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PowerPoint Tactics: Part 8 - Final Thoughts
November 29th, 2006This series of posts described basic tactics for PowerPoint slides, among the most common forms of business communication. The organization and tone of a presentation plays a critical role in how your thoughts are conveyed to others. Other aspects such as knowing your time and audience, listening to input from others, and being sensitive to cultural boundaries, all contribute to your ability to get others to understand (and hopefully get behind) your ideas.
These techniques form the foundation that lead to achievements you can place on your performance evaluation. Being able to interact with customers (who buy your products), partners (who may be suppliers or retailers that help your company build or sell your products), and upper management (who pay your salary) are accomplishments that distinguish you from your peers. You will never get the chance, though, if you cannot clearly and concisely communicate your visions to anyone.
If you stammer through an oral presentation that goes off on wild tangents and nobody understands what your point was, or if you are the only one who grasps the concepts in your design documentation, you will never have the chance to get yourself in front of anyone significant beyond your own project group. Conversely, if you can present well organized information in both oral and written forms while accepting input from others and clearly articulating key points to others, you will stand out. Your manager will think of you as someone who is comfortable explaining things to others and this will result in the highly sought after interaction opportunities with customers, partners, and upper management that lead go a great performance evaluation.
Are you kidding me? Take a look at my picture. If I’m not a genuine, bona fide nerd I’m not sure who is. I'm currently employed as the Marketing and Internet Platform Solutions, Portals and Applications Chief Architect at Hewlett Packard (try saying that 5 times fast) and write here about career best practices for techies. Why? Because I wish I'd had this kind of free advice earlier in my own career and now I'm trying to "pay it forward". See more in 
May 10th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Pete,
This is a great resource. We help entrepreneurs get their pitch/powerpoint presentations ready for investors, etc., so this is really helpful– thanks.
March 17th, 2008 at 11:35 am
A really useful feature of PowerPoint is the ability to use a multiple monitor mode, where the presentation slide is shown on the projector screen, and where the slide together with speaker notes is visible only on the laptop.
To use this feature, go to SlideShow>SetupShow and change the settings in the ‘multiple monitors’ box. You also need to set up the projector to be your primaty monitor with your laptop screen as the secondary monitor using the display settings from the control panel.
Warning: make sure you practice this before the audience shows up!