• Don’t read your presentation straight from the slides. If your audience can both read and hear, it’s a waste of time for you to simply read your slides aloud. Your audience will zone out and stop listening to what you’re saying, which means they won’t hear any extra information you include. Instead of typing out your entire presentation, include only main ideas, keywords, and talking points in your slide show text. Engage your audience by sharing the details out loud.

• Do Follow the 5/5/5 rule. To keep your audience from feeling overwhelmed, you should keep the text on each slide short and to the point. Some experts suggest using the 5/5/5 rule: no more than five words per line of text, five lines of text per slide, or five text-heavy slides in a row.



• Don’t forget your audience. Who is going to be watching your presentation? The same goofy effects and funny clip art that would entertain a classroom full of middle school students might make you look unprofessional in front of business colleagues and clients. Humor can lighten up a presentation, but if you use it inappropriately, your audience might think you don’t know what you’re doing. Know your audience, and tailor your presentation to their tastes and expectations.

• Do choose readable colors and fonts. Your text should be easy to read and pleasant to look at. Large, simple fonts and theme colors are always your best bet. The best fonts and colors can vary depending on your presentation setting. Presenting in a large room? Make your text bigger than usual so that the people in the back can read it. Presenting with the lights on? Dark text on a light background is your best bet for visibility.

• Don’t overload your presentation with animations. As anyone who’s sat through a presentation while every letter of every paragraph zoomed across the screen can tell you, being inundated with complicated animations and exciting slide transitions can be extremely irritating.  Before including effects like this in your presentation, ask yourself: Would this moment in the presentation be equally strong without an added effect? Does it unnecessarily delay information? If the answer to either question is yes, or even “maybe,” leave out the effect.

• Do use animations sparingly to enhance your presentation. Don’t take the last tip to mean that you should avoid animations and other effects altogether. When used sparingly, subtle effects and animations can really add to your presentation. For example, having bullet points appear as you address them rather than before can help you keep your audience’s attention.

Keep these tips in mind the next time you create a presentation— your audience will thank you. For more detailed information about creating a PowerPoint presentation, visit our PowerPoint 2010 Tutorial.

Excel worksheets don’t always look great on paper because they’re not designed to fit on a page—they’re designed to be as long and wide as you need them to be. This is great for editing and viewing  on screen, but it does mean that your data might not be a natural fit to a standard sheet of paper.

However, this doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to make an Excel worksheet look good on paper.  In fact, it’s not even that hard. Here are some tips for printing in Excel:

• Preview your worksheet before you print. You can see exactly how your worksheet will look on the printed page by using the Print Preview feature. In terms of saving you time and paper, the preview is your most valuable printing tool. You can even make certain changes within the Print Preview, like clicking on and dragging the print margins to make them wider or narrower. Check the preview as you change printing and layout options to make sure your spreadsheet looks the way you want.

• Decide what you’re going to print. If you only need to look at a certain segment of your data, don’t bother printing your whole workbook—just print that data. You can print just the worksheet you’re viewing by going to the print pane and selecting Print Active Sheets, or you can select Print Entire Workbook to print the whole file. You can also print a small segment of your data by selecting the data, then choosing Print Selection in the print options.



• Maximize your space. You’re limited by the dimensions of the paper you’re printing on, but there are ways to make the most of that space. Try changing the page orientation. The default orientation is good for data with more rows than columns, but if your worksheet is wider than it is tall, change the page orientation to landscape. Still need more room? You can change the width of the margins on the edge of your paper. The smaller they are, the more room there is for your data. Finally, if your worksheet isn’t huge, try playing with the Custom Scaling Options to fit all your rows, columns, or even your whole worksheet on one page of paper.
• Use Print Titles. Once your Excel sheet is more than one page long, understanding what you’re looking at can get tricky.  The Print Titles command lets you include a title row or column on every page of your spreadsheet. The columns or rows you select will show up on every page of your printout, which makes reading your data a lot easier.
• Use Page Breaks. If your worksheet takes up more than one sheet of paper, consider using page breaks to decide exactly which data should be on which page. When you insert a page break in your worksheet, everything below the break is moved to a different page than everything above. This is useful, as it lets you break up your data exactly the way you want.

Following these  tips will go a long way to making your printed worksheets easier to read. For more printing tips and more detailed instructions for the tips listed above, review our  Excel 2010 Printing lesson.

Check out the video below to see how to use gadgets.

