Tips for Developing Professional Quality PowerPoint Slide Shows

Tips for Developing Professional
Quality PowerPoint Slide Shows
If you regularly attend slide show presentations you have no doubt experienced a full range of PowerPoint proficiency.  PowerPoint is an extraordinary tool for crafting cutting edge presentations, but its sophisticated functionality is often misused.  Presentation-goers are all too familiar with gaudy slide shows that use gratuitous animations and flashy transitions with reckless abandon.  Showy effects are positively distracting and make for an ineffective presentation with a message that gets lost in the glitz. But the effects themselves are not the problem; it is how they are used.


There are numerous PowerPoint tutorials on the Internet, covering everything from basic skills to how to interact with your slides.  What is generally missing from this body of shared knowledge is information on how to build eye-popping presentations that don’t overwhelm your audience. There is definitely an art to composing a visual message that complements your verbal message, but there are also formulaic principles that can be used by anyone. This article lays out some of the most important points.
If there is a take-home message to what follows it is that most of the bells and whistles available in PowerPoint are best reserved for dog and pony shows.  If you want to achieve a professional look in your presentations, use effects sparingly, focus on high quality graphics, and arrange text to achieve flow and clarity. When animated effects are clearly called for in presentations, PowerPoint is usually insufficient to achieve the high quality graphics, animation, and control that should be used.
Backgrounds
The backdrop image or images used in your presentation should be subtle and uncluttered.  Their function is to set the general mood and provide a consistent look through color and texture, and sometimes to provide visual styling using graphical elements.  Logos can be used effectively, but they should be unobtrusive.  The better uses of logos that I have seen are those screened into a custom background like a watermark, rather than isolated in a corner.  This configuration causes them to be obscured in many of your slides, but the logo is visible where its utility is most valuable: at the beginning and end of the show.
Chose your background carefully. Avoid too many colors, because multi-colored backgrounds create limitations in the color of text that can be used.  If you have to use colored text boxes to achieve readability, it is time to rethink your background.
Text
It goes without saying that clarity is the goal for your text.  Font style, color, and size are very important. Make sure that your text is large enough for everyone to see.  You should use clear, crisp, mainstream fonts that are not distracting.  The message will rarely benefit from stylistic novelty or script lettering and, while there are exceptions to this rule, most executions should be left to experienced graphic designers who have a full grasp of the ways to convey information with fancy lettering. 
Too much text on one slide is as worthless as a blank slide.  Clutter is the surest way to get your audience to glaze over and miss your message.  Long blocks of text and lengthy quotes should be spoken, not displayed—read them from your notes if you cannot commit them to memory.
Boxes around text are difficult to pull off in a professional looking presentation. If boxed in text must be used, it can be framed by carefully positioning another colored box behind it.  Transparency effects can be used to achieve a frame that is well integrated with the background image.  If you use such graphical elements, keep them consistent throughout your presentation. Indeed, you should strive to maintain strict consistency throughout your presentation in size, style, color, and positioning.
Use text transitions rather than moving animation.  I have never seen “fly-in” text used with finesse and I am inclined to assert that it cannot be done.  Use “appear” and “disappear” (or fade in and out) effects instead of movement across the stage (one exception is discussed below).  Lists and bullet points can be emphasized using differences in luminance (brightness).  Such effects are complicated to achieve, but are well worth the time required to execute them.  If there is one effect that I have been approached about over and over it is text that brightens for emphasis and then dims as the next line brightens up.  Instead of having text vanish to reduce clutter, this effect leaves the previous line(s) of text discreetly available for reference while the talk proceeds. Audience members appreciate this effect so much that they want to treat their own audiences to it.
Animation
Moving elements can easily become more of a distraction than a useful focal element. Animations should be used with care and only when they add something to the message.  Blinking or repeating animations should be avoided altogether, unless they have an indispensable purpose.  Substitute controlled animations in place of those that repeat continuously.  For example, if you need to express that something pulsates, insert an animation that pulsates for a brief time then stops.  The control that you exhibit over the graphical elements in your show will not go unnoticed, and your audience will subconsciously translate that control into a command of your subject.
As already mentioned, a general rule of thumb for professional looking PowerPoint presentations is “never animate text.”  That is, don’t move it on the stage.  The reason for this rule is that, without a special plugin and a lot of savvy, PowerPoint lacks the functionality needed to animate text in a visually sophisticated way. 
