Course Outcomes

This PowerPoint design course will:

  • Provide participants with a clear understanding of what good slide design is and isn’t.
  • Offer tools for crafting a visual story.
  • Raise the quality of visual aids participants create.

Course Overview

Thanks to thousands of dreadful slides shown each day in boardrooms and conference centers throughout the world, the fear of death by PowerPoint is alive and well.

While slides can certainly enhance a presentation’s message, they can also initially mask the fact that a presenter doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. Although eventually, most of these people will be found out, often that doesn’t happen until a lot of time and money are wasted.

Yes, PowerPoint is a seductive tool. So much so, it can distract presenters from the work of creating solid content.

This workshop will help PowerPoint users organize their thoughts, create attractive slides, and increase the likelihood they realize their presentation’s goals.  

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

  • Explain the importance of good presentation design.
  • Craft a visual narrative.
  • Logically connect slides with the presentation’s story.
  • Choose a look that enhances the points of a presentation.
  • Select colors and graphics that improve their slides’ appearance.
  • Use transition and animation appropriately.
  • Design a presentation template.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points.  As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).

Workshop Outline

Set Off to the Design Mine: Identifying Presentation Objectives

A breathtaking PowerPoint is useless if it does not support a speaker’s message or address an audience’s concerns. This course begins with a frank discussion about audience analysis and practical tips for quickly defining a presentation’s scope and depth. Following this discussion, participants will have an opportunity to share their personal learning objectives as they shape the rest of the session’s agenda.

Clarity Counts: Articulating Your Story

In this workshop segment, participants will examine the importance of using a presentation roadmap and the various options they have to connect one point to another. Working alone and in groups, they will explore several ways to organize information. Next, they will apply techniques learned to an existing slide presentation.

Shine On: Using Slides to Support the Narrative

Once the presentation’s narrative is written, it’s time to start creating slides. 
Unfortunately, the infinite possibilities available to PowerPoint users are often more of a hindrance than a help. The vast number of options available have overwhelmed more than a person or two. To avoid PowerPoint paralysis, it helps to have some design guidelines in place. During this seminar segment, we suggest some design rules after showing several slide makeovers and discussing the reasons for the changes.

Tame the Tawdry: Working in Harmony

If you’ve ever been ambushed by slides containing color combinations not found in nature, you have experienced a visual assault no one deserves. This portion of the course focuses on creating visual agreement across a presentation and tying slides together with harmonious choices related to photos, colors, and text.

Picture This!: Finding Good, Free, and Almost Free Photos

Stock photos and illustrations have come a long way since the earliest days of PowerPoint. Do you remember that cartoon gypsy looking at a crystal ball? How about the stick man with the question mark over his head? Those two left a lot to be desired; that’s for sure! Fast forward a quarter of a century. Things have certainly changed. Thanks to digital photography and greater bandwidth, there is a lot out there from which to choose. Business Training Works maintains a list of free and almost free sites for finding professional photos and illustrations. In this part of the program, we will share this resource and take a look at a few of our favorite sites. 

Dazzle Them: Adding Movement to Your Work

Often, less is more when it comes to PowerPoint. Good designers do not cheapen their work with amateur animations and gimmicks. That said, well-done special effects can enhance a slide’s effectiveness. In this segment of the course, participants will learn different techniques they can use to add professional animation to their slides.

Craft the Perfect Setting: Creating Templates

Templates help to unify the look and feel of slide decks produced by members of the same organization. In this final unit of the course, participants will learn how to craft templates that present a consistent look yet remain flexible enough to accommodate different types of presentations.

By the conclusion of this program, participants should know how to craft a well-thought-out message, how to use PowerPoint to enhance that message, and how to unify the look at feel of their presentations with templates.