Some amazing new PowerPoint features to master your presentation skills

How PowerPoint can help you to give the perfect pitch

Pitching ideas is not easy and can be a challenge at the best of times. Knowing how to use technology and new features can give you the edge and increase your confidence. Being familiar with the latest features in presentation software like PowerPoint can help you stand out from the crowd and impress your audience during a presentation. Of course, it's also a good idea to know the best practices when it comes to presenting, so we will cover both here in this blog post.

The first thing to think about before starting any PowerPoint presentation is, who is your audience? Your ideas and knowledge are extremely important, but if you can’t reach the mind of your audience, your goal won’t be achieved.

5 Principles for a Great PowerPoint Pitch

1. Your audience first. They are most important than your idea. Recognize their challenges and how you can meet it.
2. Be brief. Your presentation can be long. But make sure that you can keep your audience engaged.
3. Clean, bright, energetic visuals. Use PowerPoint features to help you, such as Morph and Design. Prioritize great photography and typography.
4. Make it modular. One pitch won’t work for every audience. Think about creating one template that can serve as a core for several presentations. Make the adjusts as convenient.
5. Break up the monotony. Use things like infographics, video, and new organization methods to break the standard presentation rhythm.

New Features of PowerPoint

Cinematic Motion with Morph

Morph creates cinematic motion by seamlessly animating between your slides. Morph doesn’t just animate regular text or images, it can animate 3-D shapes or be applied at a word or even character level, including text wrapping. Simply duplicate slides you want to morph together, move the objects based on how you want them to animate and click the Morph button under Transitions.

See at the video below how Morph feature can make a good impression in your presentation.

It is always a best practice to spend some time thinking and planning your pitch based on the time that you have. Make sure that you have a relevant story to tell with beginning, middle, and end. After that, use PowerPoint features to help you build your presentation.

PowerPoint Designer

This brand new feature automatically gives you layout and design suggestions when you add a graphic to a slide. It supports multiple images, you can add 3 or 4 images, for example, and PowerPoint is going to suggest a couple of designs that suits your presentation.

Colour Extraction

New colour extraction capabilities add even more value by extrapolating the most visually stunning colour options from your inserted picture and then applying that colour to your existing slide. The colour extraction choice is based on functional design principles, such as light colours on top of dark backgrounds for maximum effect.

Reuse Slides

As the name suggests, this feature allows you to reuse slides from a different file in the presentation that you are currently working on in an easy way. Let’s say, for example, you are creating slides for a sales pitch and you want to include a topic regarding the company history. You have this topic already done in a different presentation file, so, instead of copy and paste and might get your template format lost, you can pull in the slides that you want from the other presentation by using the reuse feature. See below step by step how to do it.

First, go to Home > New Slide > Reuse Slides.

 

Once you click on Reuse Slides a box will appear on the right side of your presentation, as you can see below:

 

 

In the Reuse Slides box, you can browse and pick up the file that you want to pull in your currently slide deck. Once you click and open the file, the chosen presentation will appear as below on the right side of your presentation. So, you can choose the slides that you want to add.

 

 

Before adding the slides, you must select with your cursor the location where you want the slides to be added. You can also decide if you want to keep the template formatting which you are using in your presentation or keep the source formatting. Just tick or untick the box on the right bottom of your reuse slides tool, as below.

 

 

It’s also possible to pick just the slides that you want or insert all slides at once by clicking with the right button on one of the slides in the Reuse Slides box. You might need to customise and make slight adjustments if you are using customised slides designs instead of the options available in PowerPoint. If you use Microsoft PowerPoint frequently to prepare your presentations and reports, it’s a feature to save you some time.

Slide Zooms

Slide zoom is a great feature to help you to present your slide deck to an audience, as the name suggest it allows you to zoom in and highlight a specific image from your slides, showing with just one click the selection. See below how to use the feature.

The first step is to add the image into your slide deck as a hidden slide, so it wouldn’t interfere your sequence.

Go to Insert > Zoom > Slide Zoom, check below:

 

Click on Slide Zoom and a pop-up option will appear to select the slides which you want to Zoom in.

 

 

Tick the box to select the slide that you want to Zoom. Once you have done it, the selected slide it will be added as an image in your current slide. You can move the image around, it's a clickable object when you are in presentation mode. You will also have the Zoom bar on the top of your ribbon to format it, according to your needs.

 

 

The Zoom ribbon also allows you to choose how the transition will happen during your presentation. Tick the box Return to Zoom to come back to the original slide with one click while presenting it.  

 

 

Watch the video below to see how the Zoom feature works in detail.