Today, creating high-quality PowerPoint presentations requires extensive expertise and considerable time resources. Gaps in knowledge can be partially compensated for by spending more time on this. Good slide sets take time. But you can also make your job easier. We show you the most time-consuming work processes and how you can defuse these time wasters.
PowerPoint is important, sure, but is it really of that much importance? Yes, this can certainly be proven. In 2018, the statistics portal “Statista” ascertained how frequently PowerPoint is used for presentation creation. A survey in Germany on the frequency of use of PowerPoint at work found that 17.4% of respondents use PowerPoint daily. An impressive 23.9% use the software several times a week and 14.1% say they work with PowerPoint at least once a week. In the past few years, these figures will have gone up again due to Corona. The shift of business contacts to the online sphere, has significantly increased the need for high-quality presentations. This gives a very good indication of how important the program has become in everyday work. Whether for training, presentations, sales or trade fairs, there is usually no way around PowerPoint. Accordingly, planning, preparation and creation can quickly become time-consuming.
TIMEFRESSER NO. 1 – recurring work steps
Various studies have shown that self-employed and salaried employees spend a lot of time on basic work on PowerPoint slides. Around 40% of the time is invested in completing these recurring work steps:
- Image research
- Creation of charts, tables and graphs
- Slide design and formatting
- Search Master Templates
- Design adjustments for older slide sets
- Review of slide sets according to topicality
Often, it’s not the challenging topics, like animations, that convert to a time-eater. They are often routine tasks that are not in focus, but absolutely must be done to achieve a coherent overall result. Unspectacular, but urgently needed. Afterwards, no one asks where the picture was found that so perfectly matches slide 7. The fact that an employee may have had to spend three hours on research is usually not noticed.
It would therefore make particular sense to solve the especially time-intensive work tasks in a smarter and more time-saving way in the future. The valuable working time can then be made available again for other tasks and increases overall productivity in the company.
With these measures you can create your PowerPoint presentation faster in the future
If you want to finish your next presentation more effectively, include the following tools and actions in your planning:
1. Image research
Finding suitable images can be tedious and a massive time eater. But luckily, there are quite a few good free and paid image databases that offer countless images on a wide variety of topics. The respective image rights must always be observed. If you don’t find what you are looking for at Unsplash, Pexels, Slidelizard, Freerange, Creative Commons, shutterstock, istockphoto ,Pixabay, PikWizard, or praesentare, for example, you can also find image agencies on the Internet with databases on specific topics.
There are further facilitations for the image search. With picturemaxx there is a software with which you can search for pictures in all connected picture agencies and archives at the same time. With interfaces to large and small image providers, suitable results can be found quickly. Other providers for networked search include Fotofinder and Fotosearch.
2. Create your individual quick access toolbar
You can make your work with PowerPoint easier by adding regularly used commands to your Quick Access Toolbar. In this way, they can customize the user interface according to your needs.
3. Ready Made PowerPoint Templates
If you can work with pre-made designs and placeholders, you have the option to just paste your content to get a finished slide. While such “off the shelf” presentations are not necessarily the first choice if you want to create excellent PowerPoint presentations. But sometimes you can get out of a difficult situation with theme-based templates when the time pressure is simply too great.
4. Working with the slide master
Who often If you have to work on PowerPoint slides, you will quickly realize what a time-consuming task it is to have to insert the same elements on each slide again and again. What’s more, you’ll have made a mistake of a few millimeters in no time at all, and the distances on the individual transparencies will no longer match.
The slides of a presentation should look consistent. That’s what the PowerPoint slide master is for. Here you set all the preferences of your slide set. Changes, such as fonts or colors, only need to be made once in the slide master and are then automatically applied to all slides.
The PowerPoint slide master is an individually defined slide template with which the structure of all slides can be defined. With the master you provide a uniform appearance in the background of your presentation slides. Alternatively, you can put together a style guide for all of your employees and colleagues that spells out the exact rules to follow to adhere to the corporate design when designing slides.
5. Cooperation with a PowerPoint agency
If you really want to succeed with your presentation, you need to deliver the right information in the right way to a target audience that has been precisely analyzed beforehand. This requires a high level of expertise and presentation experience. You now need real expert knowledge to make a presentation a success with the audience. That’s why more and more companies are making the decision to have professionals create their next PowerPoint presentation.
To avoid unsatisfactory or even business-damaging results, presentation agencies are increasingly hired by companies and individual entrepreneurs. The agencies’ teams of experts specialize in excellent presentations and can ensure the success of a PowerPoint presentation even for challenging topics and target groups.
PowerPoint agencies provide you with valuable support. It doesn’t matter if you want to professionally refine your existing presentation or if you want a comprehensive all-in-one package and have your entire PowerPoint presentation created. Specialized agencies for presentations offer a wide range of efficient services for their presentation success.
If you have a PowerPoint presentation created, you can assign your employees to other important tasks. The experts of a PowerPoint agency produce much better results in a shorter time.
Conclusion:
When designing your PowerPoint presentation, try to simplify as many steps as possible and use helpful tools that shorten work processes. This way you already eliminate some time wasters. If you involve a presentation agency in your preparations, you can hand over individual steps or the entire workflow to experts who will achieve decisively better results in much less time.
