This slide is from a presentation made by a large Public Relations agency in India. It talks about the key services the organisation offers it clients. This slide is from a slightly evolved presenter. That's why he/she does not want to use bullets. Any normal presenter would have gone with a list of bullet points.  Otherwise, the presenter is trying to make the slide look better and impress the audience. This slide needs tweaking. The alternative colours (green and grey) is making the slide tough to read. The centre alignment (read more here ) is also causing an imbalance. The header 'Key Services' is aligned left and the rest of the text is aligned centre. Let us make some minor changes and see what we arrive at. Changes made: 1) Text aligned to the left. 2) Bevel effect removed from rectangular boxes 3) Shadows removed from the boxes and the text. 4) Text unbold. We will now try to improve the slide further. Changes made: 1) Logo removed. 2) Single co...

Here is a slide which shares a media plan. A school in my city (Hyderabad) organised an event recently. They were seeking sponsors for the event and this slide belongs to their sponsorship pitch presentation. This slide talks about how they are going to promote the event through a 360 degree media plan. The key message of the slide is a complete and total coverage of the event across all forms of media thus ensuring a good attendance at the event. I have tried three ways of improving this slide. Option 1 is trying to replace the bullets with a diagram. What I have used is a regular SmartArt diagram. This diagram visually cues a 360 degree plan.  Option 2 is nothing but a different representation of Option 1. In essence we have knocked off the bullet and made the slide cleaner. This is also a regular SmartArt diagram. Option 3 would be my preferred option. This does two things. One, the small list on the right is easy to read and understand. Two, the arrow di...

After having looked at maps, let us look at a slide which uses a photograph with some text. We all use photos in our slides accompanied with text. Here is a slide which came to me from a TV channel. I had shared this as a slide improvement example in the presentations workshop  I conducted three months back. This slide talks about the anchor of a new TV show. For confidentiality reasons, I have replaced the original image with a different one. A pretty normal slide. Has an image and some text about the image. Can this be made better? Let us give it a shot. Remember, the first post in which we used maps. We did two important things with the map. First, made it bigger and second let it merge with the background . We will try the same here. When the image becomes bigger, it always looks better. Always try to use as large an image as possible. With just the image becoming bigger, the slide has improved in its design appeal. Now try the 'merge the image with the background...

This is the second post in the series of five posts. In the last post we improved one slide from real life. Today we will work on another slide. This slide also belongs to the same presentation. This slide contains list of town names. Instead of making tables the presenter has inserted shapes and typed on to it. The centre alignment and so much of light brown colour is making the slide look bad. Not only is the design poor but the information presented in this manner is not very useful.  Here is one possible (and simple) improvement. Seems quite obvious to me. I have done three things with the list. 1) Made a simple table 2) Got the proportion right. Instead of two long columns, I now have more evenly balanced five columns 3) I have arranged the list in alphabetical order so it is more meaningfully used by the audience. If they are looking for a city, its easier to find in my list now. While making this table, I also noticed that the town 'Indore' has come twice ...

My last post on Slide Improvement was the 350th post on AAP. My blog is now 1163 days old. That's 3 years 2 months and 8 days. Feels great to blog and blog to an ever increasing and exciting group of readers. Thanks for reading and thanks for contributing.

During the course of next few days, I am going to share five slides with you. Five slides I have come across in real life. We are going to evaluate the slide and see how it can be improved. It is like the "Before and After" of PowerPoint slides. Slide Improvement 1 Here is a slide which came to me from a major agency in India. In this slide they are talking about their presence across India. This slide is meant to impress the client about how big the organisation really is. This is a slide I received a few days back and this is the inspiration behind the five part series on slide improvement. This slide is bad. What is meant to impress actually does the exact opposite. There are various ways of improving such a slide. One that I am showing below took me under two minutes to modify. What I have done is to enlarge the map, put the city names along with the red dots. Hence the lines have been eliminated. I have also removed the rectangle which contained the text and l...

Default (noun):  A particular setting or value for a variable that is assigned automatically by an operating system and remains in effect unless cancelled or overridden by the operator: changed the default for the font in the word processing program . ( source ) If you are going ahead with the default settings of MS PowerPoint then you are living in Default Land . And living in default land is not going to help you at all. To become better at making presentations, the first step you must take is to come out of your default land and explore . How do you know if you are living in default land? Go back to your last few PPT slides and ask these questions: Did I go ahead with Calibri, the default font? Did I choose a template for my presentation or went ahead with the normal white stuff? Did I choose the template I always choose or tried something new? Did I change the colour, alignment or fonts of my data table? Did I change the font size of my text? Did I change the ali...

This is a guest post by  David Gerrard . He works for Boards Direct , one of the UK's largest online retailers of whiteboards, glassboards, noticeboards and other office supplies. In an age where everyone seems to be cranking out endlessly dull Powerpoint presentations, a return to the traditional whiteboard format can often be a more engaging and effective alternative. There are, however, some differences when it comes to using this method and in both preparation and execution, you have to approach it in a different manner. Here are some tips to help you in presenting effective presentations on whiteboards . Prepare and Rehearse In the majority of tasks you approach, preparation is the key to being successful. If you're well prepared you will feel more confident and consequently, present more effectively. When it comes to using a whiteboard, not only do you have to think about what you're saying but – unlike with a Powerpoint presentation – you also have to illus...

Diagrammer is an online store where you can buy diagrams for your next presentation. It is the istockphoto and fotolia of diagrams. You go to fotolia to buy photos, you can visit diagrammer to buy diagrams. To me this comes as a bit of a surprise. This is something innovative. But will people actually pay for diagrams? What kind of diagrams are we talking here? While browsing diagrammer I realised it is like MS Powerpoint's SmartArt . SmartArt is a collection of ready made diagrams. Diagrams in which you can insert your own text. While there are only 100 odd types of SmartArts, diagrammer has more than 4000 diagrams. There are essentially five types of diagrams in diagrammer; Flow, Join, Network, Segment and Stack. These are supposed to denote five different types of relationships. Within each of these categories there are sub-categories. For example, under Flow you have Linear, Loop, Merge/Divide and Parallel. If you want to show five ideas merging you can choose one ...