The second part of our PowerPoint 2010 review centres around the improvements made in usability. There are two reasons for these improvements to be made: to reduce the stress involved in trying to perfect a presentation by making the process easier; and to save time, by reducing the number of clicks needed to perform a function, or removing the need for plug-ins or other programs.

Our testers noted three distinct areas of improvement in PowerPoint 2010. Here we explain these, and detail examples of each.

Menu Functions

One of the most noticeable things about the move from earlier versions of PowerPoint to 2010 is the shift to more intuitive menus. There has been a real effort to make things simpler and quicker for users, and this has been shown in certain functions in particular. The animation menu is significantly different, with large icons depicting each animation, and a preview of each shown by simply hovering over each option. Motion paths in particular are easier to use from this menu.

The print preview menu displays all options on screen at once, so that it is not necessary to navigate through different folders and tabs. Similarly, users are given different paste options from an automatic menu, creating a much easier option for the user.

More Editing Options

Another great improvement seen in many features of PowerPoint is the inclusion of more editing options. Pie charts are a good example of this; another is gradient fill. 2010 boasts a huge range of preset colour schemes (including everything from Rainbow to Chrome), rather than only offering the choice of two colours.

The introduction of gradient stops is fantastic. These can be added or removed separately, so that the user can include up to 10 different colours or other attributes at his own discretion. This gives a much greater control over any gradient, as colour, transparency and brightness can be changed for each individual gradient stop. The position of each can be adjusted according to percentage, or by dragging across the bar. In short, the user has a much greater control over gradient, and it is possible to get very exact effects.

Far less editing is needed to format pictures correctly after inserting them, and it is now easier and quicker to edit live graphs. The WordArt editing menu in particular is greatly improved. Inserting a WordArt automatically opens up the ‘Drawing Tools’ tab, meaning that it is now much easier to edit these in PowerPoint – a function that in 03 required a plug-in.

Time Saving

The new background removal tool is fantastic when used correctly, and can save a lot of time. Simply insert a picture and the Remove Background icon will appear on the far left of the Picture Tools tab. This feature will automatically remove what it perceives to be the background, and the user can then edit these changes using a few simple buttons, with the background adjusting intelligently.

The best new time saving feature in our opinion is the movie trimming capabilities. A lot of presenters now like to incorporate video in their presentations, and in the past we’ve found ourselves having to resort to using flash to achieve the required effect. With these changes, that is no longer necessary.

Another improvement is that you can now insert a screenshot with only two clicks from the main screen. The process is easy, and eliminates the need to mess around with windows; the user can choose the window he wishes to use from an icon in the drop-down menu.

Any Problems?

Some of our testers reported having trouble with editing shapes they had made. It was reported that it was difficult to find the tools to edit the shape once it was created. The most notable problem became obvious when our testers attempted to fill a shape with a picture: the images distorted to fit the shape making the user either manually resize using the options within the picture format options, or resize using the crop tool, then resaving. This problem was also reported for 2007.

The only real issues our testers found where related to the change in menus. The difference from 07 to 2010 is not too significant, but those who resisted the transition from 03 (as many did, owing to several reported bugs in 07) may struggle to make the transition from toolbars to tabs. That said, the menu change has been made with the user in mind, and once users have adjusted to the new system, it seems likely that they would in fact find it simpler.

Conclusion

PowerPoint 2010 has been designed with the user in mind. Most (if not all) improvements, when used correctly, save time and effort when designing a slide. While it is easy to get distracted by some of the showy new features, using the subtler, more technical, functions to create a more professional presentation should require less clicks. Perhaps most importantly some improvements, particularly in video editing, negate the need to use plug-ins or other software, thus saving the user a lot of time.

In all, PowerPoint 2010 shows a lot of promise, and should make creating effective presentations easier for amateurs and professionals alike.

The video below is an example from the PowerPoint team, showing how easily videos can be produced (and put on YouTube) using PowerPoint 2010. This software can do some very impressive things…

m62 took a short visual presentation of medium complexity and playtested three software packages that convert presentations into Flash™ animations (that can be integrated into a webpage or blog, or distributed without fear of versioning issues on different machines). Here’s what happened.

