BetterPresenting

Thanking God

2009-07-20T16:49:20-07:00

Like many sports enthusiasts, I sat with rapt attention last weekend watching 59-year-old Tom Watson defy father time and all matter of plausibility by coming within one putting stroke of winning the British Open. His grace and poise impressed all of us; however, the eventual winner Stewart Cink impressed me even more, for two reasons:

1) He knew that 99% of the gallery and worldwide television audience was rooting against him in the four-hole playoff he waged with Watson, and there was absolutely nothing that he could do about it.

2) During his victory speech, he invoked his faith in an unusual and refreshing way.

While this was not a hostile audience, Cink knew that he was in a delicate situation, going up against an overwhelming sentimental favorite (the Scotland gallery was rooting for Watson even over the British golfers in the field). He handled this situation the way that I would counsel a client who was about to give a presentation before a potentially disagreeable audience: with respect, earnestness, and grace. Cink did not take the partisanship personally, he respected and appreciated the gallery's biases, he competed earnestly and without fear, and won with grace and class.

Even more noteworthy was how he credited his faith for helping him win without being obnoxious or polarizing. This is a touchy subject, I know -- I probably shouldn't even be blogging about it. I abhor when athletes with strong religious backgrounds remark how "God was on my side today," or solemly state that "God just didn't want me to win today."

Please.

There are few things more ridiculous, and more off-putting, than the notion that God cares who wins one of our recreational pastimes. I think our supreme being has better things to do than take a rooting interest in us. But Cink phrased it differently:

"I lift this [trophy] up to God for giving me the ability to withstand the pressures and obstacles I face on the golf course."

To my ear, this is a completely different message. Cink knows that winning or losing is a function of his performance and that he is solely responsible for how well he performs. In order to perform well, everyone needs to find his or her inner strength and Cink has found his through his faith.

His was not an in-your-face expression of his religious beliefs. It was not intended to be divisive or evangelical, and I don't believe anyone took it that way. I think that religion finds its highest form when it gives people the strength to do great things, and that was what Cink represented with his eloquence.

As a presentations coach, I often spend many hours helping people find that inner strength -- sometimes in vain. As a pramatist, I don't much care where it comes from. Some people find it through a confidence they were born with, some from a passion for their work. Some get it from the love of people close to them, and others from their faith.

But the presenters/performers who generally have difficulty tapping into this reservoir are the ones who describe their primary emotion as fear of failure. They become far too conscious of external matters and rarely channel their inner being, the one that usually knows innately how to accomplish the task at hand.

If God is the ingredient that can get them to turn inward and find the strength of character to perform at their best, that is a happy ending, in my book.

Your mileage may vary; we're talking religion, after all. Do you agree that Stewart Cink allowed his faith to bring out the best in him and his was a simple acknowledgment of that? Or do you nonetheless feel that his remarks were over the top and inappropriate? If so, let me have it...

What we can learn from Michael Jackson

2009-06-29T16:59:43-07:00

The passing of legend Michael Jackson has been felt in every part of society's fabric, so it should come as no surprise that the community of presentation professionals can reflect on his life and take something from his experiences.

As I separate the bizarre from the pathetic, I try to disregard the surgeries, skin-bleaching, bed-sharing, and bone-scavenging. Instead, I focus on the loneliness and extreme isolation which led to his confusing two important emotions -- a confusion that could befall anyone who performs in public.

Michael Jackson confused attention with adoration and adoration with love. He wanted people to love him and thought that he could get there through his fame. That became a dreadful, perhaps fatal, cycle. As Jackson said to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the unofficial rabbi to the stars in Los Angeles, "I want people to love me...because I never really felt loved. Maybe if I sharpen my craft, people will love me more."

This is an all-too-easy trap for anyone in the public eye, including presenters who might place inordinate value in earning applause from an audience. If that is the closest personal connection they feel to other people, they are bound to become lonely.

I have experienced a related dynamic myself. In the course of four compressed days at PowerPoint Live, we develop tight bonds with people whom we have just met and it is easy to regard these types of friendships as more than they are. Not to suggest for even a moment that there is anything artificial in the affinity that we all feel for one another, because the congeniality and the vibe that we create at the conference is one of its most important qualities. Come Thursday morning, however, the day after the conference closes, we all realize that our newfound BFFs cannot replace the closeness of life-long relationships that have been forged over decades.

