PowerPoint, presentation design, and eLearning articles, including:

• Industry insights

Presentation slides give you a virtual stage on which graphics and text can mingle to bring data to life and make complicated information digestible. The Presentation Center at National Journal capitalizes on presentations as a medium to deliver information about Washington DC’s most topical issues. As a Washingtonian myself, I had the opportunity to meet with Alistair Taylor, Director of Strategic Content & Presentations, to learn more about this unique organization.

• Industry insights

More and more companies are outsourcing tasks they don’t have internal expertise for, but should presentations be on that list? We look at the pros and cons of outsourcing to PowerPoint experts versus using your in-house design agency to create presentations.

• PowerPoint design / PowerPoint productivity
• Comments: 3

Some presentations require the exact same chart, graphic, or image on multiple slides. A new feature of PowerPoint 2016 is zoom links. With this feature, you can work around the issues of having multiple versions of a graphic throughout a presentation: PowerPoint will do the updating legwork for you! Read on to find how to make the most of this new feature.

• Presentation technology

Microsoft has released Presentation Translator, a translation tool for PowerPoint. It’s part of the Microsoft Garage Experimental Project, so you can imagine it’s not perfect yet, but it promises big. According to the website, it is a PowerPoint add-in that allows you to add live subtitles to your presentation, and it will translate the text in your PowerPoint document. But – does it work?

• PowerPoint design / PowerPoint productivity
• Comments: 7

If you need footnotes, or if you’re a prolific user of mathematical formulae, you’re going to need to know how to make your text superscript and subscript in PowerPoint. Here are three ways to do it, with some bonus productivity tips to keep you working efficiently!

• Industry insights
• Comments: 1

As a founding member of the Presentation Guild, Sandra Johnson has trailblazed her way through the presentation industry. I recently had the opportunity to chat with her all about how she’s built a career from being a PowerPoint MVP, how she co-founded the Guild, and what she would like to see in the world of presentations.

• PowerPoint design / Visual communication
• Comments: 3

A good PowerPoint presentation is the culmination of many hours of hard work and careful planning. You’ve spent a lot of time researching, fact-checking, structuring and practising that all-important presentation. Now, what if I were to tell you that, despite all your hard work, there’s a good chance that at least 10% of your audience will have a hard time accessing any of your content?

• Google Slides / Presentation technology
• Comments: 6

I’ve recently been using Google Slides for a client’s conference event. It’s been really helpful for all parties involved, being able to collaborate, update and edit all in real time. But when it came down to the event itself, the client needed an offline version of the slides running in Apple Keynote...

• Effective eLearning

eLearning is great - it allows businesses to educate entire workforces at a pace, time, and location that suits them, while saving on costs associated with classroom-led training. Super! But what actually makes eLearning good or successful?

• PowerPoint productivity / Presentation technology
• Comments: 2

Does your PowerPoint run really slowly? Mine did. Particularly the animation pane, and slides with lots of graphics (especially vector graphics). Office 2013 was fine, then Office 365 (with PowerPoint 2016) was ridiculously slow. There might be a simple fix to help...