Figure 1-1: The new interface works the same way in PowerPoint as it does in the Office 2007 versions of Word and Excel.
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This book extract is from Cutting Edge PowerPoint 2007 for Dummies, a book that will teach you how you can make your PowerPoint dance and sing.
Get ready to add punch and pizzazz to your presentations and wow your audience using the latest PowerPoint techniques. This friendly book/CD-ROM combo covers all of the new features of Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, including interface changes, presentation themes, multimedia, the Slide Library, and more. The guide introduces you to the elements of PowerPoint: text; background, images, and info-graphics; shapes; fills, lines, and effects; sound and video; animations and transitions; and interactivity, flow, and navigation. Packed with numerous tips, shortcuts, workarounds, and timesaving techniques.
The book is part of the Dummies series, published by Wiley.
I wish to thank Greg Croy and Eric Holmgren for facilitating the permission to extract.
Unlike many other applications, PowerPoint is easy to figure out and to use. And although PowerPoint 2007 is even more amazingly simple to use than previous versions, this also means that creating terrible presentations is even easier! Although anyone can create a PowerPoint presentation with a few words and visuals, you can use PowerPoint to its complete potential only if you understand the composition of its elements.
All these elements come together to form the structure of a presentation — but there’s more to a PowerPoint presentation than just structure and the elements. One of the most important ingredients is the workflow that makes up the order in which you create and add elements to your presentation.
This chapter first looks at the new PowerPoint 2007 interface. Then it discusses PowerPoint’s elements, a presentation’s structure, your workflow for creating a presentation, and more. Although these topics cover theory more than practical application, spending a little time internalizing these concepts will take you a long way toward making your finished presentations more effective and cutting edge.
And that brings me to what I mean by the term cutting edge. After all, that term is part of the title of this book. By cutting edge, I mean using simple concepts to create presentations that will work in all situations. The cutting-edge part here is the results — not that I expect you to create presentations in a space satellite somewhere outside the earth’s atmosphere! And those types of results mean that you have to be element-savvy. Later in this chapter, I discuss these elements — and each of these elements is also discussed in separate chapters within this book.
Maybe you’ve worked with PowerPoint for the last several versions of the program, or you might have just started with the program. Either way, you’ll find that PowerPoint 2007 has a new interface. Gone are the menus and the toolbars. In their place, you see the Ribbon with all its tabs and galleries. And yes, you have the Mini Toolbar, as well.
Cut the Ribbon and get started
Figure 1-1 shows you the new PowerPoint interface. It’s actually the embodiment of simplicity, but I still explain its components because I refer to the interface all through this book!
Figure 1-1: The new interface works the same way
in PowerPoint as it does in the Office 2007 versions of Word and
Excel.
The Mini Toolbar
So what is a Mini Toolbar? As much as you might like that mini bar in your hotel room, I promise you this one is more helpful! If you select some text in PowerPoint, you’ll see a semitransparent floating toolbar that provides all the text formatting options you need without having to make a trip to the Home tab of the Ribbon. That’s the Mini Toolbar.
Figure 1-2 shows you the Mini Toolbar in all its resplendent glory. Just move the cursor away or deselect the text, and the Mini Toolbar gets sad and goes away. If you want to get it back again and it’s in no mood to come back, you can always right-click the selected text to order it back into your esteemed presence.
Figure 1-2: Here comes the Mini Toolbar.
When you open PowerPoint, it presents you with a blank canvas that you color with your ideas and your message. The brushes and paints used to transform this blank canvas into an amazing interactive medium are its elements of composition:
If you’ve heard or read any of those “Death by PowerPoint” cries in the media these days that bemoan the lack of aesthetics in PowerPoint presentations shown all over the world, you need to make friends with all the elements of PowerPoint so that you can use these elements more effectively to create more aesthetic PowerPoint presentations.
In the following sections, I explain more about these individual elements and then follow it up with how they team together to form an entire presentation workflow. I discuss each of these elements in greater depth in separate chapters throughout this book.
Text is the soul of a presentation — it relates to content like nothing else. Your text could be in the form of titles, subtitles, bullets, phrases, captions, and even sentences.
A barrage of visual content might not be able to achieve what a single effective word can say — sometimes, a word is worth a thousand pictures. Text is significant because it means you have something to say. Without explicit text, what you’re trying to say might not come through as strongly as you want.
Too much text is like too much of any good thing — it can be harmful. For example, a slide with 20 lines of teeny-weeny text just doesn’t work. The audience can’t read it, and the presenter doesn’t have time to explain that much content! Anyway, if you’re cramming so much text on a slide, you’ve already lost the focus of your presentation.
PowerPoint uses three types of graphical elements:
Images and text always work together — collectively, they achieve more than the sum of each other’s potential. However, images need to be relevant to the subject and focused; using an unsuitable visual is worse than using no visual at all. The same rules apply to info-graphics, as well.
PowerPoint provides many ways to present images — from recolored styles, effects, and outlines to animations and builds.
Simple objects such as circles, rectangles, and squares can help you explain concepts so much better. PowerPoint looks at the entire shape concept in a different way through its Shapes gallery. The shapes within the Shapes gallery seem like regular lines and polygons, but that’s where the similarity ends; they are very adaptable in editing and creation. Shapes can also function as building blocks and form the basis of complex diagrams and illustrations.
