Powerful Presentations is your fast track to creating presentations that actually work—clear, confident, and impossible to ignore. In this course, you’ll learn how to transform messy ideas into crisp narratives, design slides that guide attention instead of competing for it, and deliver insights in a way that feels polished without being stiff. Whether you’re pitching to leadership, teaching a room full of learners, or sharing data with stakeholders, you’ll walk away with practical frameworks, repeatable templates, and a presentation style that makes people lean in, not tune out.

Powerful Presentations includes:

• Lifetime access to lessons about Message, Design, and Delivery.
• Case studies from your colleagues on analyzing grantmaking data, building dashboards, and adding accessible graphs to slideshows.
• Guest speakers who specialize in PowerPoint, public speaking, and more.
• Office Hours sessions throughout 2026.
• Additional support and materials, like an 80-page ebook with checklists and case studies; private Data Vizards community of fellow participants; captions on all videos; and certificates of completion.

And when you register by March 14, 2026, you'll also get:

• Swag Bags with t-shirts, stickers, and pins.
• A 45-minute 1:1 consultation with Ann K. Emery after you finish 25% of the course lessons.
• Another 45-minute 1:1 consultation after you finish 50% of the course lessons.
• Make Slide Templates, a half-day course about building branded PowerPoint templates for your company (with sample templates to download and keep!).
• Course Creation, a half-day course about designing, recording, and marketing your own online course.

Slidedocs vs. Slidedecks

In the first module, you'll master critical presentation lingo: differentiating between slidedocs (standalone documents) and slidedecks (presentation slides).

Sample activities:

• Slidedocs vs. Slidedecks: Post a screenshot of a recent slide that you made. Is your example currently more of a slidedoc or a slidedeck? Which one should it be?
• Slidedocs: Transform one of your slides into a slidedoc. Follow the 5 characteristics. Post before/after screenshots and describe your changes.
• Slidedecks: Transform one of your slides into a slidedeck. Follow the 5 characteristics. Post before/after screenshots and describe your changes.

Design

In Design, you'll apply your brand colors, fonts, photographs, and icons; you'll create color-coded divider slides; and follow my checklist of 15+ Ideas for visuals to ensure that every slide has a powerful visual.

Sample activities:

• Brand with Colors, Fonts, Photos, and Icons: You'll locate your organization's existing style guide and presentation templates, or begin making some of your own.
• Match the Aspect Ratio to the Screen/Page: Time permitting: Match the aspect ratio to the screen or page. Time crunched: Just use widescreen for everything. Post a screenshot here.
• Match the Background Color to the Room Lighting: Time permitting: Match the background color to the room lighting. Time crunched: Just use dark text against a white background for everything. Post a screenshot here.
• Create Color-Coded Divider Slides: Create one of the four types of Divider Slides. Post a screenshot here.
• Set Up the Slide Master: Tweak your organization’s existing Slide Master. Or, create your own Slide Master to save time. Post a screenshot here.
• Aim for 1+ Visual Per Slide: Open a recent slidedeck. How many slides had visuals? Post your numbers here (e.g., 3 of 8 slides had visuals).
• 15 Ideas for Body Slides: Open a recent slidedeck. How many different types of visuals did you use? My challenge for you: Double that number in your next slideshow!
• Bullet Points into Graphs and Photos: Open a text-heavy slide. Add one of the visuals from the checklist.

Public Speaking & Tech Tips

You'll fine-tune 10 aspects of public speaking, like:

• using microphones for in-person and virtual talks--or not;
• making "eye contact" with the webcam;
• adjusting the lighting on stage and in virtual talks (so we don't have to worry about our appearance);
• using our hands to help explain the patterns in our data;
• avoiding scripts (so we don't sound robotic) and what to do instead; and
• my go-to technique for removing filler words (like, um, so).

You'll also get a behind-the-scenes tour of my home recording studio.

Guest Speakers

You'll hear from three previous guest speakers: speaking coach Heather Sager, evaluator and All-American debater Isaac Castillo, and PowerPoint MVP Dave Paradi.

Want me to review your draft slides? Have a how-to tech question? Submit your drafts, screenshots, and questions to Office Hours. You'll be invited to all the live Office Hours scheduled for 2026! We hold 25+ sessions each year.

Sample topics addressed during Office Hours:

• "How would you transform this dense table--3 years' of data for a dozen different types of cars--into a graph or two for a slideshow?"
• "I'm interested to know your process for transferring a chart from Excel into PowerPoint or Word. Everything I have tried results in a blurry image."
• "For someone that is starting in data viz in Evaluation (as in, has less than a year in) and hopes to be self-employed really really really bad, do you think hiring a business coach is a good idea to start? How did know you had enough data viz experience in order to be self-employed?"
• "How do you make bump charts in Excel?"

Ebook

You'll get a license for our 80-page ebook, which includes all of our presentations checklists and cheat sheets.

1:1 Consultations

When you register by March 14, 2026, you'll also get 1:1 consultations with Ann K. Emery. You'll get a 45-minute Zoom meeting with Ann after you finish 25% of the course lessons. Then, you'll get another 45-minute meeting after you finish 50% of the lessons. Past participants have said that these completion incentives help them stay motivated to keep learning.

Course Creation

When you register by March 14, 2026, you'll also get access to a half-day course about planning for, recording, and selling online courses. And, you'll get access to launch debriefs where I share the numbers behind my own courses. Course Creation is normally $297/participant, but it's included in the 2026 Powerful Presentations registration as a special gift for people who are curious about teaching online.

11,057+ participants from around the globe have already taken the leap into better reports, slideshows, dashboards, and infographics by participating in our online courses.

Here's how those researchers, evaluators, professors, and scientists are describing this course.