Articulate Presenter ‘09 – Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Windows7, tested with PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007

Articulate’s offering markets itself as an e-learning material creation tool. It offers a range of publishing options; Flash presentation for Web, a Word document of slide snapshots and speaker notes, self-running CD, or an audio-only podcast. Since we’re in the visual communications business, we have foregone the podcast and handout functionality here.

Installation is simple, embedding an Articulate submenu right into the PowerPoint window (easier to navigate in PPT 2007 which creates a new ribbon of buttons,  than in 2003 which drops down a list, but it’s still pretty intuitive to see what’s on offer). Before converting you can record narrative onto the slides (in a separate preview window), and then afterwards tweak the timings if you’re not happy with them. If you’ve ever used PowerPoint’s own narrative recorder this new interface takes a bit of getting used to. Narration is recorded a slide at a time, and requires clicking on separate buttons to advance the animations and slides rather than just clicking the mouse or keyboard continuously to proceed, as comes naturally.

Audio/video quality options are not available at this stage and are instead confined to a separate submenu, which makes creating or amending a voiceover quick to get into. More confident users (actually, perhaps that should be ‘less confident’…) can even open up an impressive audio wave editor that allows you to trim out all those pauses, coughs, ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’.

Also available is the ‘Add Annotations’ process that offers the interesting option to draw on your slides ‘telestrator-style’, by adding arrows, boxes, highlights, check marks etc. If you haven’t incorporated this kind of thing into your slides at the design stage, and you don’t mind the preset graphics style, you might find this worth getting to grips with. It does take some practice: the interface runs the pre-timed slides while you choose your shapes and place them, so you have to be quick on the draw.

You can then preview your creation and opt to Publish once you’re happy. This brings up a tabbed menu screen with the various format options described above; we’ll focus on publishing for the Web. Some digging at this stage reveals extensive calibration submenus, including specifications for rendering quality, navigation restrictions, and tweaks to change the appearance of the embedded Player (you can also add a presenter photo, bio and email address). There are only a couple of preset layouts for the player however, so if you want less conspicuous play controls you have to build up the design yourself.

Once you’re done calibrating to your heart’s content, hit Publish. Our modest ten slides took around thirty seconds to convert, and then gave options to view the presentation in a browser, upload it via FTP, or email it to someone. The final option generates a friendly email with instructions on what to do with the files inside the attachment in order to get it to work.

Quality of the output file with the default settings is good, albeit slightly less sharp than the native PowerPoint show, and we noticed very little degradation of animation effects even with complex, multi-layered combinations. Puzzlingly, we couldn’t find any way of publishing the presentation with the clicks preserved – viewers  must use the playback controls if the timings haven’t been set, which could be confusing.

The option to email the presentation with instructions is helpful, mostly because the output folder contains a huge number of flash files and construction files to hunt through. There are no options to save out the presentation in different formats (.exe, .swf etc.), the ‘go’ file is always a .html, which might be more or less useful depending what you plan to do with your package once it’s converted.

There’s probably more fun to be had by way of setting up user interaction (quizzes and games), but that reaches beyond the scope of this review. Even ignoring these features, you’re getting a good performer with a huge amount of functionality, but at what cost? Presenter ’09 standalone is currently on special at $699 (UP: $799).

iSpring Presenter / iSpring Pro- Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Windows7, tested with PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007

iSpring Solutions has three products on the market, iSpring Pro, iSpring Presenter and an SDK. We decided to test Presenter,which is a similar type of product to Articulate’s, and also the lighter iSpring Pro program since we’re not overly concerned in our arena with creating interactive content.

Like Articulate’s product, iSpring Presenter integrates easily and rapidly into the PowerPoint window, either as a toolbar and submenu (PPT03) or ribbon (PPT07).  Recording narration is even simpler than with Articulate’s product, providing the option to record audio continuously (just one button to click as the slides build and advance).  iSpring has a similarly friendly way to record video as well, just plug in your webcam and hit Record Video, and you’re taken to the same click-through interface featuring your talking head on screen. You can also sync the animations with the audio and/or video in the same window, which is a real timesaver if you need a few tries to get it perfect.

