Delivering an excellent presentation depends heavily on the speaker’ support materials, and how he/she uses them effectively. One of these tools (and probably one of the most famous ones) is Microsoft PowerPoint.

I have been doing presentations and public speaking for over 12 years now, and performed before thousands of people worldwide, and I can tell the tricks that would capture the attention of the audience, and in this week’s tip, here’s 5 simple tricks you can use to transform your presentation style with.

1. Automatically Play Videos: Multimedia Always do the Job and using Video / Audio within your presentation has an impressive effect on your audience and I’ve seen even “boring” speakers capture the attention of their audience when they play a video. Just use the following Trick for that: Make the Video Play Full Screen and “Play Automatically” rather than “On Click”. Choose High Definition videos and make sure your audio is well heard across the room

2. Use Presenter View: now although this may seem an obvious tip, but believe me when I tell you that most speakers don’t use Presenter View, and they just Duplicate their screen. Luckily with the Latest version of PowerPoint 2013, it is Set by Default to use Presenter View and for all the right reasons

You see the new presenter view is an amazing work of ART for presenters… it’s so well designed with features that would make the presenter shine without having his audience know what’s happening.

Couple of my favorite features would be: Using the Zoom Tool to zoom on a specific section in the slide, using the Pen & Laser to literally write notes on your slide and See All Slides where you can actually navigate between slides in real time, without the audience seeing that happening. And when you are in a situation that you will need to SKIP some slides or refer back to a previous slide (Like the CEO Suddenly Decided to jump on stage and say a word)… you can do that Smoothly!

3. Use Video Backgrounds: a lot of speakers would be emphasizing on a specific idea by illustrating it with a Video and some would just say: “like what we’re going to see in the next video”… Here’s 2 mini-tips: 1) unless your audience are in kinder garden, don’t announce what you’re going to do 3 seconds later.. and 2) use Video backgrounds when possible; you can start playing a video while muting the audio to avoid distraction, and add items on top to highlight the points and make it start automatically while you keep on talking…

4. Design LESS: they always say LESS is MORE… and in Presentations, try not to put all of your wordings into the slide and the READ your presentation to your audience, but use the Technique that all the legendary speakers (like the late Steve Jobs) use… Just 1 photo and 1 sentence can sometimes do the trick… Just make sure you photo fill a good portion of the screen and your 1 sentence is very visible (choose a nice font to go with it as well, rather than the default fonts)

For the above image, I used a combination of the same image 3 times, and applied a filter on each and let PowerPoint offer me Visual Aids 🙂

5. Embed background Sounds in your presentation when needed: sometimes your presentation is done in a modest environment with no support of audio/visual engineers and extra screens to display the text for you and all of the things that Executives have in their events… But that shouldn’t stop you from performing an emotional talk and engrave the echo on an idea in your audience’ heart. It is very simple with PowerPoint, just choose a good soundtrack and Insert it in your slide and use the Fading / cropping tool to match it to your tone, and the Volume shouldn’t be louder than your own voice. and Voila! 

There you go!

Present like a Super Star and make a long lasting impression 🙂

See you Next week & Cheers,
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Samer Chidiac is a Sr. Strategist, Author & an International Innovation Expert.

The Monday Tip Weekly blog is part of the “Influencing the Life of Others” project