Book Image

Microsoft PowerPoint Best Practices, Tips, and Techniques

By : Chantal Bossé
Book Image

Microsoft PowerPoint Best Practices, Tips, and Techniques

By: Chantal Bossé

Overview of this book

Giving great business presentations that stand out can mean the difference between getting and losing out on an important promotion, a critical client deal, or a grant. To start creating PowerPoint presentations that showcase your ideas in the best light possible, you’ll need more than attractive templates; you'll need to leverage PowerPoint's full range of tools and features. This is where this PowerPoint book comes in, leading you through the steps that will help you plan, create, and deliver more impactful and professional-looking presentations. The book is designed in a way to take you through planning your content efficiently and confidently preparing PowerPoint masters. After you’ve gotten to grips with the basics, you’ll find out how to create visually appealing content using the application’s lesser known, more advanced features, including useful third-party add-ins. The concluding chapters will equip you with PowerPoint’s advanced delivery tools, which will enable you to deliver memorable presentations. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to confidently choose processes to create and deliver impactful presentations more efficiently.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

PPTools

Why come back to productivity tools after discussing a design add-in? Simply because the man behind PPTools is highly respected in our industry. Steve Rindsberg has been creating PowerPoint add-ins and help articles since 1997! I made a great friend when I first met him in 2005 during a conference.

His add-in site (see Further reading for the link) has many add-ins that have been created over the years to help users with specific needs that remain unmet by the native PowerPoint features. Instead of trying to figure out which ones to include in this chapter myself, I simply asked Steve to tell me his two most popular add-ins, one free and one paid. We’ll cover the free one first in the next section.

Using THOR (free)

The THOR add-in has one simple focus: memorize the size and position of an object on a slide so you can apply it – or hammer it, as Steve would say – to one or multiple selected objects elsewhere in your presentation. As for the name...