There is one exception that I have used with good effect.  It is only useful when you have a long list of related points to make and you do not want to break up the information by splitting it up onto two slides. One should fill the slide with text using the appear function. When the slide is filled, animate all of the text upward by exactly one line in a single motion, having the top line disappear in some way (there are numerous options).  As the text moves up, simultaneously animate the next line in from below.  Repeat this procedure for each new line of text. This effect is not for the novice. Having text move in from the margin of the slide looks very crude, so it is necessary to use an appear or fade function as well as the “tweened” animation. If you have a lot of text, this effect can become somewhat unmanageable, but give it a try. A successful execution of this effect is impressive, and well worth the effort.
Another effective use of animation is to illustrate a progression of events or to show synchronized changes in display elements (usually not text), but there is rarely a situation that calls for anything more than appearing and disappearing elements, or fading elements.  When movement or animation is clearly advantageous, chances are that the desired effect is outside of the capabilities of PowerPoint, which leads into the next topic.
Flash Animations in PowerPoint
Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash files can be seamlessly integrated into PowerPoint presentations to create truly spectacular interactive slides.  There are times when an animated demonstration is indispensable in a presentation. For example, one might need to show a complicated temporally changing simulation graphic, complete with overlays that can be applied and removed during the simulation, context dependent text that can be superimposed at will, and any number of other advanced effects. Furthermore, one might want to have a set of controls that start, stop, rewind, apply overlays, etc. Such functionality is outside of the capabilities of PowerPoint, but Flash is a perfect tool for the job. Essentially, any Flash animation that you can deploy on the Internet can be deployed within PowerPoint, including Flash Video, complete with video controls.
Other Methods for Adding Animation
One can also add animation by inserting animated gif files.  The level of control that can be achieved is much less than with Flash, but animated gif files can do a lot.  I have done some very complicated animations using animated gifs, and this file format allows for transparent backgrounds, which affords a lot of design flexibility.
Video
More and more, presenters are incorporating video into their PowerPoint presentations. There is really nothing to it. It is as simple as importing a static image, though there are options to link versus imbed video. Video controls are rather simple in PowerPoint, permitting unsophisticated (and often awkward) start and stop functionality, as well as rewind (actually reload). For most presenters, PowerPoint’s native functionality is sufficient, but Flash integration affords more advanced controls to be added. There are no hard and fast rules of thumb on presenting video. My advice is to not use video gratuitously and make sure that slides that incorporate video retain the look and feel of the rest of the presentation.
Effects to Use
Perhaps 90% of your effects should consist of appear, disappear, fade-in and fade-out transitions. These effects are useful for all sorts of graphical elements as well as for text. You can achieve impressive cross fading image transitions by simultaneously fading two superimposed images of the same dimensions.  Images can be stacked with intervening transition effects to produce a slideshow within a slideshow, complete with synchronized text changes.
Sound
One should only use sound when it is relevant to the information given in the talk. For example, Jane Goodall could make good (and entertaining) use of a chimpanzee call in a PowerPoint talk. Music should be avoided, and sound effects used in combination with other transitions or animations should be avoided altogether. Remember, your audience came for the information. Your goal should be to impress them first and entertain them second.
Final Words
As a professional who has given dozens of PowerPoint presentations in front of large audiences, I have made my share of mistakes, and I owe what I know to innumerable kind critics, and a few cruel ones. My advice to those interested in impressing their audiences is to focus on the information—including the visual information. Impact is everything.
Achieving graphical elegance while spotlighting your information is truly an art form, but knowing what constitutes information is not. In my estimation, knowing which details to leave off is as important as knowing which ones to include. It may sound odd, but the most effective visual details are those that go unnoticed because your audience is focused on the information that you are presenting.
The human brain is simultaneously a brilliant sponge and a wonderful filter. Fortunately, while we filter much of the information that falls upon our senses, it is not lost. Our impression of the quality of the visual information that we gather contributes to its impact on us. So, pay attention to the little details, but make sure that they accentuate your information rather than overpowering it.
At Presentation Magic we create visually commanding PowerPoint presentations that center attention on the content to be communicated. If you have an important presentation that needs a professional’s touch, let us help you achieve that extra impact.

