You make several presentations to your department and to people in other departments of your company.  These type of presentations are difficult to prepare for because your meetings and presentations are often frequent, you do not have many resources for the preparation of your presentation and handouts and you don’t have a lot of time.  With time, money and assistance not available, how can you provide handouts of your presentation that will re-enforce your message?

(more…)

Many prophets of presentation design and skill speak about the horrors of adding text only to slides, word for word.  On top of that, there have been studies showing that reading the text off of a slide, word for word is not effective.  I tend to agree with this however every now and then someone comes along and breaks the rules with flair and brilliance.

(more…)

First things first.  In my opinion, never . . . .NEVER distribute your handout notes before you speak.  NEVER! (Was that clear enough?)  If you do that, you will lose a majority of your audience who will skim through the notes before you even start.  Then they will pull out their Blackberry’s and check their e-mail, play some silly game or tweet on twitter.  They will not be giving you their undivided attention, they will not be engaged.

(more…)

Just as I thought I had nailed down all the reasons why one should not hand out their PowerPoint slide deck to their audience, I find another good reason.  Dave Paradi, author of  “The Visual Slide Revolution” runs a blog on PowerPoint.  Dave operates out of Mississauga, Ontario in Canada.  His recent post talks about cropping pictures and how the cropped part of the image can be regenerated if the PPT compression feature is not performed on the picture.

(more…)

You have to make that critical presentation.  Before you open PowerPoint . . . STOP!  You need to ask yourself 6 good questions before you do anything else.  Addressing these 6 questions will define your purpose and scope of your presentation.

(more…)