Many of the veteran alumni who see each other year upon year have created lasting relationships, and that is the point -- they take time and earnest effort.

If we presenters are not careful, we could find ourselves seeking the quick fix that Jackson did -- adoration instead of love. When you have just nailed a presentation and 200 people are all standing and applauding, it's tempting to want to have the Sally Field moment. We can bring meaning to Michael Jackson's passing if we remember the importance of cultivating genuine and healthy relationships, instead of fooling ourselves into believing that a grateful audience can magically turn into a room full of best friends.

PowerPoint Live Design Contest Ending July 1

2009-06-16T22:52:20-07:00

Our annual user conference has a fun and storied tradition of essentially putting out for bid the designing of our conference slide template. We invite all comers to participate, with the creator of the chosen design being awarded with a free conference passport and round-trip airfare from a U.S. city.

All of the details are at the conference website, and they are worth reading. This is not a typical design project or audition, in wlhich one of the goals is to create pizazz and be noticed. This template needs to serve as a soft and graceful backdrop, in front of which our team of experts will prepare to showcase their own brilliance. It's an interesting challenge, and at the website, you can see how others have approached it.

And you've still got 10 days left. We'll close entries on Friday, Jun 26 (but we'll let you roll over that weekend until July 1. We hope you enter...and we hope to see you in Atlanta this October...maybe on our dime...

7,000 miles away...feels just like home

2009-06-10T21:49:50-07:00

I am enjoying my first-ever trip to Scandinavia, having been asked by the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Norway to give a one-day workshop on presentation skills. It stays light until past 11p in Oslo this time of year -- which is just as well, seeing how it felt like I began the workshop at midnight, given the nine-hour time difference from California.

It was comforting to have found common ground with my northern European counterparts. When I began my introduction -- remarking on how most people learn PowerPoint in about 30 minutes and then declare themselves proficient -- many heads nodded with recognition, amid comments like "That's me" and "I know what you mean."

Too much text...slides doubling as printouts...templates too rigid...last-minute changes...misappropriation of animation -- I felt right at home addressing the same issues that my clients in the States wrestle with. Having said that, many of the slides that I saw showed very good instincts for blending words and imagery. Those tasked with creating content for the government clearly feel as if there is more to life than title, bullet, bullet, bullet. If I'm being honest, this sense was more evolved here in Oslo than back home.

Then, a few moments later, I would enounter a slide with four full paragraphs and underlines and red type for emphasis and I would be snapped back to reality.

All in all, I am enjoying my visit here very much -- the people are gracious, accommodating, and full of life and spirit. They seem to know as much about American politics as we do, regularly wanting to engage in discussion about President Obama. And the seafood here is extraordinary.

I hope I'll be invited back...

Pretty Slides = Good Presentation...NOT.

2009-05-28T08:40:22-07:00

Forgive the radio silence over the past four weeks; I have been busier than ever before. I was involved extensively with a defense contractor that I an not allowed to identify, a pharmaceutical company that I am (Bristol-Myers Squibb), a foreign country that I cannot name, and an upcoming trip to one that I can (Norway).

In all cases, I note two phenomena that have a potentially profound impact on how our professional community moves forward:

1) Few of my clients understand what the word "design" means.

2) Most of them equate the set of slides that they create with their "presentation."

I accept and forgive the first tendency; I bristle at the second. And together, they comprise a healthy challenge for those who hope to advance the state of the art within our profession.

Most of my clients confuse "designing a presentation" with "making slides look pretty." If something is well-designed, does that mean that it is attractive? Maybe, but not neessarily. Design should refer more to function than appearance. If something is well-designed, it should mean that it is properly constructed, has benefitted from forethought, and is part of an effective system. A well-designed presentation is one that delivers the right message in the right way. A pretty slide can guarantee neither.

