When you think about how much rests on our  ability to effectively present, every small edge you can gain is critical. While many would argue otherwise, people form opinions and assumptions of your product based on the quality of your deck.

Many people notice the little things. Are you using complementary colors? Is the font easily readable? Do your bullets line up? The list is endless. And to a great many people, the smallest of details missed tell the customer (even if subconsciously) what to expect about the product.

One area that I see a great deal of mistakes is with the use of product screen shots in a presentation. Considering that many good presenters only use “action” slides with no bullets, your ability to do this professionally puts you ahead of your competition in many cases.

I’ve compiled some tips and tutorials below that should get you started creating exquisite slides. Enjoy!

Pitfalls to Avoid

Here are some very common mistakes I see.

• Not trimming the fat - Most applications, especially browser-based ones, allow you to customize the UI. Before you start snapping away, remove unwanted or excess toolbars and options. Keep it as clean as you can without detracting from the look and feel you want to convey.
• Being non-specific - I see this a lot. People take a screen shot of the entire application when all they are referring to is one capability within the product. Crop your shot so that only the subject of the slide is highlighted. This will keep your audience focused on your point and not endlessly scouring the slide for additional info while you’re speaking.
• Wrong shot selection - If you are speaking generally about the product, use a shot that obfuscates textual and other unnecessary detail. If you are speaking about a specific attribute, highlight it.
• Unreadable - Shot selection is so important because screen resolution is in such short supply. If you need your audience to read text in the console, you need to blow it up so that it matches the needed size for readability (24pt minimum). I cover some tips for maximizing readability below.
• Inconsistence - If you use more than one shot in a row, they need to be consistent in screen placement and size.
• Overlapping elements - One of the biggest offenders and oh so simple to correct. Most companies provide a standard slide master with company colors, logo, etc. Overlapping these elements won’t get you kicked out, but it is definitely something a design-oriented SE would never do. See my example below.

Here is the wrong way to position a shot on the slide. Notice how it covers up the border areas.

Here is a better way to accomplish the same thing.

When using large shots, don’t be afraid to take up the whole screen. Just don’t have other elements partially showing. This format allows me to make it bigger for more emphasis. Move any bullet points to your Notes section and just talk about them.

You can get more creative and use translucent boxes to capture your main point succinctly. Just make sure it’s readable.

Advanced Tactics

Here are a couple options that will definitely set you apart from your competition. I use Photoshop but most graphics programs can handle these tasks. PowerPoint 2007 also gives us some new and very cool capabilities that used to be daunting for non-Photoshop power users.

Creating your base shot

1) Here is a sample of a web-based application with all of the excess browser items to avoid.

2) Here is the same shot just with the extra browser elements removed. Much cleaner!

3) Get rid of the browser completely. You’re not being paid to show off IE or FF are you? The only time you’d keep it is if you needed to highlight the fact it was web-based.

4) Here’s where it gets trickier. If you want to do a full-screen shot, you need to size it correctly or you’ll need to stretch the image in PPT. Sometimes that’s OK, but usually it leads to blurry slides. It’s usually better to size them correctly up front.

To do this I use Photoshop. The ideal size for a PPT screen shot is 800×600. Even if you set your monitor resolution it will be hard to get it right. Just take the screen capture normally and open up your editor.

Invariably it will be some odd size after you’ve cropped off the excess. No problem. Create a new image with a 800×600 size.

Take your existing image and resize it so that either the height or width matches the 800 or 600 without the other being smaller than the required size. Meaning don’t make the width 800 if it makes your height 550. In that case make your height 600 and let the width be greater than 800. See below.

Copy and paste your shot into the new image file. Move it around until it lines up they way you like. Save it to a new file, you now have a properly sized shot for PowerPoint.

Advanced Image Effects

PowerPoint 2007 makes it very easy to add some slick effects to your images. Used properly and sparingly, you’ll have other SEs asking for your secret in no time.

In this example we are going to add 3-D and Reflection effect.

Paste your properly sized image file into the slide. It will likely take up 80% of the slide workspace. Make it a bit smaller so you can play around with it.

Highlight the image and you’ll see Shape Effects on the Home ribbon tab. Experiment with adding shadows, 3-D views and reflections. The screen shot below used all three and was created in less than a minute.

 

While this in no way is a comprehensive PowerPoint tutorial, I hope this gives you some things to try (and things to avoid) next time you’re putting together a presentation.

Related Posts at thesalesengineer.com

• What NOT to Say
• Great Presentation Tool - ZoomIT
• Virtual Lab (cont)

Filed under: Presentation