Tips to Make Effective Microsoft Power Point Presentations 2007. Help to Make Public Speaking Easy

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So you´re using PowerPoint. Did you know that the #1 fear among people is public speaking? Death is #2. Why not make public speaking with PowerPoint a little easier and a little less fearful? You can use these 5 tips to help make PowerPoint and public speaking a little easier:

1) Use Slide Master.. You want all of your text to have similar look and feel. The way to do this is by using the slide master. Slide master is where you can change how each type of slide will look and feel with the formatting. It´s a great way to change your entire presentation formatting with only a few clicks. Having the same look and feel for the entire presentation will make it more visually appealing to the audience.

2) Make Your Presentation Like Goldilocks "Just Right." What I´m talking about is don´t use too much or too little content on your slides. This includes words/sentences, animation, pictures, colors, emphasis (bold, italics, underline), etc. What happens is if you have too much it distracts and takes away from your presentation and you can quickly loose an audience. Not enough content can make the PowerPoint slides pointless. It is better to have too little instead of too much content because the audience will be more focused on you presenting instead of the slide presentation. You might be thinking, "that´s not a bad problem, I don´t want the crowd as focused on me." The issue is that if the audience reads the slides instead of paying attention to you then your message may not come across the way you want it. How do you find the Goldilocks zone? That is a case-by-case solution but with practice it gets easier to figure out what your audience wants and how much content to include. A rule of thumb is the larger the audience the less content you should keep on your slides.

3) Be Structured. When you write with word be sure you know what you´re writing. Once you determine what you´re writing then determine what flow structure you will use. With PowerPoint, it is sometimes best to jump around instead of going from one slide to the next. You can insert hyperlinks inside of your presentation to jump from one slide to any other slide in the presentation or even links to websites, other presentations, or other files. Using likes to items outside the presentation can be unreliable so use caution if you decide to go that way.

4) Check Your Work. Be sure to run spell and grammar check to see if you have any errors. Also make sure you use consistent tones and tenses in the slides. For example, on a slide, you don´t usually want to mix past and future tense but this depends on what you are presenting. It also never hurts to ask someone else to look over your presentation for errors.

5) Practice. After finishing your presentation read it aloud. Reading aloud will work a different part of your brain and you will hear and catch things you normally would not catch. If you can present it to someone else, they can hear anything that doesn´t sound right. You may also want to practice in front of a mirror or record yourself to see your body language.

These tips are a starting point to help you make a great presentation using PowerPoint 2007 and hopefully get you over your fear of public speaking if you have a fear.

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Ankit Patel

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My Computer Buddies

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