Today, PowerPoint is everywhere. In almost every profession, like Accounting, lawyers, software professionals, Lecturers, etc every profession uses PowerPoint. Providing presentations using PowerPoint is an art, but for it, you need to excel in creating the PowerPoint design. Hence, it becomes very important to master PowerPoint skills in today’s world.

You never know when it comes in handy and if you have the skills already then you will completely remove your dependency on any other individual.

What are the skills required in PowerPoint for working professionals?

Some really important skills which you need to consider if you are a working professional are:

1. Design layout: Plan the design layout.

2. Choosing Templates: Choose what works best with content

3. Choosing Introduction and Conclusion slides: Always important to include both of these slides

4. Maintaining no. of slides: Minimalism works the best in case of deciding no. of slides to keep

5. Fonts: Choose the size of your fonts. Headlines should have a bigger font size

6. Fill Colors: Not to be overdone

7. Animations/Graphics: Necessary to be inserted

8. Tables: Effective way of representation

9. Effects: Choose for each slide, can be similar for all or different

10. Content: Needs to be put together efficiently without missing any relevant information

11. Background Fill: Not too bold nor too basic

12. Writing style: Choose when to keep Bold and when in some other format

13. Synthesis: Framing of the slide titles

14. Shifting between different slides: Plan out your slides priority and then arrange

15. Hyperlinks: Should be inserted if necessary

16. Charts and graphs: Visual representation of content

17. Screen Mode: Fullscreen display or minimal display can be chosen accordingly

18. Font color: Should match the background shade

19. Display Modes: Choose according to needs

20. Reference: Should be added to make ppt effective and provide sources of information

PowerPoint skills to consider

During uncertain times of Covid 19, we have witnessed that we all have to be stronger and autonomous. Without our normal office records, millions of us have found ourselves working from home. Many professional services companies have extensive support personnel. Even if a company maintains its support staff on call, both of them ain’t in the same physical location as the professionals that they assist. There are huge chances that your team’s PowerPoint specialist may have been laid off and there is no one around the corner to help you with these skills. Well, here are a few great things: fending with the right skills and tools for ourselves is pretty easy. In particular essential PowerPoint, skills facilitate life and make presentations more convincing.

Here are a few important PowerPoint skills which you can focus on to become a specialist;

1. Focus On Your Basics:

Most people receive little or no training in the correct use of PowerPoint so they do the hard work. For design experts, marketing specialists, lawyers, managers, etc, this holds true completely. These basic skills reduce PowerPoint usage time and effort. You need to understand what kind of presentation you want to create, it can be-

a) Based on templates

b) No of slides

c) Fonts and colors usage

d) Watch the speaker’s notes

e) Just keep it simple

2. Ask questions- Why do you want to create a presentation document?

The key skill of PowerPoint is to decide the slide deck’s purpose. This fundamental decision will affect all the elements of a slide deck. Who is your crowd? How are they going to see your presentation? Ask questions and then adapt your content to the answers. As a presentation tool, PowerPoint started to create slide decks for viewing during discussions. People are now increasingly using PowerPoint for documentation instead of Word. The doc decks are more visual than traditional text-heavy word documents to communicate information.

3.  Begin with choosing an excellent Template

Each PowerPoint will start with a base template that defines your available policies, colors, and layouts. It is essential to have a strong, well-designed template.

All the building blocks you need are presented in a good template. Allow the layout and design of the template to focus on the content.

Choose something which goes with your content. If your presentation is for technical background like code walk through, keep it a bit basic. Do not overdo with bright colors.

If you are from the creative designing side, you can experiment with your page layout colors as you are from a designing background and your work revolves around creativity.

4.  Master the skill of editing slides

There is a master slide behind each slide, which controls the design of that slide. The layout of any slide can be modified by hand. However, if you need to change the global formatting for all the slides of one type or another, you need not change each slide individually, but modify the slide master. In PowerPoint, the view tab lets you view and edit master slides.

5. Use proper placeholders

It is much easier to use master layouts properly. Clicks and helps you position things properly. Don’t ignore them, they work in your favor if you know how to use this option properly. Location holders are text, graphics, and video pre-formatted containers. They are easily recognizable by the icons which automatically appear when they are empty.

If you see a slide layout with a placeholder, use it. These icons save your time and help in ensuring that contents are displayed on the slide. The useful position holders must be highlighted in each PowerPoint training.

6. Application of fonts and colors

For your presentation, define the fonts and colors of your slides. Resist the urge of using too many fonts and colors. Do not change fonts or text colors unless you have a particular reason and a good design sense. Your audience, no matter how it looks, needs to understand the message.

