One of the reasons that presenters don’t use visuals instead of text is because they don’t know what visual to use to explain the point they are making. Business professionals tell me all the time that they aren’t graphic artists or designers, so how can they come up with a visual?

Occasionally, I'm asked by colleagues or clients to send samples of "great slides" or "good PowerPoints."

I usually hesitate to send examples of slides since my answer to the question, "what does a great PowerPoint slide look like?" is "it depends."

In a world which often thinks in terms of absolutes — "this is good, that is bad" — "it depends" is not the most popular answer.

When replacing text with a visual, don't make the mistake of thinking that you need a fancy or complex visual. This makeover shows that a simple visual combined with a good headline is much easier to create than trying to design a more complex visual, and it is more effective.

Nearly a year ago, Adobe produced their “PowerPoint for the web” software, which will soon be negated by Microsoft’s in-built presentation broadcast feature in PowerPoint 2010. Though there is no real use for one-to-one broadcasts, this is a new way lecturers and teachers can give presentations and lectures to students over the web with no extensive technology needed.

In the "so bad it's good" category, we honor eight PowerPoint slides that will make you say, "What were they thinking?"

As every meeting planner and attendee has witnessed, putting “power” into a PowerPoint presentation is not always the easiest task. And after minutes, hours and cumulative days of enduring slides, slides and more slides, it’s not uncommon for participants to consider PowerPoint a dirty word.

In addition to bullet points that not-so-magically appear with the click of a hand-held mouse, overwhelmed, under-focused and altogether time-starved attendees are also reasons behind the popularity of new technologies, such as audience polls or surveys.

This tutorial will teach you how to embed a YouTube video into a Powerpoint presentation.The computer showing the presentation with the embedded video must have an Internet connection and must not block youtube.com in order for this to work.

When comparing financial figures between two periods, one of the common messages we need to communicate is what makes up the difference between the two figures.

Instead of just pasting an Excel sheet on your slide, use the ideas in this makeover to break down the difference visually and make each component clear to your audience.

Hopefully by now you’ve heard about the new versions of your favorite Microsoft Office applications that are showing up on the web. A large part of the effort behind Office 2010 has been to bring Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint functionality to SharePoint and Windows Live, enabling a whole new range of distribution and interactivity.

You may even have tried these out for yourself in the preview SkyDrive customers are currently invited to explore. If you have, please let us know what you think, and if you haven’t, well, you still have time to check it out.

Creating New Experiences

We’ve done our best to create web experiences for the applications that will feel comfortable to current customers, but we’ve also extended the applications to anticipate and take advantage of some brand new ways of using and viewing documents.

Today I’m going to give you a little background into one of these new areas, the PowerPoint Web App Reading View.

PowerPoint documents were originally fairly simple collections of images, displayed as a presenter spoke. The slides reinforced the spoken message. Typically, they didn’t encompass complete messages. The speaker filled in the heart of what was being presented.

Over the years, we’ve seen an evolution in presentations, and now many business documents are created exclusively in PowerPoint. Often the slides are distributed to those not able to attend, or for general reference. In lieu of presenter, it’s a common best practice to annotate the slides with text in each slide’s notes panes.