A question arose after one of my masterclasses recently about how to do a bouncing ball animation. I met with Andonella Thomson, who posed the question, to run through it with her.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m obsessed with beer in my articles but there have been a couple of posts that have featured said elixir. The first was the filling Guinness glass produced for Phillip Khan-Panni and the second time was the creative chart using different sizes of beer glass. Someone who saw both suggested to me that it would be great to combine the two – in other words, produce a ‘bar’ chart like the one in the second image but with the glasses filling up. ‘How difficult could that be?’ I asked myself. Actually, trickier than I first thought.
I was asked recently to supply some before and after examples of PowerPoint presentations so I thought it would be a good opportunity to put together a short video article with a handful of these examples.
Knowing how to use PowerPoint (or Keynote or Prezi or whatever you use) is completely different from knowing how to use PowerPoint. (Duh, that’s the same thing on both sides of the equation Dave!) Yes, but you know what I mean – really knowing how to use PowerPoint.
It’s a bit like riding a bike. When you were a young child and had never ridden a bike, you probably thought you knew how to ride a bike. It couldn’t be easier. You sit on a saddle, put your feet on the pedals and move your feet round and round.
There’s been a bit of a hiatus in my article posting and you’ll see why in this my first post for over 2 months. I didn’t know whether or not to post this article but, after some thought, I decided to do so.
PowerPoint is, of course, a presentations program and that’s what it should be used for. But there is one thing that PowerPoint is surprisingly good at and that is producing clear and high-quality video.
The chart tools in PowerPoint and Keynote are very powerful and quite capable of producing perfectly good charts. But if you want to differentiate your presentation, not to mention make it more memorable and therefore more effective, why not try getting creative with data?
One of the newest features of PowerPoint is the ability to bring in 3D models and manipulate them. It can be a really useful feature especially if you want to show off all the attributes of a product for example.
In this video clip, I have produced a title slide that shows simply how to bring 3D models into PowerPoint and use the morph transition to move them on screen.
As I pointed out in a previous article, PowerPoint can be used for things other than for speaking. And I promised I would expand upon some of these, so here goes.
The first usage I want to cover is still concerned with speaking. It’s inspired by people who tell me that they only use PowerPoint as a prop, and I hear that a lot!
My main focus is on helping people produce slide presentations for use in a speech or talk to help reinforce, illustrate, clarify or enhance (RICE) the message they are trying to get across. But, taking off my presentations hat for a short while, there are other things that PowerPoint can be used for and I wanted to briefly talk about these in this article. I’ll come back to these in more detail in future articles along with concrete examples so, watch this space.
The morph transition is a really neat facility added in to PowerPoint 2016. It's very simple to use. But of course, it’s also dangerous. It would be really easy to get carried away using the morph transition, adding morphs left, right and centre without any purpose or direction. As with anything in your slide presentation it has to achieve one or more of the RICE aims.
Here’s what PowerPoint says to you when you open it up to start work on your presentation. “Hello Sir / Madam (delete as applicable). Thank you for opening me up to produce your presentation. Now let’s get started. That’s right, add a new slide and look, it’s a title slide. Pop a quick title in there and we’ll go on to the next slide. “OK, the next slide is a text slide. That box at the top is where you can type in your title and then there’s a nice big box underneath where you can start tapping away those lovely bullet points."
A bouncing ball animation (and other stuff)
It’s OK if your slides suck
The beer slide revisited
When should I use slides?
Before and after slide examples
Having someone else operate your slides
Do you really know how to ride a bike?
The hardest PowerPoint presentation
Want to avoid this feeling? Then rehearse, rehearse and rehearse some more
Other ways of using PowerPoint – Producing video