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)

Bringing perspective to your data with Designer

The human brain has a hard time figuring out what large numbers really mean. For example, the size of my country, Canada, is 9,985 million km2 or 3,855 million square miles. That sure sounds big, but we could make it more relevant by comparing it to something else that might help make it more relatable. If I am presenting to a European audience, I could compare it to the size of France and add that Canada is 149 times the size of France. Finding relatable comparisons for large numbers can be time-consuming but we can again turn to Designer to help us, thanks to Microsoft Research’s Perspectives Engine.

To see how it works, let’s start with a simple example where I have added a title placeholder, Commercial planes fly at 30,000 feet (Figure 5.17). The Designer feature supplied a list of design ideas, and I applied the first one (1). First of all, it was great to have a nice-quality image supplied just because the word...