It could be a specific data point on a chart or a number in a table.  I have a laser pointer inside my presentation remote, the Kensington33374 Wireless Presenter with Laser Pointer, and “occasionally” I use the built-in laser pointer.

If you like to use a laser pointer when presenting, you should do it with a bit of care and follow these two tips:

• Make sure you limit the movements to the bare minimum, and turn off the laser pointer after you have indicated the item you want to highlight.  Presenters who insist on circling around and around the items on the screen and move the pointer all over the slide think they are focusing the audience’s attention, but in fact they may cause everyone’s head and eyes to spin and get distracted.  Some speakers even forget they have the laser turned on and move their hand while dangerously pointing the laser beam everywhere.
• If you hand shakes too much,  maybe because you are a bit nervous, it might be better to find an alternative way of highlighting items on the screen, for example by

1. using arrows and different colors directly within the PowerPoint presentation
2. enlarging the font size to increase readability
3. breaking the information into multiple slides or  building a specific slide for each point you want to highlight

The same problems can happen during a webcast, this time it’s not the laser pointer but the mouse pointer.  Try to limit the mouse movements when you are recording or presenting to a live Internet audience.  Here as well too many movements can be very distracting.

1) Graphics Cheat Sheet (above left) produced by Mike Parkinson (read an interview with Mike on Using Charts in Powerpoint)
2) Chart Chooser from Andrew Abela (above right), also available online:  Chart Chooser from Juice Analytics

If you know of any others, feel free to add them in the comments.

Notice how everything is centered.  I know that PowerPoint defaults to centered headings so I can understand a centered title ( though generally I have a preference for left-aligned) but certainly not centered bullet items!

Here is a very simple make-over using PowerPoint SmartArt graphics to make the slide more readable.  If you want to show two options, the easiest way is to make two columns and use different colors. I used the same font everywhere, and did not use italics.

How would you have restyled the slide?

To define the structure of a new presentation I am using the post-it method.  Post-its have the advantage that they can be moved around on a page and their small size helps you to focus, focus, focus.  Many presentation gurus (Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds to name just two) suggest using them at the beginning. I use an A3 sheet of paper on which I printed the BBP template from Cliff Atkinson, which I find to be a good starting point. The hierarchical structure helps me to focus the content around 3 main points, and then develop 2 levels of sub points.

This manual (analog) method doesn’t make my mind wander off to thinking what could be visual ways of presenting the information, what fonts would be appropriate, what charts and what photographs.  I’ll leave these decisions to later.

Once I like the structure, I copy the text from each post-it into the outline view in PowerPoint. This gives me a single slide for each post-it.

Now comes the second phase.

This is a good point to think about outsourcing, if you have resource constraints.  Get in touch to see how I can help turn your structure into an effective PowerPoint.  Take a look at what my clients say about my work.

How do you start building a brand new presentation?  Post-its?  Straight to PowerPoint?

Take a look at this presentation from the SlideShare team that shows statistics elaborated from all the presentations that were loaded on SlideShare in 2010.

It’s practically a  news summary for 2010. Have you searched for these terms too in the past year?

One more, how could I forget Facebook?

Here is a video of what was popular on Facebook in 2010:

If you are on Twitter (I am @slidecoach on Twitter, by the way), you can check out a site which reviews Twitter happenings in 2010.

p.s.

Zeitgeist means “the spirit of”.