Merry Christmas folks

Wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Have fun.

Image: zirconicusso

List of useful blogs on presentations

Apart from my blog there are various other blogs which write on the topic of presentations. It would be very nice if we had a link to all these useful sites at one place. A small list of 10 to 15 blogs. Blogs which are good.


Alltop is one such site which is supposed to help us. The problem however is the number of blogs it lists. More than 50. A fellow blogger Andrew Dlugan too has a great list. But again the problem is, its too big. 118 blogs.


How about compiling a small list of useful blogs? Blogs YOU follow regularly. Blogs which have helped you become better at presentations. Blog which you love to read.


Share some names with me by leaving a comment on sending an email to me (vivek @ all about presentations dot com). Your contribution will help all of us here.

"Few PowerPoint tips will take you far" says Jon

Just a while back I came across an interesting post by fellow blogger Jon. He blogs on Presentation Advisors. In his post Jon talks about how knowing a few PowerPoint skills can take you far. In order to create visually exciting presentations you do not need to know all the PowerPoint tricks and tips.


Know which of the are more impactful and will give a better return on investment. Master these first. Do not get intimidated by all the thousands of things you don't know about MS PowerPoint.


He presents a graph to depict which skills are more important. The one of the left is more important than the one on the right. While I am not sure how he came up with this order, the true lesson from this post is not the order but the realisation that 'few crucial skills' will create more impact. You do not need to master all the tricks now.

Let us not worry whether 'Graphs and Tables' is more important than 'Shapes and Objects'. I propose you pick up the top five tricks and master them.


1. Importing a picture onto PowerPoint (and being able to edit and crop them)
2. Understanding how to use colours
3. Fonts
4. Graphs and Tables
5. Shapes & Objects


Keep watching this space for more on this topic.

Quick Test: Understand this Chart

Here's a small test for you. In the image below, there are four pie charts. You need to look at them quickly and answer this question. These charts are supposed to tell you how four different industries spends money on advertising.


Real Estate companies spend 15% of their advertising money on Radio. What is the share of Radio for Jewellery, Educational Institutes and Local FMCG?


Quick.

Many of us will take quite a lot of time to understand these charts. Atleast I took. These charts are not 'intuitive'. Ours eyes take colour cues very easily. These charts go against our normal cues. In Real Estate, Radio is marked in yellow colour. So naturally we expect all yellows to be Radio. Even if we do not consciously expect, having all Radio as yellow will make the job of audience much much easier. Why make it tough for the reader? As presenters, we must use colour to our advantage. 




Source: This image is from an article on afaqs which I came across this morning.