In my last column, I wrote about creating PowerPoint slides for lectures, and of preparing to use these slides in a lecture. The topic of this column is more general, focusing on post-lecture activities and on making yourself more productive with PowerPoint.

Post-Lecture Activities

It is a great idea to take a few minutes after class to note exactly which slides you covered, your finishing point, and how long the lecture ran. Use this information the next time you use the same set of slides.

Jot down any thoughts that occurred to you while you were presenting your slides, such as mistakes on the slide, ways to improve the material, or places where you could create additional slides.

Creating a Reusable Slide Library

In the long run, you want to get as much bang for the slide buck as you can. This means that slides created for one course or for one book can be used again when circumstances change. The goal is to create slides that function easily and quickly after being copied and pasted into a new lecture series, which is to say slides that are fully modular and interchangeable.

The first thing you need to do for this to happen, is to be consistent with all of the style decisions you make as you create slides: font faces, colors, sizes, capitalization, layout, and headings. In effect, you should develop "style traditions" for your electronic work. Think about creating a simple style sheet to help you remember how to format your slides.

Use the Help facility to learn how to use the PowerPoint's master slide capability (View… Master), and how to modify the automatic colors (Format… Slide Design… Color Schemes). The trick here is to avoid customizing colors or any other aspect of format on any individual slide and to effect changes instead on the master slide or the slide design defaults.

The goal is to change all slides in a file with a single change to the master slide or the default color scheme. This will make reuse and recombination far easier. Similarly, specific course or book information should be relegated to the Master Slide only. This way you can move slides from course to course or even between conference presentations and courses and back again without having to change individual slides.

Your slide library itself should be modularized. Create lecture-length, or shorter, modules. Each module should be its own file.

You might wish to create a spreadsheet to help you keep track of each topic covered in each module. For each topic, include the number of slides and the approximate lecture time needed for the topic.

Name your slide file modules consistently to facilitate your search. I like to use names like: nn_content-title where nn is the sequence number (with a leading zero for numbers less than 10) and content-title is the subject of the lecture. This way a consistent sorting order is maintained when I look at the files using Windows Explorer, or the files are put in a Web directory.

If you do quantitative courses, learn how to use the equation editor that comes with the suite of office products. A bonus here is that the same software works on word processing as well as slide processing.

I hope that this advice makes you as productive as possible. Look for these tips and others on the ARC at www.marketingpower.com/arc.