5 Ways to Make PowerPoint Sing! (And Dance!) When if comes to software, bells and whistles are great! If you know how to use them. Working in PowerPoint every day, we’ve learned a few tricks. So when Microsoft asked us to use latest version of PowerPoint to create a cinematic presentation, we couldn’t wait to show off our skills. (Our excitement, Exhibit A: We used PowerPoint 2010–and only PowerPoint 2010–to create a short trailer sharing “5 Rules for Creating Great Presentations.” Nancy recently took a turn as a guest writer on The PowerPoint Team Blog, to expand on the process, and outline the top “5 tips for Getting PowerPoint to Sing!”
12 Top Notch Online Presentation Tools With more long-distance meetings going on due to increasing travel costs and decreasing expense accounts, you need to be able to show your work to clients and co-workers so they can easily see your point. These 12 tools will help you create all of the online presentations you need, set them to music, add links and videos and then embed them or share them as you see fit. authorSTREAM: authorSTREAM allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations to unique URLs that can be shared with others. BrinkPad: BrinkPad is a Java-based presentation creator that allows you to save your finished work to the Web, save to disk, save as JPGs and more. Empressr: Empressr bills itself as making rich media presentations. Google Docs Presentation: The Google Docs suite of office products includes a presentation tool that will allow you to collaborate with others just as you do with any of its other products. What are some of your favorite presentation tools?
Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test? - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 11:00 AM October 22, 2012 An audience can’t listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards. Keep It Simple Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they’re stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each slide to remember who you work for? It’s also important to stick to a consistent visual style in your slide deck. Consider the “before” slide below. Instead, streamline the text and incorporate simple visual elements (and save teleprompter text for the “notes” field, which the audience can’t see). Flow. Contrast. White space. Hierarchy. Unity.
Tools New Presentations From creating story and design concepts to developing entire presentation templates and systems, Duarte can make sure your presentation makes the right impact on your audience. Existing Presentations Using the building blocks you already have in place—your content, presentation system, and visual assets—Duarte can enhance, revise, or redesign your existing presentations. Device-Based Presentations Your content must be compelling on all platforms. Multimedia Sometimes your idea is best showcased and shared through multimedia, including motion graphics, videos, and animated demos. Events Duarte has been part of hundreds of company events, doing everything from creating the theme and message strategy to crafting presentations for keynotes and break-out sessions.
Presentation Tools: Keynote vs. PowerPoint When we need to make a presentation, we often think about using Microsoft Powerpoint. Whether it’s presentations for school, work, home or party, Microsoft Powerpoint seems to be the only choice. But Powerpoint’s got a whole lot of competition: Google Presentation, Impress, Symphony, and its strongest rival, Keynote. Some of you may have heard of Keynote, the Apple version equivalent of Powerpoint. Loyal Mac users have raved about it. 1. First of all, theme designs dictate the whole look of the presentation. The basic theme designs offered by Keynote are without competition–genius in design and simply gorgeous with 44 standard themes. Keynote Theme Designs Powerpoint Theme Designs Making a presentation with Keynote allows you to stand out–you’re going the extra mile, so you’re more professional and more memorable. 2. Both Powerpoint and Keynote have interesting transition effects. Sparkle Transition Effect from Keynote Dissolve Transition Effect from Powerpoint 3. 4. Graphs from Keynote 5.
3 tips for TED speakers (and other talkers) VUVOX - slideshows, photo, video and music sharing, Myspace codes 10 Ways to Prepare for a TED-format Talk These 18-minute talks are hard to do. It’s easier to blather on for an hour than talk for a tight 18 minutes knowing that if you go over, you (literally) will get the hook. The talks I give usually take me a comfortable 45 minutes but I needed to get the insights out in 18 minutes. I delivered one talk at TEDxEast and was thrilled to look up at the clock just as it was ticking down with :06 seconds left on the clock. Here are the ten steps I went through in rehearsing for my talks. 1. I trimmed and trimmed and trimmed until I felt like it was close to 18 minutes. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Present! - Edition #1 Rethinking Presentation Design Secrets From a TED2013 Speaker: Preparing for the "Talk of One's Life" 5 Ways to Help Your Students Become Better Questioners The humble question is an indispensable tool: the spade that helps us dig for truth, or the flashlight that illuminates surrounding darkness. Questioning helps us learn, explore the unknown, and adapt to change. That makes it a most precious “app” today, in a world where everything is changing and so much is unknown. And yet, we don’t seem to value questioning as much as we should. For the most part, in our workplaces as well as our classrooms, it is the answers we reward -- while the questions are barely tolerated. To change that is easier said than done. How to Encourage Questioning 1. Asking a question can be a scary step into the void. 2. This is a tough one. 3. Part of the appeal of “questions-only” exercises is that there’s an element of play involved, as in: Can you turn that answer/statement into a question? 4. 5. If the long-term goal is to create lifelong questioners, then the challenge is to make questioning a habit -- a part of the way one thinks.