Posts Tagged ‘PowerPoint’

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Advanced PowerPoint: 3 Tips The Pros Use

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Image Credit Great Looking PowerPoint Slides Are Easy To Create – If You Know How

Great Looking PowerPoint Slides Are Easy To Create – If You Know How

PowerPoint is a double edged sword when it comes to giving a speech: it can be both a powerful way to add a multimedia impact to your speech or it can end up distracting your audience and taking their attention away from what you have to say. The experts know how to use this tool correctly and here are three of the ways they tame the PowerPoint beast…

It’s All About Look & Feel

The PowerPoint slides that a speaker uses to augment their speech should look professional. Now this doesn’t mean that they needed to be done by an expensive design house, just that they shouldn’t look like they were put together by an amateur (even if they were!)

The most important part of this is to make sure that the slides have a consistent look and feel to them. The first step in making this happen is to decide on a PowerPoint template and then use it for your entire presentation.

However, that’s not quite enough. All too often I see presenters who’ve had a presentation that has been force-fit into a new template. That it doesn’t fit is pretty clear because the text and images spill over the edges and on top of the template’s decorations.

As a presenter it’s your responsibility to make sure that this doesn’t happen to you. Review your slides and make sure that they are living in harmony with the template that you are using.

Getting From Here To There

PowerPoint is a powerful tool. It has a lot of features that either enhance your presentation or take away from it depending on how you use them. One such feature is the “slide transitions”.

When you move from one slide to the next, PowerPoint can do a number of amazing things on the screen. These are what is called a transition. Transitions can range from the simple (old slide fades away only to be replaced by the new slide) to the complex (new slide zooms out from the center of the screen).

My advice to you here is to keep it simple. Just as your PowerPoint slides should not overwhelm your speech so too should your transitions not overwhelm your slides. If your audience is eagerly awaiting seeing your next transition, then you’ve done something wrong.

PowerPoint will let you use a different type of transition for each slide. Don’t do this. Instead pick one type of transition and stick with it for the entire presentation.

No Surprises

Technology is a wonderful thing – until it turns on you! The professional speakers know that although the PowerPoint presentation that they put together while sitting at their desk looked one way, it might not look that way when they are standing in front of an audience.

There are a lot of reasons for this: you might be using a different computer, the display system might change one color into another color, etc. The way to overcome such surprises is to be prepared.

When you are going to use PowerPoint slides as a part of a presentation, always try to show up early in order to run through your slides on the system that will be used to display them and in the space where you’ll be giving your speech.

The reason that you want to do this is that you’ll be able to see what your audience will eventually be seeing. Issues with a slide being too dark, the colors being messed up, or some other technical snafu can be quickly identified and corrected on the spot.

What All Of This Means For You

As speakers, we all need to make use of whatever tools we have available. PowerPoint is one such tool. However, if not used correctly, PowerPoint can actually end up diminishing the impact of our speech.

We can avoid the pitfalls and make the most of PowerPoint if we follow some simple rules. Making sure that all of the slides in our presentation have a common look and feel is important. Picking a slide transition that doesn’t distract from our slides and then using it consistently will boost our impact. Finally, taking the time to preview how our slides are going to look before a presentation can prevent any technical glitches from showing up.

Technology is here to stay and speakers need to learn how to harness it. By using PowerPoint the way that the pros do, you can create and deliver powerful multimedia presentations that will leave your audience saying to themselves “That looked professionally done…”

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that just skipping using any fancy transitions would be the best way to go?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Check with just about any professional speaker or pick up a book at the book store on public speaking and you’ll get some great advice. They’ll tell you exactly what you SHOULD be doing. That’s all good, but what’s been missing has been anyone talking about the other side of that coin – what should you NOT be doing?

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Mastering The PowerPoint Beast In 3 Easy Steps

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Image Credit There's No Need To Fear PowerPoint, Show It Who's Boss!

There's No Need To Fear PowerPoint, Show It Who's Boss!

Can we all be honest here? PowerPoint is a part of everyone’s life no matter how you feel about it. We all seem to fall into one of three camps: we fear it, we love it too much, or we just don’t really know what to do with it. With a little help, I think that I can help you out here…

Get Your Head Straight

The first thing to work out isn’t what your slides need to look like, rather it’s what role PowerPoint should play in your next speech. The answer is, always, a supporting role.