Elsewhere, like Articulate iSpring lets you add an existing Flash movie onto a slide, and is quite loud and proud about its YouTube button, which in exchange for a YouTube link will embed a clip and a player onto the slide. This is essentially the same ‘insert from link’ function that Articulate uses, but here there’s also an inbuilt video tutorial to guide novices through the process. Again, there’s a feature to insert a quiz, and again we’re not really interested in it. The in-window menu is clean and straightforward: record narration and/or video, sync the slides, make changes to the ‘presenter and company’ metadata if you want, throw in a YouTube clip, and then hit Publish.

A new, large, tabbed window now pops up containing all the various publishing options. iSpring have really put some effort into keeping this part of the process simple - it’s much easier to deal with these options all in one go rather than tinkering during the preparation process. The output can be saved to CD, to iSpring’s online sharing community SlideBoom, attached to an email or saved to hard disk. For increased flexibility, different output formats can be chosen via simple checkboxes: separate flash files for use with other animation packages, an .EXE file which is a completely self-contained single ‘go’ file, or a single .swf movie with an accompanying .html file.

There are nine preset player styles, ranging from the businesslike (with navigation pane, picture / video, and presenter information) to the inconspicuous (transparent player buttons in one corner), with other styles at various degrees of glossiness and functionality. One player allows viewers to types notes as they watch or scribble on the slides themselves.  Depending on the detail each style affords, the players can be customised with colour options and information or photos. Changes can be previewed in real time with the user’s actual slides, which makes it much easier to see how the final product will behave.

On other tabs, a similarly open interface presents settings for video and audio quality, playback controls (this time you do have the option, among others, to advance the slides on a click), and the pixel size of the output video – very useful if you’re using a CMS to insert your presentation into a blog or webpage. Another tab lets you customise the image, video and audio compression.

On hitting Publish, iSpring Presenter converted our test slides in just under thirty seconds and immediately launched the file in a web browser. Using the default settings, the graphics and audio were crisp and the animation very sharp. Upon examining the output folder, there’s just one file in it – in this case a .swf file which opens by default in a web browser – very portable and easy to upload or share. Even simpler is the .exe format option (automatically zipped for security) which bundles the presentation and player with the latest flash launcher as well, again in a single file.

iSpring Pro works in exactly the same way as iSpring Presenter, but without the options to record video and insert quizzes, so it’s all about getting the slides narrated and self running with minimum hassle. The real attractions to these packages are the intuitive interface and low cost. iSpring Presenter downloads with a business licence at $399, and if you can live without the video recording and quizzes, iSpring Pro is just $249.

FlashPoint Professional –Compatible with XP, Vista, Windows 7, PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007. Tested with PowerPoint 2007.

On offer from FlashDemo comes FlashPoint Pro, a straightforward PowerPoint to flash conversion tool. This is the lighter of the three and installs cleanly and easy, embedding a single button into the PowerPoint interface. This immediately launches a Wizard, starting with three options for encoding the final file: a single Flash movie (.swf) with an option to generate an .exe (useful), as separate Flash movies by slide (probably useful), or as a screensaver.

The next stage offers two player options (a row of navigation buttons, or nothing), and sets up some very basic options around the way the slides run and the render quality. An Advanced tab lets you redirect the viewer to a website after the movie has finished playing, which might be a good idea but can be done more easily by adding hyperlinks into the presentation yourself.

The next two stages allow you to import audio files into the presentation, and record a narration for each slide. FlashPoint Pro appears to use PowerPoint’s own Rehearse Timings feature to accurately sync the animations with your voiceover, which is actually a much simpler way than the more sophisticated packages: you get the slides running full screen, and click to advance the builds and slide transitions, rather than working with buttons in a separate window.

