Top Tips for Effective Presentations

Overview

Welcome everyone to our webinar today which is Top Tips for Designing and Delivering Great Presentations. We're going to spend the majority of the time focused on presentation figures but we're also going to cover some of the less thought of aspects of presentations as well again if you are interested in signing up for a BioRender account, you can follow the link that's on the screen there, it'll take you to this sign up page where you can create your BioRender account and you know log in and follow along with the content that we're we're covering today. 

‍

Before we jump into things here just a couple of housekeeping items for everyone first if you have any questions please use the Q&A section of the zoom window it just helps us stay organized and make sure that we're able to get to your questions if there's a lot of activity in the chat sometimes your question can get buried and we just want to make sure that we're able to address all the questions that you do have and I'm joined by my colleagues Kat and Val who will be keeping an eye out on the chat and they'll be happy to answer any of the questions that you have and we don't have a dedicated Q&A so at any point if you do have any questions during this time feel free to just ask into the Q&A window we want to make sure that you're getting the most from this time so there's anything that's unclear anything that you want to learn more about just let us know and we're happy to dive into it deeper with you and then you can use the chat

in the zoom to say hi to your colleagues I see a lot of activity in there already you know people getting to know each other and sharing what they're using Bender for so we definitely encourage like the interaction and the engagement and looking forward to the questions and thoughts that you have to share.

‍

For those of you who are brand new to BioRender, it's a Communications tool that was developed because our co-founder Shiz Aoki who's with us today realized during her time as a medical illustrator at National Geographic that many scientists and labs don't really have the budget or resources to visually translate their science and this was the spark that drove the founding of BioRender to give everyone the tools and the practical knowledge to visually communicate their research and allow everyone to clearly convey their message visually so you can see an example of some BioRender images on the screen right here and here are just some of the common ways that we see BioRender being used to give everyone some ideas for those of you who are power users or veterans of the platform you probably already know this but you can use it to create figures across your entire scientific journey starting all the way from the

ideation and brainstorming phases all the way up to your publications to your posters and even more in the future and of course for today our focus will be on presentations so let's get started here as scientists you know I'm sure everyone knows presenting our work is an important part of what we do whether we're presenting to our own team to other departments at conferences or presenting you know project progress to leadership it's a critical part in making sure our work is understood to make sure that we're making well-informed decisions regarding the direction we're taking our research in and the challenge is that the people that we present to they often have far too much to do and far too little time to do it in so we have a limited amount of time to make sure that they clearly understand our key message and thinking for yourself too like as you to the people that you present oftentimes we we need to make sure that our key message is abundantly clear so that people don't get distracted and that's what the tips we're going to cover today will address you know how we can get our message across efficiently during our presentations and our meetings and to help us do that today is broken up roughly into three parts. We'll do a quick review of hardware and then we're going to look at design tips for your entire slide deck and then focusing on design tips for our slide figures specifically and again at any point if you do have questions feel free to ask we're happy to dive into deeper with

you. 

‍

Hardware Tips

‍

Alright so let's dive in here with a quick review of hardware tips that we can use to engage our audience and I think with many of us meeting regularly over zoom and presenting virtually like we are now, we don't always stop to think about the equipment that we're using to present um and the main thing that I want to talk about here is about audio quality specifically from your audience's point of view because it could really make make or break your presentation and here's sort of a rough ranking of audio quality for different types of microphones starting

from you know airpods, our laptop microphones, gaming headsets, standalone microphones as well as teleconferencing headsets as well and what might be surprising are the gaming headsets they sort of sit in the middle of the spectrum and the reason for that is while gaming headsets are designed to deliver really great sound so you can hear all the little details in your game you know the wind rustling the music footsteps they're not always designed to have the best microphone quality so it's just something to be aware of and it's similar for airpods or similar headphones as well often these are optimized to give you really good sound but they're not necessarily optimized for microphone quality and to just highlight the impact and the difference that different devices can have I actually want to do a quick test with everyone

right now I'm using a headset but what I'm going to do is actually just switch over to my laptop microphone. I'm just going to make that switch here and maybe you can hear that difference right away you know it's echoey it's a bit more distant I'm already in a room that has carpet so that helps a little bit but if you imagine if you're in an office that has concrete walls bare floors that sound is going to be much bouncier and you can you can hear that difference right away and as a listening experience this can be quite challenging for someone to have to listen to this for an extended period of time and it can't detract from you know what you're trying to say and to switch back over to my headset now hopefully you can hear that difference you know the sound is a bit more lush there I sound closer to you partly because physically the microphone's closer to my mouth and I'm not advocating for any specific brands you're really just looking for a microphone that's designed for teleconferencing and something that's close to your mouth again to help reduce that echoey effect that you get and again with you know so many