An equally common occurrence is the client who gives me a printout of their slides and says "Here is my presentation." This grates on several levels, most notably how willing these people are to denigrate their own value statement. What does that say when presenters thinks that their slides are more important than their words? Where is the priority when the product of PowerPoint rates higher than the product of a person's thoughts?

Pretty slides = a good presentation. That is the simple equation that these two misconceptions create. It is incumbent on all of us to raise our consciousness around these points to a higher plane.

Mobile Networking and Golf

2009-04-12T17:23:55-07:00

As i was watching the Masters today, one of the biggest golf tournaments in the world, I was struck by how many players made the same mistake. On the 15th green, a severely sloped and long traverse, just about every player who was putting uphill (and all pros know it's better to putt uphill than downhill) came up short. I watched in amazement as over a dozen players made the same mistake, reading the green as faster than it actually was.

The object of my surprise is not that these players misjudged the green. Golf is so hard, and courses set up for the pros are unimaginably difficult, that any player from Tiger Woods on down is likely to misread a green. But I find it funny when a commentator says to us, "Every one so far has left this putt short...let's see if he does any better...nope, he left it short, too."

How is it possible that a television viewer is better informed than the players? This certainly is not a question of technology. It would be a simple matter for a tour player to have spotters on the greens who could communicate via text message or Twitter. (@Tiger watch out for 15 green slower than it seems. add 10 feet.)

Technology has outpaced the sport as the the rules explicitly prevent a player from being better informed. A player and a caddie are not allowed to receive any information from "outside the ropes" -- they can only glean what their experience and instincts tell them and what they see with their own eyes.

I am an avid golfer and I'm also a technocrat, so I can't decide how I feel about this. Would it help the sport for the pros to have access to outside information? They still have to perform, so what's the big deal? With a sport as steeped in tradition as is golf, this is a rhetorical question--any proposed change to the rules is a big deal!

But it is certainly fun to speculate. What would happen if tour caddies had access to a back channel? How would the sport change, and would those changes be for the better or the worse? Hmm...

What Annoys You the Most?

2009-04-08T06:23:18-07:00

In the Professional Speakers and Seminar Leaders group at LinkedIn, author George Torok asked a seemingly banal and innocent question:

What annoying phrases from popular culture are speakers overusing in their presentations?

In the space of four days, over 60 people responded and it became a cathartic vent session for everyone who finds him or herself driven up a wall by presenter quirks. Here are a few of the ones that resonated the most with this group:

"No problem" (I never thought it was a problem, until you mentioned that it wasn't. Now, I'm not sure.)

If I hear one more person use the phrase "think outside the box," I think I'm going to scream!

"Am I right, or am I right?" That makes me want to say "no!"

"In my book..."

Misuse of the word "myself."

When presenters show up drunk for a presentation, trip on the stairs to the dais, and throw up on the lectern (that was submitted on April 1...)

"I feel your pain."

"Food for thought."

"I'm going to tell you a funny story." (Just tell it!)

"This is true story." (Aw come on, tell me a false story!)

"You've got to have passion." (I'm passionate about not wanting to hear that expression anymore.)

"At the end of the day" (...I'd rather be home than sitting here listening to you).

"At the end of the day" (...I go to sleep, which is what happens when I hear most speakers).

"Let me unpack this for you."

"Irregardless."

"May or may not." Well, that narrows it down now, doesn't it?

"To to be perfectly honest."Is there an imperfect way to be honest?

"Can I be honest with you?" No, please continue to lie to me.

I use "bottom line" probably ten times an hour, I am seeking help...

"Research has shown..." and "Some people say..." Quote the source or shut up. It's a weak way to bring up a counter-argument. It's backed by nothing yet used to validate.

We could go on and on here, but you get the idea: no shortage of annoying phrases that presenters adopt. What are yours??

Switch to Apple Keynote? Laughing Out Loud!!

2009-04-03T10:03:53-07:00

In the course of the past two weeks, I have read three separate writings that hail Apple Keynote as the antidote to Death by PowerPoint and a savior to the presentation community.

Please.

Let me begin by saying that I have absolutely nothing against Keynote. I like many of its creative transitions and its direct export to video is vastly superior to PowerPoint's deficient offerings. But a magic bullet for everything that people do wrong during a presentation? Again...please.

