Upgrade to PowerPoint 2007

There a few features inside PowerPoint 2007 that are extremely useful and often not advertised as key reasons to shell out money for a version upgrade of Microsoft Office.

Some of these comments might come across as a bit detailed, but believe me, they do make a big difference.

• Much improved color management. Once you have defined your color schema, PowerPoint makes it very easy to apply intensity levels of the same color in your presentation
• Adding a monochrome color overlay to images
• Sophisticated drop shadows. There are many useless graphical effects in PowerPoint (Microsoft had a look at Adobe products), the drop shadow is the one I actually use
• 3D text rotation. In a later post I will explain how to stick a 3D logo/text on an image (update: here it is), PowerPoint has a more basic function now that more or less does the same
• PDF conversion plug, one that is free, and better than Adobe Acrobat (see this post)
• Smaller file size
• Much improved editing of data charts, fully compatible with Excel. Creating beautiful, simple and clean data charts used to require a lot of "hacks" in 2003. It's not perfect in PowerPoint 2007, but a lot better.
• The proportion of tip of an arrow does not change anymore when you re-size the object
• The selection pane tool that allows you to edit charts with many overlapping objects, without having to send them to the back all the time.

All these good things come in exchange for some dollars and a few days of getting used to the new interface.

Animations - a waste of your and the audience's time

I don't like them. Bouncing transitions between slides. Flying bullet points zapping in like a space ship. It annoys the audience and does not help get your message across. More over, they are impossible to edit. There are exceptions:

• Complicated technical diagrams that require a build-up to explain (still, putting them in as a sequence of slides will make your life easier
• Perpetual motions such as slowly turning wheels or a high-way of moving arrows to support a concept of a never-ending force

Chart annoyances - round those numbers

Most of the time people cut and past numbers straight from Excel into a PowerPoint slide. Take a few seconds and round numbers, what looks better: 2007 sales: $3,496k 2007 sales: $ 3.5 million

Avoid pompous templates - colors do the work

Many PowerPoint templates waste a huge amount of screen real estate with big logos and/or graphics. I prefer the opposite approach. Through the consistent use of the template colors on the slide, the audience will immediately recognize the corporate identity of the presenter. As an example, a slide that I use in my own introduction presentation:

The power of professional images

Images can amplify the message of your chart by a factor 10. Use a professional stock image site such as iStockPhoto instead of Google image search:

• It's legal, you pay copy right
• You can search images precisely with keywords
• You can download very high resolutions

Garr Reynolds created an extensive overview of other image sources.

Be bold - make your audience remember...

Due to PowerPoint overload, business audiences find it hard to get excited about facts that sound the same. For example: the fragrance industry is saturated and it is hard to launch a successful new brand.

Here is a series of slides that could support the point in a more dramatic way:



Rather than putting just a bullet point with text, the slide actually provides a (partial) list of new product launches to drive home the point (click on image for larger picture).



An image amplifies the message (click on image for larger picture).

Photo composition rules applied to PowerPoint

A presentation slide is like a photo, or like a painting: the basic rules of composition apply.

• Rule of thirds. Put your screen guides so that they divide the page in 3-s, creating a 3x3 box of 9 rectangles. Place and align objects alongside these lines

• Balance. Make sure charts don't "tilt": heavy graphical objects one side of the chart should be compensated on the other. If the slide is out of balance: move things around or give them a lighter color

If you are interested, read more about the Golden Ratio and use it instead of the Rule of Thirds.

Finding a beautiful PowerPoint color scheme

Nothing determines the look and feel of a presentation more than its colors. Not all colors go well together. A matter of personal taste, but there is also hard science. How to find a color scheme that suits your situation?

• From an image. Good images have a natural harmony of colors. There are great online tools that allow you to upload an image and extract colors from it (kuler, colr, etc.). This image could then feature prominently on the title page of your presentation.
  
  
• From a corporate logo. Many companies have not installed PowerPoint templates with the proper corporate colors. Take a hi-res image of your company's logo and subject it to a similar process as you would do with an image.
  
  
• From a color you like. Pick one color you like/is appropriate and let a tool generate matching colors automatically. For example, move the slider in the color wheel in kuler.

Once you extracted the desired colors, write down their "RGB" codes and enter them as a color template in PowerPoint.

For example, for my own web site I was inspired by the fresh colors of an apple and generous amounts of water.

The resulting color scheme can be viewed here.