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Seven Tips for Putting Power

into Your PowerPoint Presentation

website: www.communispond.com email address: info@communispond.com phone: 1-800-529-5925

 Seven Tips for Putting Power
into Your PowerPoint Presentation
One of the reasons Microsoft's PowerPoint software is so
popular is that it can get you seventy percent of the way
toward an effective presentation, even if you've never
used it before and have never given a presentation in
your life. That's a remarkable capability for a piece of
desktop software.
But are you content to give seventy percent of an effec-
tive presentation? Or would rather be the kind of speak-
er who electrifies an audience, changes listeners' atti-
tudes, and teaches them something for which they will
be grateful? These tips, culled from Communispond's
decades of experience coaching presenters, will help you
fill in some of the remaining thirty percent and give a
one hundred percent presentation that remains in the
memories of your audience long after you've clicked out
of your 'Thank You' slide!
website: www.communispond.com email address: info@communispond.com
1. Three Ways to Ensure Slide Legibility
First, make text more legible for your audience by
choosing a font with a large 'x-height'. Many fonts
appear larger than others, even though they may be the
same point size. You can tell those that appear largest by
the height of the lowercase 'x' in relation to other char-
acters with vertical extensions, such as the 'd' and the
'h'. Ariel and Verdana, for example, each has a larger x-
height than Garamond.
Second, whenever possible, use sans-serif fonts. They're
easier to read from a distance. Serif is a fancy word for
the little feet on the ends of letters in fonts like Times or
Book Antiqua. Take a look at Arial, then look at Times.
You'll see the difference. Serifs make a font easier to read
in blocks of text, but in the small amounts of text on a
PowerPoint slide, sans serif is more legible.
Speaking of the small amounts of text on a PowerPoint
slide, our third way to increase legibility is to observe
the 4X4 Rule. This rule prescribes maximums of four
lines per slide, four words per line.
2. Make Your Slides Slides and Your Handouts
Handouts
PowerPoint may let you convert your slides to a handout
at the click of a button, but slides and handouts are sup-
posed serve fundamentally different purposes. Using one
for the other means either ineffective slides or incompre-
hensible handouts—or both.
Good presentation visuals are sparse, few in number,
and use bullet points rather than blocks of text.
Handouts need to be understood after the fact, studied,
and given to people who were not present.
phone: 1-800-529-5925 2
 We offer two techniques, both of which require some
work but will get you better results:
• Do the long 'handout' version of the presentation
first and save it as a separate file. Then, go
through the 'presentation' version of the file and
clean it up, reducing the number of slides, simpli-
fying graphics, and editing text to the necessary
minimum.
• Do a single, simple version, but add more details
and examples in the 'notes' section of the
PowerPoint file. For the handout, simply print out
the presentation with your notes.
3. Stretch Your PowerPoint Skills
When you're in PowerPoint's slide show mode, press the
F1 key in the top left corner. A menu of very cool tricks
will appear, including:
• Type the number of the slide you want and then
press the enter key. You'll go to that slide without
showing all the others.
• Touch the letter 'B' to black out the screen.
• Touch the letter 'W' to make the screen go white.
This is a spectacular way to wake up everyone in
the audience, but it is only useful if you're pre-
senting against a whiteboard and want to show
something on it.
• Hold down the Control key and touch the letter
'P', and the marking pen appears. This allows you
to highlight, circle, and annotate the image on the
screen.
• Hold down the Control key and touch the letter
'A', and an arrow appears. This is much more pro-
fessional than a laser pointer; it remains steady
and can be controlled easily by a mouse.
4. Project the Right Image
One of the most common complaints about projectors
and PowerPoint is that the picture is 'cut off'—you can't
see everything on the screen that is on your original
visuals.
3 Seven Tips for putting Power into Your PowerPoint Presentation
The most common reason for this is that the presenta-
tion was designed on a desktop computer in high resolu-
tion but the laptop you're working from doesn't have
the same high-quality picture.
• From your computer's Start Menu, select 'Control
Panel'.
• Click 'Display'.
• Click the tab marked 'Settings'.
There you'll find all the controls that send the picture
from your laptop to the projector. Usually you can solve
the problem by sliding the 'Screen Resolution' indicator
as far to the right as it will go.
If that doesn't work, connect the projector and reboot
your computer. Although this step takes a bit longer,
odds are good that the problem will self-correct.
5. Use Alternate File Formats
In the history of PowerPoint presentations, countless
audience person-hours have been wasted waiting for
speakers to boot computers, open PowerPoint, go
through their files, and click on 'View Slide Show' to get
to their slides. To bypass some of this tedium, save your
presentation (or copy it) to the desktop so it's right there
when you boot the computer. But when you save it, save
the file as a .pps file, rather than a .ppt file. This option
comes up when you choose 'Save As…'
The .pps format saves your file as a full-screen presenta-
tion. If it's on the desktop of your computer, and you
click on the icon, it opens up in its full-screen glory,
without having to put your audience through a lot of
navigation and menus.
Saving a .pps file should be the very last step in creating
your presentation, because you can't change the slides in
the .pps format.
An additional advantage to the .pps format is it makes
the files much smaller and easier to email.
Here's another file format trick. Have you ever created a
PowerPoint slide for a presentation—say a chart or
graph—then wanted to use it in a handout package or
include it in another document? It's easy to do: save it as
a picture, instead of a PowerPoint presentation.
 Here's how it works:

