Getting Started in PowerPoint

PowerPoint presentations are now ubiquitous in the corporate world. It’s pretty much impossible to sit through a conference, seminar, or trade show without seeing at least one PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint has found its way into nearly every office and boardroom. Once upon a time a man a very unromantic man proposed to his wife by way of a PowerPoint presentation. As nice as PowerPoint can be, it has its detractors. If the software isn’t used properly, it can come between the speaker and the audience. In an article in the May 28, 2001, New Yorker titled “Absolute PowerPoint: Can a Software Package Edit Our Thoughts?,” Ian Parker argued that PowerPoint may actually be more of a hindrance than a help in communicating. PowerPoint, Parker wrote, is “a social instrument, turning middle managers into bulletpoint dandies.” The software, he added, “has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. . . . It helps you make a case, but also makes its own case about how to organize information, how to look at the world.” To make sure that you use PowerPoint wisely, this article offers more than instructions in using the software it explains how to make your presentations meaningful. Along the way, you discover how to find your way around PowerPoint, create a presentation, change views, insert the slides, and move and delete slides.

Getting Acquainted with PowerPoint

That thing in the middle is a slide, PowerPoint’s word for an image that forms part of a presentation. Surrounding the slide are many tools for decorating and adorning slides. When the time comes to show a presentation, you dispense with the tools and make the slide fill the screen. PowerPoint offers prefabricated slide designs that take most of the trouble out of decorating the slides. To make PowerPoint do your bidding, you need to know a little jargon:

 -  Presentation: All the slides, from start to finish.

 -  Slides: The images you create with PowerPoint. During a presentation, slides appear on-screen one after the other. Don’t be put off by the word slide and dreary memories of sitting through your uncle’s slideshow vacation memories. You don’t need a slide projector to show these slides. You can now plug a laptop or other computer into special monitors that display PowerPoint slides.

 -  Speaker notes: Printed pages that you, the speaker, write and print so that you know what to say during a presentation. Only the speaker sees the speaker notes.

 -  Handout: Printed pages that you may give to the audience after a presentation. A handout shows the slides in the presentation. Handouts are also known by the somewhat derogatory term, leave-behinds.

Creating a New Presentation

To create a new presentation, start by choosing File -> New (or pressing Ctrl+N). That’s all there is to it. The New Presentation task pane appears on the right side of the window. The next step is to choose a look for the slides in the presentation, and PowerPoint offers no fewer than four ways to do that: start with a blank presentation, start from a design template or color scheme, make use of the AutoContent Wizard, or commandeer an existing presentation. No matter which look you choose for your presentation, you can change your mind and choose a different look later on. To do so, click the Design button or choose Format -> Slide Design and select a new look in the Slide Design task pane. You can choose a new look no matter how far along you are in constructing a presentation.

Starting with a blank presentation

Click the Blank Presentation link in the Slide Design task pane to create a bare-bones presentation. You’re on your own. With this technique, you have to fashion a design yourself with the tools on the Drawing toolbar. Don’t use this technique unless you know PowerPoint well and have an artistic flair. Why make your own design when you can rely on a design template, one created by a genuine artist?

Starting from a slide design or color scheme

Click the Design button on the Formatting toolbar or the From Design Template link in the task pane to make use of a slide design or color scheme. The Slide Design task pane opens. Scroll through the templates or color schemes, select one, glance at the slide onscreen, and decide which design or color scheme tickles your fancy:

 -  Slide design: Click the Design button or the From Design Template link, if necessary, to see the designs and choose one.

 -  Color scheme: Click the Color Schemes link to choose a color scheme. If the Slide Design task pane isn’t showing, click the Design button on the Formatting toolbar.

Starting from the AutoContent Wizard

Click the From AutoContent Wizard link in the New Presentation task pane to create a presentation with the help of the AutoContent Wizard. With this technique, PowerPoint asks questions about the kind of presentation you want. When you’re done answering, the program chooses a presentation design for you, complete with generic headings and text, and you enter your own headings and text where the generic stuff is. Unless you’re in a big hurry, don’t create a presentation with the AutoContent Wizard. Presentations created this way are invariably cold and impersonal. As explained in “Advice for Building Persuasive Presentations,” later in this article, a presentation has to be an expression of who you are and what you stand for if it is to be successful. Generic presentations made with the AutoContent Wizard are, by definition, dull and characterless. They are the primary reason that PowerPoint has a bad reputation in some boardrooms and conference halls.