Enhance Your Windows Desktop With Gadgets

Adding gadgets is easy. To get to the Gadget Gallery in Windows 7*, right-click on the desktop and click “Gadgets.” Try dragging some of them to your desktop. Here are a few of the built-in gadgets that you might like to try:

• Clock – A customizable clock that can be set to any time zone
• Weather – Gives up-to-date weather information for your area
• Slide show – Plays a slide show of your images
• Feed Headlines – Displays the latest news headlines

Best of all, you can download more gadgets online for free. There are literally thousands of gadgets to choose from. To be honest, some are better than others, but luckily you can see other users’ ratings to see if a gadget is worth downloading.

Is there a limit to how many gadgets you can put on your desktop? Well, like any program, a gadget uses some of your computer’s processing power, so if you put too many on your desktop, your computer might slow down significantly. But a few gadgets probably won’t cause a noticeable difference, and you can always take some of them off if needed.

* To get to the Gadget Gallery in Vista, click the plus sign (+) at the top of the Sidebar. To add a gadget, double-click it. Then you can drag it from the Sidebar onto the desktop.

Publisher is a desktop publishing application that is part of the professional and business editions of the Microsoft Office suite. It offers a wide selection of templates to help you create professional-looking publications. With hundreds of basic templates, you can easily create business cards, flyers, newsletters, websites, and a variety of other publications, and then customize those templates to meet your needs.

The following 5 tips will help you easily create effective publications using Publisher:

1. Choose a template. Templates allow you to quickly create publications that are well-designed. You don’t have to spend hours deciding where to place text, which font to use, or what colors will look good together.With more than 50 newsletters, 85 brochures, 140 flyers, 300 greeting card template, and a variety of other publication types, you can’t say that Publisher gives you a limited number of choices. Spend the time to review the available templates and you’ll likely find one that appeals to you.
2. Change templates while designing. Have you ever started a project and realized halfway through that you didn’t like it? In Publisher, this isn’t a problem. For example, if you select Flyer Template A, enter all the text and graphics into the placeholders, and then decide you don’t like it, Publisher allows you to change Flyer templates.Publisher will transfer the text and images from Flyer Template A to the new flyer. Simply choose Publication Designs from the Task Pane and apply another design to see the template change instantly.
   
3. Customize a template. Templates don’t have to be used “as is.” You have the ability to customize a template for a specific use. Don’t like the AutoShape on the template? Delete it. Need an extra text box? Add it. Want to use a blue font color instead of black? Change it. You can still reap the benefits of using a template and add your own “personality” to it.
4. Use the Color and Font Schemes options. You can change a template’s color and/or font schemes to have a dramatic impact on the publication’s look. This is an easy way to keep the same design layout, but choose colors and fonts that work best in your publication.

5. Review the preset options for each template. If you choose to use a template, it will have a variety of options associated with it. For example, you can format calendar templates in portrait or landscape, display it in a monthly or yearly format, and include a schedule of events. You can choose to add graphics, contact information, coupons, order forms, response forms, and more to flyers. These options are preset in individual templates, and you can access these in the Task Pane.

Publisher gives you the ability to create publications from scratch; however, the real beauty of Publisher is that it allows design novices like me to create publications that look like they were created by a professional. Take a little time to explore our Publisher tutorial and see how you might be able to use this dynamic application.

Video Notes

Using keyboard shortcuts can make completing a task quicker and easier. Instead of using toolbars to find commands on the menu, why not use a combination of keys to execute the task swiftly! This Quick Tip shows you how to use some of the most commonly used keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Mac Shortcuts

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Constantly think about the context of your presentation as you make design choices and you will find yourself well on your way to an effective and powerful PowerPoint presentation. Interested in learning more about PowerPoint 2007? Take some time and explore the new PowerPoint 2007 tutorial.

Video Notes

There’s a suggested or standard font size that we use when writing a paper. These guidelines don’t apply for a PowerPoint presentation. So how do you know if your font size is too small or too large for your audience?  We have a few suggestions that may help!

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Video Notes

Callouts are used to draw attention to key points in your video. You can use the built in callouts or create your own custom callouts. Callouts are easy to use and they add a personal touch to each video. For example, you can add text, shadow effects, fade-ins, fade-outs, and resize callouts. You can also add hot spots to make a video interactive. If you’re looking for a teaching or training tool that’s easy to learn and use I suggest trying out Camtasia. Download a 30-day trial version and see for yourself.

Camtasia 30-Day Trial

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