One way to get better at something is to have inspiration, to see other people doing things and using that as an inspiration to do it better ourselves. Ideally that then spirals upwards as we all work to get better. If that doesn’t happen, if no one is inspired or encouraged to improve, then we get the standard powerpoint presentation. Yay.
So here’s a powerpoint presentation to serve as inspiration!
This is by Master Payne, a magician and entertainer in Seattle. He’s actually been flown all over just to give a Powerpoint presentation. It turns out they can actually be good! Who knew?!
One bit of stock advice about presentations is that it should add to what you say, and not just be bullet points that you read. OK that’s fine but … what does that mean exactly?! How do you do that? And Master Payne answered that for me by example.
You don’t have to go as far as he does to have the effort really pay off. Next time you have a slide showing a feature or something of interest, add an animation of a circle or arrow that fades in to show a feature. Fade it out and fade another one in to show a different feature. There are tons of tutorials on how to do this, just google “Powerpoint animation” or “Google sheets animation”. It’s a starting point, and you can build from there.
Also you might notice I keep saying Powerpoint over Google Sheets. Google Sheets is great but (at least as of the last time I made a presentation) doesn’t have a lot of functionality Powerpoint has, so I hit it’s limits pretty quickly and have stuck with Powerpoint.
Here are some more of Master Payne’s presentations if you’re curious:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4Q4Ai6nqHLe3nD78Rplx3GfZ4bi6DDT