Over the last few years, I have seen 3D humanoid vectors being increasingly used in eLearning courses. While I initially thought they were unrealistic, like cartoons, and hence immature and unprofessional, I have now started including them on a regular basis in my storyboards.
So what did it take to convert me?
If you work at a company with more than 100 people, you probably have an official corporate PowerPoint template. If you work in a company with more than 1,000 people, you probably don’t know the designer who created your presentation template. There’s a good chance that the graphic designer who created your PowerPoint template doesn’t use PowerPoint on a regular basis — in fact, they probably detest PowerPoint and never touch the presentation software other than to make sure the template looks okay every time the corporate branding is updated.
Does anyone see a problem here? It’s like a Mormon making your coffee or a vegan preparing your hamburger. Too many companies have templates that may look professional aesthetically but are basically impractical for daily use or have bad practices embedded right in them. I’m sure the designers put a lot of thought into the look-and-feel of the PowerPoint templates, but I don’t believe they ever considered doing any usability testing on their actual template designs. That’s too bad because all of their company’s PowerPoint users end up suffering. It forces people like me — who use PowerPoint on a daily and weekly basis — to modify the corporate templates to make them more practical and effective at communicating.
Most of the changes I make to the presentation templates are usually subtle in visual terms, but can save major headaches during the creation and presentation phases. However, most PowerPoint users won’t know how to fix their corporate templates, aren’t going to take matters into their own hands, and are essentially stuck with an impractical or ineffective presentation template.
’ll admit, I’ve created a fair amount of presentations in my time and although i love working with PowerPoint, I’m not what I would call a PowerPoint guru. Not when it comes to the more advanced settings of Microsoft PowerPoint, anyway.
That said, this week i was set the task of trying to help someone with exporting PowerPoint theme colours and I thought I would share my learnings as it turns out, sometimes its not the easiest thing to get your head round.
The particular issue in question here was that when the PowerPoint presentation was being sent over to someone else who was unable to see the theme colours that were present on the original person’s machine.
What follows, are my take aways from this particular occasion:
Remember your last marketing team meeting? That one person spoke to your team and just started throwing data at you from your monthly marketing reporting deck. No context — just numbers, graphs, and the occasional pop of color. Instead of intriguing you, he or she put you to sleep — it was really hard to stay awake when someone was just throwing data at you.
You don’t want to be that person.
Instead, you want to be the one who uses data to tell a story in your monthly marketing reporting. The one that uses data to prove an argument. The one that makes data easy to understand. The one your boss notices for using data smartly.
Delivering effective and powerful presentations is critical to business success. It’s about making an impact that influences your audience, whether you are an entrepreneur pitching investors, a small business owner pitching a product to a retailer or potential customer, a startup presenting a new initiative, or a manager asking for budget or staffing resources.
Here are five principles you must use to create powerful PowerPoint presentations:
Don’t blame PowerPoint for a boring presentation. The problem with today’s typical business presentation is NOT PowerPoint. The storyteller is the problem, the presenter who creates wordy, text-heavy slides and uses dull, convoluted jargon and buzzwords.