Across 1. What presenters, especially consultants, put on every slide? (LOGO) 8. Biggest sin you can make as a presenter (READ YOUR SLIDE) 9. Helvetica. Candara. Cambria. Garamond. (FONT) Down 2. Extremely popular presentations blogger and author of many books on presentations (GARR REYNOLDS) 3. Most searched stuff online (by presenters). Enhances the visual appeal of your presentation. (TEMPLATE) 4. Ready-made graphics to help you visually represent information and enhance visual appeal of your presentation. (SMART ART) 5. Upload and share your presentation on this website for free (SLIDESHARE) 6. Short cut. Press this during slideshow and the screen turns black (CTRLB) 7. There are two types of fonts. Serif and _______. Serif is good for printed text (books). _______ is good for on-screen display (presentations). (SANS SERIF)

Across 1. What presenters, especially consultants, put on every slide? 8. Biggest sin you can make as a presenter 9. Helvetica. Candara. Cambria. Garamond. Down 2. Extremely popular presentations blogger and author of many books on presentations 3. Most searched stuff online (by presenters). Enhances the visual appeal of your presentation. 4. Ready-made  graphics to help you visually represent information and enhance visual appeal of your presentation. 5. Upload and share your presentation on this website  for free 6. Short cut . Press this during slideshow and the screen turns black 7. There are two types of fonts. Serif and _______. Serif is good for printed text (books). _______ is good for on-screen display (presentations). Solve this crossword and have fun! I will be sharing the answers soon. Meanwhile you can share your answers through email ( vivek at allaboutpresentations dot com ) or leave your answers in comments.

1. Get your audience to pay attention to what you are saying. 2. Retain their attention throughout your presentation. The longer the presentation, the tougher this becomes. 3. Get your audience to understand your message. 4. Get your audience to remember  what you said. This is even tougher. 5. Get your audience to believe what you are saying. 6. Get your audience to care about what you are saying. You might be passionate about environment but your audience might not be. 7. Get your audience to actually act on your message . Get them to do what you want them to do. In a sales context, it will mean getting them to buy. In a sponsorship context, it mean getting the cheque from the sponsor. To summarise, these 7 challenge are: Get attention, retain attention, understand, remember, believe, care and act. These thoughts are from the classic book 'Made to Stick' (my all time favourite). While this book is about communication in general, we will look at the learning...

Last year I attended a conference in Mumbai where many speakers their thoughts about a variety of marketing topics. I do not remember most of the stuff that was spoken about. I mean, it has been more than 7-8 months. But one thing I do remember. It was a story and it goes something like this... I was a new Area Sales Manager in Hindustan Lever Limited. My National Sales Head was visiting my market. I was going to take him to a small town, so we were going to spend a lot of time travelling in the car. Expecting questions, I had prepared myself well. I had memorised all my sales numbers and growth rates. I even studied the climate and geography. What are the food crops and cash crops of the area and how was the monsoon this year? I was ready for most questions. I was also nervous. During the entire trip to the small town, the sales head did not ask me anything. When we reached the distributor point, we met the distributor and his salesmen. There was a delivery boy standing nearby. Af...

Last month, I shared a tip which will help you avoid turning your back to your audience. That tip is helpful when you are presenting on a stage. The solution I offered was placing TV screens in front of you and projecting your slides on that screen. But that tip does not answer this question. What would you do to avoid showing your back while presenting in your conference room? I faced this problem this Tuesday while presenting to my team. I turned my back to look at the slides more times than I should have. This was wrong and the solution I figured out was...  placing my laptop in front of me. When I face the audience, the screen is behind me and my laptop is facing me. This way, when I want to look at the slides, I can do so by looking at the laptop instead.

In his popular book To Sell is Human author  Dan Pink says, clarity depends on contrast. To understand something better, we should compare it. If you are presenting, use contrast to help your audience understand your concept better.  If you happen to be in the audience and seek more clarity, just ask “compared to what?”

Last week I read a very interesting book. It is called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The book talks about how habits form and how they can be changed. In our life, most things we do are not thought. We do it without thinking. They have become a habit. Charles also shares one interesting concept in his book. It is called 'Keystone Habit' . He says, some habits are more important than other habits. These keystone habits, if changed in turn influence all other habits and transform the individual. Example, for some people going to the gym or doing Yoga is a keystone habit. If such a person starts going to the gym, he also becomes careful of what he eats. He will start going to office early and he becomes more punctual in his life. He might also start working more seriously and take less breaks at work. We all have our keystone habits. After reading the book, I started to apply it to making presentations. When we asked to make a presentation, we do a lot of thi...