10 brilliant PowerPoint hacks that you need to know!

Presentations are a necessary evil in the corporate world. Estimates show that there are 20 million presentations that are made every single day. Yet sadly, most of them doesn't invoke any reaction on the audience, lest creating a deep impact. While there are no secret sauces to a great presentation, there are some essential tips & hacks which are consistently used by great presenters across the world. Knowing some of these hacks can not only improve the quality of your next presentation, but also change your outlook towards presenting content across channels.

Over my 10-year career, I had the opportunity to work on hundreds of presentations ranging from sales pitches to project proposals to motivational decks. While I presented some of them myself, most of them were put together for very senior leaders in my company. Over the years, I was thoroughly trained and mentored on churning out powerful presentations pretty quickly and effortlessly. A partial reason for my inclination to create good looking presentations, might be the genes that I received from my late father who was an artist and a design engineer.

This is a humble effort to share with you the top tricks that i have picked up along the way or learned from various presentation gurus, and use on a regular basis while making presentations. Here they go:

1. Start with an outline of the story you want to tell

All great presentations are narratives with a clear introduction, a meaty mid section and an appropriate end. Like the pages of an immersive novel, your slides should be precisely knitted together in the sequence as the story unfolds. Stories are the most effective methods to wrap information together and retain it over longer period of times, as known to even cave-men. A set of facts and figures thrown in without a strong narrative is a sure shot way to make the listener yawn or take up the mobile phone for a round of candy crush.

How to: Imagine that you are going to explain the content to your grandmother in short and crisp sentences. Depending up on the time you’ve in hand, decide on the number of slides. Start writing down the headers of each slide in a blank word/excel sheet or even in the presentation itself. Make sure you start with the context, the problem statement, navigate through the current state from various perspectives to the future state and how do you reach there. Then you get in to the various options to consider and criteria to be used to shortlist the best option and then the implementation plan. This completes the backbone of the story. All you need to do now is to add meat around it to substantiate the header message through facts, figures, pictures etc.

2. Keep your audience and mode of delivery in sight during design

This is one of the most important lessons I learned the hard way, and which you can easily avoid, by asking the right questions to yourself or to the one giving you work.

How to: Understand about your audience – who are they, what level of maturity are they operating at, what is their familiarity with the topic, what do they currently think about it, what would you like to make them think about the topic post the presentation, and from what you know, what would they be interested / excited in seeing or knowing.

Understand about the practical aspects – is it going to be an in-person presentation or over video conferencing / audio, or going to be sent over an email for offline reading. If it’ll be presented, is it going to be a hall or a small room or a cafe?

Make sure you get clarity on these areas before you device your ppt strategy. Customize the number of slides, amount of details in each slide, usage of images / videos and even the font size according to the expected audience and your mode of delivery.

3. Use the ‘Zeigarnik effect’ to your advantage

Even though it’s a fancy name, it suggests something that we can easily associate with. We human beings hate leaving things incomplete – how many of you can stop a GOT episode half way through? There are numerous scientific experiments which have shown that we experience ‘Creative tension’ when we leave things incomplete. How do we use this to our advantage while we are presenting? By teasing the audience!

How to: Tease the audience by revealing information in pieces. This is an age old marketing techniques used in newspaper or TV adds or even for movie teasers. If you want to present a new solution to a big problem, present it part-by-part using animations. Reveal each step, explain the details and go to the next step. This helps to glue the audience to the slide at a sub conscious level without even they realizing, till the entire visualization in the slide is revealed. The impact will be much more profound if the steps are not displayed in a straight line – but in a circular, hexagonal or other interesting shapes / patterns.

Bonus: Another feature that I started using recently are ‘hyperlinks’ connecting one slide to another, to bring in a ‘Prezi’ like feel of jumping around and coming back. A central slide with say 6 interesting images each connecting to inner slides with details – like a puzzle.

4. Use the power of 'visuals' to keep your audience glued in

As everyone knows, a picture speaks a thousand words. The greatest presenters of the world will be able to convey the strongest message by just an image on the slide even without a single word written on it.

How to: In the typical motivational decks that I make, I put in a powerful and a very unique picture which invokes a strong emotion along with just a line or two of text. The idea is to invoke a strong emotion through the slide. At the other extreme end, the findings of a survey or the status updates on 7 employee metrics can also be presented with minimal but effective icons to make it more impactful. Selecting the bullet points ?‘convert to smart art’ is the easiest way to bring them to life. Selecting the right smart art which supports images, followed by adding the right icons can transform a dry slide to an interesting one instantly.

