Clearly Communicate Your Information
Want slides that clearly communicate your most important points? You might be surprised at how little work it takes to go from basic to brilliant! PowerPoint provides a host of tools for keeping your slides consistent, precise, and professional.
Take a look at two versions of a basic bulleted text slide below. The text in both slides is identical. Which would you prefer to present?
It took just a couple of shapes and a bit of editing in the Slide
The version on the right uses a simple table to organize most of the content on the page. Just one table style and a handful of paragraph styles accomplish the rest of the formatting.
Grab the Viewer's Attention
The Microsoft Office Clip Art gallery offers a huge range of images. These can be great for many uses, but they might not be the most sophisticated way to emphasize your important idea.
Creating slides that get the viewer's attention is not about which pictures to include. It's about using the space on your slides effectively. Don't crowd your slides, and only include elements that contribute to the points you want to make. When you use graphics on a slide, choose images that serve a purpose (such as a chart or diagram that displays a direct benefit of your idea). Compare the two marketing slides below, for example.
The simple column chart in the slide on the right replaces two paragraphs of text, and makes a much stronger impression. Coordinating the chart colors with the slide design was automatic.
A simple Microsoft Office PowerPoint flowchart and a few well-placed borders are all it takes for the page on the right to provide substantially more information than the page on the left.
Stay in Control of Your Presentations
Custom colors, layouts, and graphics can do a lot for your presentation. But a misaligned flowchart, or a presentation that crashes on your client's computer, isn't likely to make the impression you want. For example, take a look at the two organization chart images below. Which would you prefer to call your own?
Nudging and fussing to create the organization chart on the left took about an hour, and it's far from perfect. Using available PowerPoint tools for duplicating and alignment, the chart on the right took just 10 minutes to create
The example below shows how the approach you choose can really make a difference.
Overcomplicated workarounds in the document on the left make it difficult to control. It also took more than three hours to complete. The page on the right uses tables and paragraph formatting to accomplish the same document. It's cleaner and it took just 30 minutes to create.
Stephanie Krieger
Stephanie Krieger is a document production expert with more than 10 years of experience as a consultant specializing in Microsoft Office documents, and the author of the recently released book Microsoft Office Document Designer. She has helped many global companies develop enterprise solutions for their Office products and taught a wide range of professionals and professional software trainers to build great documents by understanding the way that Office applications "think." Stephanie writes for several pages across the Microsoft Web site, including Microsoft At Work and Office Online, and frequently delivers Office System webcasts. Visit her blog arouet.net for information on new and upcoming publications and webcasts as well as Office tips that update regularly.
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