Once that’s done, FlashPoint Pro begins the conversion, which takes about the same time as the other two packages. Opening the output file however is disappointing. The converted file is noticeably degraded in image quality, even with the ‘Improved’ image conversion box checked, and many of the PowerPoint shapes that feature gradient fills or transparent fills were not displaying correctly. There were also several graphical artefacts remaining on screen after their objects had disappeared. Several animation effects suffered, with fades building in very slowly and wipes running jerkily, although motion paths and grow/shrink effects were very smooth.

The quality of the voiceover was rather good; FlashPoint provided the same recording quality options as the inbuilt PowerPoint tool, so the narration sounded clear. Unfortunately due to the visual stuttering caused by the conversion of some animation effects, the audio did not always run in sync with the visuals.

Overall, with conversion performance at the bottom-end and a complete lack of customisation, FlashPoint Pro does not live up to its claim of creating “professional-look Flash presentations and e-learning courses”. With a price tag of $59, it’s probably suited only to PowerPoint hobbyists and bullet-pointers. If that’s you, there are much more useful things you could be reading on this website before you start spending on additional software.

Which is best?

Except as an entry level solution for presentations with very basic graphics and low-end animation, FlashPoint Pro is hard to recommend. The last thing you want to do after producing a deck of slides is to then retro-engineer the graphics and animation because of poor conversion quality. It’s very easy to use, has good flexibility in the output options and is inexpensive, but sadly can’t cut it when dealing with graphics and motion of any degree of sophistication. If you’re still working with flat backgrounds and bullet-points, this will probably do what you need, but it’s hard for us to gauge the value of the tool if that’s your desired type of output.

iSpring Presenter and Articulate Presenter ’09 do very similar things in very different ways, the only major gaps in functionality being that iSpring lets you record the video narration, while Articulate gives you the slide annotation feature and audio editor. Each of these features may be more or less useful and would probably balance out the two products (since the rendering times and output quality are pretty much the same). But the big differences are in cost and ease of use.

Articulate Presenter may offer huge flexibility in customising the Player specifications and calibrating the viewer experience, but its extensive menus are not easy to find and navigate. A better range of output formats and settings, and a more thoughtful structure to the submenus would have made for a less bewildering experience. That said, the output quality is first-class, and those looking to produce interactive learning tools or e-brochures will probably find value here once they get up the learning curve and perhaps invest a few hours watching the online tutorials. For publishing a presentation for web or soft/hard copy distribution, we have to wonder whether it’s worth the hefty price tag as well as the effort required to learn where everything is.

iSpring Presenter is far and away more pleasant and intuitive, and a few hundred dollars cheaper. The viewer experience is slightly less customisable than with Articulate’s package, but iSpring delivers flexibility where it’s needed most, and without any hunting around.  Powerful as they are, both iSpring programs feel completely unintimidating at the publishing stage and make it very easy to set up the exact format, size and quality that you need.

As stated, we’re more concerned with presentations than E-learning tools, but in both cases the option to record video narration seems like a more desirable option than the ability to add arrows and boxes (something that really should be thought about at the slide design stage). Even better, if you don’t need the video and quizzes, the lighter iSpring Pro retains all of Presenter’s output quality and flexibility at just $249, so whatever you’re planning to do with your Flash-based presentation, iSpring’s solutions convert to better value all round.

Avoiding Decoration

Don’t confuse decoration with communication. As brothers Chip and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick, ‘We need to end once and for all the cult of clip art, as well as the splinter church of stock photography. “Show, don’t tell” doesn’t mean that you take your slide about “thinking globally” and add a clip-art world map.’ Use graphics that genuinely help the audience to understand, and don’t be afraid to bring props into the room to supplement your slides.

Slides Should Reinforce Your Words

Well known marketer Seth Godin knows as much as most about persuasion, and doing things that aren’t necessarily the norm. ’Bullets’, he says, ‘are for the NRA’. Presenters should create cue cards but ‘put them in your hand’ and not on screen. Then, as the slides don’t need to serve as cue cards they should ‘reinforce your words, not repeat them’.

