10 Signs of Death by PowerPoint

Original Image Souce http://bit.ly/tsYz72

Not a definitive list by any means. You may wish to add to it.

1. Setting up your presentation with your audience in the room and the projector on.
2. Too much text on a slide or the text is too small.
3. Reading directly from the slide and facing away from you audience as you do it.
4. Over use of transitions and effects with silly sound effects on text entry/exit.
5. Text all in Word Art
6. Graphs and charts with too much detail.
7. Images or pictures are inappropriate, unclear too small or none at all.
8. Asking someone else to move you onto the next slide.
9. Presentation does not have background and text theme.
10. Finishing the presentation with the black screen.

The quality and use of PowerPoint reflects on the quality of the presenter.

Once you become annoyed with the presentation you become annoyed with the presenter and you stop listening to the message, however good it may be.

Best 10 Excel Features That a Business Should Be Putting Into Use.

Those that only use Excel as a fancy desktop calculator are not in any way tapping into the power of the Spread Sheet.


AutoSum Feature

You would significantly increase your business efficiency and time savings if the following features were understood, learnt and put into use.



1. AutoSum features. There are other options available with this button: Average, Count Numbers, Max and Min.

2. Formatting cells for text, size, colour and border including conditional formatting.

Formatting Cells

3. Formatting cells for Number, Time, Date and Currency.

4. Using Fill (Pull Down) to replicate formulas.

5. Setting a Print Area.

6. Saving your spread sheet as a PDF file.

7. Using the $ sign to lock cell references for fixed and variable reference values (absolute references) e.g. C4*$A$1

8. Protecting Sheets to prevent unwanted editing or entry into certain cells.

Fill Feature

9. Producing a selection list using the List option in Data Validation.

10. Adding a Filter to columns.



Learning the above is not hard and would take relatively little time.

Does anyone feel there are other features that should be in this list?