Starting from an Existing Presentation

If a PowerPoint presentation on your computer or computer network can be used as the starting point for your new presentation, click the From Existing Presentation link in the New Presentation task pane. You see the New from Existing Presentation dialog box. Select the presentation and click the Create New button. The presentation you selected appears in the window. Start tweaking it to your liking.

Advice for Building Persuasive Presentations

In the wrong hands, PowerPoint can make for a very dull presentation. To prevent dullness, the following sections offer advice for building a persuasive presentation, one that brings the audience around to your side.

Tips for creating presentations

Here’s a handful of tips to start you on your way as you create a PowerPoint presentation:

 -  Start by writing the text in Word: Start in Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint, and work from an outline. As explained in the next section of this article, you can see your presentation take shape by working from a Word outline. Moreover, PowerPoint has a special command for importing text files from Word, so you won’t lose any time by writing the early drafts of your presentation in Word. In Word, you can clearly see how a presentation develops. You can make sure that your presentation builds to its rightful conclusion.

 -  When choosing a design, consider the audience: A presentation to the American Casketmakers Association calls for a mute, quiet design; a presentation to the Cheerleaders of Tomorrow calls for something bright and splashy. Choose a slide design that sets the tone for your presentation and wins the sympathy of the audience.

 -  Take control from the start: Spend the first minute introducing yourself to the audience without running PowerPoint (or, if you do run PowerPoint, put a simple slide with your company name or logo on-screen). Make eye contact with the audience. This way, you establish your credibility. You give the audience a chance to get to know you.

 -  Start from the conclusion: Try writing the end of the presentation first. A presentation is supposed to build to a rousing conclusion. By writing the end first, you have a target to shoot for. You can make the entire presentation service its conclusion, the point at which your audience says, “Ah-ha! She’s right.”

 -  Make clear what you’re about: In the early going, state very clearly what your presentation is about and what you intend to prove with your presentation. In other words, state the conclusion at the beginning as well as the end. This way, your audience will know exactly what you are driving at and be able to judge your presentation according to how well you build your case.

 -  Personalize the presentation: Make the presentation a personal one. Tell the audience what your personal reason for being there is or why you work for the company you work for. Knowing that you have a personal stake in the presentation, the audience is more likely to trust you. The audience will understand that you’re not a spokesperson, but a speaker someone who has come before them to make a case for something that you believe in.

 -  Tell a story: Include an anecdote in the presentation. Everybody loves a pertinent and well-delivered story. This piece of advice is akin to the previous one about personalizing your presentation. Typically, a story illustrates a problem for people and how people solve the problem. Even if your presentation concerns technology or an abstract subject, make it about people. “The people in Shaker Heights needed faster Internet access,” not “the data switches in Shaker Heights just weren’t performing fast enough.”

 -  Make like a newspaper: Put a newspaper-style headline at the top of each slide, and think of each slide as a newspaper article. Each slide should address a specific aspect of your subject, and it should do so in a compelling way. How long does it take to read a newspaper article? It depends on how long the article is, of course, but a PowerPoint slide should stay on-screen for roughly the time it takes to explore a single topic the way a newspaper article does.

 -  Follow the one-slide-per-minute rule: At the very minimum, a slide should stay on-screen for at least one minute. If you have been given 15 minutes to speak, you are allotted no more than 15 slides for your presentation, according to the rule.

 -  Beware the bullet point: Terse bullet points have their place in a presentation, but if you put them there strictly to remind yourself what to say next, you’re doing your audience a disfavor. Bullet points can cause drowsiness. They can be a distraction. The audience skims the bullets when it should be listening to you and the argument you’re making.

 -  Blank out the screen for dramatic effect: Show a blank screen when you come to the crux of your presentation and you want the audience’s undivided attention. (You can blank out the screen by pressing B, which gives you a black screen, or by pressing W, which gives you a white screen. Press B or W again and a slide reappears). When seeing the blank screen, the audience will focus all attention on you. What you say will have more impact. Sometimes PowerPoint comes between the speaker and the audience. By removing PowerPoint momentarily, you give yourself the chance to talk straight into the heart of your audience. Want to see just how PowerPoint can suck the life and drama out of a dramatic presentation? Try visiting the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation, a rendering of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint. Yikes! You’ll find it here: www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm.