5 reasons to always put titles on every slide in PowerPoint

October 9, 2009 — Adam Vero

I have a golden rule which is that all slides in a PowerPoint presentation MUST have titles, which I mentioned in an earlier post about using large images in PowerPoint. Before I get hundreds of comments saying this is nonsense, and “less is more”, I just want to be very clear: every slide must have a title, they just don’t necessarily have to be visible to the audience.

The minimalist, image-led approach often recommended by followers of Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points (and others) can be very powerful and really help to get your message heard and understood, but people often take it too far and actually delete the title placeholder from their slide, or use the “blank” layout. Even if you don’t want to put words on your slides to show the audience, you should still keep the title, and I’ll explain why and how to achieve this, and discuss a couple of things which might catch you out.

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Using large images in PowerPoint

October 9, 2009 — Adam Vero

One technique for effective presentations is to use large images, especially photographs, with minimal or no text and use these to evoke the ideas you are talking about, or create a connection or emotional response for the audience. On his Slides that Stick blog, Jan Shultink discusses a simple technique to make sure your images have the right proportion and fill the slide which is well worth a read.

Keeping things in proportion

I shudder when I see images that have been pulled and stretched out of proportion, particularly if it is the presenter’s company logo (or worse still that of the audience’s firm, hastily borrowed from their website).
Jan’s tip about dragging by a corner is great for pictures and photos because PowerPoint will assume you want to preserver the aspect ratio, but this is not true for drawings or some vector graphics – a simple hold of the shift key while dragging the corner has the same effect for these files. Note that in both cases, this technique preserves the current aspect ratio, so to get things right in the first place you need to use the reset as pointed out by Jan.

If you are using PowerPoint 2007 or later and you insert a picture from file on a content slide, it will fit it into the content placeholder, so you would then have to expand it up to fit. A quicker way to get it full screen is to make sure to change the slide layout to blank or to title only. Then when you insert the picture it will make it as large as possible while still fitting the whole of the picture on the slide. If your picture is the same orientation (portrait or landscape) and proportion as your slide it will fill it. If it is not then it will still need to be stretched a little to fill the whole slide (this is often the case if you are designing slides for widescreen 16:9 layout and using digital camera pictures which are usually closer to a 4:3 ratio).

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Creating better web pages and site design

August 7, 2007 — Adam Vero

I have recently been doing some restructuring of my company website at www.meteorit.co.uk – it’s still very plain and simple but I have tried to tick all the appropriate boxes for accessibility, usability, standards compliance and above all giving people clear information about what my company does and does not offer.

Later I may give it a bit more corporate gloss and “pictures of people in smart suits drinking cappuccinos in a meeting, and someone good looking with a headset on smiling at the camera” (to quote a friend who kindly gave me their thoughts on what it was missing).

As regular readers will know, clear presentation of information is a hot topic of mine, particularly when I am delivering software training. As I am a MOS: Master I do a lot of Microsoft Office courses, and try to focus not just on the features of the applications but also advise on good practices. This might include clear layout of a Word document, suitable formatting of an Excel chart, or the whole process of designing a professional presentation to deliver your message clearly and avoid “death by PowerPoint”.

BadPowerPointNews

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Einstein on PowerPoint

June 18, 2007 — Adam Vero

Albert Einstein famously said “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler” in reference to physics and its explanations of the Universe.

It might also apply to PowerPoint presentations, where it is too easy to clutter slide with too many bullets or too much information and detail. For example, a chart with comparisons of twenty products across three sales regions for the last four quarters – with all the individual sales figures attached to each part of the stacked bar, of course.

Don’t do it. Keep it simple. Provide enough information in the visual aid to make the point (eg Widgets are selling more than ever, and sales in Toyland are decreasing) but no more than that.

Use the speaker’s notes to provide you with the extra detail if you need to refer to the numbers, and include these notes in the handout so people can digest them later if they want to. Think about using some hidden slides so you have a selection of related charts and / or figures which you can show in response to a direct question, but will not bore the audience with if they seem uninterested (or simply happy to take your conclusions at face value).

Handouts are also the right place for giving the source of your data and any appropriate caveats such as how many people were surveyed in a poll, or what exchange rate has been used to compare sales across currencies.

A good technique to deliver a more professional presentation is to think about what the audience would write down if there were no handouts. What would be the really important things they chose to take away? So why try and ram anything else through their eyeballs and into their brains?

Eistein giving a blackboard presentation about PowerPoint

Footnote: you can make your own images of Einstein’s blackboard musings here: http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php

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Ceci n’est pas une brand

June 12, 2007 — Adam Vero

One of the training courses I run is about producing and delivering better PowerPoint presentations. This looks at ways to avoid Death by PowerPoint by using well-crafted, visually attractive slides to provide maximum impact and increase audience understanding and information retention.

In a future blog post I might collect some thoughts together around that topic, but for now I thought I would link to a pretty good example. Given that this is a slideshow with no presenter, there is text accompanying pictures which would not necessarily be the case if it was speaker-driven. However, it is still a great example of visual impact to deliver a strong message.

Notice that because of the limitations of SlideShare (and good taste on the part of the designer) there are no animations, no builds, just pure, simple, accessible slides. One of the disciplines I ask my course delegates to adopt is to print their slide deck in black and white, 6 slides to a page. Only if their slides are readable and make sense (and have impact) in this format will they be successful for a presentation. Maybe my new discipline should be “post it to SlideShare” which has similar limitations of size* and lack of animation .

*I know you can view it in full-screen mode but many people won’t do this, and those that do often want to see if the first couple of slides draw them in before doing that.

The Brand Gap Presentation is also an interesting insight into the topic of branding and marketing, which is often a theme which comes into choice of presentation style and touches on some of the areas I teach.

Your brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.

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Huge PowerPoint files and how to avoid them

June 7, 2007 — Adam Vero

I have used PowerPoint for many years in a variety of job roles and it never ceases to amaze me that other people are able to create presentations which are, quite frankly, vast in their file sizes. There are several reasons for this, but the underlying problem is twofold:

a) users don’t think about file size until it is too late (when they realise they can’t email it, nor fit it on their memory stick nor even burn it to a single CD)

b) they don’t know how to avoid or fix the problem even if they did think about it

This means that many common causes of over-sized files go unchecked, files are used and re-used, and by the time you see there is a problem you have a huge clearing up job to do. Much better to tackle the issue at the source – when creating your presentation in the first place.

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Posted in Office System, PowerPoint, Training + certification, Utilities + Tools. Tags: . 2 Comments »

Making presentations clearer by zooming with NLarge

May 15, 2007 — Adam Vero

When I’m delivering training sessions about Microsoft Office and I start a demonstration, I find that it is often hard for the audience to see the detail of what I’m doing. While I can zoom in on a document I can’t easily make the toolbars and other details bigger – such as the formula bar in Excel.

Of course, I could lower the screen resolution, use big fonts and large mouse schemes to address some of the issues, but then the PowerPoint parts of the course become clunkier, and anything which involves seeing the ‘whole picture’ loses some impact due to lack of screen real-estate.

There are several great tools to help with this by providing a magnified area around the mouse. One such tool is ZoomIt by Mark Russinovich, but this does not work for all my machines (partly due to .Net 3 requirement I think). I have subsequently come across NLarge which is based on the same principles but seems to ‘just work’ so it is now my utility of choice for this kind of work.

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