PowerPoint Tip: Making Your Point Stand Out with a Photo

As I have written many times before, using pictures can illustrate your point much better than words in some cases. Just be sure that when you use a picture, the point is clear. A recent slide reminded me of this. The presenter was using a picture that covered almost all of the screen. It showed 3 objects, two incorrect examples and one correct example. The difference was very slight and in terms of the large picture, the section of difference in each object that the presenter was emphasizing was perhaps 10-15% of each object. The presenter verbally pointed out the differences and the audience had to figure out where on the picture the difference was shown. I suggested some changes that made it much clearer for the audience to tell what the difference was and made the point much stronger. I took the one picture and broke it into three pictures, one for each example. For each example, I zoomed in on only the section of the object that was being emphasized. I added a graphic arrow pointing directly to the area of difference. And I added text to explain what was wrong with the example. I then built the three examples one by one on the slide. Now when the new slide was shown, the presenter talked about the first example and what was wrong. The audience clearly focuses on the only picture on the slide and has an arrow pointing to the problem in the photo and text explaining what the issue is. Then the presenter builds the next example on the slide and again the audience easily sees what is wrong with this picture. Finally, the presenter builds the correct example photo on the slide and the audience can easily see how it is different from the two incorrect examples. The point of the slide is now clear to anyone who glances at it. Remember when you are using pictures, you need to explain it to the audience with callouts and text if you want them to get the full meaning of your message. Photos can be a wonderful way to illustrate your points. But too many times you may be unable to locate just the right photo or adding a digital picture all of a sudden makes your PowerPoint file too big to e-mail and it runs slowly. I explained how to solve these problems in my video on Using Digital Photos. Learn more and claim your copy at: http://www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com/wtphotos.htm .