You have to give a speech but you don’t know how to organize the presentation yet? Here are four tips that should help to arrange and structure your speech. Learn how to convince your audience with an attractive PowerPoint presentation.

1. Know your audience
Before giving the speech you should inform yourself about your audience. You will always leave a good impression already knowing who is sitting in front of you and which background knowledge you can expect. This is one of the most important aspects regarding the preparation of your speech. You can directly display your central statements and discuss them with your listeners. It doesn’t make sense to give an introduction into a topic if your listeners already are experts in it.

2. Collect materials
Your presentation depends on significant illustrations that underline your speech. To have a convincing appearance you should collect materials for your topic in good time prior to your PowerPoint presentation. Everything that is of use for your presentation should be collected at first and then, according to priority, be evaluated, for example, pictures, newspaper and magazine articles, monographs and videos as well as self-made diagrams or tables. Don’t use too much text; choose 8 to 10 graphic illustrations instead to display facts and ideas.

3. Structure your speech
Structure your speech: Work out the most important statements and divide them into introduction, main part and conclusion. The PowerPoint presentation just stages the main statements of your speech; focus on the essence and don’t overload it. 10 to 12 slides are enough to outline the most important facts. Also consider that the listener’s attention will last for around 20 minutes. So it is always a good idea to ask interposed questions to achieve new attention as well as to initiate a dialogue.

4. Layout & design – less is more
Choose a uniform design and font size for every slide with moderate coloration. Microsoft offers a manageable selection of default designs. If you want a presentation with professional layout or even the corporate design of your company, the online shop PresentationLoad offers high-quality PowerPoint templates ready for download. The shop’s range covers charts for project management, business basics, self-presentation, application, strategy, analysis, and many more. You can immediately insert these charts to your presentation and just need to add text, pictures and content.

This Guest Post was written by Birthe Stiglegger of PresentationLoad.

This is a guest post from David Lazar, a tech blogger writing on behalf of http://www.convertpdftopowerpoint.com/.

These days more and more offices are turning into virtual offices. Having employees that are on another continent no longer poses a problem thanks to the great advances in communication technology made in recent history. In order for a virtual office to function properly, finding a way to constantly communicate and collaborate is essential. While there are some great screencasting tools that you can use to send your employees a visualization of your ideas or perhaps a recorded tutorial, there are many such things that should be done live and as personally as possible.
Thankfully, there are some great tools available that you can use in order to hold real-time and live collaborative conferences, tutorials or brainstorming sessions no matter what parts of the world your employees are working from. Here are five not only excellent, but completely free tools that will allow you to hold professional, productive and effective online presentations, demonstrations and conferences live and in real time.

TeamViewer
If you are looking for a screen sharing application for holding tutorials or showing your co-workers something you are working on, TeamViewer is one of the best free tools available. It allows you to connect over 20 team members and allows all of them to share their screens with one another. The collaborative features also allow team members to work on a file at the same time and transfer files between each other easily and effectively.

Join.me
Join.me is great because it was made to work for both Windows-based computers and Macs. It also has a feature that makes sure that you are only sharing your screen with people you want to see it, by giving them a code that they need to use in order to gain access to your screen view. Join.me is one of the better tools for tutorials are project walk-throughs and presentations.

Google Hangouts
This tool allows you to hold a video conference with your team and share your screen with them, though only one person can share a screen at a time. The biggest advantage of Google Hangouts is that you can combine and merge it with Google Docs, allowing you to collaborate on various files with your team simultaneously.

Vyew
Vyew has just about every collaborative feature you can imagine. You can share your screen with your co-workers, you can chat via text, audio or video, upload files and work on them simultaneously, and even take notes on a virtual whiteboard that is set up for you and your colleagues to use. The best thing about Vyew is that it does not require any software to be downloaded or installed – it is completely online-based.

Scribblar
Scribblar is a bit simpler, but it is still a great free tool for live collaboration online. Basically, you and your co-workers are given a whiteboard where you can share ideas. While you write on the board and flesh out ideas on it, you can use the chat box on the side to talk between one another, or you can initiate a voice chat as well.

