If you have been asked to give a presentation there is one simple rule which you must follow above all others: Do The Groundwork.

Strong Foundations

As with any building, you must have strong foundations in place before you can place anything else on top of it. If you do your research or background reading and create a solid foundation you can then take confidence from that and put your best foot forward. The fear of public speaking should be tackled with facts: if you know what you're talking about it's much more likely that you will sound confident and your PowerPoint presentation will make the desired impact.

Ready? Then let's begin with a look at what exactly we can do - and shouldn't do - during a PowerPoint presentation.  

In The Beginning

Don't put off doing your presentation until the last minute. PowerPoint has some clever features that can be used to achieve a successful talk so give yourself plenty of time to not only design the layout of your information but also to review it. Although you may be satisfied with completing your preparation the night before, during the presentation is not the time to realise you've made spelling mistakes, devoted too much time to one particular area at the expense of another, or as people start to talk among themselves their puzzled faces make it clear that no-one has any idea what you are talking about. Answer: prepare and review!

Before we tackle how you can prevent such mistakes in more detail, let's quickly get an overview of Microsoft PowerPoint's key features.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Key Features

You can create dynamic presentations

- A new look and feel makes creating, presenting, and sharing presentations an easier and more intuitive experience.
- Use dynamic SmartArt diagrams to easily create relationship, workflow, or hierarchy diagrams from within Office PowerPoint 2007.
- Define and save your own custom slide layouts so that your presentations have a consistent and professional look and feel.

You can effectively share presentations 

- Help ensure broad communication with your PowerPoint presentations by converting your files to XML Paper Specification (XPS) and PDF for sharing with users on any software platform.
- Compressed Office PowerPoint XML Format offers a dramatic reduction in file size, while also offering an improvement in data recovery for damaged files.

You can manage your presentations efficiently

- Use Document Inspector to detect and remove unwanted comments, hidden text, or personally identifiable information before sharing your presentation with others.
- Add a digital signature to a PowerPoint presentation to help ensure that the contents are not changed after it leaves your hands, or mark a presentation as "final" to prevent inadvertent changes.

What Do Those Features Actually Mean?

Let's break it down into facts: if you have Office 2007 then you have access to PowerPoint 2007, the latest and most up-to-date presentation software around. So if you still have Office 2003 it's time to upgrade McFly!

The new "ribbon" user interface means it's easier to use, it's easier to get things done and your presentation is going to look smart.

You can create PowerPoint Slide Libraries from which new presentations can be created, edited or amended.

If you don't know what XML is then you're not alone! XML is an open, industry-standard language for organizing and storing data. Having data in XML means that the information is transportable and can be easily shared and reused.

Office PowerPoint 2007 supports XML in many ways. The default file format for Office PowerPoint 2007 is the Microsoft Office PowerPoint XML Format, which is a compact, robust file format based on XML. The PowerPoint XML Format offers a substantial reduction in presentation sizes, improved data recovery for damaged presentations, and support for custom-defined schema to facilitate the inclusion of custom-defined XML data in PowerPoint presentations.

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Software4Students.co.uk - Official Microsoft Partner


Read how to avoid the classic mistakes in part two...

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