How to Avoid Losing Your Temper When Preparing Your PowerPoint Slides

Posted by J.J. under GTD, Presentations, Productivity | Read the First Comment

If you have presentation to do for your meeting or your coaching sessions, preparing slides are simply time consuming as it requires patience and hard work. Preparing presentation slides isn’t about “copycat” work. It’s about putting the right messages or ideas into your slides. Your slides would end up become “junks” if you include all chucks of information into your slides.

If you want to create simple and efficient slides – it would take longer time to complete depending how many slides you need to include in your presentation.

You can actually prepare your slides fast and avoid losing your temper – it’s all about strategy.

How do you actually do it?

Step 1: Gather all your resources and tools before you start creating slides

How could you possibly start a task if you don’t have a proper guidance or reference materials? It’s like climbing a mountain – you have to be well-equipped (i.e. bringing along tools like head gear, climbing shoes, ropes, and other climbing paraphernalia).

I have some basic tools for my slide preparation:

• Flickr’s Advance Search Tool – You can “steal” images that belong to Flickr users that are protected by Creative Commons license. By using this feature, you can find content to use commercially or modify, adapt or build upon. You have to attribute the work of the owner as specified by the licensor.

For example, I’m searching for pictures related to “presentation” by using Flick’s Advanced Search.

Then, I’ll scroll down the page and check the radio buttons as shown above.

• Multiple tabs feature (Mozilla Firefox or IE8) – At this feature, you can view multiple web pages when you’re performing content research.

  
  Limit yourself by using up to 6-8 tabs within one internet browser. By using this tab feature, you’ll be able to scheme through different articles or web pages rather than having multiple tabs at the taskbar. You can also leave those multiple tabs untouched when you turn off Mozilla Firefox browser – read more about it here.

Step 2: Increase your productivity by setting your goals in advance

You can set your goals based on this method – How to Create Your Own Four-Quadrate Weekly Goal Plan. You can change the duration into forty minutes, four hours, four day and etc (make sure it able to be divided equally into four quadrates).

Step 3: Promoting visual thinking in your slides

Promoting visual thinking is by using less text and inserting related images in your presentation slides (read this post: Visual Thinking – Create your own Drawing in your Decision Making Process). You can create images on your own – by drawing on post pads or blank paper. You can scan your drawings and save it into your computer, so that you can insert it into your slides.

Bear in mind that your drawings have to be simple and clear. You can also use additional shapes like arrows or text boxes from Microsoft PowerPoint software to enhance your drawings. You can get some ideas about drawing simple diagrams here.

Related posts:

1. Is It a Good Thing to Make Fun of Your Own PowerPoint Presentation?

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.