Animating Text in Your Presentations

Animating Text in Your Presentations

This article reprinted with permission from All 'Bout Computers.
The most basic way of having your say in a PowerPoint presentation is to use text in a bulleted list placeholder. Microsoft has graciously provided basic placeholders for formatting bulleted lists, both single column and double column. These placeholders allow you to add the text quickly and easily, and ensure that the text shows up in your outline. Furthermore, these placeholders are set up so that the text displayed in the placeholders can be built a character, word, line or bullet at a time.

Text entered in one of the bulleted list placeholders is great for drawing attention to one part of the information at a time. To set up your animations, use the "Custom Animation" item on the "Slide Show" menu. This tool lets you assign which animations you wish to use on the placeholder. You set up how you want the placeholder to appear, exit, and (in PowerPoint 2002 only) move around the screen. Once you have defined the basic animation, you are ready to define the animation for the bulleted text itself.

When you enter text in a placeholder, you are setting up a bulleted list. This list can either be a straight list, such as:

• Level One, bullet one
• Level One, bullet two
• Level One, bullet three

Or it can be made up of nested lists such as:

• Level One, bullet one
  • Level Two, bullet one
  • Level Two, bullet two
    • Level Three, bullet one
• Level One, bullet two

Nested lists are nice when you need to provide just a bit more detail than you could on a single bullet item. But they are very easy to abuse. Even though PowerPoint will let you set up a total of 5 indentation levels, please think carefully before going beyond two. The further indented the text is, the smaller it is, the less space you have to say what you need, and the harder it will be for your audience to stay focused.

Bulleted lists are animated by using animation options. The basic options you choose from are text grouping and text effects. Use the grouping to determine how many levels you want to appear at a single reveal. In our list above, we could select from the following options:

• As one object - All text in the placeholder revealed at the same time.
• All paragraphs at once - Each bullet revealed in order, regardless of bullet level.
• By 1st level paragraphs - All the nested bullets for the 1st level revealed at the same time as the 1st level text, repeated for each level one bullet.
• By 2nd level paragraphs - The first 1st level bullet revealed, the first 2nd level bullet revealed with all of its nested bullets, then the next 2nd level bullet. When all 2nd level bullets are revealed, then the next 1st level bullet is processed.
• By 3rd level paragraphs - Same idea as above, but with one more level of grouping.

How much grouping you do depends on what you want the audience to see at any given time during your presentation. If you want the audience to concentrate only on the current sub-bullet, then use a very tight grouping level. If you want them focusing on the bigger picture, then use a looser grouping level. (Most presenters use 1st or 2nd level grouping.)

Once you know how much text to bring in at once, you can determine the order. The order of the bullets can be either top to bottom (the default) or bottom to top (reverse). Be careful about combining reverse reveals with tight grouping. It can be confusing to your audience.

Are you ready for another level of enhancement? Good. Next we are going to define what we want to happen as the text is brought in. You have three decisions here:

• If you want a sound played when the text is brought in, which sound to play
• What you want to have happen to the text when you bring in the next bullet
• How fast you want each bullet brought in

These options are found on the "Effect" tab of the animation scheme. We are going to look at these in reverse order, as that is how you really set it up.

How fast text is brought in is determined by the "Animate Text" option. This option lets you bring your bullets all at once, a word at a time or a character at a time. Think about your screen as a typewriter, and you will have the idea for character at a time. Word at a time is slightly less spread out across time, all at once is just what it says. For word or character at a time, you also need to determine how long you wish to wait between characters/words before the next one appears.

Next, you should define what you want to happen when the next bullet appears. This is the "After Animation" option. You can choose any of these four options:

• Do nothing to the text
• Change the color of the current text as the next text appears
• Blank out the current text after it finishes animating and then bring in the new text
• Blank out the current text on the next mouse click and then bring in the new text

As each of these options is applied to the text box, you must choose one option for the entire placeholder. You cannot mix these effects within a single animation. Also, while you can set the sound to play and the amount of text to animate for exit effects, you cannot set dimming animations.

Finally, you need to decide if you are going to play a sound with each set of text that you have animated. You can choose any of the predefined sounds from the drop down list, or by choosing "Other Sound" you can select your own sound from your hard drive.

But what if you don't want all your text lined up in nice neat bulleted lists?

You can use text boxes (also known as autoshapes) for those text elements which you want to place at other locations around the slide. This text can be animated to appear element by element and move around the screen. There are two downsides to using text boxes:

• Text in the boxes does not appear in your outline
• Text in the boxes can not be "built", unless you are using PowerPoint 2002

To use text boxes to animate your text, place text boxes around your screen and use the "Edit Text" option on your right click menu to add your text. You can add any amount of text you wish to a text box, from single characters to multiple paragraphs.

When you have added all your text elements, your next step is to remove the shapes from those text elements you wish to merely show on the screen. To do this, select the shapes and go to the "Format AutoShape" selection on your right click menu. On the "Colors and Lines" tab, select no line and no fill. Your text will now sit directly on the background of your slide, just as it does when you place it in the placeholders.