Attractiveness vs. Effectiveness

Mike Pulsifer, author of the blog Thoughts on Presenting and Design, argues that presenters should really rethink their design. There is a big difference between attractive slides, and effective slides. What is the point of slides that look good, if they don’t convey your message? Take time to rework your presentation, and “change your whole office culture.” We couldn’t agree more.

Number of Slides

Don’t worry about how many slides your sales presentation runs to. As Jan Schultink, author of the well-regarded Sticky Slides blog notes, when people worry about the number of slides they have “they are choosing the wrong metric; number of slides, kilos of printout, presentation file size, it does not matter. Time is the only relevant factor.”

Other Visual Aids

Remember that slides aren’t the only possible visual aids. We think PowerPoint is great when used well, but they aren’t the only visual aid available. Make use of flip charts, boards and posters, paper handouts, your product, video, or other media if it helps to get your message across.

Using Your Surroundings

Own the room. This isn’t going to be possible when presenting for a rushed ten minutes in a prospect’s office, but there are plenty of situations where it is possible to get in to dress a room in advance. For Jon Steel, author of Perfect Pitch, ‘the room in which a pitch is delivered should be a physical manifestation of both the agency and its idea’, and the room ‘has to feel different’. This might mean dressing a room with examples of work, images produced in the research process, or even visual aides to make up the presentation. Dressing a room to relate to the core message of a presentation helps bring the message to life. But remember that the room must support the presentation, not distract from it. Keep things ‘on-topic’.

Hand-Outs

Do more with hand-outs. For many pitching solutions to creative briefs, it is important to remember that the prospect is buying both an idea and somebody to implement that idea. For this reason, leave-behinds should not simply consist of slide print-outs. They shouldn’t simply repeat the material of the presentation, but go further to summarise this idea in a way that helps to ‘demonstrate the relationship between the people who work in the agency and that idea’ (Jon Steel, Perfect Pitch). For Steel’s agencies, this means asking staff to bring in photos, write personal stories, and then binding these collections in glossy print. Pitching to design and build a school? Ask staff to tell stories about the best places they have studied in. Want to leave your slides behind? Record narration, or host slides online.

The results we produced were so extensive that we’ve split this review into two parts. This, part one, outlines the improvements and new features PowerPoint 2010 professes over the earlier versions.

What’s New?

Video – In older versions of PowerPoint, videos would have to be linked from PowerPoint to the internet, or to the correct file on your computer. This would cause problems if the internet connection was lost; the file was moved; or when trying to use the PowerPoint file on another computer. It also meant that video could not be edited when in PowerPoint, and when embedded, was in a simple rectangular frame.

2010 has changed the way videos are used in PowerPoint. You can now insert a video file directly into PowerPoint, which, aside from making life a lot easier for the presenter, actually enables the video to be edited within PowerPoint itself. You can adjust the length, brightness, colour, frame… In short, PowerPoint now covers all the basics in video editing, reducing the need for additional software to prepare video for use in presentations.

Animation – I would wager that there are few, if any, presenters who have not at some point experienced a lag in certain animations (unless, that is, the most complicated animations you’ve ever used are ‘Appear’ and ‘Fade Out’). Motion paths have perhaps been the biggest culprit, but there were quite a few animations that had a tendency to jump, and not flow as smoothly as they should with PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007.

PowerPoint 2010 has changed all that. Animations now run as they were designed to. Gone is the jumping, gone is the delay, and you are left with animation as it should be.

It’s a Lot Prettier – Those who have customised PowerPoint 2003 will vouch for the fact that if you’ve chosen to make a lot of tools available on the main screen, the view can look a tad messy. 2007, when customised, can also do so. Practical? Perhaps. Pleasing on the eye? No.

PowerPoint 2010 in general just looks better. It’s cleaner than 2007, and much cleaner than 2003. It looks, in fact, like a design tool. Slides themselves are crisper, and were in fact compared by one of our designers to the graphics on an HD advert. In general, the whole program is just nicer to look at.

Share – It’s not that we haven’t had the option to share a PowerPoint file before, it’s just that it had to be done outside of PowerPoint. Send it as an email; upload it to a slide sharing website; convert it to video. All possible, just a little time-consuming.

