How to Enhance Your Images in PowerPoint for a Web Conference

Last post I wrote about fundamental concepts regarding using PowerPoint slides in a web conference. This post covers ideas to enhance images to make your images and slides look professional. Note that these tips are written for PowerPoint 2007.

1. Outline your images

Once you’ve found the right images to represent the key concepts and ideas to include in your PowerPoint, you can give them a polished look by applying a “picture style.” Simply click on the image and you will see the Picture Tools feature activate at the top of the screen. Select one of the picture styles that you like.

2. Remove the background from an image

If your slide background color is not white, placing an image with a white background won’t look right. But it’s easy to remove the image background to make it blend in with your slide. Click on the image and the Picture Tools feature will activate. Select Picture Tools > Recolor > Set Transparent Color. Then click on the image background you wish to remove and it will disappear.

3. Incorporate text onto images

One way to make images more appealing and professional looking is to select an image that contains space to write text. For example, to convey the idea of something brief, select an image of a person holding a blank card. Then click Insert > Text Box and draw a text box on the image. Write something such as “Use limited text” in the text box. You may need to resize and recolor the text to improve the visibility of the text.

Whether you are facilitating a web conference for a sales event, virtual classroom training or a knowledge sharing event, you will need PowerPoint slides to support your content. You don’t need to be an expert in PowerPoint to put together a good slide deck, but when developing your slides, keep these two concepts in mind:

1. Use a Lot of Slides

Using a minimal amount of slides in an in-person setting is a good practice, however the opposite is true in a web conference. Since participants cannot see the speaker, the slides provide a place for participants to focus and maintain their interest. When converting content from a face-to-face setting to a web conference setting, I typically increase the number of slides between 30-50%. More slides doesn’t mean more content – it means the same content (or less) spread out over more slides. Try to only cover one key concept per slide. When you rehearse your web conference ask someone to observe and see if the ideas and concepts you are describing are supported by the slides you are showing. If you start to go off on a tangent either eliminate the tangent or create slides to support it. Slides for a web conference should also include:

Slides for transitions (starting a new section, doing a wrap up, etc.).
Slides with instructions (ground rules, instructions for exercises, instructions for next steps, etc.).

2. Use a Lot of Images

Aristotle said that ‘the soul never thinks without an image.’ Apply this thinking to your slides and see where you can support or replace text with images. If you don’t have images readily available, you can search for pictures in PowerPoint by going to Insert > Clip Art. Type a keyword and click Go. For the best search results, use this feature while you are connected to the Internet. For more ideas on how to find good images check out Steal this Presentation. Slides 23-32 cover images, however the entire slideshare is worth viewing.

In addition to images of key concepts you should also include photos of:

The presenters
The participants
The materials (if you will refer to materials that you mailed to participants such as a workbook or job aid, display an image of the item when referring to it).

These concepts are a starting point for developing slides for your web conference. Next time, I’ll blog about advanced techniques for PowerPoint.