Slide Aspect Ratios - 4:3 to 16:9

Don't miss that you can easily improve the appearance of a PowerPoint presentation on a wide screen computer monitor, or plasma, LCD, or OLED flat panel monitor by changing the aspect ratio of the slides.

The 16:9 aspect ratio common to HDTV monitors is twice as wide and 1.5 times the height of the standard 4:3 video graphics array (VGA) display. You can switch between the two in PowerPoint by going to Design . . . Slide Size

Making the switch can change the appearance of a slide from this in 4:3:

. . . to this in 16:9

Action to Add PDFs to PowerPoint Files

If you need to import all of the pages from multiple PDFs into a PowerPoint presentation, Lori Kassuba has created an action that will do it. See the post named, 'Convert PDF to PowerPoint' on the Adobe Actions Exchange. Download the .sequ file named 'temp_file_Convert_PDFs_to_PowerPoint1.sequ' and simply double-click on it to import it into Adobe Acrobat. It will appear in the Tools menu

Click on the action and you will given the option to process one or more PDFs.

A PowerPoint file will be automatically saved to the same folder as the source files with each page of the PDF saved to a separate slide.

Avoiding Death by PowerPoint

David JP Phillips is the author of How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint, and the owner of a Swedish business specializing in professional presentations. His TED Talk provides some basics on to prepare an effective PowerPoint presentation.

Phillips begins his talk by showing some examples of bad PowerPoint slides. A New York Times article We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint included a copy of a slide used at a briefing for General McChrystal, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The article notes that H.R. McMaster banned the use of PowerPoint and quotes General Mattis as saying that, "PowerPoint makes us stupid".

Another notorious slide has hard to follow arrows zigzagging between obscure objects.

Phillips' key points are:

1. One message should be the focus of each slide. Don't try to cram information on a single slide - just make more slides!

2. Don't speak at the same time the slide is shown. Let the audience focus on the image or points on the slide.

3. Titles are usually not the most important thing on a slide - don't make them big:

. . . keep them small. The most important part of a slide should be the biggest.

4. Use a dark background.

5. Contrast different points on a slide for emphasis. A particularly effective method is to gray out each bullet point after you move to the next one.

5. There should never be more than six elements on a slide. The viewer should just see the total - they shouldn't have to count.