Now, sharing your presentations has never been easier. You are given the option to ‘share’ right from the ‘backstage’ area. By email, by website… Arguably the best function in this section is the ability to convert a file straight to video with recorded narration. Before, this would have to be done using another piece of software. Now, it can be done with minimal clicks, and minimal fuss.

Stability and Power – PowerPoint 2007, while offering new and improved features on 2003, wasn’t perhaps the most  stable programme. There were bugs, lags, and compatibility issues, that caused many PowerPoint users to revert back to the older PowerPoint 2003.

PowerPoint 2010 has all the features of 2007 (plus extras), with none of the problems (thus far). 2010 has resolved the known bugs, and combined an increased range of options with great constancy in performance. Hyperlinks are more stable, lags have been removed, and the whole experience is a lot less stressful.

Any problems?

With the more obvious, accessible, animations and transitions it might be tempting for amateur designers to go crazy and use every option available. The trouble with this is that most of the new animations in PowerPoint 2010 would serve to distract the audience rather than to direct their attention towards the right things, even to the extent of becoming annoying. Users should think carefully about how they use each function, and why. Probably a challenge for user-education, rather than a problem with the software.

So… How much better is it?

The general opinion of our designers is that PowerPoint 2010 is what 2007 should have been, with the tidy layout, extra features and smooth animations. For functionality, 2010 is the way forward. In the right hands, this software will produce truly beautiful, effective presentations.

In the second half of this review, we will look at usability. How easy is PowerPoint 2010 to use, both for the new user and those experienced in older versions? Our designers judge the ease of use, based on how straightforward a function is to use, and how time-consuming to execute.

We asked our expert PowerPoint slide designers for their personal PowerPoint design tips to help you to keep your slides in shape, whatever your level of presentation design experience.

Keep it simple

We all know that slide after slide of bullet points tends to disengage audiences, but taking the visuals too far by creating busy, garish graphics and overdone animations will be just as irritating.

For each slide, think about the key message and make sure everything on screen is complementing that. If you find yourself inserting more than five or six photographs on one slide, perhaps it would be better to express the ideas behind them in your narration instead, and use a simple diagram to represent the key message. Over-complicated shapes and animations can also distract from, more than reinforce, your point. Try to stick to regular shapes and subtle animations: a small silhouette of a person moving simply across the page will look better than a photo dancing across.

The key thing to remember is that you are not creating a presentation for entertainment value or purely for visual interest; the visuals are there for a purpose, to add clarity to what you are saying and keep the audience focused on the right thing at the right time. If there’s too much going on, or too many interesting photos to look at, you can easily lose control of the communication flow.

Stick to a sensible colour palette

Garish slides filled with contrasting primary colours look cheap and nasty. Stick to a simple and subtle colour scheme based around your company’s brand guidelines and work everything around that. Look at your company’s brand book or website for inspiration, and choose fill colours and font colours that stand out well from the background without clashing too much. Click on Format > Slide Design to bring up a selection of colour schemes so you can choose one that best complements your background image, or if you need to set specific colours to match your brand guidelines, you can click on Edit Colour Schemes… below the preset schemes to set your own custom colours. View a short tutorial that shows you how to do this – choosing a slide colour palette.

Design takes time

Presentations rarely have long lead times, but you can’t get away with adding new slides the night before a deadline that feature a bunch of obviously rushed graphs and animations. Allow yourself time to really perfect every aspect of your slides. You want to make sure that you are using an effective visual aid, not just a jumble of graphics. If you’re really pushed for time, you’re better off copying and pasting elements from other slides in the deck and modifying them, rather than starting from scratch.

Crop tool

Use this to trim a photo so that the key part of the picture is more obvious. This is particularly useful when using a screen grab; the image you need can be easily singled out from an image of the entire screen.

To do this, select the image you wish to crop, and then click the ‘crop’ icon (found on the picture tool bar). This will bring up black corner outlines, and in the mid section of each wall. These can be dragged at will to create the edit of the image you want. Don’t worry if you crop out too much and need to undo it – PowerPoint remembers the entire image even after you’ve trimmed it, so you can always drag the crop back to ‘uncover’ more of the original image if you need to.

