iWork® '09 Portable Genius

Chapter 11. How Do I Make My Presentations Lively and Compelling?

All text and no flash make for a dull and forgettable presentation. To keep your audience focused on your presentation and to deliver your message successfully, you'll want to choose a suitable design for your presentation, and plan its content carefully to give it impact. Then add movement, color, and depth to your presentation with movies, audio, and hyperlinks; bring it to life with animations; or give the presentation its own voice by recording narration in sync with the slides. To create powerful presentations of your own quickly and slickly, you'll want to develop your own slide masters and save them in custom themes.

Choosing the Best Theme for the Presentation

Giving Your Presentation Impact

Adding Movies and Audio

Adding Hyperlinks

Adding Animation Builds to Slides

Adding Transitions between Slides

Adding Narration

Creating Your Own Slide Masters

Creating a Custom Theme

Choosing the Best Theme for the Presentation

The first essential for making your presentation work effectively is choosing a suitable theme for it. Just as you wouldn't write a formal request for a hefty salary raise on a novelty card, you normally wouldn't use a highly colored or super-casual theme for a serious business presentation; you probably would use one of the sober, professional-looking themes instead.

Conversely, if you're giving a high-tempo ...