Jan 31 2010

PowerPoint SmartArt is Dumb

Theres no Bob Ross feature in PowerPoint to guide you through the process of visual communication.

SmartArt is not PowerPoint + Bob Ross.

PowerPoint is often criticized for encouraging presenters to rely too heavily on bullet points and not helping people to communicate more visually. Microsoft added a feature known as SmartArt to help convert text into various stylized graphics. When you’re designing your PowerPoint presentation, you can quickly rotate through various shapes, colors, layouts, and styles in order to find the right graphic for your presentation.

For novice or casual PowerPoint users, SmartArt can be a handy tool for quickly making your presentation more visual and professional looking. If you decide to use SmartArt in your PowerPoint slides, you need to be careful because SmartArt is dumb. Continue reading “PowerPoint SmartArt is Dumb”

Tags: , , , , ,


Dec 08 2008

Content Staging: Propel Your Slide Content Higher

Like a rocket, introduce your content in stages to propel your slides higher!

When you’re presenting your slide content, the last thing you want to do is overwhelm your audience with too much information on any one slide. If you find that you have too much content on one slide, you can divide it up and spread it over several slides. However, sometimes it’s not about simply breaking the content apart across multiple slides but about displaying the information more effectively in bit-size, digestible chunks in one slide. In these latter cases, I leverage a PowerPoint Ninja technique called content staging. Continue reading “Content Staging: Propel Your Slide Content Higher”

Tags: , , , , ,


Nov 29 2008

13 Ways to Quickly Derail a PowerPoint Presentation — Part I

Avoid derailing your PowerPoint presentation. Start strong, build momentum, and don't let up!

Most presentation experts would agree that it is important to have a strong opening to your business presentation. Your audience will give you five minutes or less (usually less) to determine if your presentation is worth listening to or not. They may not physically leave your presentation (that would be rude), but if your audience is unimpressed, disappointed, or annoyed, they will disengage mentally. Suddenly, their iPhone/BlackBerry or the doodling in their notepad becomes more important to them than what you’re presenting. Continue reading “13 Ways to Quickly Derail a PowerPoint Presentation — Part I”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,


Nov 24 2008

Book Review: The Back of the Napkin

The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam

The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, written by Dan Roam, is a bold effort at introducing business people to using visual thinking principles to solve problems and communicate more effectively. Visual thinking is something that I feel I excel at; however, I know it has been a challenge for many of my co-workers, managers, and clients. Even if you don’t struggle with visual thinking, I recommend The Back of the Napkin (four of five stars) as it provides a valuable set of processes and frameworks that can even benefit experienced visual thinkers, who probably operate more by intuition than methodology. Continue reading “Book Review: The Back of the Napkin”

Tags: , , , , , , ,


Oct 29 2008

Four Steps to Customizing PowerPoint Clip Art

Have you ever struggled to find just the right clip art for a particular slide in a presentation? You may have searched through PowerPoint’s extensive collection of clip art images and identified some possible options. However, the clip art weren’t exactly what you had in mind due to one of the following reasons:

  • Image was okay but the colors didn’t match the rest of the images or slide background
  • Image was close to what you wanted but it had a few extra details in the illustration, which were unnecessary or distracting
  • Image contained a useful illustration but several background elements made the clip art unusable Continue reading “Four Steps to Customizing PowerPoint Clip Art”

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,


Next Page »