PowerPoint's bad reputation is owing to the fact that roughly 3.5 bazillion people use it, and of those 3.5 bazillion, 98% of them are undertrained. If all 3.5 bazillion people switched overnight to Keynote, would they all become better presenters? Of course not! The ony inevitable result of this fiction would be the sullying of Keynote's reputation.

If you are a clueless presentation content creator -- if you like to stuff untold text blather onto your slides, compose complete sentences, and make things spin stupidly onto the slide -- there is no magic potion within Keynote that will compel you to stop. I'm sorry, but Keynote's cleaner default slide is not enough to stem this tide. Apple Keynote will not infuse in you a decade of experience, a modicum of good sense, or a schtickle of restraint. It just doesn't work that way.

Apple Keynote is thought of more highly because, by and large, the people using it have higher graphical skills and deeper design sense. That is a gross generalization, I know, but as a cultural axiom, there is little denying that the background of the loyal and zealous Mac user is more creative than that of the corporate-based Windows user. As an author and conference host for Corel products, I have been a witness to this for the past 15 years, and I see little on the presentation side to contradict it.

The people creating more attractive slides in Keynote have an advantage over the typical PowerPoint user because they stand a better chance of being able to get out from under their slides and present more emotionally and powerfully to their audience. With cleaner visuals, they have more access to their audience's emotional senses. But this is because of the violinist, not the violin. That same person, if sat down behind PowerPoint, would likely follow his or her instincts and create slides that are less "PowerPointish" than the norm.

PowerPoint use outnumbers Keynote use by factors that have many zeroes behind it. Going on sheer numbers, I'll bet you that the number of PowerPoint slides that are beautiful, impactful, and artful (however you might choose to define those terms) outnumber those of Keynote.

These types of statistics are meaningless. Talented presentation designers will do good work with whatever tool they adopt. Inexperienced content creators will struggle with whatever tool they are given.

I have more to say about this, but let's first hear what you have to say...

Should I become an UNconference host...?

2009-03-24T08:32:39-07:00

Over the weekend, I had the unique experience of seeing my reflection...or my antithesis...or my something-opposite. I attended and spoke at slideshare.net's PresentationCamp, billed as an "unconference." The primary idea behind an unconference is that there is no one central organizing body determining content, but rather a free-flowing dialogue at the center of decision-making.

For an anal-retentive conference host, this took a bit of getting used to—we sat around for the first hour, kicking around ideas for seminars and discussion groups, using up a lot of dry-erase markers and going through many post-its. "Couldn't this have been done in advance?" I wondered to myself on several occasions.

Yes, of course it could...but then it would have been a different event. It would have been more like PowerPoint Live, and I had to see past my own biases to appreciate the value of this event. Everyone had a say in building the content and the approximately 65 people who attended felt completely engaged in the process.

I did an hour on practical makeovers of slide design and message that anyone could undertake, irrespective of design background. Other topics ranged from mind-mapping to storytelling, to embracing the back channel of Twitter during a presentation.

To answer the question in my headline, no, I'm not qualified be become an unhost. My need to organize and prepare would disqualify me. Nonetheless, the idea of spending a Saturday with a group of colleagues, collectively determining topics of conversation, is attractive and compelling.

Watch for a presentation camp to be formed in a city near you...

Me Hates That!

2009-03-11T09:43:36-07:00

Okay, one more grammar-related post and then I'm done for the season...

I suppose I cannot hammer my two teenage daughters too heavily in the face of what I just read. I am continually correcting Erica and Jamie for sentences along the lines of "Me and Nicole want to go to the mall," because I would like to set some minimum standard of speech for the two of them. I don't get on their case for the verbal twitch that is responsible for every third word being "like," and I don't go overboard and insist that they respond with "It is I," to every query of "who's there." I would just like them not to sound like morons when referring to themselves.

But they seem to be in pretty heady company these days. Here was former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a major opinion piece in Newsweek:

"Considerations such as these induced Sam Nunn, William Perry, George Schultz and I to publish recommendations..."

Oy vey.

