With 1.2 billion Microsoft Office users around the world and an estimated 35 million PowerPoint presentations made daily, it’s clear that the value of a good business presentation is not something to underestimate.

This is a pre-recorded Pickit webinar hosted by Brad Hawkes & Rob Dysell

PowerPoints & presentations are everywhere, every day. Yet most people never get the proper training to help them make impactful presentations that inspire, inform and get their ideas across in an effective way. 

Attention all photographers! One of our clients–a large corporation in the banking and finance sector–is on the lookout for approx. 75 exclusive images to increase their image library. This is a fantastic chance to have your photos featured in a global brand's communication, as well as earn $40 per image. Sound exciting?

Here's what we're after: 

If you've used Pickit Free Images recently, you might have noticed some new collections created by Pickit Community photographers Rosstek and M. Koppang.

This week we decided to mix things up a little and invite an illustrator to collaborate on a collection. Frida "FridaRit" Panoussis is a Graphic Recorder and live illustrator who earns a living summarizing and visualizing meetings and events. It's her job to capture people's words with her pen and turn them into compelling pictures, which seemed like the perfect fit for Pickit.
 

Every day, people all over the world are pitching ideas, putting together proposals and presenting their work. Often, countless hours go to compiling the most compelling ideas, insights, and suggested improvements, while little attention is paid to presentation. Whether its pressing deadlines or a lack of experience, people fail to package their work, so it makes it past the front door.

But in an age of images, choosing the right visual elements to complement your content is crucial.

We teamed up with our friends over at Qorus to compile some practical tips for building beautiful, compelling documents in Word for Office 365. This gives you an idea of what to expect if you download the e-book. 

Having a good grasp of design elements helps designers create more visually appealing work. When it comes to proposals and presentations, the more attractive your content, the better.

Here are our 5 tips for creating compelling documents: 

Growing up, I was always into the visual arts. Inspired by surrealists, cartoonists, and graffiti artists, I doodled my way through high school, taking extracurricular art classes whenever I had the chance. 

This was before smartphone filters and Photoshop had turned every other office worker into a shake n' bake-style creative. The area of the arts was reserved for the Cure-loving goths down the back of the schoolyard. And the hazy-eyed hippies with their handpainted schoolbags and tie-dye Hendrix shirts. The closest I ever came to digital art was when I was handed a school bulletin covered in ClipArt. 

And it made me cringe. 

Forgive us for being self-indulgent, but we're pretty thrilled to hear the Pickit app has won another award this year at the Office APP Awards. The announcement was made at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, and this time we took home an award in the category Best Overall App. 

For those of you reading this article because of the title, apologies for the click-bait. But wait! I promise I’m not exaggerating too much.

It’s no secret that the world is changing, and that with that comes the working world. In addition to being more global, more visual, and more allergen-free, most offices are starting to become more efficient, often at the cost of human jobs. Automation can make businesses run more smoothly, but can also mean that you’re at risk of being replaced by an algorithm.

So how do you make yourself irreplaceable?

There’s a lot of buzz around “work culture” these days, and it’s obvious that the behaviors, practices, and attitudes in your workplace shape your experience and the kind of work you produce. This can be a tricky thing to manage and cultivate, but becomes even more complicated when you have people from very different backgrounds in the same environment. Navigating language is one thing. Navigating work styles is another.

In this piece we give you some pointers for where you might come across cultural friction, and how to navigate this and communicate clearly using images.

It’s no secret that our environments affect how well we work—the visual world matters, and lots of companies spend loads of money trying to crack the code on making their offices people-friendly. Still, there’s little evidence to show that an open floor plan is better than cubicles, or that beanbag chairs stimulate creative thinking.