PowerPoint, presentation design, and eLearning articles, including:

• PowerPoint design / PowerPoint animation

As a designer that works in the field of presentation, I am constantly on the lookout for inspiration and new ways of thinking to further advance my presentation skills. Inspiration is all around, one of my favourite forms of ‘presentation’ are movies; specifically the title credits of a movie.

• PowerPoint design / Presentation technology
• Comments: 10

How marvellous that the recent versions of Office automatically embed videos into PowerPoint instead of linking them. And how frustrating when you bundle up your multimedia presentation and someone else reports that the videos don’t play on their PC. This is an issue we’ve come across many times over the years, and it can be very tricky and time-consuming to troubleshoot, so we’ve developed a little tool to help.

• PowerPoint design / Visual communication
• Comments: 5

No matter how good your content might be, if it doesn’t look good you’re going to put your audience off even before you’ve started speaking. Here are three design hacks that will have you creating professional-looking presentations in about half an hour.

• PowerPoint design / PowerPoint animation / Effective eLearning
• Comments: 12

Triggers allow you to initiate a sequence of animations by clicking on a specific object rather than a simple mouse click. This can be helpful for de-cluttering a slide or making a presentation more interactive however getting triggers to work practically can be a bit tricky. Let's take a look.

• PowerPoint design
• Comments: 17

PowerPoint does many things well, but typography isn’t one of them. I’ll walk you step-by-step through techniques to get it to play ball. Be warned – SERIOUSLY advanced PowerPoint functionality follows...

• Presentation technology
• Comments: 3

There seems to be universal acknowledgement that presentation software (like PowerPoint) can’t do it on its own (without a team of experts), and we need a better alternative. But is SlideMagic the answer?

• Sales presentations / Sales messaging

We exhibited at a large trade exhibition a couple of weeks ago, and I went along to see what other vendors are up to. A lot of exhibitions are a desolate wasteland for exhibitors with nothing but tumbleweed and other vendors to stop the boredom. This show was actually pretty busy though, and by walking around l think I managed to notice things companies were doing (right and wrong). Some of these observations are surprisingly apt for sales presentations too...

• Presentation technology

To quote Microsoft: Sway is an app for expressing your ideas in an entirely new way, across your devices. The trouble is I don’t really know what to use it for…

• Presentation skills / Visual communication
• Comments: 1

Presentation handouts and leave-behinds are a great resource in giving your audience a tangible reminder of you and the company you represent. The problem is that they're oft-neglected and oft-ignored. So how do we create handouts that not only accurately represent our content, but look great and don't take a fortnight to create?

• Presentation technology
• Comments: 2

The number of websites that allow the user to create narrated slides that can be exported and shared on multiple devices has increased dramatically. These websites all share a common goal – to get users to switch over from using PowerPoint. But can they actually serve as an alternative or are they getting ahead of themselves? I decided to answer my own question by testing out one of the sites in question and then pitting it against our beloved PowerPoint. How does PowToon compare to PowerPoint?