presentations being virtual here audio quality just becomes so important especially as you need to present for longer just imagine having to listen to you know my laptop microphone or if I

have something like airpods for example it would be a much more difficult listening experience because you are almost fighting to understand or trying to tease out the words that I'm actually using and really the message that I want everyone to take home here from this part is to just

test out your audio quality whether it's asking a friend or a colleague to test your audio or even just recording yourself speaking with different microphones and playing back for yourself to see what it sounds like. It can give you a very good idea of what your audience's listening experience is going to be as well don't be afraid to tell your colleagues if their sound is not great because it really does take away from the message that they're trying to deliver as an extreme example if you imagine when someone has like a choppy internet connection or if there's a lot of static you're not actually listening to the ideas and message that trying to send you're actually just trying to you're fighting to understand each word that they're saying and that just detracts from that overall message that's the intent of the communication.

‍

Design Tips for Slide Decks

‍

So now that we've gone over that review of Hardware, we're going to jump right into that next category here which is design tips for overall slide decks and I think it's difficult to give tips here because every presentation is, you know, a little bit different. The length of your talk is going to be different, the content that you're presenting will change, etc. So instead of talking about what you should do for your presentations and your slide decks I think it actually might be more helpful instead to talk about all the things that you should be avoiding regardless of the deck that you're creating and regardless of the meeting that you're present or you're preparing

so I have it on the slide here basically everything all at once of things that we shouldn't do. So one of the first things that we want to avoid doing is avoiding gradient backgrounds and the reason for this is that it's twofold one is difficult to do tastefully it can make your deck look a little bit more dated but it also creates inconsistent legibility and I have some examples later of why this is impactful probably because you have like this changing background color we also want to avoid things like Drop Shadows because it's distracting for your viewers reading this line likely you're also looking at underneath and just examining the shadows which again just detracts the focus of your audience away from your message towards things that are irrelevant to that discussion you also want to avoid using harsh colors like this bright yellow font that we're using above for this title slide because very bright, very strong colored elements really pull your attention towards it and again when we hop into the platform I have examples of where this can actually be very impactful. Another point that we want to avoid is using decorative bullet

points going back to where our focus is when you have very ornate bullet points it sort of takes away and draws your audience's attention to it so sticking with something more of like a standard bullet point or a dash can go a long way to just keeping your audience more focused and lastly we just want to avoid serif fonts. These are all the fonts that have that little flourish at the end things like Times New Roman for example that's a serif font as well and then we want to instead focus on using sans serif like arial, calibri, etc. These come off cleaner when you present your slides and even just comparing you know this slide here to the previous slide that we're looking at right away you can see like the difference between the two to just give you an idea of you know how far creating clear slides can make your content just be

become more approachable and easier to engage with. 

