Resources for honing your presentation skills using PowerPoint
If you want to improve your presentation skills in PowerPoint, you might be interested in some tools that can help you practice and polish your slides. In this blog post, we'll introduce some of these tools and how they can benefit you.
One of the most useful tools is Speaker Coach, which is available on PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 for web, desktop, and mobile versions. Speaker Coach is like a virtual assistant that listens to your rehearsal and gives you feedback on various aspects of your performance, such as:
- Pace: The speaker trainer tells you if you're speaking too fast or too slow and shows you a graph of your speaking pace over time.
- Pitch: Speaker Coach analyzes the pitch of your voice and suggests ways to vary it to keep your hearing engaged.
- Filler words: Speaker Coach detects if you use words like "um", "ah", "like" etc. too often. and advises you to avoid them or replace them with pauses or transitions.
- Informal Speech: Speaker Coach identifies if you are using slang, colloquialisms, euphemisms, or other informal expressions that might not suit your audience or topic, and offers alternatives.
- Culturally Sensitive Terms: The Speaker Coach flags any words or phrases that might be considered offensive or insensitive by certain groups of people, and recommends more inclusive language.
- Wordiness: Speaker Coach alerts you if you're being too wordy or redundant in your speech, and suggests ways to simplify or shorten your sentences.
- Reading text: Speaker Coach advises against reading the text of your slides verbatim and instead encourages you to paraphrase or summarize it.
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To use Speaker Coach, simply open your presentation in PowerPoint for the web (or desktop/mobile version if available), navigate to the Slide Show tab, and click Repeat with Coach. You can choose to enable real-time feedback during your rehearsal or view a detailed report at the end. The report will also show the duration of each slide and the number of repetitions.
Another tool that can help you practice your presentation is **Rehearse Timings**, which is available on all versions of PowerPoint. Rehearse Timings allows you to record the time needed for each slide in your presentation. This can help you adjust the length of each slide according to your allocated time slot. To use Repeat Timings, go to the Slideshow tab and click Repeat Timings. You can pause/resume the timer as needed during your rehearsal. When you're done rehearsing, PowerPoint will ask if you want to save the timings for each slide.
Along with practicing your speech, it's also important to practice designing effective slides that convey your message clearly and visually. One aspect of slide design that can make a big difference is the **color scheme**. Choosing a harmonious color scheme can enhance the aesthetic appeal of your slides as well as create contrast and hierarchy between different elements. To find a suitable color scheme for your presentation theme/topic/branding/audience preferences/etc., there are several online tools that can generate color palettes based on various criteria such as complementary colors/ monochromatic colors/analog colors/etc.
We hope these tools will help you practice presenting in PowerPoint with more efficiency and confidence. Remember practice makes perfect!