Big Marker
We are probably saving the best for last with Big Marker – it certainly has a huge amount of features for a free online tool. Big Marker gives you an online meeting room of your own that you can either make private or public. If you make the room public, anyone using the service can come in, but if you make it a private room, then only people you give the password to can enter. Once inside, you can do a variety of things – chat via text or audio, share screens, upload files, write on a whiteboard, or turn on your webcam to discuss something with your team. You are in control of what is being seen and heard as the conference room creator, which is also good for keeping these presentations focused and productive.

These six tools allow you to collaborate and hold demonstrations with your team even when you do not share the same office and thanks to tools like these, more and more offices are going virtual every day.

Being a motivational speaker can be very rewarding. As well as providing lucrative business opportunities, a speaker position can also lead to significant contacts and the chance to explore and enthuse others about an area that you are passionate about. Those that want to get into motivational speaking should think about some key personal strengths, and how to make the most of them. These areas can range from knowing your subject, through to being flexible about work and other arrangements, as well as being able to sharpen up your public speaking. More information on this is listed below:

1 – Know Your Subject

To be a good motivational speaker, you need to know your specialist subject inside and out. A niche area that no one else is working on in detail is important to consider, as is a fresh perspective on a popular subject.

2 – Be Flexible

Good motivational speakers are ones that can adjust to different goals and requirements on them. You may have to make last minute changes, or adjust your performance to the needs of a particular company. In this respect, it is worth having a comprehensive enough plan about what you want do in your speaking to be able to switch your approach for different occasions.

3 – Be Honest

Speakers that think they can get away with being all style and no substance will eventually be caught out, so make sure that you are honest about what your abilities are, and the kind of subjects that you are prepared to speak about to professional degree.

4 – General Public Speaking Skills

Public speaking skills take time to develop, and you will need to refine your performance over time, as well as building confidence to go off script. Practice your delivery as much as possible, and seek feedback from audiences.

5 – Be Passionate

A passionate speaker will be able to enthuse an audience, and will lead to a more memorable subject. Even if you do get a bit frustrated talking about the same subjects, try to remember what brought you to them in the first place, and why you are passionate about that area.

6 – Be Prepared

A big part of being a motivational speaker, or a professional speaker of any kind, is being able to understand different venues. Make sure that you have all of your equipment, and that you discuss issues like food, a dressing room, and any technical requirements beforehand.

7 – Know Where You Can Go for Advice

A professional speaker agency, or bureau, is perhaps the best place go to for when you need advice about building up clients and promoting yourself to prospective clients. It is also worth getting in touch with any established speakers for advice.

8 – Know Your Audience

Not understanding a target audience can lead to problems with tone and delivery. You want to be able to be flexible about what an audience can expect, as well as being prepared for questions.

9 – Refine Your Act

Again, lots of practice will make it easier for you to refine your act, and to become a better motivational speaker. Focus on cutting out anything that doesn’t work, or that means you run out of time when speaking.

10 – Market Yourself Well

Marketing yourself means being able to create a strong presence across a range of media. This presence might include a personal website and blog, as well as paper adverts and listings on a bureau website.

About the Author
Lisa Gan writes on behalf of Speakers Corner – a world-leading speaker bureau for live corporate events.

The ability to communicate effectively is vital for the modern workplace. Whether you are a manager who needs to communicate with staff, or someone wanting to improve their professional and interpersonal skills, getting the right message across to people is essential to being able to make relationships and develop a career. Developing the right kind of communication skills means being able to deal with a range of different people, as well as working on being able to find a communication style that is comfortable for you. The following list offers some ideas, in no particular order, for how to achieve this:

1 – Understanding an Audience

Having a good understanding of your audience or an individual will make it easier to avoid making mistakes. Recognising if someone is unlikely to contribute to a conversation will mean that you have to take the cue to lead, and to ask the right kind of questions. Try to engage a person on the level that they are with you, and don’t try to dominate a conversation.

2 – Be Direct, But Not Abrupt

Simple language is often the best way to get across an important point. If there is an unpleasant point to make in terms of the workplace, from issuing a disciplinary warning to firing, make sure that you are straightforward. The listener will still be frustrated, but at least they won’t have had to endure you getting to the point. However, try not to be too abrupt, as this can come across as uncaring.

