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)

Using the new Record feature to practice

Although recording a slideshow has been available as early as Office 2013, the new Record feature introduced by Microsoft has many great tools to help you practice. Yes—its main goal is to help presenters create videos of their content for distribution, but using it to see how you look and hear how you talk is the best way to improve your delivery. You will probably hate seeing and hearing yourself the first few times—we all do!—but this type of feedback is even more realistic than just using Speaker Coach. Using both is the best practice you can have.

I will review the Record feature, but it will be shown under the angle of practicing your delivery, not producing your content to be distributed as a video file. This means not all features will be explained. If you want to follow along, make sure to open a PowerPoint file that contains notes, and have your microphone and camera ready. My example will use presentation content...