Shapes, pictures, and even info-graphics in PowerPoint can stand out from the slide by using as assortment of fill, line, and effect styles. Most styles are found in galleries on the Ribbon tabs.
PowerPoint provides many ways to incorporate sound: inserted sounds, event sounds, transition sounds, background scores, and narrations.
PowerPoint was perhaps never intended to become a multimedia tool — nor were presentations ever imagined to reach the sophisticated levels they have attained. Microsoft has tried to keep PowerPoint contemporary by adding more sound capabilities with every release. This version finally makes it easier to work with sound in PowerPoint by adding a whole new Ribbon tab containing sound options.
As computers get more powerful and play smooth full-screen video, viewers expect PowerPoint to work with all sorts of video formats. But that’s a far cry from reality. In Chapter 11, I look at workarounds that keep PowerPoint happy with all sorts of video types.
Animations and transitions fulfill an important objective: introducing several elements one at a time in a logical fashion to make it easier for the audience to understand a concept. Keep these guidelines in mind when using animations and transitions:
Animations and transitions are covered in Chapter 12.
Amazingly, interactivity, flow, and navigation are the most neglected parts of many PowerPoint presentations. These concepts are easy to overlook because, unlike a picture, they aren’t visible:
Interactivity and linking are covered in Chapter 13. Good flow concepts are influenced by proper use of consistency and animation. Consistency is covered in Chapter 4, and animation is covered in Chapter 12.
Although you might believe that all the elements of a cutting-edge presentation are accessible from within PowerPoint, that’s not entirely true. Professional presentation design houses don’t want you to know the secret of using non- PowerPoint elements in your presentation — this knowledge is often the difference between a cutting-edge presentation and an ordinary one!
Examples of non-PowerPoint elements include the following:
When these non-PowerPoint elements are inserted inside PowerPoint, most of them can be made to behave like normal PowerPoint elements.
The words structure and workflow might sound a little intimidating, but they are merely a way of ensuring that your presentation elements are working together.
A typical presentation structure combines the elements I mention at the beginning of this chapter into something like what you see in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3: A typical presentation structure.
Figure 1-3 is just an example — almost every presentation has a unique structure depending on the content of the presentation and the audience. On the other hand, the presentation workflow for most presentations remains unchanged, which is what I explain next.
The presentation workflow decides the sequence of the elements that I explain earlier in this chapter. In addition, it includes some more abstract elements such as delivery and repurposing. Chapters 14 and 15 discuss these vital concepts.
Figure 1-4 shows a typical presentation workflow.
As you can see, the workflow begins with concept and visualization and ends with delivery and repurposing. But that’s not entirely true — repurposing can often be the same as the concept and visualization of another presentation! That’s food for thought — and the stimulus for thoughts on another interesting subject. . . .
Figure 1-4: A typical presentation workflow.
You can use PowerPoint to create all sorts of presentations:
Of course, you can use PowerPoint for so much more — electronic greeting cards, quizzes, posters, and even multiplication tables. You’re limited only by your imagination. PowerPoint is a great tool to present your ideas.
The simplest secret of creating great presentations is to give audiences what they like to see. If you give them anything else, they’re bound to complain with bouts of loud-mouthed vengeance and stupidity. Okay — I admit that was an exaggeration. They’re more likely to doze off and snore loudly while you’re presenting!
So what do audiences like to see? That’s what I discuss next.
More than anything else, audiences want sincerity and truth. Just because you put that sentence in a 48-point bold font in a contrasting color doesn’t mean that your audience will believe what it says. If there’s something in common among audiences of any place, age, and sex, it’s that they want something they can believe — and if there’s even a hint that something mentioned in your presentation is gobbledygook, you can wave goodbye to the remaining 999 slides in that presentation! (And please don’t make such long presentations.)
Of course, there are rare exceptions to that rule. A few centuries ago, audiences didn’t believe that the earth was round — or that people could find a way to fly. If what you’re presenting is similarly groundbreaking, I’ll let you put that in your next PowerPoint presentation. And I’m so proud that you are reading this book.
Never use any content that can be thought of as discriminatory toward race, gender, age, religious beliefs, weight, and so on. Not only will discriminatory phrases or even images reflect badly on you, they’ll also hijack the entire focus of your presentation.
To enliven your message, use as many of these style and design guidelines as you can balance on a single PowerPoint slide:
Test your background choice by inserting enough placeholder text in an 18-point font size to fill the entire slide area in two slides. Use black text on one slide and white text on the other. If you can read text on both the slides clearly, your background really works! If just one color works, you can use that background if you make sure that you use the right colors for all other slide objects. See Chapter 3 to find out more about picking the right colors.
Nothing is as embarrassing and shameful as a misspelling on a slide — especially considering that PowerPoint includes an excellent spell checker. But even beyond the spell checker, make sure that the spellings work for the country and audience you are presenting to. Thus, color is perfectly fine in the United States, but make that colour if you’re presenting in the United Kingdom or in India.
Avoid repeating the same word on a slide when possible. For example, if you see a phrase like “report results in weekly reports,” you need to do some editing! You can use PowerPoint’s thesaurus (accessible on the Review tab of the Ribbon) to find alternatives if you find yourself repeating certain words.
Don’t read the slide aloud to your audience while you’re giving your presentation. Slight differences in language and wording can make all the difference. Audiences want you to take the content further by sharing your experiences, opinions, and ideas on the subject.