At Filtered we have a range of business training and software courses including Microsoft PowerPoint. Our PowerPoint online training course will teach you everything you need to know about this popular application so that you can produce impactful presentations quickly and efficiently. This post, however, is a quick five point tongue-in-cheek guide of things to avoid in your PowerPoint presentations to ensure you keep your audience engaged and your delivery clear.

I took a project financial management course many years ago. The course was chalked full of formulas and calculations to analyze project performance.  While the information was good and I gleaned value from the course, I feel the material overlooked one critical factor to variance analysis. A properly developed and baselined schedule is imperative to facilitate meaningful analysis.

To avoid career-threatening errors Ok, so it doesn’t happen every day, but there are lots of horror stories about disastrous spreadsheet errors. An Excel catastrophe can strike anywhere and anyone: from Harvard professors whose internationally-renowned research on government austerity was found to contain a significant error in a spreadsheet formula to a UK government department that failed to understand the assumptions a spreadsheet was based on, costing their taxpayers £millions.

With the General Election just round the corner, last week’s Budget gave us an important insight into the Government’s priorities.  For SMEs there was quite a lot to be enthusiastic about. But more should be planned for upskilling the UK workforce.

Source: http://may2015.com/category/poll-of-polls/

Things were delightfully simple in the early days of spreadsheets. The distance from multi-column analysis paper to its on-screen equivalent was relatively small - just involving a whole lot less Tipp-Ex and doing the calculations for you. Very quickly, as we moved from VisiCalc to SuperCalc to Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, the capabilities of spreadsheets increased. As well as moving from single sheets to books of multiple pages, available calculations and functions became more extensive, macro and programming languages were included, and graphs and charts were introduced.

Rain Check, New York, Tom Eversley (isorepublic.com) We live in a rapidly changing and sometimes volatile global business environment, that makes decision making fraught with complexity. But, many corporations are still relying on management tools that were developed in the 1980s for a completely different, non-internet era. New tools are needed.  How do you create options for growth in your business when the fast moving uncertain environment makes the future highly unpredictable?

  TUNNEL By Ousseynou Cissé You are building a new web app. You’ve chosen to build the front-end and back-ends as separate applications. You only have a small team of three devs.  They have asked you, as the manager, if they can have one person work on each part of the system. The database layer, the REST layer, and the front-end app. They say they would each not have to learn so much (most of the tech is new to the team) and that it will help them not get in each other’s way. They also say they can be more productive as they will know everything about the one area they would be working on. This seems reasonable and the statements do sound logical.

  Roger Martin* (former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada) maintains that in his 30 years experience as a strategic advisor to large corporations, the vast majority of strategic plans he has dealt with are simply budgets with highly detailed explanations! Quite often, people confuse the formulation of organisational strategy with preparing a strategic planning document and use the terms interchangeably. But, they’re not - strategy is not planning.

Today, I’m excited to share the availability date for Windows 10. In fact, I thought I’d let Cortana, the world’s most personal digital assistant, share the news. You can ask Cortana for the answer, or if you don’t have a Windows phone or a PC running the Windows 10 Insider Preview handy - you can hear it for yourself here:

So what is "spin"?  Spin is a name applied to the misrepresentation or distortion of information, to persuade someone either in favour or against a certain point of view.

A Project Manager(PM) conceptually is the person charged with delivering defined scope on time and within budget. Sometimes it can feel like the PM has been relegated to be the status person.

There’s good news for Mac users today; the all-new Microsoft Office 2016 has officially been released, with lucky Office 365 customers being the first to experience it in all its glory.

Even though there have been major changes in the way that languages are taught, many people upon hearing "I teach English online" suddenly look confused. Soon after their intrigue kicks in and barrage of questions are released: "Is that possible? Where are your students from? How do you teach ...

My first English teaching website took me hours upon hours of trial and error. I had no coding experience and didn’t really know what I was doing, but somehow I managed to have my own website created. It looked pretty basic and wasn’t scalable, but it got the job done. It had all the informati...

  As well as teaching online lessons I have also been on the other side of the webcam. Taking Spanish lessons has given me great insight into what it is like for a student to take online lessons and having that experience has made me a better teacher. The one thing that is the most annoying as ...

It took me some time to feel comfortable about putting my face and name on my websites. I felt a little uncomfortable putting myself out there and building a website around me. It was difficult at first but now I’ve started to brand myself more, not due to any egotistical tendency, but because it’s ...

Most teachers that teach ESL online give general lessons without really being specific about what they do. Conversational lessons are the most common, with some offering business English along with exam preparation. But it usually stops there. I’ve talked about how students buy into the teacher firs...

  From Monday to Friday at around 1pm, and again 10 minutes later, my 12lb dog sounds like he wants to rip someone’s head off. I never knew such a small dog could sound so angry and ferocious. The nice, friendly mailman pulls up and drops off our mail, and then 10 minutes later pulls up a...

  This was probably the number one thing I heard during my first year of online teaching. I had offered new students a free twenty minute trial lesson which the majority of my students interpreted to mean free lessons for life. Two of the biggest mistakes I made at the start were not charging f...

I have seen many new English teachers make a beeline straight for the online newspaper when first taking lessons. It seems a great idea at first, right? You choose an article that you think is interesting, send it to the student, they read it before class and out loud during class, then you look at ...

You know the story: Man/woman is fed up with the rat race and his/her terrible boss, escapes his/her 9-5 hell and ends up becoming their own boss and making lots of money. Sorry to disappoint those looking for a similar story here, but that isn’t exactly how I ended up with my own language sch...

  As I mentioned in my post about becoming an independent teacher, I encourage my students to shape our lessons and choose topics and articles that are relevant and interesting to them. One student this week chose an article that talked about the following advice - "Follow your pass...

This is one of my favorite lessons that I use for my students. it is inspired by this article (point 1) and looks at some key language, along with a great discussion about making decisions. Level: Pre-intermediate + Language: How long does it take you…?, tend to be, to get anxious, make decisi...