3 – Understand body language and NLP

Some research into Neuro Linguistic Programming can help you to develop better body language for different speaking situations. Work out what gestures and general body language will work best for you, and try to follow cues laid out by other people. Taking an aggressive stance, or appearing too casual in a conversation might lead to problems with being taken seriously.

4 – Think About Personal Space

An important factor to consider in most situations, finding the right amount of personal space in a conversation can be easily achieved. You may find that being a few steps away from another person in a conversation is fine. Getting closer can make people uncomfortable, especially in a crowded room.

5 – Give Positive Feedback When Necessary

Offering praise in the right places can make a big difference to a conversation. Leading off with a compliment, or noting good points made will help to create a more relaxed exchange.

6 – Make a Good First Impression

A poor first impression can be made in a few seconds, and can have a significant impact on how people view you afterwards. Try to smile and make eye contact with people, while appearing approachable.

7 – Don’t Demand Results

When dealing with employees, try not to demand results, but rather enter into a conversation where you can point out the benefits and the necessity of a particular approach. Be open but firm, and make sure that the employee understands what is expected of them.

8 – Avoid Jargon

Littering a conversation with acronyms and buzzwords can cause a listener to drift off or lose respect for you. Keep language simple, and try not to be too formal.

9 – Find the Right Tone for Emails and Nonverbal Communications

Many misunderstandings can occur as the result of writing emails that haven’t given thought to tone. What might seem like a harmless email, or a joke, might be lost in translation, and can cause problems within an office and relationships. Always read through these communications carefully to make sure that meaning is explicit.

10 – Listen and Learn

Maintaining a good level of communication isn’t easy, and you have to be prepared to learn from your mistakes. It may be worth discussing any communication issues with a line manager to ensure that any misunderstandings or problems are resolved before they can become worse.

Christina Appleworth is an intern for Speak First. Inspire confidence and create impact via our presentation skills training courses available throughout the UK.

In many business units presentations belong to the weekly routines. Despite that most employees dread presenting as well as listening to boring presentations. However presentations don’t have to be stressful or dull. The following tips will help you to create a successful presentation.

5 tips for a perfect presentation

1. Keep it simple: Use simple sentences, so that they are easier to understand. Use bullet points for a clear statement. Less text is sometimes more, and gets better memorized.
2. Tell a story: A presentation should have a coherent narrative structure that is catchy and easy to understand. The story should have a central theme that the audience can follow. A good story builds an arc of suspense.
3. Work with images: You can communicate your ideas much better, as concrete and graphic they become. Complex context is easier and quicker understood using diagrams, tables, drawings or images. Images provoke emotions of the audience, when it sympathizes it engages better with your ideas.
4. Attract attention: You can attract attention using professional PowerPoint slides with extraordinary design that capture and inspire your audience.
5. End with a call to action: Not just end your presentation with a conclusion, but put your audience in charge for the goals you want to reach. Get the audience to act in order to have your presented ideas converted.

The construction of a perfect presentation is of course aligned with much effort. To save time and work we’ve developed a tool called Charteo. There you will find an online shop with over 15,000 pre-designed PowerPoint-single slides and templates that can be individually composed online and afterwards downloaded as a complete presentation in the desired color. Our portfolio offers various layouts, charts and graphics, but also finished PowerPoint slides of different business and marketing categories. All of these were designed to harmonize with each other and can be customized to match the corporate design.
Link to our Website Charteo

Use “charteo10us” to save 10 EUR on the online shop.

Following are some sample PowerPoint charts from Charteo:

When you give a speech, you want the audience to respond. You want them to be motivated to take some action to improve their lives in some way, and you probably want them to walk to the back of the room and buy your book or course or sign up for your next seminar. In order to get the desired results from your speech, you need to grab the audience’s attention right from the start and continue to engage them throughout your speech. Here are six ways to engage your audience while speaking.

1. Ask questions.
To get your audience used to responding to you, start off with a question right away. Make it something easy—a yes or no question to which the answer is obviously “yes.” Get them to raise their hands by raising yours first. Next time you ask a question, try to elicit a verbal response by adding “yes or no” to the end of your question.

