Five Easy Ways to Improve Your Presentations with Microsoft PowerPoint
Updated: September 14, 2004
A Business Software Tip by J. Carlton Collins, CPA
Communication is a primary key to the success of any business. J. Carlton Collins, independent business software analyst and president of ASA Research, presents five simple yet powerful features in Microsoft PowerPoint that can help you communicate more effectively.
Presented below are five powerful PowerPoint features which are often overlooked, but are definitely worth your time to learn.
1. Avoid awkward moments.
When delivering a PowerPoint presentation, you already know the left mouse button will advance the slide show with each left mouse click. However, as a default, the right mouse button pops up a menu, rather than displaying the previous slide. This can result in an awkward moment in the presentation when the presenter truly wants to slip back to the previous slide. Instead of fumbling with this dialog box, I find it is better to set the presentation to display the previous screen on right mouse click. To do this, in the Tools menu, select Options, select the View tab, and clear the Popup menu on right mouse click box as shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Options dialog box
2. An efficient way to make your layout more attractive.
PowerPoint provides a slide master page which allows you to set up the background, fonts, and formats to be used for every page throughout your slide show. Setting up the slide master page first makes it easier to then position your text and objects in an attractive manner as you create your presentation. The slide master page is accessed under the View menu. In the sample screen below, you can see I have inserted a washed-out image of myself as part of the background—this image will now appear on all slides.
Figure 1.2 Example of master slide
3. Make your audience say "wow."
By selecting the Slide Show menu and clicking on Custom Animation, you can create motion paths that cause text and pictures to move across the screen. However, a rather professional effect can be achieved by using a motion path on an object larger than your slide, such as a photograph. In the example presented in Figure 1.3, I have inserted a picture of clouds which is larger than the slide, and applied an animation in which this image crawls slowly across the screen. When displayed, the text remains stationary as the background image seems to slowly float by. This illusion makes this slide play more like a movie and results in an interesting affect.
Figure 1.3 Using motion paths and oversized pictures
4. A presentation that speaks for itself.
Once you have completed your PowerPoint presentation, you can run the slide show on your computer and use a microphone to record your comments, advancing the slides as you speak. The resulting product is a self-running slide show, complete with your voice embedded in the presentation. This file can then be sent to others who can view the slide show and hear your voice walk them through the various slides. To use this feature, in the Slide Show menu, click Record Narration. As you speak, your voice is saved as a sound clip which is associated with each slide—you can re-record any individual slide's narration as needed.
Figure 1.4 Record Narration dialog box
5. An easy way to update customized presentations.
You can create different versions of your PowerPoint presentation, and save them as "custom shows." For example, the screen below shows how I pared down my primary PowerPoint presentation, which runs 90 minutes in length, to create a custom 10-minute version of this presentation using only five slides. With this approach, I can maintain multiple versions of my presentation, but I need only update a given slide once to have those updates automatically reflected in all of my custom shows. In the Slide Show menu, click Custom Shows to take advantage of this option.
Figure 1.5 Define Custom Show dialog box
Contact Collins at Carlton@AccountingSoftwareAdvisor.com with questions or comments.
J. Carlton Collins, CPA, president of ASA Research, LLC, is an independent author, lecturer, and analyst in the accounting systems industry. He has installed more than 200 accounting systems, and delivered 1,800 lectures around the world on the subject of accounting systems and technology. Collins has published extensive accounting system reviews which can be seen at www.AccountingSoftwareAdvisor.com.