‍

Tips for Slide Figures

‍

Alright so now that we've sort of covered like the peripherals of creating and preparing our presentations let's actually dive into the content today which is design tips specifically for the figures that we're creating for our presentations because I think there are some slight differences compared to when we're using it for our publications or otherwise there are things that we should be keeping in mind when we're resenting. Going to hop into BioRender here and just kind of walk through a lot of these tips with everyone and there's a lot of different things that we should keep in mind right like I said a lot of when we're presenting to people these are people that are doing way too much with way too little time and what we want to do is make sure that our figures are effective at communicating our key ideas to our audience and there's a handful of things I want to talk about today one is about contrast and accessibility we're going to talk about legibility how we can use color as well and also we're going to look at what the impact of alignment and spacing is and we're going to have different before and after examples with all these tips to show you how big of a change that it can create when you're just applying these little things and so these are all very readily accessible tips I think everyone can apply into their their figures so the first thing that I want to talk about here is contrast and accessibility and I have this before example here with our two different cells um so one thing that you always want to keep in mind and I think we do this a little bit already is to make sure that everything on your page is actually legible and one thing to keep in mind is that when you're presenting virtually your monitor will very likely look different from your audience's monitor because it's a different brand different technology as well if you're presenting on a projector that's going to look a little bit a different as well so it's important to consider how your audience might actually receive your figure and so here in this example you can see that we have some challenges already right we have some labels that sort of blend into our background a little bit for both our T cell and our macrophage and one thing that I wanted to highlight here we talked about why we should avoid gradient backgrounds and I think this is a really good example of what you can see here is that we have our our text box and it actually crosses different colors we have one color for our nucleus one color for our cytoplasm and we also have another color for our nuclear membrane and what it does is creates that inconsistent legibility because our font is generally going to be a consistent color when it needs to cross different color boundaries it's going to be a little bit more legible in some spots and less in others and it creates this inconsistent experience for your a audience and one way that we can check for our contrast and legibility is actually counterintuitively to strip all the color away from our figure and we can do that by going over here to this navigational toolbar we have this option here to view canvas and Grayscale we're going to go ahead and do that and this removes all the color from our figure and when this happens you'll see that certain things are blending into each other right like our DNA sort of just disappears into our nucleus the cell part the cell label becomes even more difficult to read and when we see these things happen it's our cue to go back in and make sure that we have appropriate contrast between all of our elements and some simple fixes could even just be to you know move our labels out and this is really easy because you know within the platform we can make edits to our illustrations really quickly and one thing that we're able to do we saw that the DNA disappeared is make it stand out more from our background and so one way to do this is just make it really dark so if we do that and again we go ahead and strip the color you'll see that the DNA now is stands out in much sharper contrast compared to the background that it's

sitting on and if we just wave a magic wand here and just fully transform this illustration you'll see that right away this becomes much more legible compare especially compared to our previous illustration where we have things that are a little more faded we're going to have this much brighter and more accessible illustration for to use in our presentation and to just highlight some of the changes that we made we didn't really change the composition at all right what we did was we made the cell a little bit lighter and then we made the the DNA darker which then increases the difference in color value between our foreground and background what we also did was change our bacteria color again just making sure that it stands out more against the background that it's sitting in and also something to help as well for with our text we brought it out of the cell just so that it has a consistent color background that it's sitting on so you don't have those inconsistencies in legibility and to just add again one more example to this you see some cells in a test tube here same thing when we have our color stripped away you can see that this fades in a bit more whereas when we have like that darker color in the front this becomes much more legible so we always want to just double check our figures make sure

that they are easy to read because then the audience doesn't have to fight to get into your

figure.  And the next thing that I want to talk about here is how we can actually use contrast to help us tell our story so previously that was more of like a practical application of contrast to make sure that things are legible but we can also use contrast in a way that helps us to focus on the key elements within our story so here we have an a before example of the four stages of lung cancer you can see here that the main characters are likely the tumor as well as the lymph nodes and then the lungs these are actually just what help us set the stage for our story but right now because our lungs are so opaque what happens is that it takes away from the our main characters a little bit these are not as big of a star of the show as they could be and so this is where we can use contrast to help us what we can do is actually change the background the transparency of our of our illustration here and have that fade in a little bit so you're still able to see the context of where the story is taking place but now instead of stealing the show it allows us to focus more on the tumor and the lymph nodes and you can see that it actually pops into view quite a bit better I'm going to just return the slide to as is because I want to highlight that difference that before and after so once we apply that transformation and like just make all of

the lungs a little bit more transparent you can see that it starts to highlight that tumor and this is one simple change we just increase the transparency of the lungs so that they are still there we're still able to see we know the context of the story but now we're focused more on the tumor and the lymph nodes and if we hop back and forth between these two figures you can see that now the tumors stand out quite a bit more in relation to our figure and so just highlighting this is that before and now this is that after and so we have all those same components it's just a little change in the composition and how we want to represent what's happening in the background compared to what's happening in the foreground so kind of cool way to you know add focus and spotlight to your audience so they can kind of they know where they should be

looking and I'm seeing a lot of activity in the chat in the Q&A this is fantastic please keep the keep the questions coming we really do appreciate the engagement it helps us it helps me at least see that you know people are sort of letting these tips percolate and then getting ideas and how they can Implement them into their their own figures and I think I saw a question actually that came in talking about you know font size and you know what the minimum font size is that they should be using for their illustrations and I think this is a nice sort of segue into that as well like what we should be considering when we deal with our text. One thing that I thought was actually really interesting was that when we talk about font sizes it's not actually the magnitude of the font size that's important. It's actually the ratio of the font against the the size of your