2. Get volunteers to help you.
Pick volunteers out of the audience and ask them questions or have them do some sort of exercise to illustrate a point. If you are asking a question that requires some thought, recruit your volunteers before the presentation so they have time to think about their answers.

3. Conduct group activities.
Try to come up with some activities the group can participate in that will reinforce the point of your speech.

4. Lead a discussion.
If your subject matter lends itself to discussion, hosting an informal talk where you accept feedback from audience members can introduce some fresh perspectives into the session.

5. Host a Q & A at the end of your presentation.
Give your audience time to ask questions. This can help establish you as an expert because the audience will have a chance to surprise you with questions you haven’t specifically prepared for. Obviously, you must know your subject matter well if you are planning to do a Q & A.

6. Bring something to hand out.
Bring a workbook for attendees to take home with them, a test they can take to evaluate their skills, or some other type of handout to keep the engagement going after your speech is over. Make sure you bring more than you think you’ll need. You don’t want to run out.

By engaging the audience and building rapport with them, you will be more likely to get them on board with your message. This will increase their chances of getting something useful out of your speech, something they can act on when they return to their normal routines.

About the author: Bethanny Parker likes to write about finding success in business and life, and mastering the art of public speaking will serve you well in both. The de Burgh Group offers public speaking courses that will help you gain the skills and confidence you need to become an outstanding public speaker.

The day of my big presentation, everything went wrong. I arrived early to set up my Powerpoint slides, but it all went downhill immediately.

My laptop wouldn’t interface with the projector. I’d put my Powerpoint file on a thumb drive, so I borrowed someone’s computer—but when I opened the file, my slides all looked a little wonky. There was no pull-down screen in the room, so the images on my slides looked grainy against the bare wall.

I forged ahead, getting more and more nervous. I’d thought I knew the material, using the bullets on my slides as cues for each new point. But when a network virus suddenly froze the application, I realized that I was 100% dependent on Powerpoint to deliver my presentation.

Let’s just say that I didn’t leave a terrific impression that day. But this story could have been a triumph, not a tragedy, if I’d used a flip chart instead. I’d be remembered as someone with initiative, humor, and the ability to connect with people… not someone whose nerves fell apart when the equipment failed.

Forget Powerpoint! Here are four reasons that I recommend using flip charts instead.

1. You’ll be a better presenter.

Using a flip chart means that the visual is only there to support your presentation, not take the place of it. Too many people think that Powerpoint slides will do the work for them.

When you ARE the presentation, you’ll know your material inside and out. That means you’ll be more confident—and you’ll have greater credibility in the eyes of your audience.

Even better, there are no technological excuses, because the equipment can’t possibly fail! If the electricity goes out, you and your flip chart are still good to go.

2. Powerpoint bores your audience, but a flip chart entertains them.

With a Powerpoint presentation, the lights are dimmed and all attention goes to the screen. This is the least effective way to deliver an important message. Your audience has lost its connection with you and is about to fall asleep!

Flip charts put you, the presenter, at the center of attention. Instead of staring blankly at a screen, they’ll be making eye contact with YOU. If you’re doing your job right, the audience will enjoy watching you so much that they’ll forget they’re learning.

3. Using a flip chart gives you room to be spontaneous.

An over-rehearsed presentation is just a lecture, and that’s boring. A flip chart lets you be flexible with your delivery, depending on the feel of the room. And since you can decide how much to pre-draw, you can adjust the spontaneity level to suit your audience.

4. Your audience will remember you, and your message.

Your flip chart presentation will convey more about you as the speaker than Powerpoint ever could. Have fun with it, and the audience will have fun as well. When your audience is engaged, they’ll understand your message… and they’ll want to continue working with you in the future.

Joanne Westley is a senior manager in the supply chain of the UK’s Jansen Display. In her spare time Joanne likes to go mountain biking as well as hiking in the Lake District.

In connection to my previous post about being nervous during a presentation, I want to follow-up and even state that: If you’re not at least a little bit nervous before a presentation, you should be worried. I do about 10 to 40 presentations a year. And during some of the “peak presentation times”, when I might do 2-3 of a very similar presentation in the same week – it’s possible that I might think “no need to worry about anything, I’ll do this well, piece of cake”. But those are often the times I present badly.