We all have our pet peeves in life, and I readily admit to this one being mine. It is particuarly sad because it is so easy to fix: Remove everyone else from the equation and it immediately becomes obvious which form of the pronoun to use. Erica would never say "Me wants to go to the mall." Mr. Kissinger probably would not have written "Considerations such as these induced I to publish..." You can almost always figure out which pronoun to use if you formulate the sentence without any other subjects or objects.

The more egregious misuse — the one that really is akin to fingernails across the chalkboard for me — is the butchering of "myself." Here is our 44th president speaking about a meeting he had with his predecessor:

"...there was a substantive conversation between the President and myself."

I suspect this is often used to soften the landing for someone who cannot deterine whether to use I or me, but to my ears it sounds worse. "Myself" is a reflective pronoun (I'm not sure that is actually a grammatical term, but it helps in understanding it)—it must reflect back to the person using it. You can't return the book to myself, forward the email to myself, or speak with myself. There is only one person who can have a conversation with myself and that is me...er, I.

In presentation content, the two errors I see most often are:

Lose being spelled with two Os
And the possessive "its" being given an apostrophe

Do you have a pet grammar peeve? Share the pain...

Eight grammar errors...all in one post

2009-03-06T09:05:00-08:00

In honor of National Grammar Day, I posted an entry on Wednesday with eight subtle or not-so-subtle errors of grammar or prose. A few of you wrote in to suggest a handful of other errors that you THOUGHT you noticed. Harumph...

The Original Post:

Several of my readers have brought to my attention the significance of this day—March 4.

National Grammar Day

On this day, we all should resolve to try his or her best, myself included, to bring the penultimate, the highest, experience to the written and spoken word. For at least one day, gone should be the cute abbreviations that foreshadow text messages and the feckless disregard for proper capitalization.

For 24 hours, lets try to make every sentence count, every one of our words carry their proper meanings, and our intonations and inflections reflect our genuine intentions.

And the errors:

1. "...the significance of this day—March 4."

Use of a dash is not correct here. A color or a comma would be better.

2 and 3. "On this day, we all should resolve to try his or her best, myself included"

"we" requires "out" best, or "each of us" goes with his or her.

Incorrect use of myself.

4. to bring the penultimate, the highest, experience to the written and spoken word

Penultimate means second from ultimate. Contradicts use of "highest"

5. "gone should be the cute abbreviations that foreshadow text messages"

Incorrect use of foreshadow.

6. "feckless disregard for proper capitalization."

Incorrect use of feckless. Intended word here is reckless. (We suppose you could have feckless disregard for something, but we don't recommend it.)

7. "every one of our words carry their proper meanings, "

should be "carry its proper"

8. "For 24 hours, lets try to make every..."

"lets" missing its apostrophe

Friend and colleague Byron Canfield wrote in to suggest a ninth: "disregard for" should be "disregard of". Hmm, what do you think, can one not have a regard or disregard for something? Or must it only be of something? He also cited me for using "we all"—I resent that only southerners can use that form of plural!

National Grammar Day

2009-03-04T10:44:36-08:00

Several of my readers have brought to my attention the significance of this day—March 4.

National Grammar Day

On this day, we all should resolve to try his or her best, myself included, to bring the penultimate, the highest, experience to the written and spoken word. For at least one day, gone should be the cute abbreviations that foreshadow text messages and the feckless disregard for proper capitalization.

For 24 hours, lets try to make every sentence count, every one of our words carry their proper meanings, and our intonations and inflections reflect our genuine intentions.

There are eight grammar errors in this blog posting...who can identify them all?

The Debate Over “On Click”

2009-03-02T16:20:13-08:00

The Debate Continues
Over “On Click”

A workshop or seminar rarely passes in which I do not have occasion to engage in a favorite controversy: Whether or not to display a list of ideas or bullet points one by one or all at once.

One reason that this issue rubs me wrong is because so many content creators do not give any thought to it at all: They apply animation to their text and they accept PowerPoint’s default setting, which is to have bullets appear one by one (On Click).

Their entire reason for choosing a presentation strategy is because of the program’s default setting.

