Improving PowerPoint Presentations

The quality of presentations that I am asked to edit are often – and I am being quite moderate in my criticism – rather poor. People lack a basic understanding of the inherent power of PowerPoint and fail to take advantage of the many features provided. So, in the following I have assembled a few tips that will help you enhance your PowerPoint presentations. Although this newsletter refers to elements of PowerPoint 2007, most of these features are available in older versions of the application and, with a bit of poking around, you will be able to locate them in the version that you have installed on your computer. If you require any assistance, please contact me.

THE FINAL WORD AS AN OPENER

PowerPoint is its own worst enemy. The audience has come to hear you, not merely to stare at images on the screen. Build a strong PowerPoint presentation, but make sure that your spoken remarks are more compelling than your text and accompanying pictures. PowerPoint doesn't give presentations. It just makes slides. Remember that you are creating these slides to support a spoken presentation.

INSERTING LABELS ON AN IMPORTED ILLUSTRATION

You can easily place a semitransparent white rectangle over an imported picture. Click Insert>Shapes>Rectangles and draw a rectangle over the relevant portion of the picture you have imported. Next, right click the rectangle and choose Format Shape. When the dialog box opens, click Line Colors. Under Fill, click the arrow on the right side of the Color box and choose white. Set Transparency to about 50% and click Close to close the dialog box and save your settings. Type the required label.

By the way, if the picture background is light, you can also select a dark color and the label will appear with white text.

ALIGNING OBJECTS

The Align and Distribute tools let you balance all the objects on a single click. To access these tools, select Picture Tools>Align.

RECOLORING AN ELEMENT IN A PICTURE

You can modify the color of a single element in a ClipArt picture that you have inserted in a PowerPoint slide. This is a bit tricky, but obviously worth the effort. First, right click the picture and select Format Picture>Group>Ungroup. Now, click on that one particular area of the picture that you want to recolor. Click on Format Shape>Fill>Color. Select the color you want to use and it will replace the existing one.

CONVERTING POWERPOINT TO WORD

This may sound trivial but it can be a real pain. In fact, you can’t convert PowerPoint to Word. The best you can do is to save your presentation as RTF which, with a bit of work can be edited and formatted as a Word document. Select Save As>Other Formats>Save as Type and then select Outline/RTF.

By the way, Publish>Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word creates a Word file with the slides embedded as graphics. That will not get you very far if you want to utilize the text.

USING CTRL-DRAG TO COPY

You can quickly make a copy of any object by holding down the CTRL key while you drag on the object. You will then "drag off" a new copy.

SELECTING SMALL OBJECTS

You sometimes may struggle with your mouse to select a small element, or an object that is covered by a larger object in a PowerPoint drawing. Try the keyboard! Press ESC (to insure that nothing is currently selected) and then repeatedly press TAB which will toggle you through all of the objects on the slide.

CREATING THE PERFECT CIRCLE, SQUARE, STAR, AND MORE

If you have even tried to draw a circle or square on a slide, you might have noticed that the tool that is actually used is the ellipse or rectangle. They do not automatically give you a proportional shape. To get the perfect shape, click Insert>Shapes>Basic Shapes. Then draw an ellipse or rectangle, while holding down the Shift key. Release the mouse before letting go of the Shift key and you will have a perfect circle (or square). Press Shift again if you need to resize the shape. This trick can also be used for drawing other shapes including stars, octagons, triangles, and more.

USING THE NOTES PAGE FEATURE

If you want to create printable pages that have speaker notes associated with each slide – to help you deliver a successful talk – PowerPoint has a feature designed to do just this. It is called Notes Page. To access the Notes Page for any slide, select View>Notes Page. You will see an image of your slide and a placeholder for adding text. You can cut-and-paste text from Word, if you like. You can print these pages, by selecting Print What>Notes Pages. If you are not too confident when delivering your presentation, a great way to work is to keep your notes displayed on a separate monitor.

AVOID THE FLASHY

Avoid the use of flashy transitions such as text fly-ins. The same holds for special effects such as animation and sounds. These features may seem impressive at first, but are distracting and even annoying. You are selling your product, not PowerPoint.

COMPARING TWO VERSIONS OF A PRESENTATION

Since PowerPoint does not support track changes, it is difficult to identify a reviewer’s modifications. Here is a neat trick that lets you easily locate changes. Load both presentations and make sure they are both on the same page and in Normal view. Select Zoom>Fit to Window.

Hold down the CTRL key and Press the Tab key several times. The cursor will land on the text in which there are differences. You have to manually move from slide to slide and repeat the process.

CREATING A TEMPLATE

This one is for people with a bit of experience. If you use a presentation, or parts of it, regularly, turn it into a template which lets you modify it quickly. A template saves all the selected settings – background images, color scheme, font selections, and so on – and ensures that the presentations you create, based on this template, will all have the same look and feel. To turn a presentation into a template: click the Microsoft Office Button>Save As. In the Save as type list, click Design Template. Name the template file and click Save.

By the way, there are hundreds of free templates on Microsoft Office Online.

To use a template that you've saved to your local hard drive, click the Microsoft Office Button>New>Installed Templates.