This means that you need to make sure that your audience doesn’t end up spending your entire speech looking at your slides and not you. Likewise, you don’t want your slides to confuse your audience – almost as if they are telling a different story than what you are talking about.

Speech First, Slides Second – Or Third

If you only remember one thing from reading this, I’m hoping that this is it: always, always write your speech first. Don’t you dare pop open that copy of PowerPoint and start creating slides until AFTER you’ve gotten your words all worked out. Remember: the slides are there to support your speech, not the other way around.

I fully understand just how easy it is to instead of picking up a pen (or a keyboard) and spending some time doing the hard job of writing (unfun) that you open PowerPoint and spend a lot of time drawing (fun!) The problem with this is that you’ll end up creating a lousy speech.

When your words have to follow your slides, the slides will take center stage and you’ll be shoved off into a corner. There won’t be a natural flow to your words. Instead it will appear as though you are just reading off of each slide as it is displayed. This is no way to give a speech.

Slides Are Like Diamonds – They Should Be Rare

Sadly I suspect that at one time or another we’ve all had to sit though one of those speeches where the presenter showed up with like 300 slides and come hell or high water, they were going to show each and every one of them to us.

After you’ve created your speech and when you start to design some slides, you need to make sure that you don’t turn into that person with 300 slides. A good way to prevent it is to take a step back and look at your speech. What is the main point that you are trying to make? You should probably have a slide for that. What are the three ways that you support the main point that you are trying to make? You should probably have slides for those. If you can stop here, that would be a good thing.

Cut Down On The Slides That You Have

The last thing that you’re going to want to do is to throw away some of your slides. “What?” you say. You heard me, you’ve got too many slides. I don’t care which ones you throw away, just get rid of some of them – they can’t all be critical to the message that you are trying to make.

This may be difficult for you to do, but do it anyway. Your audience will benefit from it and they’ll thank you in the end.

What All Of This Means For You

Repeat after me “PowerPoint is my friend”. It can be an important tool that can make your next speech even more powerful; however, you have to know how to use it.

The key things to keep in mind are simple, but critical. You must remember to write your speech before you start to create slide. You have to keep the number of slides that you make to a minimum. Finally, you need to make a second pass and throw away as many slides as you possibly can.

Adding multimedia to your next presentation can only make it better. Just remember, you are the star of the show, not your slides!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: How many slides should you use for a 30 minute speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever gone to hear someone speak and just been blown away by what they had to say? I mean their words just seemed to flow out of them and the stories that they told were right on the mark – a perfect complement to the point that they were trying to make? It turns out that you can deliver speeches like this too…

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Speechwriting Magic: 3 Ways To Cast A Spell Over Your Audience

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Image CreditIt Turns Out That Your Speeches Can Be Magical

It Turns Out That Your Speeches Can Be Magical

When you deliver a speech you stand up straight, you speak clearly, and you have fantastic eye contact. What more could anyone ask for? How about a speech that is both memorable and magical…

Do Your Homework

If you want to create a speech that will do the two most difficult things that any speaker can attempt, inspire and motivate your audience, then you’re going to need to write a killer speech. That speech is only going to be as good as what you are able to put into it. This means that you’ve got some homework to do.
If you wait until when you are sitting down to create your next speech to start to collect the information that you are going to need to make a great speech, then it may already be too late. The really good speechwriters are always collecting information. They read everything that they can get their hands on and those items that catch their attention get filed away somewhere they can find it when they eventually need it.
Your ultimate goal needs to have more information that you’ve collected for your speech than you could possibly use. This will allow you to sort through it all and pick out only the best bits to use.

Magic Speeches Start One Word At A Time

What’s interesting about speech writing is that all too often we are our own worst enemies. We all know what a great speech sounds like and as we are creating a speech we quickly realize that our first draft basically sounds pretty lousy. If you aren’t careful, you can get caught in an almost endless loop of editing in which you try to get a sentence perfect before you write the next one.
Don’t do this. Instead just let the words flow out of you as you create your first pass of the speech. One way to make sure that your speech is able to grab your audience’s attention and holds it is to identify 6 or so main points that will grab attention and which have a good story associated with them.
As you practice your speech, what you are going to be listening for is the “rhythm” that your speech has: it has a lot to do with the pace of the speech and how it all links together.

