How to Improve Presentation Skills?

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Mammad Yahyayev

Hello people, today I will share the favorite tricks that I learned from the course on Udemy. The course is PowerPoint Presentation Masterclass — Presentation Design & Animation. These tricks that I will share today, saved my tons of time while creating presentation.

Why creating presentation is important?

Before we begin, I want to answer the questions. Creating a good presentation could be vitally important in your life.

Let’s assume you have a company, and you need to advertise your products. The most important thing is the presentation. Sometimes presentations give more insights about your products than words.

Good presentations skills that bring you more money and more success.

You need to acquire this skill, it doesn’t matter what is your occupation, because 90% of time you will need this in your life. College/University students, public speakers, teachers, developers, product owners, project managers and list goes on and all of them should have good presentation skills if they want to stand out from the rest of people.

How can I create good presentation?

This one is other important question. If you have great presentation skills, but you create for the wrong audience, it will be time wasting.

Before creating any presentation, you need to know your audience. Where and to which audience are you going to present?.

If you are a teacher and you need to explain some difficult concept to the students, giving plenty of animations can be distracting even if it looks amazing.

But if you are a product owner in a game company, adding animations will be enticing to game lovers. Therefore before the presentation, always identify your audience.

The another thing that you need to give attention that is the time of the presentation. Let’s assume you are a public speaker, and you have limited time to present. If you create numerous slides, perhaps there will be no time to complete your presentation or you can present every slide quicker, but this time you will be uncertain whether people understand your idea or not.

Therefore, I prefer not to present the slides that takes more than 30 minutes to talk all of them, but it depends on the place where you are going to present.

If you want to create a good presentation, you need to consider the followings.

• Know your audience
• Adjust time of the presentation

Why speed is important to create presentation?

When I was university, I had spent my whole day to create presentations. After creating each presentation, I have learned new things then applied them for the future presentations to save time and effort.

When I say speed is important, I don’t mean add 2 images, some texts to complete the presentations in 5 minutes. Explaining your idea is more important than speed, but saving some time meanwhile creating your presentations, can be very helpful to think more about the idea.

Structure of your presentation folder

In my point of view, the most important things the structure of your presentation folder. Actually, a lot of people, don’t structure the presentations, they will keep all images, resources in different folders, files and this takes so much time to find them. Thus the most crucial thing is the structure.

In the image above, this is the structure of my presentations. I keep all images, icons on Images folder, and some documents, pdf files, word files, presentations files on Resources folder.

This is the base structure of my all presentations and saves tons of my time. Furthermore, if you need you can add other folders, files depend on the presentations you want to make, but the base structure always remains the same.

Renaming files, images

It is good to collect the images, files, generally resources in advance. If there are tons of files that have unclear names and you don’t rename the files, you will spend your time to find the correct image in the folder.

For example, let’s download the picture at below.

When I download this picture, the name was pexels-trace-hudson-2475301.jpg. It will be hard to remember, if you have lots of images.

Thus I can rename it to train or metro for based on the image. You might say, this will take time to rename it, but trust me it will be less than to find it. Same purpose works well for the files.

Slides’ contents in one file

I really like to store all slides’ contents in one Microsoft Word file or notepad. After I found my resources, I copy contents from websites, pdf files into one file and modify it a little bit such as adding titles, adjusting font size, changing font family and so on. Then I will copy from that Microsoft Word file into slides.

The plan is created automatically, if you keep all the contents in one file.

The texts copied from the Wikipedia and those are just examples, I adjusted a little bit, but I kept underlines, perhaps you need to highlight them in the slides as well.

The another great thing about this, you can prepare your presentation by reading from it, because adding every resource into your slides will make it untidy. However you need to speak more than you wrote in the slides. Creating this Word file will assist you to make your speech.

Slide size and Zoom out

When you add images into your slides, sometimes they will be inserted abnormally bigger. In order to fit them in slide, you need to zoom out. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time. Therefore I set the size of the paper 16:9 size, and work with 50% zoom. You will understand why it is so useful.

This is my workarea for each slide. The great thing is that I can add different images to the around of the slide.

As you can see on the above, I added different images around the slide. If I want to give color to shape, no need to set the value of the RGB color manually. Use Eyedropper to give background colors. I take screenshots of the colors from the website Color Hunt.

Take a screenshot, place the image around the slide, then click the color with Eyedropper to give the color to the shape. With this way, we can easiliy resize, select, adjust the images, shapes or texts. 16:9 slide size and 50% zoom are a great combination.

However you can set those values whatever you want. In order to change slide size. Do the following steps.

1. Go to Design tab on menu
2. In Design tab, you will see Slide Size

Also you can customize your slide size by yourself.

Caution: I use Microsoft Powerpoint Professional 2016, I hope it will be in the same location in other versions of Powerpoint, if you can’t find it, let me know in the comment section below, I will try to help you.

Quick Access Toolbar

A lot of people underestimate power of the Quick Access Toolbar, but it provide you really good amount of time. There are some tools that hard to find in Powerpoint, if you have less practice.

Quick Access Toolbar, as the name suggest, allow you to access those tools easily and quickly. In my presentations, I use following tools regularly.

1. Shapes
2. Textbox
3. Equation
4. Eyedropper

You can add your favorite tools into Quick Access Toolbar, and you can access them by using keyword combinations or clicking the icon of the tool with mouse.

Adding tools into Quick Access Toolbar is so easy. Click right button of the mouse over the tool, then popup will be appear over tool, then click Add to Quick Access Toolbar option.

You can manage the tools from Quick Access Toolbar window. In order to open the window, do the following steps.

Click the icon which highlighted with arrow. Then select More Commands option in the opened popup.

After choosing the More Commands, window will be open on the center of screen.

You can configure your toolbar from here. In order to access the tools fast, use keyboards combinations.

When you press Alt key, you will see the numbers and letters like above image. After that you can press any number to use tools from Quick Access Toolbar. In my case,
Alt + 1 is Shapes, Alt + 2 is Textbox and so on.

Keep open Format panel

Format panel allows you to add more adjustments for shapes, texts, backgrounds, images and so on. If you keep this panel open, you can easily modify the objects without moving over the ribbon menu.

The another great thing is, when you select different objects, it will change Format panel to Format Shape, Format Picture, Format Background based on the element.

If you right-click on the slide, then select Format Background or right-click on the shape, then select Format Shape and similarly applies to text objects.

Keyboard combinations

Keyboard combinations are very important in Microsoft Powerpoint as in every other desktop application. If you get accustom to work with them, you will not want to move your hand from the keyboard most of the times.

I don’t force you to learn every keyboard combination in Powerpoint, because it is almost impossible to remember all of them, just learn the basic and most common ones such as increase or decrease the font size, create or duplicate slide, quick access toolbar keyword combinations that we’ve already seen those.

Try these combinations on your own, but don’t forget that you need to select text in order to apply text related keyboard combinations, select slides for slide related keyboard combinations, select objects for object related keyboard combinations and so on.

Conclusion

I want to conclude the article with the Udemy course that I’ve mention on the beginning of the article. The course helped me a lot to learn plenty of new things, even if I have quite experience in Microsoft Powerpoint.

It is highly recommended for those of who want to put presentation skill into their skill stack.

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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Mammad Yahyayev