PowerPoint - Adding Excel Tables

What if your boss asks you create a slide set that shows a sample of your mailing list. You think, hey, that will be easy it’s just a cut and paste job. But did you know there are a few ways to paste an excel table into PowerPoint that create different results?

Simple Cut and Paste: In Excel, highlight the data you want to show, then go to Copy. Now the data is in your Clipboard. Open PowerPoint and paste your selection onto the slide. This creates a link between your Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint. This link permits anyone with access to your PowerPoint slide to adjust or change the Excel file. This can be a good or a bad thing – depending on if you want to keep the original data intact or allow changes. Once you have pasted the table, you can adjust the column and row formatting. Highlight the table and use the double line with arrows (see below) to stretch or reduce your columns and rows.

Paste Special – Bitmap or Picture: There are several options offered in Paste Special. If you want to maintain the formatting of your table and don’t need access to change the spreadsheet, choose Bitmap or Picture. When you pick one of these options your table gets pasted into your slide a graphic – it’s not linked to the spreadsheet. This graphic can now be scaled without jeopardizing its column and row formatting.

Paste Special – Unformatted Text: Use this when you only want the text from what you are copying, and don’t care about the formatting. It’s also handy for copying information from web pages – the result is pure text (no html links, no graphics, no formatting, etc.)

If you need help with a PowerPoint project – we can help you – we’ve been working with PowerPoint for over 15 years. Contact us at amy@aapk.com.

Steps to Social Marketing - Step 4 - Set Up a Calendar
Previous Steps:   1   2   3

Now that you have made a commitment, created a plan and determined where you customers are it’s time to create a calendar to keep you on track with your activity! The information that will help you build this calendar comes from answering the following questions:

1. How often are you posting messages? We recommend starting with a minimum of once a week; once a month is too sporadic and daily might be too much of a commitment initially.

2. What are the messages you want to convey? Create a list of at least 8-10 weeks of content ideas so you don’t run out of steam in a couple of week.

3. What methods will you use to get the message out? Social postings, enewsletters, emails, ecoupons, contests, etc.

4. What is the next step you want the user to take after seeing your message? Go to your web site, a specific page with an offer, respond, ask a question, etc.

5. What media channels are you posting to? These were discussed in Step 3 – click here to see that article.

6. What days or times are best for posting based on your audience? Depending on your audience and message day and time can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your campaigns. For instance, a large restaurant chain got this all wrong with one campaign – they sent emails out to customers around 2PM on a weekday encouraging them to come in the next day for lunch. Unfortunately, by the time the next day came around their customers had forgotten the previous days message. They would have been better off sending the email around 10:30AM with an offer for lunch that day, because at that time of day on a weekday their customers are beginning to get hungry, think about where they are having lunch, and are more likely to take up the offer!

7. What are future ideas for content? We keep an Excel sheet where we jot down future ideas – this is very helpful if you are having a busy week and have little time to think about creating content for that week.

Creating Your Calendar

Now with those questions answered you can take all this information and create yourself a calendar. The calendar will not only keep you on schedule, but will help you track your progress. We prefer to use Excel for this and some of the columns include:

• Dates and times of posting
• Content of posting
• Where posted
• Type of message (enewsletter, social posting, event posting, etc)
• Number of people your message went out to (for instance if mailing an enewsletter you are aware of how many went out, but with some other vehicles it may not be as easily quantifiable).
• What are the results of posting (Likes, responses, unsubscribes, subscribes, page visits, etc)

Now that you have an outline and schedule to adhere to, the next step is to create your content. We will discuss this in Step 5 of this series, next week.

In the meantime if you have questions or need help organizing or implementing a social marketing campaign, contact us at info@aapk.com we can help!

You Have To Laugh

Funny Video: A bear breaks into a candy store .. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417544n