Do you like those inspiring combinations of words and pictures you see on many social media sites?
Photo courtesy of National Archives of Canada. Children Reading Art books 1931-1959. Quote courtesy of ebookfriendly.com
You can use PowerPoint to combine pictures and words and then use the Save Ascommand. Select the JPG type. Perfect for uploading to your social media feeds. Here’s a link to the PowerPoint template sized for Twitter pictures I used to create the above sized for Twitter pictures I used to create the picture above. You are welcome to download and use it.
Join me in this webinar, hosted by the Medicine Hat Chamber of Commerce
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “Zoom Fatigue”. The trailer above is one way to combat fatigue. Creating trailers for your presentations allow you to shorten the presentation by introducing information ahead of time. Like a movie trailer; your talk trailer tells your audience what to expect and allows you to cut your talk time down.
And why limit yourself to a single trailer? For longer and more complex materials, you might want to create multiple trailers that can prepare your audience properly for your talk.
Creating your trailer in PowerPoint allows you to easily reuse elements in future trailers. This saves time and strengthens your brand presence. You can bet I’ll be reusingthe little animated stars on this slide that act as an attention getter for keywords.
These little purple star animations pull the eye to key words
Like the idea of saving time? Drop me a line, and lets’ make something fantastic for your next presentation. A reusablesomething fantastic!
The latest version of PowerPoint allows you to export your presentation as an animated GIF. Animated GIFs are great for catching the eye on social media.
Redcliff Library Board Member Promotion – as an animated GIF
There are of course, lots of animated GIF sofware packages available, many are free. But none are as useful as PowerPoint when it comes to incorporating imagery that you already have on hand. Remember to keep the size of the file down, as Twitter limits animated GIF size to 5MB.
If you want a little more room or sound, remember that you can export your PowerPoint presentation as a video in mp4 format.
You notice some differences between the video and GIF versions of this little social media piece. This is to optimize file size for the animated GIF.
The beauty of creating this in PowerPoint is that it is easily accessible for updating by the client.
Like what you see? Drop me a line, and lets’ make something fantastic for your next social media promotion. A reusablesomething fantastic!
Music:
Path Of The Fireflies by AERØHEAD | https://soundcloud.com/aerohead
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
You can make a professional looking Zoom background quickly in PowerPoint. Just be sure to use a 16 x 9 dimension slide.
Oh, and flip your logo or any text on the slide. Yes, it will be mirrored. But when uploaded to Zoom as a virtual background, it will read properly for your audience.
Don’t forget to reverse images
After creating your slide, save it as a jpeg and then upload it to Zoom.
Looking for help with getting the most from your presentations?
Contact me at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
This is a reissue of an article I originally posted on March 7, 2019 on the WebGenii Consulting website. I think it will continue to be relevant for some time to come.
Last weekend I attended the Southern Alberta Library Conference. I really enjoy this conference, the speakers are great and the topics really relevant to my volunteer work with the Redcliff Public Library. So what does this have to do with presentation mistakes? It was interesting to see the kind of presentation mistakes that speakers who are good at presenting make.
Mistake Number 1
Our old friend – too much text on the slide. Even good speakers do this, even though they shouldn’t. I suspect because they worry about leaving something out of their presentation.
All the text, nothing missing. (Dummy text courtesy the Bacon Ipsum generator)
Once again, I’d like to join my voice to all the presentation experts telling you NOT to put all your text on the slide. But, I know it will happen anyway, so what can we do to improve a slide like this?
Remove Bullets
Same slide – fewer bullets
If you are going to write full sentences with punctuation, then bullets are completely unnecessary. They take the viewer’s eye away from the content of the sentence. Save bullet points for sentence fragments, which is what they are designed for.
One Sentence Per Slide
Give each Sentence its’ own slide
Help the audience focus its’ attention by restricting yourself to one sentence per slide at a time.
Position Sentence Text
Control text wrapping to effectively position your message
There is no rule in PowerPoint (or any presentation software) that requires you to use the default text wrapping. Add line breaks to force text to wrap for greater readability and easier recall. Notice how the ham jumps out from the rest of the text, when it is forced onto its’ own line. Think about the part of the sentence you wish to emphasize and add line breaks accordingly. Also, if the sentence is on its’ own slide, there will be room to do this.
Mistake Number 2
Smart Art can cause problems of its’ own. In particular, the seductive way it shrinks text to fit into the graphic makes people forget to edit. (See mistake number 1)
Smart Art isn’t as smart as you think
Also, the default colour schemes means a lovely rainbow of colours. How is this a bad thing you ask? Well, inevitably you get a colour combination like point three in the graphic above. White text on a yellow background. That’s readable on a computer monitor, but when projected onto a screen it doesn’t have enough contrast.
The rainbow effect above, does something else as well. It wastes the potential usefulness of those colours. Colour is a great way of adding organization and hierarchy to a presentation. In the slide above, perhaps green refers to free-range meat, blue to fish, yellow to poultry, red to spicy foods, and I have no idea what pink would refer to. Because there is no organization being used here, just the random default applied by Smart Art.
Ignoring the organizational impact of colour, is like leaving money on the table.
Mistake Number 3
This last mistake is a little bit of mistake 1 AND mistake 2 combined, and it comes from using Smart Art process graphics like the one below:
Here is a process with multiple steps and a lot of text.
Every time, a process graphic like this leads to the speaker saying “I know this is hard to read, but”. Hmmm, yes it IS hard to read, but I can understand the desire to help people understand the flow of a process. So why not introduce your process in a series of slides like this:
Introduce your process in a series of slides.
In this sample slide I’ve taken the process and reduced to a smaller graphic in the top left corner. Here it will act as a map to show people where we are. I’ve toned down the colours of the steps that are not being talked about on this slide. I’ve left the bright blue alone, because we are talking about the blue step on this slide. I’ve cut out the blue step and enlarged it, so the text will be easier to read. It is easy to imagine each step in turn being featured on a separate slide and highlighted on the map.
Once again, thanks to everyone who spoke at the Southern Alberta Library Conference. I learn a lot about how to be a better library board member every time I attend. And, if you are a resident of Alberta; consider volunteering in your local library. It really is the best volunteer gig around. Such a positive environment that really makes a difference in the community!
I offer presentation design services and coaching. Feel free to send me an email.
My updated (November 2019) email address is: catharine@mytechgenie.ca