When I’m not nervous, I feel like I don’t need to prepare or “pump up” before the presentation – I’m uninspired and not as motivated. And it shows during the presentation. The energy level is low, there’s no excitement. It’s hard to fake passion or excitement and the audience will pick up on this. When I get into a phase like this, I usually try to do something differently during a presentation, just to keep myself on the edge, just to move out of my comfort zone a little bit. For instance, perhaps I will add 2-3 “edgy” and daring slides, just to see how the audience reacts. Perhaps I will try to add some additional interactive parts (e.g. ask questions). Or maybe insert a short personal anecdote. If you feel like you’re starting to get a bit too much routine with a presentation, try to find ways to make it more exciting! Any great and seasoned presenter will tell you that even they still get a little nervous before getting up on stage.

Being a bit nervous before a presentation is a good thing. It keeps your mind sharp and focused, it keeps you excited. The audience will appreciate that.

One of the things that I notice a lot is that people tell me after the presentations: “I was soo nervous, it was embarassing! Everyone saw how I was making mistakes and how I was shaking!” – usually my response is: “Not really, it was hardly noticeable. I only saw it a little bit after you pointed it out to the audience.”

What I’m trying to say is: If you’re nervous, if you THINK you’re body or your voice is shaking due to this — just keep going! Most people will not notice this at all. Your mind often exaggerates your own mistakes — people won’t notice at all. And even if they did (which is a rather rare case), they will empathize with you and they will be understanding.

80-90% of the time the shaking voice is just in your head and I advise to just to continue with the presentation. In the few times where you are actually shaking a lot and it is having a big effect on the presentation, I suggest that you tell the audience that you need a few seconds, then take a deep breath (this will relax you a bit and make you more focussed), optionally a glass of water if it’s available. And then continue.

One of the worst things (I think) you can do is to say at the beginning of the presentation: “Sorry, I haven’t prepared that much, so let’s hope this goes well!” or “I just got this task a few days ago, so sorry if I’m not that good, but that’s the reason”.

Usually that’s a sign for me to the heck out of the room. If someone hasn’t prepared enough – they’re maybe just going to read off slides – why should I sacrifice my time? What added value will this presentation give me? Just give me the handouts and be done with it!

Remember: The audience is not out there to “get you”. They understand the pressure of being on-stage and they support you. So don’t think of them as the “opponent”, but rather a friend you want to share something with.

Dear Readers, I’ve been now creating presentations for other people for about 5 years and in the last years I’ve more and more used the ideas and approaches from Nancy Duarte and Duarte, Inc. They’ve just published a new tool called Diagrammer. If you can’t be bothered with creating new diagrams or don’t have the time to create them, then Diagrammer might be the way to go. Just take a quick look and see if there’s anything that you like. Following is the press release:

Mountain View, California, March 14, 2012 – Duarte, Inc., a presentation communication agency, today launches Diagrammer™ (www.diagrammer.com) an online resource that provides sophisticated but low-cost slide diagrams to businesspeople and other communicators who seek to create powerful and memorable presentations.

Diagrammer is a library of 4,000 slide diagrams comprising all of the essential concepts and relationships common to business and professional communication. But it is more than a database of images. Diagrammer is a unique visual taxonomy that enables communicators to understand their ideas in a more nuanced and accurate way, and guides them to find more evocative and harder-hitting means of conveying their messages.

Business executives, thought-leaders, government employees, teachers, and communicators of all types have come to rely on popular software tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint® and Apple Keynote® to create slide presentations. Most communicators, however, have little or no professional design background, and consequently repeat common design errors that result in unclear, inaccurate, or merely forgettable slides, weakening their presentations.

Among the most common design mistakes, for example, are the overuse of text and bullet points, resulting in wordy, hard-to-understand slides.

“If there are several words on a slide, they are related in some way. If you can show the specific nature of that relationship or connection in your slide design your idea will be clearer and stronger,” said Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte, Inc. “Diagrammer shows presenters how to think about their concepts in a more specific and evocative manner, and gives them the correct slide graphics to express it.”

For more than 20 years, Duarte has helped create hundreds of thousands of presentations for many of the world’s best-known brands and thought-leaders. Clients include Avaya, Cisco, Food Network, GE, Google, HP, Qualcomm and The World Bank.

