by Geetesh Bajaj, August 16, 2016

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Last week, we released the first podcast that I recorded with TJ Walker. In today;s podcast, we will look at this topic: Many presenters spend considerable effort and time to create their slides-but they do not get the time to practice. Did you know that PowerPoint has had a built-in practice tool?

Read, view, and listen to this podcast

Here's another podcast that I recorded with TJ Walker. In this podcast, we explore several areas: How do you balance between the text slides vs. picture slides approaches? Is there more than one presentation scenario that needs different strategies? Or is there a one-glove-fits-all option that works for all presentations? What about handouts? And when do you provide them? Do you print them, or can they be electronic? Here are the video and audio embeds, and the transcript follows later on this page.

Read more here

In case you haven't heard, presentations delivered standing behind a lectern are out and fireside chats are in. Whether it is an effort to emulate the format originated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt or an effort to avoid the curse captured by the old Jerry Seinfeld joke: "To the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy," chats are the new way to present. FDR, whose patrician voice and dignified manner made him sound formal and distant, developed the fireside chat to create a more intimate bond with the public. But the format has another equally-important benefit and, although FDR didn't need the help, it reduces the pressure that presenters invariably feel when they are the sole center of attention. "Yikes! They're all looking at me!"

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Born in England, Nigel Holmes studied illustration at the Royal College of Art in London and then freelanced for magazines and newspapers for 12 years in London before going to New York in 1977 to work for Time Magazine. He became graphics director and stayed there for 16 years. He has written several books on aspects of information design. With his son Rowland, Holmes makes animated short films. Clients have included the TED conference, Fortune Magazine conferences, Good Magazine and the National Geographic Society. In this conversation, Nigel explains how he prepares for each speaking event.

Read the conversation here

Format Font Attributes (Styles)



The appearance of text makes a huge difference to any presentation. The font typeface used within your slides is dictated by the active Theme or Theme Fonts set of your presentation -- you can certainly override these defaults and choose another font typeface and also change the font size. However, there are times when you need to highlight a word or a phrase contained within your text so that it stands apart and commands attention. To do so, you can apply font styling attributes such as bold, italics, underline, etc.

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Font Dialog box



Fonts are more than just pretty characters, although your choice of fonts can have a profound effect on how readable your text is to the audience. We have already explored how you can format font styles to make your text bold, italicized, underlined, etc. Beyond these basic offerings, PowerPoint 2016's Font dialog box offers some advanced format options for the selected text. You can still change the font type, set the font size, color, and other font attributes in this dialog box, and you can also do more.

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Character Spacing



Font size does make a difference for the aesthetics of your slide, but what do you do if the text itself uses more or less space than you may want? Sometimes, you may want the text to take just a wee bit lesser space so that all content can fit within two lines rather than three. If you would like to alter the spacing between text characters, you can do so by using PowerPoint's Character Spacing option, which affects the appearance and readability of both title and body text. Essentially Character Spacing is the amount of space in-between individual letters. You can easily adjust this spacing for a cleaner look or to make more or less text fit within any text container.

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Change Bullet Styles



People talk about how bullets can cause "death by PowerPoint" -- and while that may be partially true, it certainly is not the complete truth; not everyone is in the rush to abandon bullet points in their slides! Even then, too much of anything cannot be good and bulleted lists are almost the mainstay of PowerPoint slides these days. Most of PowerPoint's slide layouts are already set up with placeholders for bulleted lists (or paragraphs) -- so that when you start typing into a text placeholder, your text is automatically bulleted. Making changes in how bullets appear visually can make a subtle difference; so we show you how you can change the bullet styles for your text placeholders (or text boxes) in PowerPoint 2016.

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Theme Fonts in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows



People talk about how bullets can cause "death by PowerPoint" -- and while that may be partially true, it certainly is not the complete truth; not everyone is in the rush to abandon bullet points in their slides! Even then, too much of anything cannot be good and bulleted lists are almost the mainstay of PowerPoint slides these days. Most of PowerPoint's slide layouts are already set up with placeholders for bulleted lists (or paragraphs) -- so that when you start typing into a text placeholder, your text is automatically bulleted. Making changes in how bullets appear visually can make a subtle difference; so we show you how you can change the bullet styles for your text placeholders (or text boxes) in PowerPoint 2016.

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Want to play a Jeopardy-like game using PowerPoint slides? Yes, this is absolutely doable but making PowerPoint slides with all the interactivity and layouts takes too much work. Fortunately, we have done the work for you. Just download our Jeopardy-like 25 (5x5) question PowerPoint template, replace the placeholders provided for questions, answers, and categories - and you're done! You'll still need a real human being to track scores - and you could soon be playing this amazing game as part of a fun exercise, a training program, or even a quiz show.

This template is entirely Theme aware. Change your Theme colors and fonts - and everything automatically updates. We tested this template in both Windows (2007, 2010, and 2013) and Mac (2008 and 2011) versions of PowerPoint.

Download and play your own Jeopardy-like game.

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