Help a boss avoid “death by PowerPoint” by stealing presentation tips from the famously charismatic CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs. Jobs is a gifted speaker, not necessarily because he was born with talent, but because he sticks to several strategies. Jobs uses presentation software as a tool to visually complement his stories.
Avoid sending big files back and forth with your boss—try Dropbox, a virtual hard drive … Hold a web conference free and invite up to 20 guests, with DimDim, which Inc. magazine calls the best in its class … Print less by taking advantage of the less-popular settings in your Print dialogue box …
With more than 200 other administrative assistants in her building, Ilja Kraag sees admins working away in their “own little boxes,” independently figuring out how to tackle tasks that an admin at the next desk may have mastered long ago. So she decided to share some of her “best practices,” especially for common tasks, such as scheduling meetings.
“It’s one thing to keep a crowd engaged for two minutes, but two hours—or more—requires a different set of techniques,” says communications coach Carmine Gallo in BusinessWeek. So if you’re preparing a PowerPoint presentation, remember Gallo’s rules for keeping an audience captivated:
Put together a presentation that captivates an audience with the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.
Take a PowerPoint presentation from good to great with these six tips from Presentation S.O.S. by Mark Wiskup.
Use your laptop to squeeze more productivity out of meetings: Share data; brainstorm better; take and distribute meeting notes digitally.
Turn your best PowerPoint presentation ever into a custom template.
The new PowerPoint 2007 has had some work done to it. If you haven’t checked it out yet, take the new version for a “test drive”…
Using PowerPoint visuals that only Einstein could decipher doesn’t make the presenter look smarter. Complicated visuals will cause an audience to focus less on what the presenter is saying and more on trying to figure out the images. Here are seven rules for keeping visuals clear and powerful: