I discovered this trick when my superior at work asked me to run a presentation in a loop. The requirement was something like this: You are organising a conference where you will address a large gathering. Before the actual speech can begin, while the audience is settling down, you need a presentation to run in continuous loop. First the company logo appears, then the tag line, then the screen goes blank, then logo appears again, then the tagline and so on... A similar example can be found in many multiplexes where they keep running the movie schedule in a continuous loop. The question in front of me was how to do this. Before you read on to find out how I managed to crack it, think about how you will create this trick in PowerPoint. The solution: To find out how to do it let us take a case. The logo will be of All About Presentations and there will be the URL coming below it. And this will be in a continuous loop (without any manual intervention). Step-1: Place the objects on the slid...

Dear friend, There is a small update which I want to share. I would be writing a few articles from now on for the website www.24Point0.com . This is after the website approached me and wanted me to write for them. Every once in a while. Here is the first article I have written on the website. State of PowerPoint Presentations in India I have shared some of my thoughts about what ails PowerPoint Presentations in India. I have also shared what I feel are the reasons for the same. To read the article click here . I would love to have your views on the topic.

I was among those fortunate people who were invited for TED x Hi-Tech City , an independently organised TED event at Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. TED is a great platform for amazing people to come and share their ideas which make a difference to the world around us. TEDx is a program run by TED which allows local, self-organized groups to organize TED-like talks. The Experience I went to TEDx with a lot of expectations. After having seen so many TED talks online, I was expecting some good stuff here as well. And I was not at all disappointed. None of the speakers except Nagesh Kukunoor, the famous film director, was a known celebrity. Yet each speaker was doing something in life which was so very different from normal people like us. They all had a great story to tell. How well they told their story, is where their presentation skills come to play. Lessons I Learnt as a Presenter I am not going to talk about the life lessons I learnt from each speaker. Let me talk about the...

This is a guest post by Edmond Mahony . Edmond is an independent digital strategist and brand planner based in London, UK. One of his current projects is The Ideas Forum – Spotlight Ideas. Introduction I worked in a large IT company for many years. My experience of working in that company was that most presentations were left-side-thinking in approach. I imagine most other people in business in general have a similar experience of presentations (?) This article is about presentations that are about being right-side-thinking in approach. Difference between “normal” presentations and creative presentations What’s the difference between left-side and right-side thinking? Left-side is about linear, logical thinking. Right-side is about creative, lateral-minded thinking. Left-side in presentations, involves, most typically, imparting information with a certain degree of analysis (what many might consider the typical or “normal” presentation). Right-side in presentations, might involve, f...

This is a guest post from Joel Xavier, an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad. He is based out of Pune, India and trains students for various entrance exams including MBA. This is a slightly long post but is very insightful. It is based on Joel's presentation experience during his recently concluded 5 day training session. I shot out an SOS email to Vivek one day asking him to provide me with ‘whatever’ content he had on ‘making presentations’ [He is a senior from my MBA days who even back then, was known for his slick presentations]. Why? I was to teach a bunch of engineers-to-be the nuances of making good presentations in about 3 day’s time and I had no clue how I was going to approach it . Who better to ask for guidance than your own senior? I got more than I bargained for. Within no time I had a long list of twenty odd links pointing back to this blog which was his pick of the best of the basics. I got to work. I was carefully copy pasting the content to a word document for offline refer...

Yet another month passed by. In January the blog completed one year of existence. 164 posts, 13.7 posts a month and 1 post every 3 days. A huge amount of time and effort has gone in the last one year and will continue to go in every month. I would like to list down the most read posts of the blog in the last one year. Here is the list: #1 How to make sponsorship proposal presentations? #2 How many slides should your presentations have? #3 How to make a business review presentation? #4 7 lessons from Dr. Steven Covey's presentation #5 An introduction to SmartArt graphics #6 How to create your own template in PowerPoint? #7 How to add hyperlink to SmartArt? #8 Checklist for making any presentation #9 Free E-Book on 14 Tips to make awesome charts #10 How to present one bullet at a time? Coming to January 2010, I shared a couple of tricks on PowerPoint and talked about the amazing talk by Devdutt Pattanaik. No wonder the most read posts of the last month are: #1 How to create a lunar e...