Presenter View is a secret view that’s only for you! It’s a way of seeing your notes and upcoming slides while your audience sees only the current slide as usual. Here’s what Presenter View looks like. What can you do with Presenter View? As you can see, Presenter View has 3 panes: your slide, your notes, and the upcoming slide or animation. Plus there are several controls at the top and bottom. Here are some great Presenter View features: You can resize the panes by dragging on their border. For example, you might want to make the Notes pane larger and the Slide pane smaller At the bottom o ..read more

When creating a presentation, formatting your slide titles can greatly impact how your audience reads and understands the information presented. Many people default to what’s called “title case,” where each word is capitalized (with some exceptions). However, others prefer “sentence case,” where only the first letter of the first word is capitalized. In this post, I’ll explain why I prefer sentence case for slide titles. Readability matters While title case can make text look more important, it can also make it harder to read. Imagine reading an entire book in title case – it would be difficu ..read more

One of the newer features of PowerPoint is cartoon people. They’re fun! They are SVG files, like icons. You can resize them and recolor them. You can also ungroup them and edit them like other PowerPoint shapes. Here you see the original black along with a version in which I changed the outline color to blue. While many of the cartoon people are complete like the one you see here, there are also “parts” so that you can combine them to make your own. I’m especially intrigued with the facial expressions that you can insert into a face. Where to find them You find the cartoon people in the same ..read more

Not long ago, I created a presentation for a client that included a video with text on top. My client asked why she couldn’t see the text. After rechecking that other people could see it, I asked which version of PowerPoint she was using. It was Mac version 2008! Only 14 years ago… And yes, at that time, you couldn’t put text on top of a video. So she asked which version she should get. I think others have the same question, as there are lots of choices! My answer is first I’m going to explain the ins and outs of the various versions of PowerPoint so you can make the decision for yourself but ..read more

What if you could present with a resizable webcam of you on the slide? And what if you could then export the presentation as a video? PowerPoint now offers a way for you to add a customizable, live web feed that appears on the slide, as you can see here. It has more features than the ones that come with online meeting software, like Zoom or GoToWebinar and you can even animate it! Finally, you can export your presentation as a video, including the Ccameo window. Cameo is available to Microsoft 365 subscribers in the desktop app for Windows or macOS. If you have an older, permanent (not subscr ..read more

You can use abstract images to create interesting, textured backgrounds for slides or shapes. For example, Nancy Duarte’s signature slide uses a textured image background. You can see an example here. Here’s an example, using abstract images as a fill for the shapes of a diagram. First, you have to find an abstract image. That’s fairly easy. For example, go to pixabay.com or your favorite stock images site and enter abstract in the search box. Find some images and download them. Here are 3 that I downloaded from pixabay.com: Another easy technique is to take your own abstrac ..read more

At the end of a presentation, what do you want your audience to do? You should know! I often see presenters make similar mistakes at the end of their presentation: They don’t have a call-to-action slide at the end They have a call-to-action slide but follow it up with a “Questions?” slide, so that the call-to-action slide isn’t visible for every long Their call-to-action slide has too much information on it so the audience gets confused. Should they write it down? Take a picture of it using their phone? Sometimes, the presenters are embarrassed to ask for something. Sometimes, they don’t re ..read more

From my perspective, you can use images on a slide in 3 ways: As a background, behind text: The purpose is to make a slide that is essentially all text look better As a supplement to text: The purpose is to help people understand and remember the text As the main focus of the slide, with smaller text that supplements the image: The purpose is to have a strong impact How do you decide how to size, place, and format an image on a slide? It depends on your goal, your purpose. There is no right way to use an image, but understanding these 3 ways will help you design better slides. You’ll learn h ..read more

Research shows that people pay more attention to images than to text, but sometimes you want people to focus on the text, not on an elaborate or complex photo. A nice compromise is to use icons and they are VERY common on slides these days. PowerPoint 365 includes icons in its collection of images (choose Insert> Pictures> Stock Images and click the Icons tab), and you can find icons in lots of other places, as well. One simple way to use an icon is to put it in place of a bullet point, as you can see here: Make icons bigger! You can make your slides more engaging by using bigger icons ..read more

You probably know that creating slides with lots of text on them is a sure sign of “Death by PowerPoint.” Even if your content is valuable and interesting, the text makes it LOOK boring. Also, research has shown that images attract more attention. So the solution is almost always to replace text with images and not put everything you say on the slide. How do you present without the text? Presenting without the text on the slides can get some people nervous. Presenting without the text means you have to do one or more of the following: Use Presenter view to see your notes (put what you’ll say ..read more