There are two types of people residing within the huge spectrum of the presentation world: those that love the assertion and interaction of hosting a presentation to an audience, and those who dread it.
For many of us, the notion of standing up in front of large audiences and giving an engaging and confident presentation can be a daunting one. What if nobody understands the content on show? How could they be kept enthralled if a technical error takes place?
Presentations can lead to sleepless nights if you’re not confident in your slides, and in a dynamic business environment confidence is key – whether you’re pitching to prospective clients or investors, or training employees.
Luckily, if you’re not a naturally confident person, help is at hand. There are plenty of little tips and tricks that can inspire confidence in your content – or at the very least give your audience the impression that you’re high on confidence. Here’s three highly useful and easy to implement tips that could help to give your presentation that all-important edge, regardless of the subject matter or who your audience will consist of.
Create outstanding content
Sometimes a little bit of AI goes a long way. Well, most of the time AI can be a profound help, especially when we’re suffering from a crisis of confidence in the technology that we’re relying on.
If you’re struggling to find the right balance with your slides then Designer may well be on hand to save the day. Designer is an AI-infused tool that automatically updates your slides based on your text and pictures to create beautiful layouts.
Image Source: Office
The great thing about Designer is that it works in the background, so if you have it installed, you don’t have to lift a finger to build a presentable presentation out of the raw data you feed into your PowerPoint file. The tool springs into action immediately too. As soon as you begin inserting pictures, Designer will create some suggestions. The program even has the power to transform your bullet points into sequential graphics.
If you’re one of many of us who occasionally suffers from creativity blocks then Designer could be something of a lifesaver. Just be mindful that the tool needs access to the internet to work – and if you see anything you don’t like, you can intervene at any time.
Utilise Zoom
Another tool that’s designed to significantly improve the usability of PowerPoint is Zoom. If you have a presentation that carries specific focal points you can use Zoom to seamlessly shift through scores of slides to refer back to the table or quotation or text quickly and efficiently.
Zoom carries plenty of navigational purposes for your slides. It’s not only capable of allowing you to flash back to any point in the presentation while remembering your place, but Summary Zoom has the ability to ‘zoom’ out of your presentation entirely to provide a single overhead bird’s eye view of the slides on show. Section Zoom also enables you to focus on a smaller collection of slides, helping you to compartmentalise your presentation and make it more digestible for audiences.
Convenience in transitions
If you’re looking to exercise a visage of supreme confidence when presenting using PowerPoint, you can now utilise your smartphone as a remote and laser pointer.
By downloading the PowerPoint app for Android, iOS and Windows phones, you can run plenty of your processes directly through your smartphone. This creates a much more professional atmosphere around your presentation while enabling you to be much more flexible with your actions in transitioning through slides and physically highlighting charts and passages of text.
There’re a few other online-based tools that can help you with building a decent presentation:
- Canva – allows you to easily design decks and graphics
- PoweredTemplate – a collection of 15,000+ templates
- PowToon – a tool for creating animated presentations
- Piktochart – a tool that allows you to visualise data
The use of your phone as a tool to help you through your presentation can not only empower you to feel more confident in the delivery of your presentation, but it can also help you keep focused. Where traditionally you’re required to be near your computer to click a button to progress slides, the use of a portable device that you’re already familiar with opens up the potential to step away from the podium or desk and address your audience directly. This makes for a significantly empowering stance if you naturally lack confidence in front of a number of people.