Category: Hints & Tips

Hints and tips for MS Office and other applications. Contributions from our team of talented trainers.

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ADVANCED PRESENTATION SKILLS: 5 Tips to “Wow” Your Audience

5 Tips to “Wow” Your Audience

As a presenter, your goal should be to engage your audience, keep their attention and get them to take action or agree with your point of view.

You are most likely to keep the audience’s attention if you remember that you – not your props or slides – are their main focus. People buy people, so your delivery style matters.

5 Tips to “Wow” Your Audience

In order to deliver compelling presentations, there are many things you can do to boost your performance. (you may also want to check out our advanced Presentation Skills workshop).

We take a look at five essentials:
Be Confident

The key to being confident is preparation. After all, if you are not comfortable with your topic and content, then you won’t appear confident. Therefore, the time invested in the practice and rehearsal stage pays off.

Develop a Process

For greater efficiency and impact, follow a clear process for introducing yourself, getting your presentation started and working through each of the topics you need to cover.

Treat your presentation as a journey and guide your audience through it, by consistently letting them know where you are, where you have come from, and where you are going.

At the outset of your presentation, state your purpose and outline the main points you will cover. When wrapping up your presentation, summarize your content and finish with a clear and memorable conclusion.

Use Vocal Emphasis and Verbal Techniques

For advanced presentations, there will be certain words and messages that you want your audience to remember. There are several para-verbal techniques that you can use to emphasise these important points:

  • Vary your tone of voice and the pace of your delivery this will draw attention to what you are saying
  • Use silence for impact
  • Ask rhetorical questions to connect the audience to your message
Be Aware of Your Body Position and Movement

From your body position and movement, your audience will form impressions about how comfortable you are making your presentation. Moving around the stage can be positive and keep the audience engaged; just be sure to move with purpose.

Before you deliver your presentation, work off any nervous energy because that could convey anxiety to your audience and make a bad impression. Most importantly, avoid putting your hands behind your back, in your pockets, or crossing them in front of you. Each of these things can convey a lack of confidence.

Use Gestures

In order to give your words extra impact, you can use gestures as you speak. For example, if you are describing how a department has to be divided into two, you could indicate separation by pushing your hands apart.

When describing the size, quantity or extent of something, add emphasis by expressing “large” or “small” with your hands. Use your fingers to introduce separate points clearly and sequentially.

Conclusion

For advanced presentations, as well as ensuring your message is logical and credible, you need to connect with your audience and strike the right tone to involve, motivate and gain their support.

These techniques will give your presentations an extra visual dimension that grabs attention so you can hammer your message home.

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Improve your Reports with Power BI Tooltips

Tooltips pages can add visually powerful information to your reports and dashboards. Not only are they visually stunning, they’re also incredibly simple to implement! Follow our guide below to enhance your Power BI dashboard, and instantly reap the rewards of greater analytical power.

An Example of Tooltips:

The tooltips will appear when you hover over visuals and will add important, highly visual additional information to the page.

The image below shows an example of the tooltips, when we hover over May in the line chart.

Power BI Tooltips example
Example of Power BI Tooltips

If we move the mouse curser over June, the key information for June will be displayed as tooltips (see image below).

Power Bi tooltips example 2
Second example of Tooltips page

The tooltips page can include visuals, text boxes, images, and any other options or items normally included in a Power BI report. These options are selected and controlled by you when setting up the tooltips.

There are no limitations of how many tooltips pages you can create. You can control which tooltip pages are shown when you hover over visuals in your report, and the tooltips will simply be filtered by the data you point at with your mouse curser.

How to Create a Report Tooltip Page

1) Create a new page in your Power BI report and size it to the proper size for a tooltip.

You can do this on the Format pane in the Page Size card. If you click on the down arrow under Type, you have an option to size it to default tooltip size, but you can also customise the size. The canvas you get will not give you the right feeling of the size before you change the page view to actual size. To do this click on the View tab Page View and Actual Size.

2) Decide which visuals and objects you want to have on your tooltip page.

Below you will see an example tooltip page, where a donut chart shows the sales amount for VIP clients and normal clients. You can see a pie chart showing sales amount for segments, using the KPI visual to visualise targets. There is a card showing quantity, and a card showing sales amount.

Choosing tooltip options
Use the dashboard to select the fields for your tooltip

You can set up the options for your own tooltips page in the same way, just choosing the most essential features for your report.

Setting Up and Configuring the Tooltip Page

You need to configure two options to get Power BI to show your tooltip page when you hover over the visuals in your report. You will also need to define which tooltips you want to appear when you hover over a specific visual.

First, you need to turn the Tooltip slider to On, in the Page Information card, to make the page you created a tooltip (see below).

An example of setting up tooltips
Make sure you turn the tooltip option on!

The next step is to define the fields you want the tooltip to display. Select the visuals in your report that contain the field you specify, and the tooltip will appear.

You can tell Power BI which field or fields to apply by dragging them into the Tooltip fields bucket, which you can find in the Fields section of the Visualizations pane. In the image below, the Sales Amount field has been dragged into the Tooltips fields bucket.

There can be either categorical, numerical or measures fields in the Tooltips fields bucket.

Choosing tooltip fields
Choose the fields for your tooltip

When this has been done, your chosen options will automatically substitute the default Power BI tooltip.

Configure the Tooltip Manually

Alternatively, if you can find a Tooltip card in the visual’s Formatting pane, you can get the tooltip to appear when you hover over the visual. Please note: not all visuals can display tooltips.

Select the visual you want to setup. In the Visualizations pane, select the Format section and expand the Tooltip card. Select the tooltip report page you want from the dropdown for the visual.

Unfortunately, tooltips setup for custom visuals will not appear on mobile devices.

Conclusion

Tooltips is a new feature in Power BI that can quickly and easily improve the usability and aesthetics of your reports. Use it effectively and you elevate your analytical power to the next level.

For more information, tips and techniques, check out our Power BI Training Course.