Firstly, we’ve always advised that you need to research your audience! This is important from every perspective – what and how you are about to present and how it will look. We’ve spoken about this in our online course “Plan a presentation like a Pro” and while we know you will go and check it out. Even more, here is a bonus – an article which will help you understand the presentation-related differences across the different nationalities.

Obviously, you may end up using a chart of some kind – bar, pie, line, or any other. However, what you should be careful with is how many colors you are using for that chart. We have talked a lot about how to search and not just present the data itself but what the conclusion of that data is. This may require you to use a different than the planned chart or data visualization but again – colors are not to be overused. Careful there and read the answer to the next question.

What you can also do is put your data into context. For example, if you want to present to your audience that something ways 2Ts then you can put that into context and tell them that your product is as heavy as a BMW limousine. Has your audience seen a BMW? Most likely yes. Well, now they can easily understand how much your product weighs.

There’s no fixed rule but using three colors is a good start and suggestion. One color for background, one that’s the main one – for text/shapes, and one that you can use for emphasis. Important – you have to make sure that there is a contrast between those colors that you are using and the way you are using them. One great resource for that is Adobe Color.

In order to animate it, your chart must be a real chart. Wow, that sounds interesting, right? What we mean is that your chart should still be editable and not a photo – remember you can paste a chart as an image? Well, if you do that, there are no animations. So, what are the steps that you need to follow:

1. Create the chart (or copy -> paste it from Excel)

2. Go to the Animations tab

3. Choose the desired animation

4. On the right side, you will see the button Effect options

5. From Effect options, you can choose how to animate the chart you have

Note: For bar charts and line charts we recommend the Wipe animation. For pie charts, we would advise you to use Wheel.

There’s no fixed rule but using three colors is a good start and suggestion. One color for background, one that’s the main one – for text/shapes, and one that you can use for emphasis. Important – you have to make sure that there is a contrast between those colors that you are using and the way you are using them. One great resource for that is Adobe Color.

Well… Fascinating question! We would say that many people don’t even suspect the whole range of possibilities that PowerPoint offers. Furthermore, Marinela shared that she was surprised by the functionalities that PowerPoint has when she started to work with us.

However, from a business point of view, we don’t only use PowerPoint. Although, it depends on the goals you want to achieve. PowerPoint is an extremely powerful and familiar tool but as with every single tool – if you know how to use it, you can create incredible things with it. We have used PowerPoint for client projects that as a result brought them 8-figure deals. Well, that’s nice! However, if you want analytics for your presentations – you should use Prezi However if you want to include more exciting animations – Apple Keynote is the software for you. And from a collaborative point of view – Google Slides beats them all.

Marinela shared that she found the PowerPoint Zoom function most challenging to use during a recent project we did for one of our clients.

We hope that you learned something new from those questions! If you have any additional such, feel free to leave them in the comments below and we will be happy to answer them!