Customise your toolbar

A must for any PowerPoint user, a customised toolbar gives you quick access to tools you use most frequently, thus cutting down time.

To create a toolbar, click Tools > Customise. This will open the Customize window. Under the ‘Toolbars’ tab, click New. Give your new toolbar a name, and then it will pop up on your screen – completely blank for now. Now clicking on the different ‘Categories’ in the left hand list will display all the toolbar buttons related to that category. This can be done for just about every function possible – have a play around, and choose the tools most useful to you. Key categories our designers find especially useful are the Format, Table, and Drawing as these provide useful tools for building slides. View a short tutorial that shows you how to do this – PowerPoint Toolbar Customisation.

Drawing with the ‘shift’ key

The shift key is your ‘regulator’ when creating autoshapes or lines. When drawing a rectangle or oval, holding down the ‘shift’ key keeps the shape regular, so you get a perfect square or circle (the same goes for more complicated shapes like stars). Also, when resizing a photo or shape, holding down ‘shift’ will preserve the dimensions of the object so that it doesn’t end up distorted.

‘Shift’ is especially useful when drawing lines – holding it down will only let you draw a line that is perfectly horizontal, vertical, or along a limited number of diagonal angles. This can save massive amounts of time and effort when drawing graphs or tables. View a tutorial featuring more handy keyboard tools like this – Keyboard shortcuts for PowerPoint.

Set AutoShape default

This handy feature enables you to determine the fill properties and line properties of a new AutoShape. All you need to do is format one shape with the right properties, and then every new shape you draw will look the same. This makes it much quicker and easier to create consistent graphics to ensure your slides look professional.

To set an AutoShape default, create a shape and double click on it, then choose the settings you want from the various formatting options (fill colour and style, line colour and weight etc.) Then check the box that says ‘Set AutoShape Defaults’. Now any new shape or line you draw will have the same properties.

Use drop shadow on text

This tool can make all the difference to the clarity of your text, especially when contrast is lacking because of the colours you have to use. A drop shadow is a contrasting shadow that sits just behind the text, enabling it to stand out better. In order to get the best result from PowerPoint’s shadow function, it is advised that you select a colour several shades darker than the colour on which your text rests. This will avoid the harsh contrast that might result from the use of plain black or directly contrasting colour, but still make it easily visible.

To apply the drop shadow, first make sure you have the ‘shadow settings’ toolbar available, which can be accessed through the Tools > Customise menu. Select the text you need to distinguish, then choose the colour required for the shadow via the drop down selection box on the shadow settings toolbar. You are then able to fine-tune the positioning of the shadow relative to the text through the use of the ‘nudge’ buttons on the Shadow Settings toolbar. For the most pleasing results, it is often effective to make sure the shadow hugs the text as closely as possible without disappearing under it altogether.

• Create a hyper-linked index slide in order to allow your audience to choose what material you spend time on
• Create hyperlinks to slides in other presentations, in order to allow quick discussion and presentation of further detail such as case studies
• Create hyperlinks to other applications, and to websites.

Use these tricks together to create truly interactive presentations.

[See post to watch Flash video]

The most basic way of introducing interactivity in a PowerPoint presentation is to learn how to skip to specific slides within a presentation using keyboard shortcuts. Far more impressive, and what we focus on here, is to set up simple hyperlinks to navigate to other slides without interrupting a slideshow.

Subjective VS Objective Quality in PowerPoint Design

What makes a slide work? Well, we at m62 believe the ingredients are a strong and focused message, engaging slide visuals, intelligent presentation design and attractiveness, and professional delivery. But interestingly, since the design is the ’skin’ of the presentation, the icing on a painstakingly-assembled cake, this is often the aspect that is most frequently subjected to scrutiny, debate, and adjustment ad infinitum.

When quality-auditing each other’s work our designers follow an interesting distinction between aspects of design that can contribute to (or detract from) the slides’ effectiveness, and aspects that similarly affect their ‘eye candy’ quality.  We refer to this distinction as Subjective VS Objective Quality Standards (or SOQS). Understanding this difference can save presenters and presentation designers a lot of time and effort.

