PowerPoint for Business in 60 Minutes

Description

PowerPoint for Business in 60 Minutes

Course Description

Copyright Ross Maynard 2021

Course Description

Welcome to PowerPoint for Business in 60 Minutes.

Microsoft PowerPoint has been around for nearly 35 years, and I am sure you are familiar with it, and have experienced many PowerPoint presentations – some good; many extremely tedious!

Creating a business presentation in PowerPoint presents a number of challenges and there is a danger of “death by PowerPoint”. I recently attended a meeting which was supposed to be a planning discussion but which the person leading the meeting insisted on introducing with a PowerPoint presentation of 60 slides – mostly bullet points! We were hardly in the mood for action planning after that assault on our senses. 

PowerPoint is good for presenting business results or for a training course, but you need to plan your slideshow carefully to avoid bullet-point boredom and to keep your audience engaged and interested. And that is the purpose of this course – to teach you PowerPoint techniques which you may not be familiar with, and which will help you improve the impact of your business presentations.

Less is more in a slide show so it is important to use techniques and effects which will help engage your audience and draw their attention to the points that matter. 

In “PowerPoint for Business in 60 Minutes”, I cover six key topics that will help you produce more impactful business presentations:

1. The best slide transitions and animations for business presentations
2. The morph transition to make the narration of an agenda, or similar list, or a team photograph extremely slick and professional
3. The Zoom effect to create a summary slide with hyperlinks to zoom into the section that you or your audience choose
4. How to animate charts to highlight the key points you want to bring out
5. How to embed Excel tables with slicers into PowerPoint, and why PowerPoint is not developed enough to make this useful for a business presentation
6. How to turn your PowerPoint presentation into a video. This is the technique I am most often asked how to do.

This is not a full “PowerPoint from scratch” course: it assumes familiarity of Microsoft’s ubiquitous programme. Instead, the course takes only 1 hour of your time to focus on key techniques that can help you improve the impact of the presentations you create.

I hope you enjoy the course.

Key Learning Points 

On completion of the course, delegates will be able to:

• Identify the most useful slide transitions and animations for business presentations
• Use the morph transition to draw the audience’s attention
• Create a “zoom” summary slide to jump to user-selected sections of slides
• Animate charts to highlight key points
• Embed a Microsoft Excel table in a PowerPoint slide 
• Create a video with commentary of their PowerPoint presentation

Curriculum

Lesson 1: Transitions and Animations

Lesson 2: The Morph Transition

Lesson 3: Zoom

Lesson 4: Animating Charts

Lesson 5: Excel Tables and Slicers in PowerPoint (or Not!)

Lesson 6: Making a PowerPoint Video

Pre-Course Requirements

There are no pre-course requirements

Additional Resources

None

Course Tutor

Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in business processes and organisation development. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses.

Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

Questions

1. What slide effect allows you to give the illusion of moving around a larger “page”?
1. The Wipe transition.
2. The Dissolve transition.
3. The Push transition.
4. The Fly-In animation

1. What does “Zoom” in PowerPoint allow you to do?
1. Zoom creates the illusion of “zooming in” on a particular part of a slide 
2. Zoom creates a summary slide with hyperlinks to the individual slides or sections contained in the summary
3. Zoom creates a smooth object animation from one slide to another to animate, for example, an agenda or timeline
4. Zoom is used to highlight areas of a chart or graphic to draw the audience’s attention

1. What is the main problem with embedding a Microsoft Excel table with slicers into PowerPoint?
1. The slicers do not work, and the table cannot be manipulated, in presentation mode in PowerPoint
2. The table cannot be opened or manipulated in PowerPoint slide view
3. Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint are incompatible with each other
4. The file size created is too large for most business PCs to handle

1. When seeking to create an MP4 video file from a PowerPoint presentation, why is it advisable to record the commentary separately?
1. PowerPoint’s built-in recording facility is unreliable and frequently crashes
2. It’s much quicker to record the audio separately and then insert it into PowerPoint and save as a video file
3. Separate video editing software needs to be used to improve the video’s look and sound where the audio is recorded directly in PowerPoint
4. It removes the stress of commentating “live” on the presentation while recording it, and allows any mistakes and errors to be cut out