Why Creating Infographics in PowerPoint will save you hours – Guest Blog Post from Shelley Fishel

Those of you in the VA Help Desk Facebook Community will already know this great lady, Shelley Fishel of Tomorrows VA as you will often find her answering questions on how to get the best out of the various Mircosoft packages. So I am delighted this week that we have a guest blog post from Shelley on “Why Creating Infographics in PowerPoint will save you hours.”

Infographics using PowerPoint?

You are a busy VA. That goes without saying and you may be one of the Social Media savvy VAs who love nothing more than creating Social Media Campaigns for her clients.

You may be wondering about the title as you probably use other software to create your Infographics. Perhaps you use that stalwart of the online design world Canva or something like PikToChart another online platform.

There is nothing wrong with either of those choices or any other for that matter. My contention is simple, why pay for extra software when you have the tools within your Microsoft Office suite of programs already?

Costly software

When running your own business, it is important to keep costs to a minimum.  Each time you subscribe or purchase a new piece of software, not only are you investing your hard-earned cash, you are also investing your time. Time to learn how each piece of software works, what it can and cannot do.  It’s a double whammy.

Slow Broadband

When you work from a home office, you may not have the best broadband connection. A trainer friend of mine is always complaining about the speed of her internet. Nothing to do with her, it’s just that in the area where she lives, there are no fast broadband providers.

With a slow broadband connection, you are going to spend extra time working online. Not to mention if your broadband crashes out on you mid- design.

In business time is money even more so when you exchange your time for an hourly rate.  Wasting any time on slow upload and download speeds is frustrating to say the least and costly too. Not only that but you may end up charging your client for extra time which is no fault of yours or theirs.

PowerPoint really?

Yes, PowerPoint really.  Most people think of PowerPoint as useful for presentations only and that is the main use it is put to. It can be used for other uses, design of flyers, covers for documents, blog header images. In fact, I use PowerPoint to design all my blog header images now as well as any infographics I create.

You have the software anyway

You already own PowerPoint. It comes as part of your Office 365 or Office 2016 suite.  Isn’t it time you invested a little bit of your own time, to make sure you are using it properly? Wouldn’t it be great to create Infographics in record time, without logging in to something else, spending even more money or feeling frustrated with slow broadband?

What do I need to know to make Infographics in PowerPoint?

Well you need to know how to do the following:

  • Resize the slides so that they can be used as Infographics
  • Add pictures
  • Add text
  • Add Icons
  • Use SmartArt
  • Manipulate all the above
  • Export the slides to a web friendly format like JPEG or PNG.

Do I need to be using Windows or will it work on a Mac too?

Everything you can do in PowerPoint for Windows can also be done in PowerPoint for Mac.

Upcoming Webinar

I am going to be running a webinar for the VACT on how to Create Infographics using PowerPoint on 5 Sep 18 and will be showing you just how easy it is to use familiar software to create stunning Infographics. You can register for the webinar here.

It is going to be a great webinar and I look forward to seeing you there.

Who is Shelley Fishel

Shelley Fishel is an IT Trainer with 20 years’ experience of training people in business to use Microsoft Office in all its guises. Shelley also has 10 eBooks published online along with three books on Amazon.  She is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and a Fellow of the Learning and Performance Institute with certifications in both the Delivery and Design of Online Learning.

More recently, Shelley has been busy building her new online training portal for VAs – http://www.tomorrowsva.com where you will find a growing list of online training courses which cater for the needs of a busy VA. Her aim is to enable and empower VAs to Get More Done in Less Time.  Shelley has some great lead magnets on  her website, “The Ultimate Tech Guide for VAs” and two sets of top 10 tips, one for PowerPoint and one for Windows that you can sign up for.

You can follow Shelley on Social Media: