Archive for Beginner PowerPoint
When Should You Use PowerPoint
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I was speaking recently to a group of keynote speakers at a professional speakers convention on the topic of when PowerPoint should be used. Many people found the ideas I shared helpful, so I thought I would share them with you in this article.
As I explained to the group, I think you can see almost any business-oriented presentation as somewhere along a continuum where one end is a fully inspirational presentation and the other end is a totally informational presentation. One of the key distinctions along the line between the two ends is how many points you want the audience to remember.
A purely inspirational presentation, like a pep talk you would give your team, has very few points you need the audience to remember, perhaps only one key point. A highly informational presentation, like a training program, can have many points that you want the audience to remember in order to improve their job performance. In between the two ends of the spectrum there are a variety of different presentations with various numbers of points being made.
To help the audience remember your message, you should use recall aids. A recall aid is something that the audience can use to recall the points you have made after you are finished the presentation. There are many different forms of recall aids, including handouts, workbooks, cards, and yes, PowerPoint. PowerPoint can be a recall aid because it can give visual reminders of the points we are making.
The most popular usage of PowerPoint as a recall aid is when we use the title and bullet points to reinforce the key points we are speaking about. An even more effective way to use PowerPoint as a recall aid is to use photographs to help tell a story that illustrates your point.
Audiences remember your powerful stories more than any other part of your presentation. You can burn the points in their memory even more by showing a photo, telling a story related to that photo, then making the point that the story and photo illustrate. In this way, the emotional impact of the photo will add weight to the point you make through the story.
PowerPoint should not necessarily be the only recall aid you use, but it could be a valuable tool in helping your audience remember and act on your points. When you plan your next presentation (you do plan your presentation instead of just jumping in to PowerPoint I hope), think about where you are on the continuum between an inspirational and an informational presentation. Then consider how PowerPoint may fit into your plan for recall aids.
Dave Paradi’s Think Outside the Slide™ approach helps presenters get results by showing them how to quickly create effective PowerPoint presentations. He is the co-author of “Guide to PowerPoint”, part of the Prentice Hall Series in Advanced Business Communication. He offers a free PowerPoint e-course, newsletter and articles on his web site at www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com.
PowerPoint Tutorial
Posted by: | CommentsThis PowerPoint tutorial is really good for a beginner in PowerPoint. This is not for anyone who has used Microsoft PowerPoint many times. This video tutorial will guide you through the basics, for just making your first slides, or if you haven’t used the tool in a while and you need a basic refresher.
How to have better looking pictures on a web site or presentation
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One of the common complaints about graphics used in presentations or on web sites is the poor quality. Even if you scan in an image at high resolution, it seems that most graphics end up looking awful. It is usually because the size or resolution has not been properly adjusted. I recently helped someone with a photo they put on a web site that took up most of the page and took forever to load because it was 2MB.
The size of the graphic is the easier of the two areas to understand because we can just look at the image and see what size it is. If you take a large picture and simply use the sizing handles to make it smaller, the image appears the correct size, but the problem is that the graphic file is still the same size, making the presentation file huge or the web page slow to load. The quality of the image is also variable depending on how well the program displays a large image that has been resized.
The second issue is with resolution. This refers to the number of dots per inch in the picture. The higher the resolution, the better the quality of the image. Where that rule falls apart though, is where the device you are viewing the image on cannot display more than a certain resolution. And your computer monitor is a device that has a limitation. In general, computer screens display no more than 72 dpi (dots per inch). For print publications, it is not uncommon to see resolutions of 1200 dpi – even laser printers print at 300-600 dpi. When you scan an image for print use, you must scan it at the high resolution. But when you go to use it in an electronic format, you should resample it down to a lower resolution. Resampling is a process where the software intelligently removes dots from the image but does not reduce the overall quality of appearance.
To resize and resample an image requires software. You can use expensive, complex image software, or you can do what I do, which is go cheap and easy. I use a great utility called IrFanView (interesting name, great software). This utility allows you to load an image in any of dozens of formats, resize, resample and do a whole lot of other things if you need to, and then save in any of lots of formats. I have used it extensively to help my images appear crisp and clear on my web site and in presentations. I highly recommend it and encourage you to start using it to improve the quality of the images you use in presentations and online. Here is a link to download IrFanView from its home site: http://www.irfanview.com
If you include the image in a PowerPoint presentation that will be shown using a data projector, remember to check how the picture looks through the data projector. Depending on the room lighting and the brightness of the bulb, I have found many images appear much darker when displayed through a data projector than what they look like on the computer screen. You may need to adjust the brightness of the image to make it look good when displayed. To do this in PowerPoint, right click the picture and select Format Picture on the pop-up menu. Then select the Picture tab. In the Image Control section, increase the Brightness setting to above 50% (the default). You won’t need to increase it very much or it will start to wash out the details shown in the image. I usually find a setting of 55-65% to be sufficient.
The steps I usually follow when using a scanned image are:
1. Scan the image at a high resolution so I can use it in a print publication if required.
2. Resize and resample the image for use on a web site or in a presentation.
3. Adjust the brightness of the image in PowerPoint.
By taking care to get the best quality images in our presentations and web pages, we increase the impact of our message, which leads to more enthusiastic action from our audiences.
©MMIII Dave Paradi
Dave Paradi’s Think Outside the Slide™ approach helps presenters get results by showing them how to quickly create effective PowerPoint presentations. He is the co-author of “Guide to PowerPoint”, part of the Prentice Hall Series in Advanced Business Communication. He offers a free PowerPoint e-course, newsletter and articles on his web site at www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com.
Add Narration to PowerPoint
Posted by: | CommentsThis PowerPoint tutorial will help those who wants to add a narration to their slides. You may want to post the slide online or submit the presentation as an assignment. Whatever the reason, if you want the presentation to present itself adding a narration is a good idea. This PowerPoint tutorial will show you how to do that.
How to add music to PowerPoint Tutorial
Posted by: | CommentsPowerPoint can be enhanced by adding audio. You can either conveniently add music in the powerpoint slide where it is appropriately, or you can create a powerpoint slideshow just to show an audience with no intention to speak to the slides. Adding music to PowerPoint can make your slides very appealing, especially if the intention is just to show photos to an audience. The following video tutorial will give more information on how to add audio to your powerpoint slides.