I would feel much better, and one’s argument would carry more weight with me, if there was some forethought given to this decision. Choosing a path because software suggests it is rarely a recipe for success. Let me hear “I thought about the differences and have decided that this is the better way to go.”

Because she has done exactly that, I will take respectful issue with my friend, colleague, and she whom I describe as the rock star of presentations Nancy Duarte. In her outstanding book on presentation design slide:ology, Nancy writes this on page 145:

I prefer to have text build sequentially as I’m not sure why anyone would want the audience to jump ahead. Remember, if the audience can see your bullets, they know the points you’re going to make. They’ll get bored or agitated waiting for you to catch up with them.

Let’s start with common ground: If you have designed a slide with 15 bullet points on it, then yes, you had better bring those points in gradually. I think Nancy and I would also agree that if you have created a slide with 15 bullets, the least of your troubles is how you choose to display them.

But with a properly-proportioned list of ideas—with a slide that has four or five tersely-worded bullets on it—I believe more good than harm comes from displaying them all at once. You allow the audience to see the forest from the trees and you make it easier on yourself by eliminating altogether the risk that you might forget how many bullets are left and run past the last one.

If I am a capable presenter, I should not be concerned in the least of my audience running ahead. How far can they go?? It’s my job to keep them on point. It’s my responsibility to keep them engaged, and if I can’t do my job, I shouldn’t blame my PowerPoint plumbing for that.

Most of the time, I want them to know where I am going with a story or an argument. I want them to have that context.

My position on this has become only more adament over the past 12 months when I heard from users who are put off—actually insulted—by the practice of revealing bullets one at a time. I don’t blame them—why shouldn’t they have the context for the discussion that I have? What am I trying to hide? Why am I trying to be coy? Do I think my audience can’t keep up? Do I think that they are not smart enough?

These are legitimate questions that are raised by an over-reliance of the On Click in PowerPoint animation.

Now I draw stark contrast to the treatment of dense, chunky data, like an involved chart or a big table. That is an entirely different situation, in which Nancy and just about everyone else who has spoken at PowerPoint Live would agree: Elements like these absolutely need to be sequenced and spoon-fed to an audience.

But when it comes to bullets, my position on this is unconflicted: Life is just too short to worry about them. They're not worth the trouble. Everyone’s life is made easier when you display simple lists of ideas all at once.

I'd love to hear what you have to say about it...

American Idol Meets Slide Design

2009-03-01T22:58:34-08:00

As our annual user conference enters its seventh season, it also begins the fifth iteration of the Design-a-Template contest. From several dozen entries, we will award a trip to the event (Oct 11-14, Atlanta GA) to the person whose work is chosen as most appropriate to serve as the conference template.

Over the past four years, we have created a tradition that includes: brilliant work by exceptionally talented people; a bit of comic relief; the discovery of a unique challenge when creating a template that is to be used across many dozens of seminars; and spirited debate between our own versions of Randy, Paula, and Simon.

To see entries from year's past, including the winners, visit our Editorial Archive.

Who's Going Mobile?

2009-02-25T11:22:00-08:00

With my daughter's all-consuming bat mitzvah now in our rear-view mirror, I will return, with renewed vigor, to semi-regular blog postings. Let's see if I can actually accomplish bi-weekly...

__________________

For the second edition of what we affectionately refer to now as my Sucks book, I would like to hear from PowerPoint users who are preparing content for presentations outside of the conventional notebook / projector / screen environment. Webinars
Mobile Devices
Blackberrys
iPhones
YouTube
SlideShare
FaceBook

If you have had any experience with these or other mobile environments and would like to share those experiences with our readers, I would love to hear from you.
Email me at thebook@betterppt.com
Or comment here and we can discuss. Many thanks...

The Lunacy of the Leave Behind

2008-12-24T16:17:00-08:00

I am a pragmatic being. At my core, I understand the values of efficiency and expedience. I embrace the art of compromise and understand that life often gets in the way of ideals and theories. Reality is often harsh and not adjusting to it often harsher.

