Interactive Concepts. . . Where we create presentations that speak louder than words!

POWERPOINT DESIGN TIPS

*** This Month's New Tip ***

1. Make a Word Turn Over
2. Replace Bullets With Visuals
3. Your PowerPoint Show: An Important Part of Your Visual Image
4. For Subtlety in Your PowerPoint Shows Use Fade Animation
5. Ultimate Rule for Use of Custom Animation in PowerPoint
6. End Your Presentation With Pizzazz
7. Keep The Focus On The Presenter, Not On PowerPoint
8. Put a Copy of a Web Page in Your PowerPoint Show
9. If You’re Spending Way Too Much Time Preparing Your PowerPoint Shows
10. Modify your PowerPoint Slide Master to Include Custom Animations

Newest Tip: Reduce the Number of Bullets and Words on a Slide
One of the biggest mistakes made by speakers using PowerPoint is to put too many bullet points/words on a single slide. Don’t be concerned about how many slides you have—be concerned about how well your PowerPoint show is helping the audience get your message!

Forget the old maxim of “No more than seven bullet points, seven (or five or four) words.” Reduce, reduce, reduce the text so that each bullet point becomes a talking point, rather than your speaking notes. Yes, you can eliminate most of your text! PowerPoint is there to support your talk, not to replace you. Most common complaint made to me about bad PowerPoint? “He should have printed his PowerPoint slides and handed them out—that way we wouldn’t have had to sit through his speech at all!”

Best case scenario? One talking point per slide—because you know what the sub-points are—and the audience doesn’t have to see them.

This is the techie part. Too many bullet points? Here’s a fast and easy way to reduce bullet points—and put the focus on you, the speaker. Simply split the text into multiple slides.

First switch to Normal View. On the Outline tab, move the mouse to the point where you want to split the text (for example, at the end of a bulleted paragraph), and then press Enter. Then select Decrease Indent on the Formatting toolbar and click until a new slide icon and number appear (the split text will appear below that, as body text). Finally type the title for the new slide. Be sure the title is descriptive of the new text.

You’re on your way to a more powerful presentation! You’re going from meaningless bullet points to memorable content.

1. Make A Word Turn Over
One very dramatic way to make your point is to have a single word on the screen that is animated. Wouldn't it be neat if the word did a flip? Here's how to make a word "turn over" using animations.

Create a WordArt with the word Turnover and size it as you like.
Make a duplicate copy of the WordArt by clicking on it and pressing Control + D.
Line them up, one above the other.
Click on the top word, then click on the center top "handle" (little white dot) and drag it down until the word turns upside down.
Line up the words again so that the top of the T on both words are touching, head to head.
Let's call the top word #1, the bottom word #2.
Animate #1: (To see the animation menu in 2002/2003, select Slide Show, Custom Animation.)
1. Click on the word and select Add Effect, Stretch. Choose On Click, From Top and Fast in the Modify effect menu.
2. Add a second effect, Disappear. Choose With Previous, From Top, Very Fast. Move the time to 1 second after the first effect.
Animate #2:
1. Click on the word and select With Previous, From Top, Fast. Move the time to start at 1.4 seconds past the first animation.
Select View, Slide Show and enjoy!

2. Font Changes on Different Computers

If you've ever had the problem of picking an unusual or distinctive font in PowerPoint, then showing your slide show on a computer other than your own,

you may have experienced an unexpected font change that warped your show.

I've experienced it several times -- I chose the perfect font to help tell my story visually, then burned the show to a CD and gave it to the meeting planner to copy to their computer. Unfortunately the host computer didn't have my chosen font on it and so it selected a substitute font instead. My

text displayed huge, tiny, or weird.

Here's a solution that I've been using in PowerPoint 2003. I type in the word in WordArt and change the WordArt into a graphic so that the host

computer won't recognize it as a font. Here are the steps:

Select Insert WordArt, and Select a WordArt style. Type the text, select your font and click OK. Use colors or fill effects as desired, including filling the WordArt with a picture. Once you have the WordArt exactly as you want it to look, including sizing it correctly, click on it, then select

Edit, Copy. Go to Edit, Paste Special and select PNG. (Using GIF results in a graphic that looks bitmapped, while using JPG results in reverse print, that is, white text in a black box).

You have now converted the WordArt to a graphic. It can no longer be edited as WordArt but you won't have any more devastating font changes. Sneaky,

huh?

3. Replace Bullets with Visuals
This is one of the tips included in my seminar, "How to Avoid the Death by PowerPoint Syndrome". If you have a slide that you use over and over again, you probably know the content as well as you know your kitchen layout. Why not re-design that slide to eliminate most of the text and just have an impactful phrase, sentence, quote, or graphic come up on the screen? The goal here is to first, make the slide more impactful by eliminating the bullet points and second, allow you to drive home the point with the content of the slide. You say the words that formerly showed up on the screen.

Here's an example. I had a slide that listed the four ways that "Bullet Points Kill" during a presentation. I changed that slide so that it showed a speaker at a podium with several audience members. Now when I click, the words "Bullet Points Kill" wipes in from left and then the audience members on the slide start keeling over in a variety of ways. The slide always gets a chuckle, even a few hearty laughs. And that means my audience is likely to get and remember the point!

