Tools to Improve Productivity for Preparing for Your PowerPoint Presentations

Posted by dannylau under GTD, Presentations, Productivity | Be the First to Comment

The tools that you need to create effective PowerPoint presentation slides is all located within the application itself. So your job is to figure out which tools will benefit you the most, here are some simple steps which you can follow to achieve your objective.

Keeping your power point slides to a manageable size is a good idea as you will be able to edit and run the slides smoothly during your presentation. The last thing you want is for the slides to hang in the middle of a presentation or a meeting. You can avoid such problems from occurring by using smaller sized picture, compressing large file types and using features that you can originally find in the PowerPoint applications such as charts and diagrams.

Other feature that you can benefit from is the “align or distribute” tool which can be used to arrange the items in your slides. With just a click you can achieve this and you won’t have to go through the hassle of nudging the objects until you tire your eyes. This particular tool can be selected from the “draw” menu. Besides this you can also use the ‘guides’ to space and align the objects, the guides can be utilized to measure the distance as well as maintain the position of the elements across multiple slides.

Should you desire greater accuracy in what you are seeing then you can use the zoom function. Just select the object which you intend to zoom on before changing the settings on the Standard toolbar, this step will help you eliminate the process of trial and error.

If you are sending the presentation slides through email and want the recipient of the slides to see to what you want them to see, then you can try to save it as a Slide Show. So when your recipient receives the file it will automatically open in slide show view. To do this you will need to go to “file” and click on “save as”; here click on the PowerPoint show. Another great way to save time and stress is to package your presentation slides onto a CD (a feature which can also be found on the PowerPoint application).

Here you will be able to run the presentation including all the linked files for any recipient that has a copy of the CD, besides this another great feature is that even though the recipient’s computer does not have PowerPoint it will still be able to run the slides.

Using Masters can help you save time and maintain a consistency throughout your slides. You can achieve this by placing the intended elements on the Slide Master, which will result in it being automatically appeared on the slide layouts. However if you wish to hide certain elements from certain slides you can still do so. Making your slides consistent is a great way to promoting your brand or logo as your clients or audience member will be able to recognize it after the first few slides (but make sure you have something that is worth remembering).

Picture courtesy of dantaylor

Danny Lau is a freelance writer who covers myriad topics including finance and careers. He’s currently a guest contributor for Mindshortcut.

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