• Find the slide you want to save in normal view.

• Click File…

• Click Save As Type…

• Slide the dropdown arrow until you find 'JPEG
file interchange format'.

• It will then ask you whether you want to save the

entire presentation or just that file.

• Once the image is saved as a JPEG, you can cut

and paste it into any document just as you would
a piece of clip art or send it to someone as an
attachment in an email message.

Just be aware you can't change the JPEG file, you can
only do that in PowerPoint.
6. During Presentation Development, Reverse the
Slides
Here's a unique way to develop a presentation that gets
to the point quickly—put your last slide first.
Many business presentations lead to a single recommen-
dation or solution. By taking your recommendation
slide and moving it to the front, you have gotten to the
point of your presentation and the rest of the informa-
tion then supports that recommendation. Odds are,
when you develop the presentation this way, you'll use
fewer slides, too.
So get all your ideas down, then take the next step—use
the 'last slide first' technique to make sure every slide
you create supports the final point.
7. Don't Plan in PowerPoint
This is our most powerful tip for a professional presen-
tation. Don't use PowerPoint or other software packages
to plan your presentation. Plan first, then use the soft-
ware to build a presentation that really sings.
Many of us open PowerPoint and start filling in blank
slides in the order they come up in the template we've
chosen. The problem is that these templates, while well-
meaning, are designed to create generic, cookie-cutter
presentations. Is that the kind of presentation you want
to be known for? Great presentations start with knowing
who your audience is, what you want to accomplish,
and the most powerful and concise way to get your mes-
sage across. You need to know all those things before sit-
ting down to fill in a template. Then, you can
• choose the most appropriate visuals and format
for your audience—senior management probably
doesn't need to see an orange fireball on every
screen
• make wiser decisions about how to organise your
information
• remove unnecessary slides to keep your presenta-
tion as lean and powerful as possible.
By taking the time to plan your presentation before
building it, you will be able to use the tools to greater
effect and get your message across with more impact. At
Communispond, we've always said that planning is vital
to the creation of an effective presentation. Here's
another way to look at it. Eighty percent of your prepa-
ration time should be spent planning and strategizing
your presentation rather than building it in PowerPoint.
If you keep your presentation concise by thinking about
your audience and focusing on those points that will
create the most value to your listeners, your presentation
will take less time to build. Moreover, it will hit the
mark better.

website: www.communispond.com email address: info@communispond.com phone: 1-800-529-5925 4

 About Communispond

Communispond has been training business professionals

to give powerful presentations since 1969, well before
PowerPoint was a gleam in the eye of Microsoft.
Communispond's clients include more than 350 of the
Fortune 500. More than a half million people from all
over the world have passed through its training pro-
grams.

Today, Communispond offers training in a wide variety

of communication skills, but we are probably best
known for training and coaching high-level business
professionals for high-impact communication events—
from product launches and stockholder meetings to
media appearances and press conferences. If your success
in a presentation is critical to your career and you think
you would benefit from the personal attention of a
skilled presentations coach, visit our website at
www.communispond.com or call 1-800-529-5925 (US)
+44 20 7017 5973 (UK).

5 Seven Tips for putting Power into Your PowerPoint Presentation

website: www.communispond.com email address: info@communispond.com phone: 1-800-529-5925