PowerPoint Ideas

Are you looking for some ideas of how to improve your next PowerPoint presentation? Here are some expert PowerPoint ideas that could make your next presentation fly.

1. Add in pictures

Nothing improves a presentation like the addition of pictures. According to research of information that we receive during a presentation 55% is visual.
To add in a picture select Insert > Picture > From File

Just to keep everything up-to-date below is a screen shot of  how to insert images into PowerPoint 2010

2. Animate your presentation

PowerPoint presentations have a tendency to be rather flat. A great way way of improving you PowerPoint is to add in animation or to use builds.

To get your slides animated you need to use the custom animation feature in PowerPoint. For a quick guide on how to animate read our PowerPoint animation guide.

There are a large number of animation types available in PowerPoint, but the ones that seem to work best are Appear, Wipe and Box Out.

By far the most professional animation feature is the Fade Fade feature. The only problem is that this only available in PowerPoint 2002 (often referred to as PowerPoint XP). If you send a file with Fade animation to a PowerPoint 97 user then these effects do not build properly. As much as I love the Fade feature – in practice I cannot use it.

A lot of speakers do not like using animation as when they are speaking they can get out of synch with the animation. This is easily solved by selecting build automatically feature rather than the build on mouse click feature.

3. Include screen shots

Screen shots are really easy to include in a presentation. Here is an example.

To include a screen shot simply press the Print Screen button. This button, sometimes labeled “Prt Scrn”, appears towards the top right hand side of the keyboard. If you are using a Microsoft keyboard you may have to select function lock first.

This will then copy the screen into the clipboard. You can then paste the screen shot into you presentation by using Edit > Paste or pressing the Control-V (press the Ctrl key and letter V at the same time).

Snipping Tool

A new tool for Windows 7 is the snipping tool, which takes away the hassle of creating a print screen> dropping it into Photoshop or paint and cropping to size.  It allow you to highlight a live screen shot of a select area and it brings it up in its own file ready to be saved in a file format of your choice.

We hope that this provides you with a few ideas