7 Responses

1. How to avoid death by PowerPoint
   Hopefully John Stokdyk’s great article on PowerPoint tips – gleaned from the TrainingZone community – will give you some overall general help:

   You can read it here:
   https://www.trainingzone.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=196898&d=680&h=608&f=626&dateformat=%25e-%25h-%25y

   I hope this helps!

   Best Wishes

   Susie Finch
   Editor, features

2. Presentation Skills Training Materials
   Hi Lisa

   We have a whole course on presentation skills with many visual examples, guidelines and best practices based on the the advice of industry gurus on this topic.

   Please have a look. I’ll be happy to help you if you had any further questions.

3. Good Slide Guide
   I have a ‘good slide guide’ I can send you if you want.

   Cheers
   Carolyn

4. Get some slide:ology
   Hi

   Shell out about £15 if you can (less for 2nd hand…) for a copy of “slide:ology” by Nancy Duarte.

   It’s bloomin’ brilliant!!!

   Less about PowerPoint, more about slides & visuals in general for presentations.

   It’s not only a visual feast but chock-full of great ideas and very practical tips.

   Nancy also has an interesting blog on this and related subjects at http://blog.duarte.com/

   I recently did a 90 minute webinar on time management with Dave Allen’s Get Things Done system – my first ever webinar – huge success – why? Partly because I’m brilliant, of course, but mostly because I took several leaves out of Nancy’s book – just 5 key slides, none of which had any words on, plus 5 ‘sign posting’ slides.

   Cheers

   Martin

5. Slide:ology
   I agree – that’s brilliant. You can find a short snippet from her as a video on here:

   http://www.completetrainer.co.uk/news/News_Items/Death_by_slideshow_525.html

6. Powerpoint tips
   Hi Lisa
   I’ve always worked to:
   1. 6 by 6 rule – 6 bullet points to a slide, and if takes more than 6 seconds to read it, then edit /split
   2. At least 28 point size
   3. Avoid red and green as most frequently associated with colour blindness
   4. Use maximum of 3 colours as a general rule.
   Hope that helps
   Happy Days!
   Bryan
   Bryan Edwards
   http://www.abctrainingsolutions.biz

7. Don’t forget the partially sighted!
   Hi there

   You mention users with all disabilities – so please don’t forget to consider the needs of blind/partially sighted people.

   You can use Powerpoint, even with blind people in the room, but obviously you will need to talk through all the slides clearly, and you will need to summarise anything that is present in graph/visual format. You should also provide a brief description of any pictures in this presentation (particularly if the pictures provoke a response from the audience). Example would be “I should explain that everyone in the room is laughing because there is a picture of a man slipping on a banana skin”. This should be done tactfully and without drawing attention to the blind person unnecessarily – it can feel a bit intrusive if every 4 minutes the presenter says something like “for the benefit of Bob, there’s a picture of xxx on this screen”.

   Many blind or partially sighted people use screen reading technology these days, so may appreciate having the slides emailed to them in advance, so they can run them through their screen reader software. However, you will need to add a text description of any pictures or anything represented in graphical/visual form. Quite often, the best thing to do is simply to ask the person what their needs are, and go from there.

   Hope this helps.