Since the text is in a text box instead of a placeholder, it would appear that you do not have as many animation options as you would on a placeholder. However, because of the flexibility of the text boxes, you can fake the grouping options, the dimming options and the sound options by creating individual text boxes for each paragraph, line, or word of text you wish animated. This actually gives you more flexibility than you have with the placeholders. (If you are using PowerPoint 2002, you can apply all of the text animations and building options to text boxes as well as to the placeholders.)

There is one other point you should know about text and PowerPoint. You cannot build placeholders. You can fake them by creating sample slides with the text boxes in places you desire them, but you cannot create "Click Here" boxes. This means that if you are creating presentation templates for others to use, you must be sure to explain how to use and recreate your text box scheme when you distribute your template

OLE Links vs. Servers for Powerpoint Helps

OLE Links vs. Servers

This article reprinted with permission from All 'Bout Computers.
OLE links and OLE servers are a common cause of confusion for PowerPoint users. Both are ways to get information into your presentation that is developed elsewhere, but they cause drastically different results to your presentation.


OLE Links

You should use OLE links to link to the output of another program. If you wanted to include an existing Word file, but still wanted to be able to edit that file in Word, you would use an OLE link to get the file. To do this, you would use the Insert->Object menu option and select "From File". Then, you would be able to browse to the file on your hard drive and link to it.
There is a potential problem with linking to a file. Since PowerPoint uses absolute addresses when linking files, distribution of the presentation gets a little tricky. If you are going to share the presentation, you should be sure to place the file to be linked in the same folder as your presentation and then link to it.


OLE Servers

OLE servers should be used when you need to create a file during your presentation from another application. In this case, you are imbedding a whole copy of another application (or at least the information needed to set it up) into your presentation. If the other application is an Office application (such as Word), the overhead isn't that much. However, if the application is not an Office application, you will be adding a lot to your file size. You won't have the problems related to finding the file that you do when you link, but your presentation is much more likely to bloat and corrupt.


A real life example

This issue was brought to my attention via a presentation that was bloated and corrupted for no known reason. One of the people working on the presentation asked me to help diagnosis what was going on. When we looked at the "Properties" for the presentation, we noticed that there were entries for both types of OLE objects. In this user's case, instead of insert clip art from the Gallery, the actual Gallery had been imbedded multiple times. When the gallery objects were removed and replaced with the clip art desired, the presentation size shrunk back to expected size.
I am not suggesting never use OLE Servers. There are very logical places for them, especially if your presentation is designed to train users on a specific application. I am suggesting that you decide ahead of time whether you need the application or the file and work from there.

PowerPoint Presentations for Multiple Machines

PowerPoint Presentations for Multiple Machines
This article reprinted with permission from All 'Bout Computers.

You have this great idea for a PowerPoint presentation that you want to send out for friends and family members to see. You have worked for hours to get the timing of the animations and transitions just right. You selected just the right music to go with the pictures. You even created some great animated gifs to show how things work and some movies to show what people can do with your information.
You copy your presentation from your hard drive to a thumb drive so that you can take the presentation to your brother's house to test. You remember to put all the sounds, animations, and movies there also, because you remembered how much fun it wasn't to deal with those things last time. You even remember to put a copy of the Viewer on your thumb drive in case there isn't a copy of Powerpoint on the other machine. You are all set, or so you believe.
You get to your brother's house and discover that you may have a few problems to deal with. Luckily, his machine does have a USB port for your thumb drive. But, as he so nicely reminds you, Mom and Dad's machine doesn't have one. When you send it out, you will need to send it on CD instead. You have just hit the first of many problems that exist when you build a presentation that is going to run on many different machines.
What is going to happen next you wonder, as you open PowerPoint on your brother's machine and run your presentation? Suddenly, all your perfectly timed sounds, animations, and effects are running very strangely. You can't hear the sound effects - you only hear the music. Your slides change very slowly. Not all of your movies run. And most of your beautiful animation sequences just sit there!
What are you going to do? You are going to go back to the beginning and make some changes to how you put the presentation together to start with.

First: Think about the machines

Always develop on the oldest, slowest, and least powerful machine that you expect the presentation will be run on. If you develop on a high-powered machine, then run on a lower powered machine, you will have many problems. The USB capability is one of those things.
If you depend on multiple effects happening at certain speeds, PowerPoint will get you. As soon as you move to an older or less powerful machine, PowerPoint will have to do more with less. You won't like the results.
If you are concerned that your presentation is going to be a resource hog, make up a little cheat sheet for the people you are sending the presentation to. Tell them to:

• Turn off all other programs running on their machine. This includes email and internet programs definitely, other programs if possible. In the most extreme cases you will need to figure out some way to prove to them that you don't have a virus embedded in the file, since they will need to turn of the virus checker as well.
• Clean out their temporary space, their browser history, and to do other regular disk maintenance. The more hard drive and temporary space PowerPoint has to use, the faster it can run and the better it can meet your design.
• Copy the presentation and linked files to the hard drive, instead of running from the CD or thumb drive. Hard drives are the fast things out there in terms of file access. Thumb drives come next. CD drives are the slowest of the three.

