A vital step to building an effective presentation is to enhance your slides with images. The key to using artwork well is to either replace or support text that is on your slide. Pictures help your audience understand your message quickly. Replace and support data with images The old adage is true that a picture…

Packing slides with information does not necessarily make them more effective. In fact, it often achieves the opposite effect, producing confusing slides that take away from, rather than add value to, a PowerPoint presentation. Well-designed slides assist the speaker in emphasizing his or her point and the audience in understanding the key takeaways from a…

Color is an important design tool. The right color scheme will make the slides in a PowerPoint presentation visually appealing and can help emphasize your key points in subtle, but unmistakable ways. However, the overuse or unintentional use of color can hurt your message by distracting or annoying your audience or otherwise detracting from their…

I love a good meeting! But I guess I’m just a meeting maniac. It makes me crazy when people make blanket statements about meetings. For example, today I read “How NOT to Have Mind Numbing Office Meetings” by one of my favorite Social Media Gurus, @ChrisBrogan. He suggests that no meeting should last more than…

I read that Microsoft had its Financial Analyst Meeting yesterday. I was curious what their PowerPoint slides looked like and went their site to view them. Below are two slides from the CEO, Steve Ballmer’s deck. Now, remember I’m a big fan of Microsoft and LOVE PowerPoint. I was disappointed with the results considering they…

There is often a lot of difficulty with reusing old slides in a new PowerPoint 2007 or 2010 presentation. We understand and empathize with your frustrations, as we deal with these same issues on a daily basis. Many PowerPoint users encounter these same headaches, so we are in “good” company. Recently, a client came to…

In recent years, more and more companies have adapted their approach to meetings… shifting away from live events and moving towards web-delivered, pre-recorded content that can be viewed on demand. Chances are that participating in a WebEx, GoToMeeting, Breeze, Brainshark or other online meeting is now part of your workday routine. But creating content for…

Until yesterday, there were no great options for presenting your PowerPoint presentations on the iPad. In the absence of a PowerPoint player or app from Microsoft, there had been a plethora of iOS apps that claimed to allow playback and editing of PowerPoint files on your iPad, but most of those fell far short of…

You’ve sorted your data, created your chart, and then added your data labels, but jeepers, what a mess! Instead of an informative illustration you have something that looks overwhelming and impossible to read. If only you could display the data in $ millions.

For the past few weeks here in the U.S., the hot topic in the news has been the Debt Ceiling stalemate. Both sides of the discussion, as well as the media, have emphasized the importance of getting the situation resolved to avoid our nation’s first-ever financial default. Sunday night, President Obama told reporters at the…