PowerPoint is one of the great products in the Microsoft Office Suite. Having spent many hours recently putting together performance presentations for executives in my company, I'd like to share some tips that might help make PowerPoint a more useful tool in a classroom environment.

- Bulletpoints - they are what they are, keep them short and sweet. A bulletpoint followed by a paragraph of explanation will easily lose the viewers attention.

- Graphics - do not go overboard on the graphics and make the slides appear too busy. Better to have one too many slides than a short presentation that is incomprehensible because too much information was concentrated in a small number of slides.

- Linking - if charts or tables are created using Microsoft Excel, link them to the PowerPoint presentation. That way, when (inevitably) a change is requested, updating the presentation is as simple as updating the spreadsheet that it was created from. To do this, just copy the data from the source workbook. Switch back over to the PowerPoint presentation and select Edit-Paste Special. Select Paste Link and your table is linked between the two files. To update the link after a change, simply right click on the slide you wish to change and select the option Update Links.

Those are just a couple of the tricks I learned during my recent foray into the world of PowerPoint. Happy Sliding

Learn more about this author, Tom Moilanen.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about Tips for integrating PowerPoint into the classroom?
We want to hear your view. Write now!