Hello and welcome to this course on PowerPoint. My name is Blair cook and I'm a professional accountant by training. I have a background in executive finance and professional education. As an executive and as an educator. I have been a heavy user of PowerPoint since it was first introduced back in the 1990s. But I'm not alone.

In fact, there are an estimated 500 million users of PowerPoint worldwide. It is estimated that there are 30 million PowerPoint presentations created every single day. And it is also estimated that Microsoft PowerPoint commands a 95% share of the presentation software market. But in spite of this high level of adoption, you don't have to look too far to find its critics. In one survey participants were asked to identify the top attributes of PowerPoint presentation That annoyed them the most. 72% of respondents identified that they were annoyed when speakers read each of their slides aloud.

51% Of respondents got annoyed when the text was too small to read. 48% said it was when full sentences instead of bullet points were used on the slides. 30% identified overly complex diagrams, and 26% said they were annoyed by the speaker's poor choice of color. The sad but true reality is that the vast majority of PowerPoint presentations bore their audiences to death with amateurish, antiquated animations and typefaces. PowerPoint itself has become a lazy crutch speakers rely on for their speaking points. Instead of using it, it has the visual aid it was intended to be.

We have all suffered through painful PowerPoint presentations, and some of us do so on a daily basis. And we will continue to do so for a while yet. But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, it shouldn't be that way. PowerPoint is a tremendously advantageous visual aid for any presentation. The multimedia principle suggests that when ideas are presented with both words and pictures, our audience engagement increases.

And the reason is because different parts of our brain process images from words, and when you stimulate more of the brain, more the message sinks in and is retained. Let's face it, most of us are not graphic designers. I'm not and chances are, you aren't either, nor can we afford to hire graphic designers to help us with every presentation we need to make. But what I want to show you in this course, is how you can use PowerPoint to create massively better presentations that will live Prove your own professional image and engage your audience at a much deeper level. This will be a course on how to use PowerPoint from both a tactical press the button to do this perspective, as well as a strategic perspective, the principles and the features that you learn about in this course can be applied regardless of what version of PowerPoint you are using, or even if you're using another piece of presentation software.

Let me give you a brief preview of what is in store. In this course, we are going to look at how you should plan your presentation. Even before you open up PowerPoint a little bit of upfront planning makes a huge difference on developing the finished product. And I'm going to show you a few tricks that you can use for any presentation you have to do. Next, we're going to look at how you should design your slide. This will include using templates, creating templates.

Changing the size of your slide and determining how many slides you should use in your presentation. The third area of this course is dedicated to developing effective visual aids. There will be a series of lessons here talking about how you can and should create and incorporate text, graphs, pictures, videos, audio, and conceptual models to bring a visual representation of your message to your audience. And finally, we'll look at some fancy features of PowerPoint that are helpful for enhancing the delivery of your presentation. These includes slide transitions, animations, and different presentation modes you can use with PowerPoint. PowerPoint is ubiquitous in the modern business world, and despite its lowly reputation, a recent study shows that it continues to grow at a rate of 15% per year.

Isn't it about time you differentiated your presentations? Click on the first lesson to begin learning how to develop powerful PowerPoint presentations. I'm Blair cook