Second: Know what PowerPoint versions people are using

If you are doing all your development on PowerPoint 2002 or 2003, people with PowerPoint 97 and 2000 won't be able to see your presentation. While the newer versions of PowerPoint will handle the older animations, they will not look the same as they do on the older versions.
Be sure that you include the right viewer so that they can see your presentation the way you designed it. If you developed the file in PowerPoint 2002 or 2003, you should provide the link to the "new" or 2003 Viewer. If you developed the file in PowerPoint 97 or 2000, you should provide the link to the "old" or 1997 Viewer.
One last word of warning on PowerPoint versions: Animated Gifs don"t run at all in PowerPoint 97. They run with infinite looping in PowerPoint 2000. PowerPoint 2002 and PowerPoint 2003 do a good job of interpreting the header information, so those versions should be fine with the animated GIFs.

Third: Make your files small

The bigger your PowerPoint file, the more likely resource issues will impact how your presentation runs. You need to make sure that your files are the smallest size possible.

1. Turn OFF fast saves (Tools--> Options--> Save tab, uncheck the box) and then save the presentation to a new name. If Fast Saves were on, this step alone will cut your presentation size by a good amount (usually 33-50%).
2. Read up on how to make sure your files are as small as possible at the PPT FAQ. The biggest thing here is to make sure your graphics aren't overscanned or oversized and that you inserted them the right way. What's the right way? Insert--> Picture, Not copy and paste!
3. Make sure your music is the minimum quality you can live with. There is no reason to distribute a sound file that is CD quality if the presentation is only ever going to be played over a mono-speaker on a laptop. Play around with the quality of your sound files and see what you can live with in the quality of sound vs. size of file battle.

Fourth: Use fonts wisely

If you are using any unusual fonts, embed them. If you used anything out of the ordinary and didn't embed them, PowerPoint on the other computers will have to to guess at the best possible match from the fonts on the machine. This makes it so that there is very little chance of everyone else seeing what you want them to see.
If you embed the fonts, you at least have a shot at them seeing what you want them to see. Since not all fonts are embeddable, you may still have some font problems, but they should be minimized. (Not sure if your fonts are embeddable? Go read my article on PowerPoint 2003. While the limitations on opening files with fonts in them is new to PowerPoint 2003, the information provided there on how to know if a font is embeddable is old news.)

Fifth: Know the multimedia capabilities of the other machines

You can't control what other computers have for speakers. Most machines won't play more than two sounds at a time. Most laptops will have problems playing more than one at a time. If you need to have multiple sounds to get your point across, you can forestall the problems by editting your sound files so that all the sounds are coming from one file. If that isn't an option, be sure that you tell people they won’t be getting the full effect without a somewhat fancy sound card.
If you are sharing presentations with movies, you need to be sure that you have created the movies with the most common CODECS (codecs are the files on your computer that tell the multimedia players how to compress and de-compress your movie files so that they can play).

Sixth: Distribute the presentation correctly

Send the sounds with the presentation. Make sure the links don't break when you move your presentation and the sound files around. Information on that problem is also on the PPT FAQ website. Make sure you save your presentation as a PowerPoint Show, so that it will play on a double click (instead of opening in PPT's edit mode).

Seventh: Relax

Even if you set all of the above up perfectly, your presentation is not going to run the same on any two machines. It probably won’t even run the same two times in a row on the same machine. The differences won’t be as noticeable on the same machine, but they are there.
If all else fails, and you need to have a perfectly timed, perfectly repeatable presentation, then it may be time to consider using another program to create or present your information. If you don’t want to loose all the work you have put into the presentation, then look into recoding your presentation or using Vic Ferri's service to create a self-contained presentation package

Holiday, Fun and Party Powerpoint Templates

Free holoday PowerPoint templates download. Moyea Powerpoint tools knowledge centre offers various free holiday PowerPoint templates for download.

PENCIL AND PAPERS Background

PENCIL AND PAPERS Background for Powerpoint Slides

PENCIL AND PAPERS backgrounds

Pink elegant flowers Backgrounds

Background for Powerpoint Slides
Free Pink elegant flowers backgrounds for Powerpoint templates. Download it.

Pink elegant flowers