PowerPoint Presentations in the Workplace

Source: Medium

Various industries consistently utilize presentations as a means of communication and sharing information. That said, relevant businesses need resources and means to create slide decks efficiently and effectively.

The best tool for creating a presentation continues to be PowerPoint. PowerPoint slide decks are used continuously by businesses to pitch services, report on data, analyze information and collaborate.

The software provides a wealth of features and capabilities that make it possible to create high-quality presentations and share them with coworkers, teams, clients and investors alike. Designing these slide decks, however, remains a time-consuming task for many companies – which is why more and more businesses are investing in professional PowerPoint design services.

Consult a PowerPoint design agency to understand the scope of their professional services and assess what type of services will best suit the unique needs of you and your business:

Pitching Your Business

The value of a professionally designed PowerPoint presentation is immeasurable when you are a business that is consistently selling your brand, product or service. Start-ups and established companies like agencies both need a well-constructed pitch deck to help them pitch their business. Check here if you want to know more.

  • Start-ups:

Start-ups need an effective pitch deck if they want to sell their brand to potential investors successfully. When establishing its brand, a new business needs to make worthwhile investments that will go a long way. A professionally designed pitch deck is an asset that is well worth the investment.

Businesses can greatly benefit from working with PowerPoint presentation design experts like the team at Stinson Design, who can help a start-up to create a concise pitch deck that distills the brand’s messaging, and includes all essential information about the business.

A professional presentation designer knows that a good pitch deck needs an engaging mission statement, cohesive structure, and visually interesting data.

  • Agencies:

Proposals and client presentations are draining, but a professional custom-made template can help agencies to streamline these processes.

Custom made PowerPoint templates for business proposals, and campaign reports will make it easy to substitute any specific information about a client or a particular campaign. This way, you can speed up your internal process while still providing clients with a custom asset that is unique to them.

After verbally delivering a business proposal or campaign report, you can send the resource directly to the client so that they can have it on file. This helps to maintain accountability and open communication.

Reporting on & Analyzing Data

Slide decks are often used to report on and analyze data that’s been accumulated over a period of time. With the help of a professional designer, you will be able to convey and interpret this data in presentations seamlessly, efficiently and effectively.

Visualize Your Data

When presenting data in a slide deck, it’s important to do so in an engaging way. According to Kissmetrics, people are 30 times more likely to read high-quality infographics than they are to read plain text. A PowerPoint presentation agency can provide you with made to order infographics that visualize your data and make your numbers more interesting (and impressive).

For example, an infographic chart can help you to display current numbers alongside past and projected figures. This visualization makes it easy for an audience to see any discrepancies or correlations – this is a way to highlight wins and identify losses in different aspects of a business.

Custom infographics greatly expands a business’s ability to present data visually through more creative formats. These are some of the most popular types of infographics that are often seen in professional presentations:

  • Timeline: Timelines are used to convey how data has changed (or not) over time, or to display projected numbers for the future.
  • Graphs: Graphs help to show the correlation between different sets of numbers (past and present data, comparison to the competitions numbers, etc.)
  • List: List infographics provide visual context for pieces of data, instead of just listing off important numbers in bullet points on a slide. Lists will typically break up numbers with icons and eye-catching fonts to emphasize specific numbers.
  • Map: To provide a geographical context for data obtained from different locations.

Using Templates

A professional agency can provide you with custom-designed templates that include sections to input data like charts and graphs. When provided with a template, your business can make customizations to add updated information on profits, returns on investments, and other relevant number-based information that may have changed over time.

In addition to slide decks that simply report on data, sometimes businesses require data analysis presentations that provide context for this data and present conclusions and action items to follow. It can greatly benefit a business to have templates to suit both of these different types of content.

Easier to Interpret:

Visualized data in presentations make it easier for fellow decision-makers to interpret and understand the data. It helps businesses to identify discrepancies, successes, and room for improvement more clearly.

Collaborating on Slide Decks

Microsoft continues to make PowerPoint more collaborative software for teams. The program has integrated a few different functions that make it possible for teams to work together on slide decks seamlessly. This helps to streamline internal processes and provides a means for open communication.

Shareability:

PowerPoint makes it easy for businesses to save slide decks and share the asset among various people. Team members can share a presentation file back and forth at different stages of the design process for review and additional insights.

Provide Notes:

If a business has a quality assurance process (as it should), PowerPoints’ note function will come in handy. This feature allows individuals to make suggestions in the note section of a slide without actually changing its content.

Save as a Resource:

Relevant data presented in a slide deck will likely need to be readdressed either for comparison with new data or to inform a future presentation. PowerPoints can be easily saved as both a presentation and a PDF for team members to keep as a resource.

This is also convenient if you are delivering a company-wide presentation as you can send the slide deck to employees to keep as a resource. This way, staff can easily revisit any information that may be relevant to their role.