.

The Very Best Slide Transition

You can always tell a novice presentation builder by their choice slide transition.  The total newbie doesn’t even know that there are transition options, so their slides always just “cut” (basically there’s no transition) from one to the other.   The naive newbie selects “random” transition (PowerPoint cycles through all the transition options with every new slide) which is just plain distracting.  But the seasoned presenter knows that the very best slide transition is the tried and true “fade.”

And yes, you can and should use it on every single slide in your presentation, unless there’s a really, really good reason to change it up.  Just because you have all those transitions to choose from doesn’t mean that you have to use them.  A fade transition has a nice, simple, feel.  Stick with it and it won’t let you down.

Now, I will admit that I have used other transitions, but I use them sparingly and for very specific effect.  For instance, the push transition works really well if you want to make it appear as if you haven’t moved to a new slide, but instead that text or a graphic on one slide is being pushed off the page to make room for a new text or graphic (just make sure the background is one flat colour).  Duarte Design created a great presentation that’s actually one of the built-in themes in PowerPoint 2010, which demonstrates another very cool use of the push transition (along with some very neat animation).

But for 90% of your presentations, just fade baby… fade away.

Customize Quick Access Toolbar

This is one of my favourite things about the newer versions of PowerPoint (2007, 2010). You can put all the things you use often up here to have access to them whenever you want. It’s a huge timesaver.

See that little down arrow up there in the top left-hand corner next to the little P (PowerPoint) symbol?  Click on it, then go to the second last item on the drop-down menu called “More commands…” and it will open up a huge menu of items you can put up in that custom quick access toolbar.  Don’t go crazy, because the number of items you can have up there isn’t limitless.  Plus, the whole idea is to save that special spot for the things you use A LOT but are a bit of a pain to get to quickly.

I use it for the alignment tools (go to back/front, and align left/right/centre, etc.).  I use these a lot because my preferred presentation style frequently uses images and builds.  In older versions of PowerPoint, they were easier to get to, but in the newer versions they’re kinda buried.

Saving time is a good thing (as Martha would say).  Do yourself a favour and try it out.