canvas and to give you an example here you can see that this is a font size of eight and if we go to present it's not the smallest font size if you think about it you know this is much larger for a size eight font than we would expect because this is traditionally considered very small but this is still decently legible. We can still make improvements here but it's not the absolute worst not as bad as we would have expected however as just to highlight this if we were let's say working on a much bigger surface and we can actually change the canvas size to highlight this is if we need to adjust it we make this really big now make this a bit bigger and then apply that when we go back into present all of a sudden that same font size 8 or 10 text looks actually much smaller than it was previously and that's because now in relation to the rest of your your your page it's going to be much smaller and so it's not the absolute size you're uh you should be concerned about it's more the the ratio of the font size against your canvas just going to reverse that here so it's a little bit smaller again but right away here you can see that with our illustration you know we can be more clear with our font size we don't want our audience struggling to read our what's on our page and I think that's something that we start to neglect a little bit because we're

presenting virtually so much that everyone has their own screen if they had to they can sort of lean closer to your the monitor to see what's on there but it becomes much more difficult when you're presenting in larger conference rooms because at some point you can't you can only lean so far so what we want to do is just make sure that all of our font sizes and everything is appropriate and everything is legible and so one thing we can do is just simply make this larger right we have a font size of seven if we needed to we can just bring up that um the size of this and then we can fix that as well to make sure everything is clear and a tip that I that was given to me before is when you're preparing for a presentation it's always helpful to just go in there you know beforehand put your slides up on the projector and then sit in the back of the room just to make sure that when you're there you can still read everything that's on the page because once the person in the very back can read it that means everyone else in the room can also

see and you know we what we can do here is just something that I want to highlight and I think that might be kind of interesting for everyone as I talked about you know font sizes and what we should be doing I would like to imagine that at least some of you were looking at these labels up top and then we really focused and wondering why those were falling out of line right like these are all kind of misaligned and maybe at least for some of you, you would wish that you could reach in across the screen and then just move them a little bit just so that they are locked into place with everything else and I wanted to leave this here to highlight why the the little details

that can really do take away from your presentation you know as we talked about font sizes and all that your focus was actually up top here on these titles and this just goes to show that the little details in your illustration can have very big impact on your presentation as a whole so to make sure that our audience is focused only on what we want them to, we want to make sure that our illustrations are crisp and neatly lined up and if I just wave a magic wand here again

we're going to fix all of those little changes and what we did here was really just change that font size change the alignment and if we go back to our previous figure and I'm going to remove that line there because it's a little bit distracting when we compare these two you can see that right away this before it's just a little bit messier. Things are a little bit out of order and it's not as easy or clean to look at whereas with this everything is very crisp we have even spacing everywhere our titles are lined up so if you were distracted before this should help mitigate that and it's just the takeaway here from this tip is to pay attention to those little details because they they can really uh dist distract sorry that's the word I'm trying to use distract from the message that you're trying to communicate and going back to font size as well you can see that you know we increase it from size size eight to to size 11 where again not actually that big of a change but when we go to present that key thing here is to make sure that the it's an appropriate ratio between our font size and our overall canvas and you can see this is much clear for us to to look

