Speaker 1: I'm sure you've sat through presentations that were super boring. I know I have. My mind starts to wonder, sometimes I reach discreetly from my phone, but what about delivering boring presentations? None of us want to be that person. But if you think honestly about your past presentations, how did the audience react? Could you have engaged them more? I've had my share of delivering bad presentations. They were bad for multiple reasons. Boring was just one of them. But here's the thing. I couldn't quite pinpoint what made them boring. I felt people were losing attention. I actually had a person fall asleep during my presentation and it wasn't a big room. Later I figured out one factor was the poor delivery of the presentation, which can be a topic of another video, but the other two big factors were the flow of my presentation and the design of the slides. You know what the worst part is? I spent hell of a long time creating those slides. I thought they were great. The audience obviously didn't. I want to save you from that. So in this video, I'm going to share with you a simple technique that you can apply to your slides, which will give your presentation a perfect flow so that you can keep your audience engaged. I'm also going to share a resource that I'm using, which have really reduced the time I spend creating slides. Plus I don't have to worry about design anymore, which is a relief because my design skills are quite limited. My most important tip for you is to use roadmaps. You can use these in two different ways. Number one is to get rid of your table of contents slide and replace it with a roadmap. So for example, instead of presenting the table of contents for your presentation like this, you'd present it like this. It's clear that with each single step, your audience is learning more. They're moving up the road to a certain outcome. Now your roadmap doesn't necessarily need to have a road in it. You can use other types of infographics. The type of infographic you use really depends on your audience. So let's say you were presenting to students. It's an educational environment. So you might want to show the table of contents like this. And for each topic, you're going to have one or more separate slides. You can then revisit the table of contents. So basically you're going to be adding them in throughout your slides to visually show the progress that was made during the presentation. This way the audience knows where the end is and what remaining topics they can expect to learn from you. If you were presenting in a professional environment, so let's say you were discussing the timeline of a project, you might want to show something like this. And for each step of the project, you'd have separate slides going in more detail. You could even add slide zoom functionality to this so you can directly navigate to that topic. I have a separate video on slide zoom. Check it out if you're interested, I'll add it to the description box below. Designing the slides in a similar way will make your presentations more interesting and easier to follow. But here's the catch. We both know that creating these type of slides from scratch is going to be a huge time eater. If you'd like to avoid wasting time on slide design, I have the right resource for you. Simple slides. These guys create some of the most visually effective slides and infographics I've seen. With their templates, which are super affordable, by the way, and I have them as well. It's really fast to create professional slides that grab and keep attention. I'm really glad Simple Slides partnered with us in this video. I'll talk more about them later. I've added a link to their site in the description box below. Go ahead and check them out when you're ready. Before I found these templates, I would stitch these slides together by myself using shapes. This is something you can of course do yourself as well if you want to. If you have enough time on your hands. For me though, the results didn't look quite as nice because I'm not a very creative person. To give you an example, I started using roadmaps in my courses so my students know the learning path that they're taking, where they are at each stage and what's left to do. The feedback was great. Here's an example from one of my courses. This doesn't seem like much effort, but it took me a good five hours. First problem, I didn't have an idea on how to visualize this, so I spent a good chunk of time researching. And the second problem was drawing out the shapes, aligning them properly, testing different formatting and so on. Well, it did the job, but it took a long time and the results wasn't as professional as I had expected. Had I known about simple slides before, I would have browsed their templates to find one with the closest fit and adjusted it to my needs by just replicating the shapes and switching the icons. What I'd like you to take away from this tip is to add a roadmap throughout your slides. So you give your audience a better orientation during your presentation. No matter whether you use a template or you design your own, this way they know what's coming and what you've already covered. If you work in a corporate environment, chances are you've seen slides like this that are filled with text. I've personally created thousands of those slides. This brings us to tip number two, use an infographic or a roadmap to describe that specific topic. I know it's practical as the presenter to have everything on the slide that you want to say. I've done that myself, but the audience can't read the text on the slide and listen to you at the same time, meaning their attention is going to be drawn to the slide. And if there's a lot of stuff on that slide, you're going to lose their attention. And before you know it, they're going to be discreetly reaching out for their phones. So only put the essential message on the slide. It's not always easy, but once you've figured out the few words that make up the core information, support it with a professional infographic or an image if it makes sense. Here's an alternative version for the slide. It includes a message on top, an infographic to visualize the required steps, and the text was stripped down just to the essentials. This way it's immediately understood what the message is and the attention is on you, the presenter. My next tip is a PowerPoint productivity tip. So let's say you have an existing presentation and you want to reuse some of the slides for a new presentation. You could go look for it, open up the presentation, select the slides you want, then you can copy and paste them into your presentation. Or you use the reuse slides feature from the home tab. From the window that's popping up, you already see a list of recommended presentations based on what you've previously used. You can also search a presentation by just typing in some keywords or you can browse for a specific PowerPoint file. Once you've made your selection, click the choose slides option and it will bring up all the slides in this presentation without having to open that file. You can just click on the slides you want to reuse and it's going to automatically add it to your PowerPoint slides. If you want the important slides to adopt the theme of the presentation you're working on, just uncheck use source formatting up here. And if you've already imported it, you can go to the paste options here and select use destination theme. This makes reusing slides not just easy, but also safe. There have been so many times when I've opened up a presentation I wanted to copy from and by mistake, I ended up changing that presentation. If you want to keep the process of creating professional slides easier, I recommend checking out simple slides. You're going to get access to more than 2000 slides and over 1700 icons to bring your presentations to life. They're all neatly organized and cover slides from more than 40 different niches like education, medical, startup, and many more. Because you have such a huge selection, you can easily adjust the slides and the infographic to your audience. I even use some of their shapes and color theme from one of their slide decks in one of my latest Excel dashboards to make sure I have the perfect color combination. Not only this, but with their premium packages, you get free lifetime updates. So you're going to receive any new slide design they put out for free. If you're not sure whether this is right for you or not, you can try their slides before you buy. You have nothing to lose. Simple slides offers a free sample download to everyone. Just click send my sample on their homepage and you get to test them risk-free. Check them out if you're interested. The link to their website is also in the description box of this video. That's it for today. So don't forget, use roadmaps to give your audience orientation during the presentation. Use as little text as possible together with supporting infographics on each slide and reuse slides safely by using the reuse slide feature from the home tab. I hope this video was helpful for you. If you enjoyed it, give it a thumbs up. And if you want to improve your skills, consider subscribing, and don't forget to hit that bell so you don't miss out on any new videos. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video.