Episode #73, Presenting in a Non-Profit World (with Andy Goodman) is up! This week we ditch the corporate world to talk about presentation in the world of cause-based organizations. Andy Goodman of The Goodman Center joins us to talk about his career teaching storytelling and presentation to non-profits, NGO’s and foundations. And we dive into his seminal 2006 book, Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes which you can download for free here.
If you’re in the business of setting up PowerPoint templates and need a way to create a layout in which a logo or other content always floats on top of an image placeholder, these are two hacks that will do just that for you.
And one will also let you create an image placeholder in any shape you want—not just default circles and rectangles.
One of my favorite PowerPoint hacks is to hide page numbers in slideshow mode because really, who needs to see those on screen? This simple technique can also be used to hide unreadable source notes and any other content that should be visible in printouts and PDFs, but just isn’t needed or wanted on screen. Watch it here!
The New York Times has been using the below graphic style for a lot of their recent political coverage. They didn’t invent this look, of course, but I really like it and wanted to show how you can recreate this effect all within PowerPoint in a just a few steps.
One of the questions I get asked most often is how can an average user create professional-looking infographics in PowerPoint. There are very good sites like Diagrammer, Canva and Infogram that can all help with providing and assembling elements of an infographic. And yes, you can always resort to PowerPoint’s own SmartArt, but unless you use it simply as a starting point, it’s going to look like…well, SmartArt. The disappointing truth is that to produce a professional looking infographic, you generally need to hire a professional. Enter Mike Parkinson and his brand new Build-a-Graphic add-in for PowerPoint.
Mike Parkinson runs Billion Dollar Graphics and is one of those professionals that has been creating custom infographics for high profile clients for years. He’s got an excellent book on infographics and a brand new one on PowerPoint, but he has also just introduced Build-a-Graphic, a killer add-in for PowerPoint that allows any user to call upon a massive library of pre-made (professionally designed!) vector graphics all from within PowerPoint. If SmartArt is a tricycle, Build-a-Graphic is a Ferrari.
But it gets even better. Because while you can simply search through the catalog of ready-to-use graphic and insert them onto your PowerPoint slides, the tool can also examine your slide’s content for you, automatically convert bullet points to more readable visual chunks and then suggest specific graphics relevant to your material. The quick demo below shows all this in action.
And all graphics are made up of pure PowerPoint shapes and vectors which means they are completely customizable, recolorable and can be taken apart however you like.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that now that anyone can have professionally designed customized graphics with just a few clicks of the mouse.
The Build-a-Graphic add-in is a $99/year subscription which includes ongoing updates and additions to the graphic catalog. PC only for right now.
Troy and I get kicked out of the room this week while Sandra welcomes guest hosts Lori Chollar and industry legend Nancy Duarte to discuss presentation businesses that are owned by women.