4. Your PowerPoint Show: An Important Part of Your Visual Image
It is best to avoid using the standard Microsoft PowerPoint templates because your audiences will have seen those same backgrounds used within their companies and by other less professional speakers. Your screen image should match the special look and feel of all your marketing pieces--one-sheet, publicity packet, and website—so the audience gets a true impression of your abilities, focus, and strengths. Also, be sure to avoid using background colors that clash with the branding you have established elsewhere.

5. For Subtlety in Your PowerPoint Shows Use Fade Animation
Want to truly finesse your animations? Then avoid using animations that have a lot of motion to them such as Sling, Light Speed and Swivel. These animations are designed to attract attention, but when used incorrectly, simply distract! The animation that causes the least "reaction" from the audience is the Fade. It's especially good for adding subtlety and grace to all your slides. Try fading in photo #1, then fading it out as photo #2 comes fading in on top of photo #1. Very smooth! And this works equally well with text. Your show will have a whole new level of sophistication and class.

6. Ultimate Rule for Use of Custom Animation In PowerPoint
The most important rule you can follow in using custom animations is to ask yourself: How does this animation help communicate my message? Here are a few other questions you can ask yourself relative to each animation: Does it create variety? Help create a visual memory? Drive home a point because there is only one word or phrase on the screen? Deliver my points with more impact? If you are using animations without a purpose, avoid using them or try to use them more effectively.

7. End Your Presentation With Pizzazz
When presenting with PowerPoint, go to Tools, Options, View, Slideshow: Turn off End With A Black Slide. Why? Because you want to use that last slide as the final opportunity to show the audience how a professional presenter performs! Make a copy of your opening title slide, in fact, make TWO copies, and insert them at the end of your show. Or create a final slide that shows your website address or e-zine signup info. Duplicate that final slide. That way if you accidentally click an extra time because you are so overwhelmed by the standing ovation you are receiving, you will still have your visual message about you and your company on the screen. Do not exit PowerPoint until the audience is gone or the next speaker is ready!

8. Keep the Focus On The Presenter, Not On PowerPoint
It’s true that PowerPoint 2002 (and even 2000) lets you do an amazing variety of “stuff.” You need to remember, however, that if your animations, graphics, transitions, and sounds are too complex, your audience may have to work too hard to figure out what your message is! If you are a keynote speaker, you may choose not to use PowerPoint at all. You might also choose to use it sparingly so that it will not only have greater impact, but the focus of the presentation will stay where it should primarily be—on you! If you are primarily a trainer, you may choose to use PowerPoint to hammer in a lot of content. In that case, you need to focus on turning words into pictures so the audience isn’t overwhelmed with bulleted lists resulting in remembering little. The best use of PowerPoint is as a visual medium.

9. Put A Copy Of A Web Page In Your PowerPoint Show
This is so easy, you're going to love it! Simply go to your website and navigate to the page you want to show in PP. Find the key on your keyboard that you've probably never used: Print Screen. Press once. Open your PP show and select Edit, Paste (or press Control V). Ta Dum!

Now all you have to do is to size it by clicking first on the screen, then clicking on the "handles" on the corners to make it the correct size.

Tip: To reduce the size uniformly on all sides at one time, hold down the Control key as you drag the handles. Then click and drag it to the desired size.

Tip: It's usually hard to read anything on your web page, so keep it large.

Tip: You can also crop the screen (eliminating the portion that you don't want to clutter up the slide with) by clicking on the screen to get the handles, then selecting the crop tool from the Picture toolbar (which should show up when you click on the picture--if not, select View, Picture). The crop tool is the XX icon. If you crop too much, just Undo!

10. If You’re Spending Way Too Much Time Preparing Your PowerPoint Shows
The best tip you can have about PowerPoint is to use the "Slide Master" page to design the style of your pages BEFORE you start creating the rest of your presentation. This is also the place to put your background, set up all your fonts, both size and color, and determine the "slide color scheme." This is the place to put your company logo, instead of placing it on every single slide, all the unchangeables. This will save you hours of extra work formatting or re-formatting every single slide. Then if you decide to alter any of these features, you make changes in the Master Slides that update all your slides at one time!

The program has two master slides: Title Master and Slide Master (which is the Bulleted List slide). In PP 97 and 2000, to access Slide Master, select View, Master, Slide Master. Here’s the tricky part: you can’t get to the Title Master without first getting into Slide Master! To access Title Master, first access Slide Master, then select Insert, New Title Master.

11. Modify your PowerPoint Slide Master to Include Custom Animations
When creating custom animations for your PowerPoint text, the default is Fly From Left—an animation that gets extremely boring very quickly. There is the tedious wait for the text to come all the way from the left edge of the screen and over/under any graphics you have displayed. Instead change your default animation to Wipe Right, which starts displaying the text from the bullet or first character on the left and reveals the rest of the text in its actual position. Much easier on the eyes and not nearly so mind numbing!

The easiest way is to change the default on your Master Slide so the bulleted text on every slide will Wipe Right. You can then modify individual slides with alternate animation as desired—and you definitely should so that your show has enough variety and interest to keep your audience alert.

To insert the custom text animation on your Master Slide:

Select View, Master, Slide Master and click in the Master Text Styles box. Select Slide Show, Custom Animation and select the text you want to animate. Select the Effects tab and change the Entry Animation to Wipe Right, then click OK. The bulleted text on every slide in your show will now Wipe Right except on the slides where you have manually changed it to another effect.