Internet Marketing

You should take advantage of PowerPoint® to make your pitch

Corporate America depends almost entirely upon PowerPoint® presentations to conduct meetings, exchange information, communicate with the public, the media, and even the government. It is so widely used that its value is taken for granted, yet small and medium-sized companies would do well to take a second look at this work horse.

The ability to easily exchange text, graphics and tables between various programs makes it possible to create PowerPoint presentations comparatively easy. Even though the menus are not particularly intuitive, users of other Microsoft® products should be familiar with the look and feel of the program. However, the use of photographs requires photo editing capabilities to resize, crop, color enhance and, in some cases, apply special effects. A program such as Paint Shop Pro is adequate. Voice recordings, sounds effects and music can all be incorporated into PowerPoint presentations, plus Flash and video movies and the program's own animation. It is easy to see that with such a broad array of features users may sometimes get carried away.

This program needs to be handled with care, because just as it can enhance your presentation, it can also backfire if you go over the top. Your presentations should follow a logical progression, and you must resist the temptation of using all the available features simply because they are there. Also, as in all presentations, the script should complement the slides - in other words, don't simply read your slides; your audience can do that as well as you can.

Once you are satisfied with your presentation's content, you have several options for delivering it. You can print out conventional foils that can be shown using a standard overhead projector; you can show it directly from your desktop or laptop computer, or you can connect you computer to one of the many available projectors, such as the InFocus, and show the presentation on a screen. This last option delivers the best quality, but projectors are not cheap.

If you are interested in more details about how to use power PowerPoint, feel free to download our step-by-step tutorial - which runs on PowerPoint. We'd like to get you email address in return, but it's not mandatory.

Download PowerPoint tutorial Ppoint.zip
(Beware: 7.3MB. Run Pngsetup.exe after unzipping file. Presentation includes fonts and .wav file)