10 PowerPoint Tips: Keep Your Audience Awake
Since its debut in the late 1980s, Microsoft's PowerPoint software has become many things to many people: a lifesaver to busy execs attempting to explain critical and complex financial data to their peers; a reliable co-presenter for sales and IT managers trying to rally the troops around a new strategy; and, some might argue, a crutch to knowledge workers everywhere who think pie charts and sound effects can cover up weaknesses in their public-speaking skills.
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The latest version, PowerPoint 2007, (part of Microsoft's Office suite) lets users "quickly create high-impact, dynamic presentations, while integrating workflow and ways to easily share information," notes Microsoft's PowerPoint overview webpage.
PowerPoint slides can hold text, data points, charts, tables, photos, videos and sound effects, which you plug in to any of the many available templates. Making a presentation regarding a company event on July 4th? See the fireworks template. Is a video from YouTube essential to your presentation? See the "Insert Movie" functionality.
To help you get started, CIO.com asked Ayca Yuksel, the product manager for Microsoft Office PowerPoint, to share five design tips and five technical tricks for those who are new to the application. Here are his 10 best tips as well as instructions on how to get at the functionalities in PowerPoint 2007.
5 Design Tips
1. Apply a template to jump start your presentation.
You can apply templates to structure style and page layout, and give yourself a jump-start on a new, blank presentation. You can apply three types of templates: those built-in to PowerPoint 2007, created by you and then saved to your computer, or downloaded from Microsoft Office Online. (Business PowerPoint templates can be found here.)
1. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click New.
2. In the New Presentation dialog box, do one of the following:
- Under Templates, click Blank and recent, Installed Templates, or Installed Themes, click the built-in template that you want, and then click Create.
- Under Templates, click New from existing, locate and then click the other presentation file that contains the template, and then click Create New.
- Under Templates, click My templates, select a custom template that you created, and then click OK.
- Under Microsoft Office Online, click a template category, select a template, and then click Download to download the template from Microsoft Office Online.
2. Add sound effects in your slides.
Want to add applause sound effects to your slides? Play a few bars of "Deck the Halls"? No problem.
1. In the pane that contains the Outline and Slides tabs, click the Slides tab.
2. Click the slide to which you want to add a sound.
3. On the
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