Maneuvering the ‘smart arts’ was a pain until I found out the magic pill. Right click a smart art ?‘convert to shapes’, helps me to easily do whatever I want with the individual pieces.

Bonus:

• I regularly use Pexels.com for free high quality professional stock photos
• The best free icons are available at iconfinder.com
• Blur parts of an image to add text, easily using picmonkey.com
• Get pre-made interesting graphics from freepik.com (give attribution)
• Download interesting free fonts from fontsquirrel.com

5. Save time & effort with pre-made professional templates

Why reinvent the wheel if you can get one and directly go for the ride? Many companies have their own custom templates that their employees must use. Seeing the same slides and the same standard smart art visuals and colors puts off most listeners. That’s where a professionally made, great looking template really helps. The best ones obviously don’t come for free, but it’s definitely worthwhile investing in some of them, if you want your presentation to stand out and make a statement. Good templates will drastically cut down the time you take, at the same time making your slide look very professional.

How to: Make it a practice to collect great looking presentations, visuals, icons and stock images over a period of time from multiple sources to create your armory which can be deployed as and when required. You can get some great looking free presentations from slideshare.net and paid ones from sites like graphicrever.net.

★ Mega Bonus: I have a master PPT template that I have put together over years with all the various representations I had created / used in all possible scenarios. It’s a monster pack with around 100+ slides full of creative shapes / representations along with 500+ icons. I plan to give it away for free (to those of you who’ll benefit from it) to help everyone make better presentations.

Leave a comment below with your email ID if you want me to share the template with you over email.

You can stay tuned to my updates (Click ‘Follow on my profile’) on making killer slides and also other useful tips & tricks that I have learned from great mentors and leaders over my career.

6. Learn these PPT shortcuts to become a PPT wizard

Every MS office application comes with its own set of keyboard shortcuts. Even though it’s a second or less that you’ll gain by using these shortcuts, the cumulative time that you save over the course of a PPT design and the agility it provides you, is pretty significant. Some of them even opens up hidden features which are not accessible through a mouse click.

How to: The simplest ones that I regularly use are the following:

• F5 to start the presentation
• Enter + slide number to jump directly to that slide
• During presentation mode, CTRL + P to bring on the ‘drawing pen’ allowing you to draw on the presented screen. This is a kick ass trick known only to a very few
• During presentation mode, press CTRL + B to make the presentation screen black and bring the attention back to the presenter. CTRL + W gives a white screen
• Use CTRL + { or } keys to increase or decrease the fonts in all the text boxes within a selection together
• Use CTRL + Arrow keys to move any object by just a pixel (for finer fitting)

7. Make sure that all attributes are consistent across the slides

Our human eye is immaculately trained over year,s to find out aberrations in a pattern. All the efforts that you have out in your presentation will go waste if one of the key members of the audience is put-off by a simple formatting error. It’s a good practice to start obsessing over consistency of all the key elements within the presentation.

How to:

• Start using ‘guides’ to align objects accurately (right click?guides)
• If using a theme, follow the template’s in-built slide designs for each type of slide
• Modify the ‘template master’ (view?slide master) to make changes to the theme that’ll be applied across slides in one shot
• If using a custom theme or not following a rigid one, keep an eye on below items:
• Make sure that the font its size is uniform across slides. Finalize on a great header-body font combination (some options) and use it consistently
• Stick to your company’s branding guidelines if there is one. Otherwise use a set of not more than 3-4 standard colors across all slides. Design?colors gives you standard combinations that gel well with each other
• Make sure that your headers start at the exact same point in each slide (mouse pointer test – the first letter should start at the same exact point in each slide)
• Use the ‘Eye dropper’ tool (in latest versions of PowerPoint) to match the color of a shape or font to that of any other object / image
• Ensure consistency in the styling of images used too. If you are using ‘flat icons’ use the same style across the board. If using doodles, don’t mix them with human images

8. Start using the ‘Presenter’ view and stay in full control while presenting

It’s when you actually are presenting, that the rubber hits the road. Even a great looking PPT will be ineffective if you feel ill-equipped while presenting. Many a times you may miss to remember a major point from the talk-track causing panic to set in. You by now would definitely be knowing about the ‘notes’ section below each slide, to capture the talk-track or the salient pointers which you should cover while presenting. The ‘presenter view’ is not the default view in PowerPoint because of which many of you might not have used it effectively yet.