To create Diagrammer, Duarte sorted through years of her designers’ sketchbooks. This search revealed patterns of diagrammatic communication, classified by a set of categories that no one else had identified. Virtually all business concepts fell within these categories, among them such ideas as SEGMENT, FLOW, JOIN, STACK and NETWORK. Diagrammer’s thousands of slide design options fall under these general categories.

Diagrammer makes it easy to find and download the best slides quickly. For example, if two departments or products were merged in a corporate restructuring, a presenter could search the Diagrammer category called JOINED. Within this category, he/she could find slide designs to convey additional specificity, such as OVERLAP – in varying degrees and styles.

Diagrammer’s visual taxonomy walks customers through the design thought process to quickly locate the optimal slides within the general categories—and to gain better understanding and insight into their own presentations. Each Diagrammer slide can be immediately downloaded as a PowerPoint for 99 cents from Diagrammer.com. Visit the site to see how Diagrammer can help businesspeople and other professionals improve their presentations with more visually powerful, more informative slides.

About Diagrammer™
Diagrammer™ is an online store that provides sophisticated, low-cost slide diagrams to businesspeople and communicators who seek to create powerful and memorable presentations. It was developed by Duarte, Inc., a presentation communication firm based in Mountain View, California, that has worked on hundreds of thousands of presentations for many of the world’s best-known brands and thought leaders. For more information, visit http://www.Diagrammer.com.

I regularly let guest bloggers write an article here. This time it’s Leon from effective-public-speaking-tips.com. If you want to have your article on this blog, just write to mail@rethinkpresentations.com.

My grandma was fond of the radio (called the “wire-less” where I was from), and sitting in her chair by the window in her small beach house, she used to listen to a lot of public speakers in the evening. But often afterwards, she was left fazed: “He was talking all over the place,” she used to say, “I feel like walking up to him and asking exactly WHAT he wanted say and why he didn’t just spit it out…”

I’m pretty sure my grandma wasn’t the only one suffering from acute speech disillusionment, since I I’ve personally left many public speaking venues wondering what exactly the speaker wanted me to take from his haphazard talk.

Novice speakers are especially susceptible to randomized babbling: Getting on stage, zigzagging between ideas, jumping between different shades of the same topics, consistently self-interrupting to share an extra or side-bar, and finishing up without actually having maintained any form of concentrated effort on one single point. This is deadly. It’s not just ineffective, its also leaves the audience frustrated, dazed and more often than not, bored.

Public Speaking is not just speaking for the sake of speaking. Like anything in life that is intended to have impact and lasting results, a public speakers needs to be aware of what exactly he wants to accomplish with his delivery. Like any good meeting that has a clear agenda, a pre-determined set of goals that the gathering will set out to accomplish; great Public Speaking will convey focus on specifics. A Public Speaker who goes on stage without a clear idea of what his speech is supposed to accomplish, is like a chairman ordering meetings simply because he enjoys hearing the sound of other people’s voices!

The easiest way to determine a speech goal is to answer the following question: What is the one thing I want my audience to have understood/grasped/implemented when I descend from stage? This is the ‘main thing’ of your speech – the ultimate goal of your entire delivery and the cornerstone around which you wrap all your content. The ‘main thing’ of your speech also becomes your judge. Everything from your content, to your delivery techniques, to your voice tonality and hand gestures ends up being measured against your speech goal, and if it doesn’t further and advance this goal, it needs to be reworked or all together
thrown out.

For example: Now that I now and really understand what I want to accomplish with this speech, is this paragraph still relevant? Is this joke still necessary? Could I shorten my speech by five minutes without influencing the accomplishment of my goals in any true sense? What about my stories and analogies – could I use sharper illustrations that’ll further the understanding of my speech goal to a greater extent? In this sense, by beginning with the end in mind, great speakers have learned to write and deliver content that is focused and precise. Never go on stage and start babbling, hoping the audience will be smart enough to grab hold of whatever you’re throwing out at them. No, start with a clear speech goal in mind and work from there. When you write or delivery speeches with a clear outcome in mind, your results will be maximized a dozen times over.

