You’ve probably heard that if you base most slides on bullet points, you’ll bore people. (Making you and your message less effective.)
But what can you do instead?
Well, below is a great 45-second clip of ideas for you:
That’s from design expert and Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Nolan Haims. I love how he uses Morph transitions to walk you through 3 options to improve your bullet points:
Do you sometimes follow the design trend of using uppercase text for headings or other short labels on your slides?
Recently, I’ve twice seen presentations with very modern-looking slides using all-uppercase text in brief captions.
If you’re anything like me when you give a talk, most of the time you probably use slides rather than using a flipchart or whiteboard (or speaking without any visuals).
But how much thought do you put into the colours on your slides?
That’s really worth your time – according to Bruce Gabrielle, author of the book Speaking PowerPoint:
“One of the secrets to great-looking
PowerPoint slides is colour choice”
Bruce Gabrielle
And I agree with Bruce. As I wrote about a few years back:
Using colours well is one of the key ways to make
your presentation look modern and professional.
You might wonder how much choice you have in your use of colours though. After all, it’s likely you use a template or PowerPoint theme that comes with colours built in.
Even so, with well-matched colours of your own, you can:
So in the 4-minute video below from Bruce Gabrielle, you’ll see a neat tip for choosing colours that look good together.
Note: The video’s sound quality is quite poor, so please bear with it.
Have you seen Pat Flynn’s great video about making slides? Right now, it’s had almost 1½ million views, and it’s called:
How to Create an Awesome Slide Presentation
(for Keynote or PowerPoint)
In his video, Pat shares pro tips to make your slideshows more engaging. So I highly recommend you watch it. (You’ll find it at the bottom of this post.)
Meanwhile, in the 1st of the videos below, you’ll see the precise steps you can use to implement one of Pat’s tips. That is, to add what he calls a “roadmap” to your slides.
So, watch my 6-minute, hands-on video to see what’s meant by a roadmap, and learn exactly how you can add one in PowerPoint:
What skills could you transfer to your public speaking, from other disciplines?
For instance, in my work as a learning designer, I’ve been heavily influenced by experts like Cathy Moore. While her advice is aimed at designers of e-learning, you might be surprised how much of it could also apply to your next talk or presentation.
Like to see an example? Try Cathy’s post called How to get everyone to write like Ernest Hemingway. (It’s under 800 words, so it’s only about a 3-minute read.)
You could use that post to help with your speechwriting (or with writing slides or speaker notes). That’s because it shows how you can take these 2 steps:
Here’s a quick quiz for you…
Do you know how to do these tasks in PowerPoint with just a few keystrokes:
Well, read on to find out, and see how other neat PowerPoint shortcuts can help you.
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How many of your slides serve double duty? Let’s look at an example of what I mean…
Suppose you have a slide with several contact numbers and email addresses on it, like the one shown below:
Slides like that serve double duty because they’re both:
If people won’t remember what a slide says, why show it?
My question is, if people won’t remember what a slide says, why show it during your presentation at all? That needlessly burdens your audience, who don’t know what you expect them to remember (or what details you might give them a copy of).
By all means, include details like that in a handout, for people to refer to later. But don’t overwhelm your audience with details during your talk.
Many presenters give their audience a copy of their slides to look at afterwards – in effect using their deck as their handout. But unless you’re careful, using your slide deck as your handout has 2 big problems:
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Ever had to give your presentation in a much shorter timeslot than you’d planned? You know – like when one or more of the speakers before you at a conference or workshop runs over time, and the organisers want to start getting things back on track.
Recently, Rob Beisenbach wrote a great post about that, which inspired me to tell you about a rarely-used PowerPoint feature that can help you out in situations like that.
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Do you want to highlight part of a photo or screenshot (or other picture) as though you’ve shone a spotlight on it? In this post, you’ll see just how to do that, with the 2nd in a short series of videos on using PowerPoint’s slide background fill option.
Make your slides look like you used Flash
Want to make your humble slides look like you used Flash, Photoshop, or another fancy (and pricey!) Adobe tool – when you only used PowerPoint? Well here are some videos to help you do just that.
In 2013, the Duarte blog featured an animation of objects emerging from behind a line, as though rising over the horizon. And in a great 12-minute video tutorial, last month Nick Smith of AdvanceYourSlides.com showed how you can use that same effect on your own slides.
To extend Nick’s method, the 4-minute video below shows how you can reuse the effect on any slide, without having to customise it each time:
Remote Possibilities 