PowerTips for PowerPoint

by Thomas G. Stephens Jr., CPA, CITP
Pursuit, August 2006

The e-mail from your boss is clear: You need to make a speech to the board of directors. Don't fret. Today's technology tools put entertaining and persuasive presentations well within your reach. One such tool is Microsoft's PowerPoint. This presentation software is an easy-to-use, feature-rich presentation tool that integrates well with other components of the Microsoft Office suite.

Many accounting and financial professionals can improve their use of PowerPoint by becoming more familiar with some of its key features. Here are three tips to help you overcome some common problems that accounting and financial professionals experience when developing PowerPoint presentations.

First, understand the use of the slide master. PowerPoint has a number of predefined templates. These are good options for most presentations. On occasion, you may want to make a change to all slides in a given presentation without affecting the template. For example, you may want to change the font or font size of characters. To do this for the entire presentation, modify the Slide Master and every slide in the presentation will reflect the change. To modify the Slide Master, select View, Master, Slide Master from the menu.

Second, ensure that special effects enhance, rather than detract from, your message by keeping animations, sounds, and slide transitions simple. Also, when adding sound effects, verify in advance that the venue's audio equipment will enable the audience to hear the effect. Your laptop's internal speaker system will not be adequate.

Third, take advantage of Microsoft's application integration opportunities. If you would like to create a PowerPoint presentation based on an existing Word document, don't make unnecessary work for yourself by retyping content. Instead, from within Word, select File, Send To, Microsoft Office PowerPoint from the menu and Word will automatically create a PowerPoint presentation based the styles you assigned to your Word text. Likewise, it is possible to Paste Link Excel data into a PowerPoint chart so the slide of a chart is automatically updated when the Excel data changes. These integration tools dramatically reduce the amount of effort needed to develop and maintain your presentations.

These are just a few of many tips that you can use to improve your use of PowerPoint. Learning how to take advantage of PowerPoint's many features can help take the anxiety out of once-dreaded presentations.