I was giving a presentation yesterday to a group of 30 major account sales professionals from a global company. For many in the room, English was their second language, so there was somewhat of a gap in our communication. Greater than the adjustments I made to my content and delivery—speaking slower, repeating key ideas, checking [...]

Visual aids like PowerPoint are an important part of any business presentation. When done correctly, they strengthen your presentation by boosting audience understanding. In fact, research shows that listeners remember key messages conveyed with the help of visual aids more than six times better after a period of three days than they do messages that [...]

I’ve been on vacation in Maine for the last few weeks. Our family has a house in a small coastal village where we come every year. I love being in Maine, so far away from the bustling Bay Area where I live. It’s a quiet retreat, a respite from the traffic, noise and density of [...]

I was flying to Houston recently and sat next to a woman who was working on…you guessed it… her PowerPoint presentation. We started up a conversation, and before she knew what I did for a living, she confessed that she really couldn’t take the time to chat because she was giving a presentation the next [...]

I work with many people who give PowerPoint presentations.  And no matter how experienced they are, invariably a few of them forget to bring (or don’t own) a remote control for advancing their PowerPoint slides.  As such, whenever I’m working with clients I always take extra remotes with me and usually end up giving them [...]

The PowerPoint Revolution continues! Every few months another contender appears in the marketplace, attempting to poke a hole in the thick skin of the 800 lb slideware-gorilla that dominates meeting rooms across the globe. I don’t believe that there is anything inherently wrong with PowerPoint, but it has undoubtedly become the software program everyone loves [...]

On the Road: My Experience Teaching PowerPoint
 
This is a guest post from Kirk Mossing, PowerPoint™ Consultant and Trainer.
 
What do Audiences REALLY Think About PowerPoint?
 
Travelling across the nation and working with clients like Google and Stanford University, I routinely ask my students one key question: “As an audience member, what do you hate most about [...]

In part one of this two-part post, we talked about the seven sins of PowerPoint. If you missed it, you can read it here.

So now that you know what not to do when preparing your slide deck, here are the seven virtues of what you should do to create informative, entertaining and memorable slides that will motivate your audience to action

During the last month I have seen some seriously challenged PowerPoint Slide decks. For a while there things were looking up in Silicon Valley; people were using more pictures, less text, more color, and congruent graphs. But I’ve recently noticed there are still pockets of stubborn “old school” PowerPoint users who simply refuse to change. I feel for their audiences who are craning their brains to stay tuned and awake.