Tag Archive for: presentation

From Bland to Grand: Slide Design Makeovers

Watch average, “been there done that” designs be transformed into visually stunning slides in real time! This session walks you through a step-by-step process, revamping poorly designed slides into clear, compelling visuals that captivate audiences and elevate your messages. Learn practical tips and techniques to turn bland slide decks into grand designs.

You’ll learn:

  • Practical slide transformation techniques
  • How to jump-start creativity and find inspiration quickly
  • How simple design elements create interest and value

Awesome Animation

Stop making boring, static slides and bring your presentations to life with animation! In this fast-paced, fun presentation, Jole Simmons will show you how to use animation to keep your audience engaged, make your story more compelling, and take your presentations to the next level. From basic text and object animations to more advanced motion paths and timing techniques, you’ll learn how to build a rhythm in your slides to keep things moving without overwhelming your audience.

Topics include:

  • Master PowerPoint’s animation and motion path features to create smooth, dynamic slides
  • Learn how to control timing and sequencing to build a narrative with your animations
  • Use triggers and layers to add interactivity and make your presentations stand out
  • Discover ways to animate graphs and charts for better visual impact
  • Avoid common animation mistakes and create polished, professional presentations

12 Awesome PowerPoint Techniques for Better Presentations

PowerPoint is an essential tool for all types of communication, but it’s almost universally used poorly. Revolutionize your content with amazing visuals, engage your audience with compelling animations, and impress them with beautiful, professional designs—all using only PowerPoint.

In this session, you’ll see a host of visual storytelling techniques, all demonstrated live, that you can use immediately to create amazing presentations or interactive content. You’ll see how to apply these to marketing content, sales conversations, and exec keynotes, plus get free sources for graphics and productivity boosting tools.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Create dynamic visuals that support persuasive stories to engage your audience
  • Develop professional looking designs for presentations and other content
  • Become a PowerPoint legend with techniques to make effective presentations quickly and easily

Advanced Interactivity in PowerPoint

Most boring PowerPoint presentations are linear: just one slide after another. Learn how to break out of the mold and create a stunning, non-linear, interactive experience with PowerPoint! In this session, Chris Converse will show you strategies for creating a global navigation structure and an interactive table of contents that will dramatically help you navigate larger presentations.

Topics include:

  • How to interact with slides during a presentation
  • How to play a sequence of slides (Slide Zoom) from any point within your presentation

Three Minutes Max: PowerPoint

This crowd favorite is back and better than ever! Don’t miss this fun-filled, action-packed, highly educational, and mind-blowing session where each of our instructors will have just three minutes to share their favorite PowerPoint tip—then you get to vote for your favorite!

In past years, some of the best tips have been held for this session, so you don’t want to miss it!

Effective Visual Communication Using PowerPoint

Few people enjoy creating, delivering, or even watching PowerPoint presentations… and yet everyone is forced into doing these things sooner or later. Even worse, some presentations are too wordy, text-based, and generally dull. They don’t tell stories that engage, excite, or inspire; and they do little to actually help people learn.

This session addresses these needs, by giving you techniques and frameworks for creating more compelling, clear, and persuasive presentations by incorporating storytelling, visualization, and some PowerPoint skills to create and deliver more impactful presentations.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Craft persuasive audience-focused messages that cater to diverse needs and requirements
  • Incorporate visual storytelling to engage audiences and ensure they understand and follow-through
  • Use PowerPoint as a tool to meaningfully enhance your communication and make it successful

PowerPoint Templates that Work

Learn to make intuitive, easy-to-use, professional PowerPoint templates quickly. Great templates mean better presentations, but unfortunately, most do not work and are often misused. Avoid common traps and mistakes. Get the tips, tricks, and secrets the pros use to design and deliver PowerPoint templates that everyone can use the right way.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Make professional, user-friendly PowerPoint templates
  • Use master slides, layouts, and themes for consistency
  • Incorporate easy-to-edit diagrams and pictures
  • Help prevent casual template users from damaging your designs
  • Keep file sizes small

PowerPoint for InDesign Users: Getting Up to Speed

PowerPoint is the app that creative pros love to hate. And yet, we all have to use it sooner or later! The truth is that once you learn how PowerPoint works, you’ll find it’s incredibly powerful and can perform some tasks even better than Adobe’s tools.

If you’ve ever feared or hated PowerPoint… if you’ve ever made a presentation in InDesign or Photoshop because you didn’t want to face PowerPoint… take this opportunity to get to know it a little better. Step up your game and embrace the tool of choice for professional presentation designers. The more you know about PowerPoint, the more fun it is!

You’ll learn how to:

  • Make use of professional fonts and control typography
  • Set up a design grid and color palette in minutes
  • Make the most of vector graphics
  • Take advantage of Creative Cloud and your favorite stock libraries without ever leaving PowerPoint

Accessible PowerPoint

If you’re not making your PowerPoint accessible, you’re excluding people from your audience, plain and simple. It doesn’t matter if you are just presenting or exporting to PDF. There are specific accessibility considerations you must use to have an inclusive presentation. This session will explore the built-in accessibility tools, some “hidden features” and the best way to get the most accessible PPT documents into PDF or for presenting to a live audience.

  • Accessibility barriers in PowerPoint
  • Setting the Read Order
  • Writing effective alt-text
  • Using the Accessibility Checker
  • How to handle video and audio content
  • Tables, charts and graphs
  • Exporting to PDF and beyond

Microsoft Lunch Session: Presentation Design in the Copilot Era

This session is sponsored by Microsoft.

Get an inside look at how the PowerPoint team sees design of presentations evolving with AI and Copilot.

Watch the session here: