PowerPoint has a bad reputation. Unjustly so. The software isn’t bad. Bad are those users who produce ugly, boring, overloaded slideshows with PowerPoint.
(By the way, a fun sport has emerged from this: PowerPoint Karaoke. If you want to play, look here: https://kapopo.de/spielen.html)
But back to a better PowerPoint. I want to show you a function that will make you better presenters without much effort: the zoom function.
From Boring to Exciting
A normal PowerPoint presentation progresses linearly. While this is practical, it’s also tiring. Especially when each slide mercilessly counts up, showing you’re only on the fourth of 40 slides.
However, you can structure and display a PowerPoint presentation quite differently: by creating thematic sections and then navigating hierarchically within them.
You start from a helicopter perspective, giving an overview of all topics. From there, you zoom into details over several levels. Once you’re done with one detail, you switch back to the higher view to dive into the next detail from there.
Diving into a Topic
This is exactly the principle behind the zoom function in PowerPoint. It allows you to make a presentation much more explorative.
The cool thing is: you don’t have to stick to a fixed order, but can adapt the sequence of the presentation to the context. Do you feel your audience has already grasped the topic? Then don’t dive into the details at all, but jump directly to the next topic.
In the next post, I’ll show you how I set up this presentation with zoom functions. After that, there will be a third post where I’ll show you another zoom trick that will turn you into presentation superheroes 🦸🏼💥🦸🏻♀️