It’s All About The Ears

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent in the past working on getting my Power Point slides just perfect. It turns out that what I should have been doing. Your audience really isn’t going to remember what your slides looked like after your speech is over. Instead, it’s your words that will stay with them if you choose them correctly.
If you take the time to make sure that your words are used to draw a sequence of mental pictures in your audiences heads then you will have found a way to leave a lasting impression. An important note here is that we write differently than we speak – we use more slang and contractions when we are speaking. If you write your speech out and then read it as you wrote it, it’s not going to come across as a natural way of speaking.

What All Of This Means For You

Finding a way to cast a magical spell over your audience is what every speaker wants to find a way to do. Creating a great speech is one way to make this happen.
The way to make happen is to get into your audience’s head while you are writing your next speech. Once you do this you’ll understand that your audience doesn’t really want to find out just how smart you are (what can they do with that?), but rather what they really want is to know what they can do with the information that you share with them during your speech…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What’s your secret to writing a great speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Humor, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Well, maybe not – simply because although I do like using humor in a speech; however, it’s a tricky beast and it can turn on you at any moment. Just how is a speaker supposed to determine when some form of humor is inappropriate for the audience that he / she is speaking to?

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10 Professional Speaking Tips That You Need To Know

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
Image Credit
The Best Way To Become A Better Speaker Is To Ask A Pro

The Best Way To Become A Better Speaker Is To Ask A Pro

Editor’s Note: This article has been selected to be included in Angela DeFinis’ “Public Speaking And The New Year” Blog Carnival. This Carnival can be found online at: http://www.definiscommunications.com/blog/public-speaking-and-the-new-year/

Happy New Year! As we start yet another a new year, you may be asking yourself what is the best way for me to become a better public speaker this year? Taking a crash course in which you immerse yourself in all of the subtle tricks of effective speaking is one way. Giving a million speeches and then studying how both yourself and your audience reacted is another.

The problem with both of these approaches is that they take time. Too much time. A much better way to quickly improve is to find a professional speaker who is doing it right and ask them how they do it…

Meet A Pro

Shawn Doyle has been a professional speaker for over 19 years. During that time he’s made mistakes. Lots of mistakes. The good news for you is that he took the time to remember what he did wrong and made sure that he never repeated a mistake.

He’s come up with his list of the “top 10” things that you just can’t learn in a class. Instead, these are the speaking lessons that all professional speakers end up learning on the road. Since you are reading this, just maybe you’ll learn them here and you won’t have to learn them the hard way!

10 Tips For Giving A Professional Speech

  1. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare: I’m going to bet that I’ve fooled you on this one: I’m not talking about practicing saying your speech. Instead, I’m talking about taking the time to know your audience: how old are they, what do they do for a living, what are they expecting from you.
  2. Become A Space-Man: The effectiveness of your speech will be heavily influenced by where you end up giving it. The room, the lighting, the sound system, etc. will all play a role in determining if you are able to connect with your audience. You need to arrive early and check out the room where you’ll be speaking. It will be too late to make any changes if you show up just before you go on.
  3. It’s All In The Opening: Welcome to the age of instant-everything. We can download movies, cook a complete dinner in a microwave in minutes, and purchase almost anything over the Internet. If the opening for your speech is long, slow, and boring then you’ll lose your audience right off the bat. You need to grab them at the start and never let go.
  4. Talk With Your Hands: When you are giving a speech, your hands are an incredibly powerful communication tool that you can use to boost the impact of your speech. If you are holding on to something (a pen, a piece of paper) while you talk, then your ability to use this tool is greatly diminished. Keep ‘em free!
  5. Stop Hiding Behind PowerPoint: Ouch! This one probably hits all of us hard. We’ve worked hard to make a great set of slides and we love to use them. Stop! You are the presentation, not your slides. Don’t use PowerPoint if you can get away with it or use it sparingly if you have to. Don’t hide behind your slides.
  6. Go For A Walk: All too often speakers will plant themselves behind a lectern and stay there during your entire speech. If you do this, then you will have missed an opportunity to engage your audience by moving around. Use your entire body and where you are standing to emphasize the point that you are currently making.
  7. Use Your Own Stories: Forget those “Chicken Soup For The …” books, when you use someone else’s story it comes out much weaker than when you tell your own story. Doyle suggests that you use the following formula for creating and telling a story: story + moral + how it relates to the topic = great story.
  8. Never, Ever, Apologize: Too often speakers spend much of their speech apologizing for a wide variety of things: the room being too cold, their slides not being in the right order, etc. Stop it! When you apologize, your audience starts to see you in a different light — a negative light. Just skip the apology and move on.
  9. You Must Believe To Achieve: In order for your speech to have an impact on your audience, they are going to have to believe that you believe what you are saying. If you are just mouthing words that you don’t fully buy into, then you will come across as insincere and your message will have no lasting impact.
  10. Think About Your Audience: All too often we write the speeches that we’d like to hear. The problem with this is that we are not necessarily the same as our audience. Your speech must be about your audience and what they want, not about you and what you want.