at all right now the next tip here that I want to chat about is step-by-step figures and what I mean by this here is how we can break apart more complex ideas into their individual pieces so that our audience can more easily follow along with your content and I have an example here to share with everyone this insulin pathway and before we even get into that sorry this is a little bit distracting here so I'm just going to crop this out so that you're also focused on what I want to talk about and not wonder why there is a big ball that is just sort of sticking off the edge here so I'm just going to tuck this in just so that we are all focused on my main message and not on the extraneous parts of this figure as well. All right so when you we're no stranger to figures like this right if you imagine any presentation or any seminar that you've been too most of the time if not always before the presenter dives into their own research they'll likely have a figure like this up either showing a pathway or a mechanism and I don't know about all of you but for myself what I found was that these slides were very overwhelming especially if I wasn't intimately familiar with the the content because as they're talking what I'm trying to do is decipher this illustration at the same time I'm trying to understand okay which protein refers to where, what's the pathway, and it becomes a much more difficult experience for me to actually follow along and understand. You know what the presenter is actually trying to say so instead what we want to do is actually break this up into smaller pieces and one way that we can do that is just make a few copies of this illustration here and have those pieces come into place one at a time so what I'll do here is just duplicate this a couple times to kind of highlight this and just once more and what we want to do is have this figure come together step by step and what we'll do is actually start from the back so this is our final figure that we want to use so in the previous figure I actually want to hide step four I just want to be focused on step three so we can remove all of that and then in our second figure we just remove step four and then we remove step three so now our audience is focused on step two and then finally in our first figure we want to remove all that and they're just looking at that binding step so we're going to remove all that there and so when we go to present what it looks like as we begin our presentation we give that background this is the overview of our mechanism and then when we go to talk about step one that binding we just have that on this on the screen here and so people are focused on that and then when we talk about the signal cascade we bring that in then we talk about exocytosis and then finally we talk about you know glucose entry and so this is a step-by-step way of walking through our illustration.  I think a lot of us do this already in the slides that we create so this is one way of looking at it the other way actually and maybe this is something that you might not have tried before to actually use a spotlight effect. I think this is actually really cool. I used to have things come together or like come in pieces but another way just to give you some ideas is making things transparent and same thing this comes together in three steps so I'm just going to come make copies of this and one more and instead of having each piece this time come together one at a time, what I'll do is have everything on my slide here but what I'll do is when I'm talking about Lan binding I can actually make this less of a focus so just like how we were playing with transparency to highlight our tumor and the main characters of our story we can do the same thing here we're going to increase that transparency to make sure that the section or the chapter that we're focused on is much more apparent than the others and we can do the same thing here so in step two we're going to talk about that cytosolic phase so in step one this is going to be a little bit more transparent same with this one here this is also going to go fade into transparency and then lastly in this last piece we're going to do the same thing I want to show you that final effect so when we go and we talk about the different phases of ligand binding leading to transcription we can start here this is the full overview and then when we talk about ligand binding we can fade everything else into the background now our audience knows this is what we need to be focused on and then when we talk about the cytosolic phase we move that spotlight into the middle here and then finally we bring it to the very end when we talk about that nuclear phase and so this can help keep everything in context while simultaneously allowing our reader and our audience to know where they should be focused on and so this is just a gentler way of just guiding your audience cross your figure so just an alternative to having things come together piece by piece. Thanks for the reactions there I'm glad to hear that these are

helpful for folks and you know it's giving people ideas on how they can bring in their bring these

tips into their own figures. So the next thing that I want to talk about here is crop and callouts. And what I mean by that is how we can actually zoom in on smaller aspects of our figure without compromising the entire thing. So I have a couple examples to show and this is the final product that we would get to but I want to highlight how we get there so I'm just going to remove this first and so let's say that on our slide we have this tumor on our brain and we want to draw some attention to the tumor. One thing that we could do is maybe click on this and then make this extremely big so that we can see all the details of the tumor of maybe the other regions of the brain but this is not very practical right there's only going to be so much real estate you have on your slide and having your brain take up you know 90% of this entire slide just to focus on this little 10% is not the most effective use and it make your slide less clear and look very cluttered. Instead, what we can do is actually zoom in the brain and what we're going to do here is we're going to first make a duplicate of this and again this might seem like I'm contradicting myself but we're going to first make this really big and hear me out what I'll do afterwards is then crop this image now. The cool thing is within BioRender all these images that you see are all vector-based images so we can actually make them really big without losing any of that detail or that resolution. So we can really see those fine details and this is really helpful for when we need to zoom into something we can make it really big first and then after we're just going to crop this and this time I'm going to use a circle crop just because I like using more of like a magnifying glass effect but you can use different shapes as well I just use a circle but we can make this a little bit smaller first and then we're going to move it on top of our tumor so this is the region that we actually want to focus on and when we click out of the crop you can see we trim everything away and now we have much more detail into the tumor and it takes up relatively less size than if we were to just make this super large and so we can do this and call this out here and then we can connect our original in context element to our call out but maybe using something like a zoomed call out or a magnifying glass to create that effect so I'm just going to use a zoom call out here and maybe I want to use this one and I can bring it out we're going to rotate that into position so that we can just kind of place things into position here and for those of you who are BioRender users, you’ve recognized that this is a grouped icon what this means I can click into it and now I can adjust the components inside so for me I want to make sure that this circle actually encompasses my entire brain so I'm going to go ahead and just hold shift to lock that into a circle so we're just going to make this bigger so that it sort of covers my entire call out. I’m going to move this into position there's a little bit that's still sticking out so I'm just going to make this a wee bit bigger. Perfect and then we're going to align these lines as well so we're just going to grab the end here we're just going to attach it to or just have it touch the sides like and then when I click away you can actually see we're able to call that focus. We keep everything in context and then we're able to call out that tumor so we can see those details and the same thing just to really drive this point home. If it's the same where we want to zoom in quite a bit more same thing we just want we can first make that first image really really big and then from here we're just cropping it it so if we want to focus in on the mouse's header just at the point between the machine and our mouse, we're just going to crop it. Same thing going to apply that circle crop, zoom it down a little bit so we're just focused on this portion here we can get even more specific as well if we wanted to so if we really wanted to just have that point of interaction we just cut out everything that we don't want click out and then now once we have this we can make this even larger so just easier for us to just sort of work with. And again because it is a vector based illustration, you can see that we don't lose any of that detail surrounding of our mouse as well we can really zoom into it and just to sort of bring this all together now we're just going to grab one more zoom call out and bring it out onto our page just to really drive that point home this is something that I find is pretty fun. It's just to highlight where we want that to go again go in here we make this call out larger and then we can cut we can relate the two illustrations back to each other like so and I think it's just an effective way of utilizing the space that we have on our slides without compromising any of the clarity of our illustration so we can just move that into position again we can fine-tune it a little bit more and then we can just talk a lot of this again just details you would don't want to have little things falling over your page because then it just makes it a little distracting and then we just fix up those lines as well and just to highlight what is very possible within the platform that there's a lot of customization that we can do to help us create clear illustrations for our figures and so hopefully this has given people good ideas on how they can improve the clarity of the figures that they're presenting or planning on presenting in all of your different meetings and I think a nice segue here I'm actually going to turn it over to Shiz now who's going to walk you through again our PowerPoint integration and you know that is super exciting we're very excited to to share this everyone so I'm going to stop sharing my screen I'm going to turn it over to Shiz here and she will take your through this new feature.