Discipline your usage of colors. Use your primary base color to catch the audience’s attention. Too much of it makes the message unclear.

7. Do not read slides

Slides help the audience remember your presentation’s main points. The public hates to listen to people reading their own slides. Use the speaker notes as scripts and slides to illustrate them for presentations.

Also, make sure that you check the speaker notes pane when sharing a PowerPoint slide deck, to make sure the notes are correct. You don’t want to unnecessarily share speaker notes. This is a deal-breaker point. Never read from your slides, it showcases that you never prepared for the presentation and do not have a viewpoint to explain.

8. Choosing the display modes

You can select five display modes in the lower right corner of the PowerPoint window( Notes, Slide Sorter, Reading View, Slide Show). Most people work in the Standard view and the slide show view is present. However, the reading view is a better choice. If in any presentation duration, like in IT, you need to shift or change between multiple applications, then the view reads the windows taskbar, and you can change it with one click.

Presenter view complements speaker notes: it displays the current slide and notes on the laptop of the presenter and the slide in front of it. But only the current slide is shown on the screen of the audience.

9. Presentation design skills

Many people make a mistake when they begin working on their slides. For example, many people begin by looking for which template to choose or start typing on their slides in PowerPoint.

Also, they change the PowerPoint dimensions so that a slide is the poster size and starts there or they are looking for a template for posters. But that’s the first mistaken step. Your first step ought to be storytelling. You risk gathering excessive information into your presentation and/or including information not necessary for your submission when storytelling is skipped. You need to design your content, this should be the first step.

Document down how you want to put out all the information in the PowerPoint. Choose what needs to be there and what is irreverent to the topic. Design complete end-to-end flow, titles of all your slides, conclusion, introduction, content, etc. Designing is very important.

10. Inserting tables, charts, and graphs

Use tables for inserting, adding data, modifying and formatting data, Copying and Pasting content.

Use charts and graphs for Visualization of data. You can show the facts in the form of visual effects which is a recipe to make presentations effective. You can show measures along with just facts through these tools. It is important to understand what kind of data you have and among tables, charts, and graphs what will go well with that data.

Also, there are a variety of graphs like bar graphs, line graphs, etc. Choose what graph will work the best. Everything should be put together effectively rather than using all the tools and putting them mindlessly in your presentation.

11. Use Effects, animations, and graphics

Between each slide, you can use effects to choose how you want the next slide to get displayed. You can choose multiple effects and the same effect as well throughout the presentation. It is better to choose one and follow throughout. When it comes to animations and graphics, these are another brilliant way to support your views in the form of visual art. Show your creativity using these skills in your presentation. They should be part of presentations to make them super effective.

PowerPoint Animations create interest. If you are a software developer and providing a walkthrough of your code, you can make it interesting using animations. Animations usage is a brilliant level of creativity and ii comes with practice.

12.  Usage of Hyperlinks

You can use hyperlinks in PowerPoint if you need to move to a different browser page. This can be part of your content and once clicked on, you can smoothly move to a different page. Quick and easy.

Mark it with dark blue color with an underline, so that it shows clearly that it’s a hyperlink.

13. Conclude your PowerPoint

It is very important to put a conclusion to your presentation. You should use a separate Conclusion slide in PowerPoint and put down all your summary points. Many people miss this task. A presentation can never be ended without a Conclusion slide.

Job prospects

There are many job options in which you can enroll if you master PowerPoint skills:

1. Business Analyst: Most of BA’s work revolves around collecting data and representing it to clients or Business owners as PowerPoint presentations. If you know how to document and put together everything in PPT, you are good to go for this job role.

2. Public Speaking: A public speaker often uses PowerPoint to express their thoughts in front of the public. They need to document everything in PowerPoint to showcase the facts and figures to people. This is where PowerPoint skills come underuse.

3. Humar Resources: Most of the companies HR, require to create business PowerPoint presentations for almost all the activities, whether it is for induction to freshers or to give sessions to employees on any topic. They work day in and out on PowerPoint presentations. This is the best-suited profile if you have PowerPoint skills.

4. Project Manager:  Managers always require PowerPoint to document everything. Even if they have to showcase any functioning of the newly developed tool to the client, they will create PowerPoint slides for it.  In every domain, Project managers definitely need to have these skills to function and you have them then you are good to go for this role.

Conclusion

PowerPoint skills are necessary and very important to learn. It will come in handy whenever you have to give a presentation. You can create one without being dependent on anyone. Also, a PowerPoint created on your own gives a different level of confidence while giving presentations. Because, in that case you know which information is present on which slide and you can navigate without hesitation.