What All This Means For You

As long as you are going to go to the effort of creating and delivering a speech, you may as well do a good job of it. The challenge that we all face is finding ways to become better at giving our speeches so that we can have a greater impact on our audience.

There are a lot of different ways to go about improving our skills; however, one of the simplest and best ways is to get guidance from professionals who have already gone out there and learned the lessons that you want to know.

I’ve listed 10 suggestions from a pro that should go a long way in helping you to avoid making some of the more common mistakes that speakers make. Read, learn, and get out there and speak like a pro!

Do you think that you could feel comfortable giving a speech without using any PowerPoint slides?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just how does one become a better public speaker? I mean let’s be serious here, you do want to get better, don’t you? Good news — I’m going to tell you how (and it’s free!) …

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Speaking Power: How To Get It, How To Use It

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

A Speaker's Power Comes From Within

A Speaker's Power Comes From Within

If you really want to connect with your audience and make an impact in their lives, then you’re going to have to discover out how to speak with power. The trick is that power is a tricky thing – you can’t touch it, you can’t buy it, you’ve got to find it and hold on to it. The good news is that I know how you can do this…

It Isn’t All About The Slides

In the quest for speaking power, all too often speakers attempt to create the very best PowerPoint slides in the vain hope that if they have powerful slides, then their speech will also have power. Sorry, it doesn’t work this way.

George Torok is a professional speaker who has spent time studying how speakers use PowerPoint slides. He’s come up with the three following observations:

  1. Everybody Uses PowerPoint: one of the big problems with PowerPoint is that everyone uses it – it’s not special. No matter how good your slides are, your audience has seen similar slides like that before.
  2. PowerPoint Is Easy To Use: because it’s easy to use, it’s all too easy to start to believe that your slides are the centerpiece of your presentation. This is not the case and many presenters have been fooled.
  3. Good Slides Can Cover A Bad Presenter: the belief that fantastic slides can smooth over flaws in a presentation has lead too many speakers to fall flat during their presentations.

Where Does Power Really Come From?

It turns out that the power that you need in order to deliver an effective presentation comes from within you. If you believe in yourself and the message that you are delivering, then you’ll have the power that you need to give an effective presentation. Once you believe in yourself, your next job is to convey power to your audience.

Projecting Power

In order to communicate your power to your audience, you’ll need to do the following four  things:

  1. Look Powerful: How you physically look to your audience is the first step in communicating your power to your audience. The simplest way to do this is to smile at your audience. This helps you to convey both trust and confidence.
  2. Posture Counts: Taking the time to stand up straight. All too often we stoop over and hunch our shoulders as we focus on what we are saying. If we stand up straight we’ll be projecting power to our audience.
  3. Use Your Voice: One of a speaker’s most powerful tools is your voice. In order to communicate power to your audience, you need to speak slowly and deepen your voice. Additionally, using pauses and actually saying less will allow more time for your words to sink in with your audience.
  4. Your Words Count: keeping your words short and simple will allow your speech to have more power than using longer more complicated words. The harder it is for your audience to understand and comprehend your message, the more diluted your power will be.

Final Thoughts

Audiences want to be told what to do or what to believe. However, in order for a speaker to be able to accomplish this you need to be able find and use your power.  Realizing that this power does not come from PowerPoint slides is the first step.

In order to release the power that you have within yourself you need to use your appearance, your voice, and your words to convey power to your audience.  Learn to do this well and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you think of the perfect speech in your mind, what do you see? Do you see yourself up on a stage giving a speech, reaching the end, and then having everyone stand up and applaud until their hands grow tired? Nice picture. However, all too often that doesn’t happen…

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