This guest article was written by Leon from effective-public-speaking-tips.com which is an ever growing online portal for public speaking tips, speechwriting help and presentation techniques.

Tools for creating engaging two-way presentations
It’s 2012! The days of presenting on boring graph paper or via a leaf-through booklet are over! Today, you need to engage your audience by creating a two-way method of communication that will keep them invested in what you have to say. Check out my picks for the top 5 effective presentation mediums in 2012:

1. Interactive glass whiteboards: These smooth, durable surfaces are like traditional whiteboards except that they are made with glass. Also, compatible with bright-colored dry erase markers, the glass whiteboard can be used to display data, explain activities, show graphs, business plans and map out marketing campaigns and ideas during a presentation. Glass dry erase boards are effective meeting tools because they encourage interaction from the audience—either via brainstorming or taking turns writing ideas on the board. I call the glass whiteboard the perfect presentation medium for 2012 because it’s Eco-friendly (100% recyclable), it doesn’t wear down over time, it doesn’t emit any toxic fumes (like vinyl covered whiteboards do), and it blends in seamlessly with the office background when not in use.

2. Microsoft PowerPoint: Yes, as far as dynamic presentation tools, Microsoft’s PowerPoint still ranks very high in offices around the globe. Not only is it compatible with the rest of the tools in MS Office suite, which is used by the majority of corporate businesses around the world—it offers various styles and custom templates for presentation—integrating text, images, 3-D graphics, audio and video clips, sound effects and even those cheesy animations we all love so much in one glorious presentation medium that’s hard to rival.

3. iPad: You might think I’m biased choosing the iPad over all other mobile tablet devices, however, as far as its presentation value; the iPad can connect to video projectors to add to your stunning presentation. Plus, it’s not a far stretch to imagine an iPad-compatible version of Microsoft Office for business. In smaller meetings, iPad is the ideal, portable tool for displaying sales numbers, spreadsheets and digital portfolios to clients within any Wi-Fi hotspot. That means that even away from the office (say for example, at a business conference) the iPad can be used to display graphic art, live websites, live blogging as it happens, to store multimedia (such as photographs, 3-D models, music, and virtually any type of file), plus you can use an iPad as a virtual sign-in sheet at your office, store or conference booth to create a mailing lists for promotional emails and newsletter sign up.

4. Prezi: You’ve probably already heard of Prezi, but for those who haven’t, this web-based presentation medium is an ideal storytelling tool that uses a blank canvas to let you lead a presentation with dynamic flow—as opposed to traditional linear slides, like PowerPoint. Prezi lets presenters move the audience’s attention around the canvas by zooming in and out, going right, which is ideal for highlighting a certain phrase or close up of an image—instead of following a linear line. Plus, Prezi gives the wow factor that many complain PowerPoint lacks. Instead of looking dated like PPT, Prezi allows you to select from a number of elegant fonts (more than just Comic Sans), templates and even allows you to you can create and upload customized PDFs to match your presentation template.

5. Slideshare: This professional social media platform has gained a positive reputation of late with millions of business professionals turning to it for its dual social media-traditional presentation function. Slideshare offers custom templates for you to create slides, upload video, post promotions, and even create bookmarks within presentations. The unique thing about Slideshare, compared to traditional presentation mediums, like PowerPoint, is that it doubles as a social media content site that allows you to upload your own presentations and embed a link in your blog, Facebook page or on your website, view and download others, join groups, and network by commenting, tagging favorites and linking creating backlinks with other users. Oh and did I mention…Slideshare is free (although a paid membership is required for registering a premium, custom channel). Slideshare drives relevant traffic to your presentation via Search Engine Optimized (SEO) keyword tags in the body of your presentation. Anyone can upload a presentation to Slideshare so you can see how it would be a great presentation medium for dispersed audiences—just give them the URL and away you go!

Angela is a freelance writer, loving wife, and mother of two beautiful twin girls and a standard poodle named Morty. She graduated with her Master of Arts Degree in English from the University of North Carolina. During her time in university, she wrote a number of children’s short stories that focus on a set of curious twin sisters and their dog (go figure). Angela is currently looking for freelance writing opportunities and can be reached at angelatlr600@gmail.com.