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PowerPoint Top Tips

To many, PowerPoint sends shock waves down the spine, the thought of public speaking is apparently in the top three of most stressful situations. The reality is, in today’s world, being able to write and give compelling presentations is not an optional skill. Whether pitching for new business, explaining a new process or justifying an old one – good presentation skills (and by association PowerPoint skills) give competitive advantage. Hopefully this blog will help you get a bit more out of PowerPoint…

...Its funny what people get hooked on, take my colleague Phil, apparently he’s hooked on painting Romans. To see what the Romans have done for us and .NET development, check out his blog

Hi, my names Gary Duffield, I’m hooked on  PowerPoint,. I thought I could handle it, all my friends were doing it, and I got hooked. There I’ve said it. Giving the presentation is almost the easy bit; you’ve got to write it first. If you want help polishing up those presentation skills, this might be the course for you.  You can even get a new style certification in PowerPoint, I must get round to doing it.

For those already proficient with PowerPoint, I thought I’d share my top 10 tips:

Picture Cropping

If you want to crop the edges from an image, the crop tool comes in handy. Click your picture and find the crop tool (Format menu in PowerPoint 2007). This will put black handles on the image, dragging them inwards will crop the picture for you. Cleverly, if you change your mind later, you can drag the handles back to reveal the previously cropped image. The example below is a cropped stock Microsoft picture.

Format Painter (works across all Office Products)

When starting a new set of slides it makes sense to configure the slide master so that every slide is consistently good. Use View > Slide Master to configure colours, recurring images, section slides etc. Get this right at the start and you’ll save a load of effort later.  If you do want to change some element of formatting, and you already have a good example, have a look for an icon that looks like a paint brush. Then click and drag this over the “good formatting” – repeat this with the formatting you want to change – there…9 times out of 10, you’ll have the look you wanted. It also works with shapes.

Image enhancements (make pictures and logos look like they are supposed to be there) 

Sorry, this is limited to Office 2007 only. Pick a picture, choose Format and have a click around. The graphic shows some of these features applied to a text box.

Picture Transparency:

Have you ever been to a presentation where they have lifted your logo off your web site and inserted it into their slides, as if it’s written just for you? Trouble is their slide background is a grey gradient and your logo is on a white background.

Enter the transparency tool – In Office 2007 you will find it under the Format tab> recolor picture> set transparent colour. Click on the colour you want to become transparent and that’s it – done. Have a look at the Microsoft logo in the image to see the effect.

Visio

If you need to show complex processes, you’ll save time doing them in Visio and inserting into PowerPoint. My preference is to save the Visio file as a PNG or TIF image file and insert it as a picture. This also stops people changing the process diagram easily.(These file formats are lossless so will remain crisp – trouble is 2007 automatically compresses pictures – Use Tools on the save as menu to stop this). The slide below uses a build to overlay a process onto a Vista desktop – it projected really well.

Get a presenter mouse.

I’ve been using the Microsoft Presenter mouse or similar for ages. It makes for a more professional delivery and doesn’t tie you to the USB mouse radius of your machine. Good ones include a zoom facility and a laser pointer. If you use builds and animations (and you should), a wireless mouse makes the delivery much more fluid. The Microsoft mouse flips over to reveal buttons to advance the slides, trouble is they don’t play until you download the mouse software. So you can’t just ship up, plug it in and present. Although it works fine in mouse mode.

Clip Art / Aspect Ratios

I’m not a fan of Microsoft clip art, mainly because I’ve seen most of them a 1000 times. With some Microsoft clip art, you can right click and chose ungroup. Depending on the graphic, you may then be able to remove unwanted elements from the image. Incidentally, if you agree to the question about going on line for clip art, you get access to a lot of fairly decent photographs.  O’h and only ever resize a picture by dragging from the corners – anywhere else and you will destroy the aspect ration. 

Pin oft used files

In Office 2007, when you click see the list of recently opened documents, you may notice a pin icon. Click it and you will pin that document to the recent list. Permanently. 

Picture Alignment

Before I discovered this, I’d spend ages trying to move an image into just the right place, usually so it lined up with an arrow. Abandon the mouse and use Shift Arrow Key and then Control Arrow Key for pixel by pixel movement. You can display a grid as well to make this a more exact science. 

The LCD Projector is your friend...

Assuming you are using a laptop to present, PowerPoint can provide you with a neat way to remember what’s coming up and what you are supposed to say. You can use a presenter view, here the slide is sent to the projector and an interactive presenter screen is displayed on the laptop. A neat solution, especially if like me, you tend to deliver the content of the next slide at the end of the current. If you are lucky enough to be using Vista, you’ll already know that the days of Function Key + F something are over. If it doesn’t find the projector, Windows Key + X on any laptop will.

Till Next time....

PS Did I mention that you can right click on a object on a slide and choose save as picture?