‍

BioRender <> PowerPoint Integration

‍

Thanks so much Tim for those great tips and thanks everybody for all the great engagement. If you have any questions, please continue to ask them in the Q & A. We'll also stick around. I know this is only set for I think 45 minutes but we'll stick around till about you know 10 to maybe even 5 minutes to the hour if you have any questions. Happy to stay back. I'm starting out with you know on the topic of presentations, all too familiar PowerPoint so if you can see my screen you can see that I've opened up PowerPoint I'm using Microsoft in Apple so I'm on a MacBook it might look a little different if you're on a PC but what's really exciting is that we've now built an integration from BioRender directly into PowerPoint. I've had a lot of requests for this probably one of the most requested features in the history of BioRender’s existence it is still in beta there's a lot more we want to add to it and we're really really open to hearing feedback on how

it works. But let me just real quick walk you through how it actually works so I've got my almost perfect PowerPoint slide here I'm getting ready for my meeting to report up to my directors if you're working in Industry or maybe for my PIs or during online lab meeting or departmental meeting and you know what you probably typically did was go into BioRender to export your

image and then you know usually we do 150 DPI for images that tends to be enough for PowerPoint if you do 300 it's kind of overkill I find so what you do is you know export that, download the jpeg to your computer, go to PowerPoint insert that into your deck and then if you want to make changes you have to do that whole process over and over again. So to avoid that what we've done now is you can actually just directly import your figure into the slide itself so let's see here let's find an open slide that I'd probably add it to let's use this one so what you would do a lot of you probably would be the first time ever inputting or downloading this integration but what you would normally do is go to your home and insert option here if you can see my mouse, there's this button here called get add-ins and it'll take you to the Microsoft App Store probably going to be your first time ever seeing this website which is fine it was actually is my first time too I don't think all of us regularly download PowerPoint Integrations but we've got your first go at it which will be your BioRender hopefully. So we've got BioRenderfor PowerPoint, click get it now it'll sort of walk you through the steps you might have to sign into Google if you

have like something special set up or sign into your actual Microsoft account but I'll skip all those steps assume you went through a little bit of the process of getting this imputed and then  once you've got your plug-in downloaded and you navigate back to PowerPoint it should show up in this little menu here when you click get add in and it should probably show up here as well if you see the BioRender logo in the top right think of it as your trusty you know BioRender helper now that you can like now add your figures in there so let's try it out um click the BioRender button and I'm actually already logged in but I'm going to log out just to show you what it might look like when you first come across this plugin so you'll see BioRender it almost looks like the sign-in page but like squished onto the right side of your PowerPoint app. I'm going to type in