Aesthetics and Presentation Design

When designers or presenters argue about whether a slide would look better in blue or green, they aren’t really making any claims about the colours themselves; they are not disagreeing on any point of fact. What they are doing is describing something about themselves and what kinds of things they find enjoyable. Discussions about slide design are often simply disagreements over aesthetics  - a very powerful, but frequently misunderstood, form of judgment.

It is frequently very interesting to compare and discuss our aesthetic judgments. Yet, it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time arguing over whether a blue shape or green shape would look better on a slide – but, amazingly, that’s what a lot of presenters do.

Except where corporate brand guidelines apply (which frequently dictate colour palettes but little else where PowerPoint is concerned), our designers have free rein to apply their artistic instinct and make the slides look as stunning as possible. In this sense, having freedom of design within a framework of meaning (the storyboard) and rules (the Objective Quality Standards), our designers are artists collaborating on a work of craft. These Objective Quality Standards “clips the wings of genius” (Kant), making sure that clear communication is not compromised in favour of purely ‘nice design’.

Objective Quality in Presentation Design

m62’s Objective Quality Standards take the form of a fixed set of rules that our designers follow when designing slides. Each and every slide we produce is put through quality audit and measured against these Standards. Any deviation from the Standards, which set tolerances for over a hundred specific slide properties, requires a rework before the presentation goes live. The OQS are strictly enforced, but they have nothing to do with the graphics. Instead, they seek to prevent tiny but significant distractions. We need the audience to pay complete attention to the presenter and the slide simultaneously as the presentation is delivered. Anything that looks out of place, untidy or unexpected could provoke a “why is that like that..?” reaction in an audience member and make them disengage for a few seconds – grit in the Vaseline of smooth communication.

Objective Quality Rules

There is common sense behind all of the OQS rules.

• An arrow that points downwards should be animated from top to bottom (e.g. ‘wipe from top’).
• A row of pictures should be aligned and evenly distributed (using PowerPoint’s align and distribute tools, not by eye).
• Graphical objects should adhere to a consistent palette and should not introduce a crazy new colour for no good reason.
• Animations should not be too dramatic, last longer than three seconds or repeat themselves over and over – overenthusiastic animations can be mesmerising at best and irritating at worst.

Slide Titles, an Example

The first thing that usually appears on a slide is the title. We want the audience to read the title quickly and understand it so they can contextualise the information that follows. Therefore we always place our titles on a contrasting bar that wipes from left to right. Contrast is important because we need the text to be clearly legible and we need the audience to understand that this is a title and not part of the explanation. Wiping from left to right is important because that is the direction the eye travels as it reads. Title text (along with any other text) is also determined at an absolute minimum of 24pt – this is the minimum size that we find audiences can read comfortably and quickly in a typical setting. If they have to strain to read it, they might not bother, and if they don’t bother, it’s a waste of time having the text there at all.

Eliminate Distraction in Presentation Design

Arguments about subjective design quality can be a welcome distraction from rehearsing, but they rarely illuminate more than the individual tastes of the observers, and cannot provide much insight into the various tastes among the next audience.

The point is this: when you’re finalising a presentation, design matters just as much as messaging, visualisation and delivery. But the aesthetic aspects of slides will not make or break them. Think about the basics: “Does the slide look tidy? Is everything easy to see/read? Do the right things grab attention at the right time?”

Eliminating distractions in presentation graphics will go a lot further towards keeping your audience engaged than trying to guess their favourite colours.

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How to record narration in PowerPoint 2007 in order to deliver a self-running presentation. Useful for distributing slides that don’t make sense without a presenter, when the presenter can’t be there.

Covers setting up the microphone, sound quality settings, recording narration, and saving the PowerPoint presentation.

Includes a simple use of the push-left transition to animate a timeline over two slides.

More advanced techniques including manipulating images within autoshapes, compressing photographs, and cropping images to fit exactly into autoshapes to minimise file size.