Presentation Creation Without The Notes…

Powerpoint presentations have become an expected element of any pitch, such that presentation creation is usually viewed as lacking if they don’t have a set of slides accompanying them. The problem with this is that the tail ends up wagging the dog; Powerpoint is basic to use but difficult to master, and the outcome is almost inevitably a sub-standard presentation that props up a talk without giving much to it. If you are going to do Powerpoint, it is worth doing properly since a poor slide-show comes across as amateur – obviously something to be avoided. However, slick Powerpoint design doesn’t just captivate the audience visually. It can also help you to deliver an excellent talk – without notes and the normal paraphernalia of such events.

Once upon a time, ancient orators trained in the art of rhetoric would use a series of mnemonics to help them to recall the consecutive arguments of a speech, thereby enabling them to avoid using notes in their addresses. A common device was to use points along a journey or features of a familiar building, which they would mentally link to ideas they were speaking about. Today we rely on cue cards or even read straightforwardly from a sheet – something that can lead to a halting and uninspiring delivery. Nowadays, politicians and other professional speakers often garner praise for their ability to speak for a lengthy period without notes.

Good presentation creation should enable you to do the same. sales presentations can be long, and faltering makes you look bad and reduces confidence in you and your ideas. However, by treating each slide as a mnemonic or summary of what you want to say, you can avoid the problem of leafing through a sheaf of notes or load of cue-cards. An ostensibly off-the-cuff presentation is far more impressive and professional-looking than one that rests on such paperwork – which makes you look like you aren’t familiar with your own pitch. Start to look at your presentation creation as a way to facilitate your own delivery and complement your speeches, rather than being additions that have been stuck on at the end as an afterthought because that is what audiences expect nowadays. You’ll find that it’s easier than you think, and your listeners will appreciate the extra effort you put in and the veneer it gives the event.

Please visit https://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/

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Presentation Design Agency is key to a great bid

Powerpoint presentations are a mainstay of corporate bids, and just about any meeting that looks to influence your audience. Sales presentations are given in their thousands, day in, day out. So what distinguishes the outstanding ones, the five or ten percent that really wow people, from the majority that are forgotten almost before they are done? The answer is Powerpoint design. It’s something that is apparently so simple that many businesses don’t give any real thought to it. The software is accessible enough for anyone to use. The problem is that it’s challenging to use well, and all too often that shows  both in the presentations themselves and your audiences reactions.

As a general rule, Powerpoint slideshows are provided as a bolt-on extra to spoken presentations. In other words, the speech is written first, using all of the sales material and research you would expect for an accomplished pitch. This is where the real work goes in. But then the slideshow that goes with it is put together afterwards, typically without a lot of work. It’s treated as something thats there because it’s expected (can you imagine a sales presentation without a Powerpoint slideshow…?).

This is a big mistake. Often the accompanying Powerpoint presentation adds nothing: it just restates what is being said. The outcome is worse than if there was no visual presentation. It distracts the audience from what you are saying, offering no benefit in return.

The real challenge is to use Powerpoint design to communicate in a way that complements your sales presentations, providing facts and insights that cannot be communicated in the spoken word. There’s a maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words. Powerpoint is great for projecting graphs and pie charts, the bottom line that is complex or tedious when written down but possible to take in at a glance in this format. Powerpoint presentations appeal to a different level of communication. People generally take in information best in one form. That might be on a descriptive, intellectual level (your detailed spoken presentation). It might be on an emotional level (which you can tap into with stories, film and illustrations). Or it could be on an instinctive level, where everything is pre-digested and presented in easy-to-read format for immediate consumption and assessment. Powerpoint is best used as a supporting tool in a presentation that has been carefully crafted to meet all of these learning types.

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Powerpoint design – a key tool in the business world

I had been doing sales presentations for a long time when my boss took me to one side and started to question why my performance was not as strong as the rest of the team’s.  He asked me to give him one of my standard Powerpoint presentations, to give him a better idea of what I was doing in my meetings.  He wasn’t totally unimpressed by my efforts, but he thought that my use of powerpoint design could do with being updated.  I hadn’t been on a course for a while and had been concentrating on the content of my presentations at the expense of the style, which is more important than I realised.

My boss sent me on a brief course which I found really useful.  It really made me aware of all the tools in the program that enable you to really make your presentation into a multimedia experience that is less at risk of boring the audience to tears.  I found it particularly useful thinking a bit more in depth about the visual element of my presentation.  I had always included pictures, but the course highlighted how carefully these need to be considered.  Rather than picking a vaguely appropriate picture to go with a statistic, it is more effective to use a pie chart or bar graph that properly reinforces the statistic.

The course also reminded me that, while Powerpoint design does allow for very technical and detailed slides, simplicity remains key.  As the audience only sees each slide for a number of seconds, a hectic page is unlikely to make an impression and convey all the information on it.  The classic rule that audiences can take in three points at a time is worth remembering, and extra elements such as video content should be seen in context of this.  I was glad that the team at the training course also worked with me on my existing presentations, looking at how I could improve the effectiveness of the message I wanted to get across.  General advice is always useful, but I really felt that I got value for money when I was able to see how much better my new presentation was than the one I would traditionally give.

When I got back to the office I was actually quite excited about showing my boss my new Powerpoint presentations!  He agreed with me that they did a much better job at getting my point across, and were more interesting as well.  My next sales presentations went quite well, as I was much more confident about my new presentations, I think this improved my confidence and therefore my presentation style.  A bit of powerpoint design training certainly went a long way.

Please visit http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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