my login here BioRender.com and actually because it's kind of meta but BioRender as an institution, say BioRender swap it up with Harvard or Pfizer your institution might have single sign-on or you know that special portal login. It'll detect that and I'm going to use that to log in because it actually makes it easier. I don't have to remember my password and all of that and there we go and really only one prompt. Not too many bells and whistles as of yet but we're trying to keep it simple and easy to add a file. And what you're noticing is like I actually have

my BioRender Gallery within the PowerPoint popup here so if I were to switch over to BioRender really quick you'll see that it actually mirrors my gallery page so this is my BioRender gallery is now available here within the PowerPoint sort of like a popup. I happen to know that the

figure that I want has something to do with the Warberg effect so I can search by name or

it'll probably be one of the last files that I worked on so I can click it as well. So I'm going to find it there once you click it. Actually, if you go back, some of my files are BioRender slides. Some of you have been using slides for a while within BioRender. Slides is kind of a misnomer. I kind of use slides as a multi canvas but in any case I clicked it and so it's now giving me another option to say okay well which of those slides within BioRender did you want to import I'm going to click this one. Also you'll see how bad I am at naming my files and so that's something I encourage you all to maybe do some housekeeping on if you don't already I'm sure we all have like Untitled version 1 2 3 4 5. It'll just make it easier if you name it you know I don't know October 25th presentation to embed or something like that but anyways add to slide and voila. Now say my background was I don't know something special like a soft gray or something like that for some reason. Although we discourage background colors but say it is for example I've got this sort of white box effect happening and to remove the title there we go maybe a little more realistic. Say I want to remove the white background again what I would have normally had to do is go back to BioRender and remove the background as a PNG export it and then import it back in. I can actually go directly into BioRender here and click this snazzy little slider button to remove the background or put it back in. You can actually just do it right from the PowerPoint integration. Now PowerPoint does this kind of annoying thing where it's now telling me hey you can add all these fancy finishes to this slide kind of ignore that it has nothing to do with BioRender, I promise. It's this special designer popup that shows up. I'd probably recommend just keeping a background white anyway but you know you never know you might want to have something show up in the background or if you're kind of layering different images I really like

that quick PNG option. Now speaking of presentations, Tim gave some really good tips about making sure your font is at a minimum size if I'm presenting this in a big conference hall those little tiny glucose labels are going to definitely disappear so I'm going to go back to BioRender and make an edit and one hot tip you don't have to actually click shift click click click click to do you know to to increase the font size for everything. A very unknown feature is to be able to select all text at once and that's here in the dropdown I'm going to go to edit select all text and then increase the font size for everything. Great tip now of course everything is perfectly, you know, laid out and so now I have to go back and do just a little bit of finessing but that actually is I think less time spent than having to go back and you know manually click everything so love that little tip. Definitely we should probably make it more obvious. I like having the title nice and big too and then any spelling mistakes or anything no I think it looks good so go ahead and you don't have to hit save because everything actually autos saves but just from my own anxiety I'm going to hit save and then move back to PowerPoint and now it's not automatic because maybe you might not want it to automatically update we give you that option so I'm going to go ahead and click the click the figure again and it says hey there's an update available either I made the update or maybe if it's like a shared figure with my colleagues they made an update and I get to now take advantage of that. So let me see if I'm going to want to update that. So you saw the difference there the before and after much better and I didn't have to go through the process of exporting and and re-adding to my slide it's exactly where I placed it as well so that's also a nice thing and if you have a million files like me again and you aren't good at labeling the name you can actually just click this edit in BioRender button and it'll take you exactly to that figure it'll hopefully drop me right right back into BioRender’s app there we go so super easy it's just kind of a you know cyclical function and really excited about this feature. Shout out to the developers that worked on this internally in the team Mit, Polly and the whole growth team super excited that this is now launched again it is still in beta so what beta means it's just you know still a work in progress. So we'd love it if you kind of gave feedback here one two three four five stars and elaborate on anything that you'd like to see added to this feature we're constantly making improvements to the BioRender product as well so would love your feedback. Let's see anything else I wanted to touch on this I think this is it hope you enjoy this plugin let me go back to my app and we've only got a few minutes left so maybe I'll just wrap up here Tim if you want to chime in as well but thank you all so much for the for the engagement and the excitement really

excited that uh we can help you make better presentations going

forward

‍