Preface

Using PowerPoint is something that many people have done at some point in their business life, and maybe before as students – but creating engaging and impactful presentations is something many users struggle with.

When I was asked to write on PowerPoint applications, it became obvious I also had to discuss more than just the tools. For close to 20 years now, I have seen clients struggle because they did not know about the industry’s best practices and did not have formal training to help them discover and use some more advanced and very helpful features. All the people I trained and all the clients I worked with also had a common desire: they all wanted to save time when creating their presentations.

This is why this book is different from most PowerPoint books. You have the choice to go on a journey through the most important tools to help you plan, craft, and deliver visually appealing and more flexible impactful presentations. Otherwise, you can choose to read any chapter or about any topic that will help you learn about features and tools that you didn’t know already.

Whatever method of reading you adopt, I can guarantee that you will be more knowledgeable on presentation best practices, PowerPoint features that help you create better presentations more efficiently, and how to improve your presentation delivery by the end of this book.

Who this book is for

This book is for business professionals without any formal design training or experience, but the advice contained in the book could also apply to executives and teachers. These professionals may have had some very brief PowerPoint training in the past, but many will be self-taught. Most will have used PowerPoint before and will therefore already be familiar with the basics.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Analyzing Your Audience and Presentation Delivery Needs, introduces questions that will help you plan and structure your presentation content.

Chapter 2, Using Industry Best Practices to Design Better Visuals, helps you learn about important industry best practices to improve your design.

Chapter 3, Leveraging PowerPoint’s Slide Master for Design, talks about how the Slide Master can be used as a design automation tool.

Chapter 4, Using PowerPoint’s Document Masters for Handouts and Notes, covers how to leverage masters, which will help you make your presentation files serve more than one purpose and still be efficient and impactful.

Chapter 5, Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Your Visuals, helps you understand how the Designer feature can save you some design time.

Chapter 6, Adding and Modifying Visual Elements, discusses how to use graphical elements and customize them to replace text and bullet points.

Chapter 7, Adding and Modifying Multimedia Elements, goes into how to improve your content by using and formatting audio and video elements.

Chapter 8, Working with Transitions and Animations, focuses on generating movement with purpose, which will improve the pace of your content and the audience’s understanding.

Chapter 9, Building Flexibility and Interactivity in Your Presentations, explains how to engage your audience by using navigation elements to adapt to their needs or show them special content.

Chapter 10, Using PowerPoint Third-Party Add-Ins, brings in a few ways to boost your content creation productivity and presentation management possibilities.

Chapter 11, Practicing Your Presentation Delivery, points out some of PowerPoint’s native tools that will help you practice your presentations so that you have a memorable effect on your audience.

Chapter 12, Using Presenter View, puts forward how this feature and its many tools can help you deliver more engaging presentations and have more control.

Chapter 13, Using PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams, has been included to help virtual presenters who use Teams discover many features that will help encourage engagement.

To get the most out of this book

This book will give you step-by-step instructions to help you find the right features and tools and use them. To get the most out of this book, you should try features that are new to you as you read about them. This is the best way to learn about and remember them. If your goal is to learn about how to implement a better presentation creation process, you should read the chapters in order, but reading chapters or picking up topics in any order can be valuable if you are a more advanced user.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
PowerPoint	Windows
PowerPoint Live/Teams	macOS is compatible in most cases
BrightSlide
BrandIn
WeCompress/NXPowerLite
Slidewise
Build-a-Graphic
THOR
PPTMerge

If you work for an organization with an IT admin team, you might need to confirm with them if you find that your M365 PowerPoint version lacks some features, or if you want to install any of the third-party add-ins discussed in this book.

After reading this book, if you need a little support or have some questions, please consider filling in this form – https://forms.office.com/r/9kX3bapZdG – which will also give you access to a special LinkedIn private support group. Here is a QR code for your convenience:

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “For example, you cannot have two objects named !!Shape on the same slide.”

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “If you uncheck the On Mouse Click checkbox, you can remove the option to navigate with the mouse or keyboard when the presentation is in slideshow mode.”

Tips or important notes

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Get in touch

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