Archive for Learn PowerPoint
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.
Using Clip Art/Photos on Presentation Slides
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The most common slide element used after text is a graphic, usually clip art or a photograph. The old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words” and it is true. Just make sure that the thousand words being spoken by the graphics you use on your presentation slides are words that will increase the impact of your message, not detract from it. Here are some areas to keep in mind when choosing graphics to use on your presentation slides.
Graphics Should Add to the Point
The real reason for using a graphic is to add some flavor to the text that is on the slide. It gives the audience visual variety, which keeps their attention raised. A good choice of graphic can make a point come alive in the audience’s mind. A poor choice of graphic will leave the audience wondering what the point really is since the graphic is inconsistent with the message. I once saw a presentation where a picture of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France was on a slide. It was a beautiful picture, but it had absolutely nothing to do with what was being spoken. Make sure you carefully select each graphic to match the point you are making on that particular slide. I spend far longer choosing a graphic than I do typing in the text.
Choosing Effective Clip Art
The most common graphic used on presentation slides is clip art. Most presentation software packages contain a large number of clip art images to choose from. In most cases, I suggest you avoid the standard ones that ship with the software. So many people use them that the images have become overused and do not stand out anymore. Instead, look for new ones in clip art software packages that you can buy or free sources on the Internet. One of the best sources I have found is Microsoft’s Design Gallery Live (see web link at the end of the article). This is the web site that is automatically loaded when you ask PowerPoint’s clip art function to find an image on the web. You enter a search term and it displays those clip art images that match the keyword you entered. This allows me to select images that most others are not using.
When you are selecting a clip art image, make sure to select one that is stylish looking, not dated looking – it makes your slide look current and your points fresh. Be careful about the colors of the clip art image. It must have enough contrast with your slide background color in order to be seen well. I usually use a dark background for my presentation slides, so I try to pick bright colored clip art. It is usually a good idea to avoid black clip art unless you are using a very light colored background as it is hard to see black on top of most colors.
There is one category of clip art images that I suggest you avoid – animated GIF’s. An animated GIF (GIF = Graphics Interchange Format) is a graphic image that moves. This type of graphic is created by stringing together multiple images that are set to cycle on a time sequence so that the image has movement. The graphic can be set to cycle in a loop endlessly or cycle once and stop. Any movement you have on your presentation slide, especially continuing movement of an image, is very distracting to the audience. It will divert their attention away from your message. These images have been so overused on the Web that many people now consider them to be less than professional and your use will impact your credibility with the audience.
Using Photographs
The other common graphic used on presentation slides is a photograph. This can be a digital photo you have taken, a print you have scanned or a photo supplied in your presentation software package. As in using clip art, select photos that others are not commonly using. The Design Gallery Live web site mentioned above is a good source for photos as well as clip art. Similar to clip art, pay attention to colors of the photo to make sure they contrast well with your slide background so they can be seen. With photographs, you also need to be aware of the emotional impact that a photo has. Unlike clip art, photographs evoke a direct emotional response when shown, they bypass the logic center of our brains. The emotional response tends to be stronger for photos of people than it does for photos of inanimate objects, although there are exceptions. Be careful in using photos that may evoke strong positive or negative emotional responses to make sure that you want that emotion to be in the audience at that point in your presentation.
When you are selecting or taking a digital photograph, one concern is what resolution do I need? If the photo is only being used on a presentation slide, you do not need a high resolution image, a 640×480 image is fine. If the photo will also be used in a print publication, you will need a much higher resolution and it is best to ask the print production staff what resolution they prefer. If you have a high resolution photo that you want to use on your presentation slide, try to have the resolution reduced in a graphic program before you insert the image. A high resolution image takes a lot of disk space to store and inserting a large image file in your presentation will make your presentation file very large and run more slowly.
Modifying Graphic Images
Once you have your graphic image in your presentation slide, you can make some changes to the image that will make it even more effective. Here are some of the most common changes.
Size – The size of the graphic should be big enough to be seen but not too big as to dominate the slide and take the focus away from the text message. To change the size, you can usually just drag an expansion handle at the corner of the image once it has been selected. I suggest using the corner handle to size an image because it keeps the same aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height) and does not distort the image.
Cropping – If the image you want is a portion of the total image, you can crop out the areas you do not want after it is inserted on your slide. This function is usually found in the Properties section of the graphic element. It is a good idea to check the size of the image first before setting the cropping distances from each edge so that you can get closer to the image you want within just a few attempts.
Colors – Some images, clip art usually, allow you to change one or more of the colors used. This function is again usually found in the Properties section of the graphic element on the slide. It allows you to take an image that has low contrast with the slide background color and increase the contrast by changing one or two of the low contrast colors to high contrast colors.
Brightness – Especially when using photographs, the brightness of the photo has a large impact on how well it will look when displayed. This effect is magnified further when the image is displayed on a screen through a data projector in a lighted room. I have found that in many cases I have to make the photo brighter on my screen in order to get a good image through a data projector. The brightness setting is found in the graphic element Properties usually. Check your photos using the data projector you will use and the room lighting if possible. If checking before the presentation is not possible, learn how to set the brightness and be prepared to test the photos and change it if necessary when you set up for your presentation.
If you select your images carefully, the pictures will add “a thousand words” to the message you are delivering and you will increase your impact on the audience.
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.
How to Write Powerful Bullet Points
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If you have sat through too many presentations where the presenter read the full text of their slides, you have probably wondered, “How can I avoid droning on and on and focus on just the key information that my audience needs?” One part of the answer is to create bullet points that you can expand upon. When using bullet points on a presentation slide, there are some key ideas that you should keep in mind.
A Bullet Point is Not a Sentence
Too many times a presenter puts an entire sentence as a bullet point. This defeats the entire purpose of the bullet point, which is to convey the key point only. It also tends to lead to the presenter reading each bullet point. If you plan to just read each bullet point, save the audience the time by just e-mailing them your slides and they can read the points on their own.
Reveal the Key Idea Only
A bullet point is supposed to be a short summation of the key point that you want to make. It should not reveal all you know about the idea, or there is nothing left for you to say. For each idea you want to convey, consider what the key point is and put that as a bullet point. Then add to the bullet point by the words that you speak during the presentation.
Use a Consistent Style
When using bullet points, make sure that they have a consistent style. This means that:
* start each bullet point with either a verb or a noun – a verb is more action oriented and is usually preferred
* use the same tense for each verb – the most common is the present tense with the past tense being the next most common
* capitalize each bullet point the same way – usually the first letter of the first word is capitalized and the rest of the words are in lower case unless it is a proper name
Observe the 6 by 6 Guideline
In order to keep the amount of information in each bullet point concise and to keep the slide from looking cluttered, you should keep the six by six guideline in mind. It states that each slide should aim to have no more than six bullet points and each bullet point should aim to have no more than six words. I would not consider this to be a strict rule, but it is a good guideline that will keep your slides clean and concise.
Know When NOT to use Bullet Points
Increasingly, audiences are turned off by slides that contain nothing but a list of bullet points slide after slide. They are asking “What is relevant here for me to know in order to make a decision in my business?” Make sure you are also using visuals to convey the key points of your message. Visuals can be graphs, diagrams, pictures, videos or combinations of the above. If you want to know how to create persuasive PowerPoint visuals, check out my book The Visual Slide Revolution.
By keeping these ideas in mind, the bullet points on your next presentation slides can add even more power to your presentation. If you want more ideas on communicating effectively when using PowerPoint, sign up for the free seven day PowerPoint Effectiveness e-course and newsletter by filling in your name and e-mail address on the right.
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.