How to: Slide show tab?Monitors?tick ‘use presenter view’ option. While presenting in another monitor or projecting in a video output device, this will give you a ‘master dashboard’ view (in your laptop) while showing the ‘full slide view’ in the output device. The dashboard view shows you your narrative notes for each slide and also the earlier and next slide preview, so that you have everything available on your fingertips. Just play with the options in this view and get used to it much before the actual presentation.

Bonus: If you always ‘duplicate’ your screen while connecting to an external device for presenting, you should start using ‘Extend’ option (Function key + F8). This will allow you to drag and drop items on to your display output and have some other content running in your laptop. Even though it may take some time for you to get used to this, once learned, you will never go back to ‘Duplicate screen’ option.

9. Get a good external mouse – one with a scroll wheel

Even if you may feel its old school to use a physical mouse, it definitely adds value if you are serious in making good PPTs. It will help you navigate through the toolbars mush faster and gives you more control and accuracy while editing graphics. The scroll wheel is a really great add-on which has not been fully utilized by most people.

How to:

• Hold the CTRL key and scroll the mouse wheel up or down to zoom in and out of the slide quickly – swap between the bigger picture and the finer details quickly
• While doing research on the internet for your presentation, click on any hyperlink with your scroll wheel (yes, use it as the third button) to open the link in a new tab
• Done with reading a tab, click on the tab with the scroll wheel to close it
• Holding the CTRL key, drag an image or graphic to make an identical copy

Bonus: Most professional designers that I work with have a preference for standard size mouse (which covers your inner palm comfortably) over a compact one. The good old Microsoft 3600 is what I have been using for more than 3 years now and Its very comfortable. I’ve heard good reviews about the Dell and Logitech ones too (ps: these are not paid promotions and I’m just sharing my preferences).

10. Go beyond just slides – make videos, prototypes and more with PowerPoint

The final point I want to drive home is that PowerPoint is a wonderful application with so many possibilities if we use it creatively. Over years I have fallen in love with it experiencing its versatility and usefulness for doing a multitude of things. Given below are some of the cool things that I use regularly use PowerPoint for.

How to:

• Create an info-graphic resume (A4 Size): PowerPoint is a much better option to create a resume, thanks to easier drag-and-move and rich graphic capabilities. Export it to PDF once you are done
• Do basic image editing: You can remove background from a photo (high accuracy), change colors, compress it, crop a circular profile pic (using picture styles) and even do 3d rotation (effects-3d rotation). Post edits, you can right click and save it as a picture on your desktop
• Make a movie / gif: You can do almost everything in PPT that the ‘Windows Movie Maker’ or any basic video software offers. You can add audio, animations and slide transitions to enhance the appeal, record the transition times with ‘rehearse timings’ and finally save it as an MPEG or WMV video. GIFs are also made the same way which can be exported and used elsewhere.
• Do screen recording to create tutorials (PP 2016 and beyond): You can now do a screen recording of anything (of the presentation or anything else) and save it as a video. I am loving this feature while creating tutorial videos for some of the training programs I run
• Remove background from a picture: You can remove the background from any picture and make it look clean and blended with the slide through a bit of practice
• Combine shapes and save it as an image: I use PowerPoint to create social media posts, profile backdrops and even representations to be used in emails. You can combine various shapes and ‘merge shapes’ to create custom made graphics which looks unique and cool 

Let's go over the 10 points again:

Closing thoughts and a request

Every tool is as good as its master’s intent and interest, and PowerPoint isn’t different. Even though there are several alternatives that have come up in the recent past, PowerPoint still remains the favorite for most managers and leaders in the corporate world. Thus investing in sharpening your PowerPoint skills is definitely worth the time and effort. A carefully thought through and tastefully crafted presentation can open up many doors to you while you navigate the corporate jungle.

Hope there was something new that you learned today by going through this article. Are you inspired to try out some of these tips and make your next presentation stand out? Let me know what you think by adding comments below ??

Ps: I'm on a personal mission to help as many people as possible across the globe by sharing the limited knowledge that i have mustered along during my exciting career journey. You can help me towards that by sharing this article with people in your network and helping these ideas reach as many people as possible. As you know, sharing is caring!

★ Mega Bonus: Leave your email ID in the comments below, if you want me to send across my monster ppt template.

About the author

Vivek is an XLRI Jameshedpur alumnus and manages Human resources for Cognizant Technology solutions. He is a specialist in Organizational design & development, change management through behavioral transformation, career architecture design, process automation & analytics, and Performance management. He has a deep interest in deconstructing how our minds work and is currently doing his personal research on cognitive biases, heuristics and mental models people use for decision making.

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