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Preparation, Presentation, Persuasion are the key ingredients when you are speaking to 10 or 500 people. Your audience will judge your presentation within 30 seconds; 55% by your body language, 38% the quality of your voice and 7% the words you say. The most effective way to communicate to your audience is with accuracy and energy.

55% of how people perceive you is body language:
* Look at your audience, glancing at your notes only occasionally.
* Step out from behind the lectern or podium to make yourself accessible to the audience.
* Use your hands to emphasize a point, otherwise relax them at your side.
* Use flowing movements. Rocking side to side indicates insecurity.
* Smile and be dramatic or humorous when appropriate. It denotes you are a multi-faceted person.
* If you need notes make them on 5 x 7 index cards; not paper because it’s noisy. Use black ink for your main bullet points and red or another color for sub-points. Number the top corner of the cards.
* Place a glass of lukewarm water near your notes (cold closes your throat).
* If you blank out and forget a point, take a sip of water and check your notes.

38% of how people perceive you is by your voice inflection:
* Practice your speech out loud repeatedly. Eliminate umms, ahs and maybes. A pause is more powerful. If you connect your name and your company together: “Hi, I’m Bill Smith and my company is XYZ”, it would not be as effective as “Hi, I’m Bill Smith. (pause) The name of my company is (pause) XYZ.” This method draws the listener’s attention toward what you will say next. Pausing also helps the listener to digest what you have said before you go on speaking.
* Female speakers, lower your pitch.

7% of how people perceive you is by your words:
* Eliminate words like if, someday, but, problem, issue. If you have a problem, mention it once, and then go into conclusions, results, answers and solutions.
* Use powerful words: memorable, colossal, limitless, family, friendly and excellence.
* Opening your speech is your chance to attract your listeners attention. A powerful technique is to open with a statement or question to get them focused on you and your presentation. An eloquent analogy or comparison to preface what you intend to say is an audience grabber.
* Closing your speech is another opportunity to create a call to action finish for your audience in. You could end by using an famous quotation, or a slogan or a story that sums up your topic.

Your audience is rooting for you. They want to benefit from what you have to say. Practice your speech standing up, record yourself, play it back and have friends or family critique you. Take deep breaths and realize that nervousness is normal. The secret to giving an excellent speech is to commit, prepare and rehearse. Have fun, make audience eye contact, project your voice clearly and be committed to what you are saying.

The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek announced OnLive Inc.’s release of an app that allows the full Windows versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint to run on an iPad. These are real programs that work the way they do on a Windows PC. The app lets you create, edit, view and run Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. They are fully functional and available for free. This is however a cloud-based app, which means that Office is not installed on the iPad, but rather, runs through a remote server which you are connected to via the Internet. Nonetheless, it’s still great news for iPads users, who constantly work with the key Office productivity apps.

Adding Voiceover to PowerPoint

Businesses, schools and the general community use these key apps for several reasons. Whether it’s for professional, personal, social or academic purposes, they play a significant role in today’s world. PowerPoint has become a powerful tool in companies and schools because it can be easily integrated into online courses, conventions, webinars, remote business meetings and teleconferences. What’s great about PowerPoint is that you can also add audio to the presentation.

Microsoft Office lists the following cases where a PowerPoint voiceover or a narration can be added to a presentation:

• Web-based presentation
• Archiving a meeting so that presenters can review it and add comments later on
• Self-running slide show presentation

If you want to hold your audience’s attention, you should aim to entice all or as many senses as possible. It’s just like watching TV or videos; no matter how great the visuals and animations are, they still won’t be that effective without music, narration or sounds. The material on screen, whether it’s an advertisement, trailer or movie, will only be effective if the visual presentation is complemented with the appropriate audio.

For PowerPoint presentations, which are usually informative or instructional, the voiceover should be short, concise and clear. You should ensure that you perfectly time your PowerPoint voiceover to match the correct slide. When you record the audio, use PowerPoint’s slide timing features, which you can set up if you want to run the presentation automatically.

Getting Started with PowerPoint Voiceover

Before starting your PowerPoint voiceover, be sure to check that your computer has a sound card, microphone and speakers to be able to record and hear your narration and music. You can either record your voiceover before creating a presentation or during the presentation; in which case you should have a clear understanding of the presentation, a list of slides etc. Please note that PowerPoint is setup so that voice narration takes precedence over other sounds. So if for example, you’ve inserted background music, it will be overridden by the voiceover.

Recording a Voiceover PowerPoint

Once your equipment is ready, you can begin creating your PowerPoint presentation with voiceover or music on each presentation slide.

When adding a voiceover in the presentation, here are simple steps you can follow:

1. Check if your microphone is ready: turned on, not muted, sound mixer set at a balanced level.
2. Create a new folder and label it accordingly.
3. Save a copy of the PowerPoint file you’ll be working on.
4. Set up Narration Recording in PowerPoint and follow the instructions below:
a. Select the slideshow option in the menu bar.
b. Click “record narration”.
c. Choose “change quality”.
d. Select “44.100kHz, 16 bit, Mono”.
e. Click “set microphone level” and test your microphone.
f. Tick the “link narration” box.
g. Choose “browse” then open the new folder you’ve created from the previous step and select the folder.
h. Click the “OK” button and begin recording voiceovers on your slides.
i. Choose “yes” every time you’re asked to “save timings on the slides”.
j. Save the completed PowerPoint presentation again.
5. Review the audio quality of your presentation.
6. Run the entire PowerPoint presentation to check if voiceover and slides are well synchronised.

When you are working on a professional or business presentation, especially if it’s to be used for sales and marketing, it’s recommended that you consider hiring a professional voiceover talent to ensure that the final product is perfect. With a professional voiceover talent, you get to choose a voice that’s attractive, confident and experienced in capturing the targeted audience’s attention.

Contact us today and we’ll show you the gallery of our voiceover talents.