Making Good Presentations?

[Silence04]

does anyone have any experience in making good presentations.

I have to make this years product presentation. It is used to train distributors on how to sell the products.

for the past presentations i've been making the slides in photoshop and placing them into powerpoint. the whole thing ends up being kind of lifeless and cheesy, especially with microsoft's pixilated fades and transitions.

is there any better software for making presentations? should i be using flash or director to do this?
what about keynote, anyone ever use that regularly?

thanks!

[Jackimalyn]

the whole thing ends up being kind of lifeless and cheesy, especially with microsoft's pixilated fades and transitions.


Thats cuz your using powerpoint. PP sucks, but its what I use. If you have a lot of time on your hands, all the power to you- go with Flash. You could make some sweet ones in there. But if you've gotta crank em out quick, PP works. You can download free backgrounds for some variation from the standards it comes with or make your own. Plus if you're going to email the presentation or work with anyone else on it, more people know PP than Flash (although just this morning my boss asked me, 'Jackie... can you get rid of all these boxes everywhere????'... he needed me to delete a few extra text boxes in a PP slide....) jeeze....

[Craig B]

Keynote is definitely nicer and smoother than PPT but it's less standard and as Jacki said the reason why PPT might be better is because in theory other people can make changes and edit it. then again, that could be a bad thing.

Keynote says it exports to PPT, but I'm not sure how well it does it. You might want to do a few test if you go that route.

[Jimeda Fork]

Corporate presentations are run on PowerPoint, at least in my experience. I have had the opportunity to incorporate a few flash pieces into them over the years, but they are few and far between. The good and bad about ppt is that everyone has it. Once you send it out, it's impossible to prevent changes you don't want made. On the positive side, you aren't always being called to add a comma here, a line break there. I've literally done hundreds of ppts over the years. The program is what you make it. If you have the creativity for it, your presentation can be absolutely awesome. Skip the cheesy animations and go with a consistent set of transitions. Don't make them fly all over the place, instead use random bars (horizontal) or a wipe from left. The key is to get it to look good without killing the processor and making things jumpy. I have found that PPT handles *.png files well, as long as you don't need to print the file. That's another can of worms. Skip the prefab templates and make your own.

[1ooScreamingTrees]

microsoft's pixilated fades and transitions.

Don't use transitions at all.

[Navian]

Jimeda, you can always set your power point presentation password for no alterations, and who can open it.

Tools>Options>Security(tab)


Don't use transitions at all.

I agree. people use them at the wrong time. what is stupid is when they use random ones on each slide..

[urstwile]

If you're feeling adventurous, you could do the whole thing in InDesign, and save that as a PDF. Acrobat has a bunch of transitions you can apply, or you can choose to have none at all.

The nice thing about doing it in InDesign is that you have all the layout and type controls of InDesign but you can run it as a PDF presentation in Full Screen view.

[SurfPark]

Transitions are a no go. What you need to do is work on the information you're laying out. Too often people use charts or bullet lists to convey a lot of information. The less information on a slide the better. You should be using these as visual cues and not storing real infromation on them. For example, if you're talking about the sales of a product, don't put numbers up there. A generic graphic that supports the topic is better. You don't want people read the slides, but rather use them as visual points of interest in your topic.

Check out this article on good PowerPoint design... http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2005/09/whats_good_powe.html

[Silence04]

cool guys, thanks for the feedback...
the transitions i was using was just the slide in/out, the others were the ones that looked pixilated.

we aren't really limited to powerpoint because we have to provide a computer to do the presentation

that was a good reference surf thanks!

[colorsplashstudio]

That's a great idea, urstwile! I hadn't thought of it before!