Yet there is one principle relevant to the presentation community on which I do not yield. One ideal to which I hold stubbornly. At this windmill, I gladly tilt: it is the notion that a presentation content creator can create one set of slides that will function ably for the projected content and for the printed material.
This is an impossible notion. Everything else in life might be possible if you work hard, but not this one thing. In my 15+ years as a presentation consultant, I have not once seen it done successfully.
Not once!
When you set forth to create content for a presentation, you work with two forces that are fundamentally at odds with one another. You want to create projected content that is compelling and you want to provide information that is complete and useful. The pragmatic being in you usually prevails, and in the interest of time, you look for a happy medium.
Unfortunately, that twain shall not meet. Nary.
As discomfiting as it may be for content creators, a properly-prepared set of visuals for a presentation will fail as leave-behind collateral. Your slides are supposed to be incomplete; they are supposed to be no more than the tease for the words that you will speak. If they say too much, they inhibit your ability to tell the story.
Read the full article at our Editorial Archive...

PowerPoint as the Generic...ugh

2008-10-24T23:15:00-07:00

While I like a great many of the trends that I see in the presentation community, here is one that I loathe:
"Create a PowerPoint for your presentation."

My disdain for this new expression exists on many levels, but I'll cut right to the chase: In elevating the slide deck to such importance, it threatens to undermine and cheapen the experience of creating and delvering a presentation. It's also unfair to the software, as if it is primarily, or worse, solely responsible for the success of a presentation.
I understand that PowerPoint's saturation is about 99%; I practically owe my livelihood to that fact. Nonetheless, I cringe when I hear it used as the ubiquitous noun for all things relating to a presentation. We don't say "Create a Word with your thoughts," "Put together an Excel with those figures," or "Write me up an Outlook on that." Why is PowerPoint different?
I fear that the answer is in the way people view the slide deck: Too many people see one's slides as the presentation itself, as if the presenter is secondary. And this, of course, stems from the unfortunate reality that people rely too heavily on their slides when giving presentations. Too much text, too many complete sentences, too many audience members thinking "couldn't you have just emailed this to me? Why did I have to be here?"
Where do we stem this tide? We start by remembering that you are the presentation; your slides are not. They must be subordinate to your ability to connect with your audience in meaningful ways and on levels other than the purely intellectual. Audience members are moved to action because they feel it in their gut; that rarely happens because you created a "good PowerPoint." It happens because you conceived a good message, prepared content to support that message, and yes, prepared compelling visuals and key points to complement that message.
"Creating a PowerPoint" does not bring rise to any of those critical activities. It cheapens the entire process. Creating a slide deck to help with your message is fine; asking it to BE the message is not!

Can you tell your story with no text at all?

2008-08-15T10:34:00-07:00

The other day I was working with a client on a presentation that had to be less than 10 minutes, and he was frustrated with the challenge of creating slide content for a talk so brief.
I said one thing to him that became a bit of a sea change.
“Why don’t you forget entirely about slides with text on them?”
[silence]
“I’ll bet you could be just as persuasive with your words, and your slides could be even more impactful.”
It needs to be said that I caught my client at a weak moment in which he was unusually receptive to such an unconventional idea. Most execs would look at me as if I were from Mars were I to suggest slides with no text on them, but the rigors of a 10-minute presentation demanded unusual measures.
His talk went beautifully. Which raises the more vital question: Could you do it? Do you know your topic well enough? And are you sufficiently in touch with the images that you would want to evoke with your audience?
If so, the search capabilities at all of the stock photo sites can help. In the case of the presentation shown here, I used the general search word “economics” to find the right imagery. I had to wade through lots of photos of currency, as well as some clichés of scales and gold bars. But it was worth the dip into the photo pool, as I uncovered photos that nicely complemented the messages of the talk.

One PowerPoint trick to note when you intend to create text-less slides: Instead of having to switch to the Blank layout for every slide, edit your slide master so that the title and the bullet placeholders are both off the slide. Just move them out of there! Now you need only issue the New Slide command to get a blank slide.

Images by Committee

2008-07-15T09:03:00-07:00

There will be times in the life of any content creator when the desired image doesn’t exist and needs to be created. Those are the times when it’s good to know about objects—photographic images that consist only of a central foreground object, removed entirely from its background.
Our quest is to create an image of a healthy woman working out. As robust as the photos.com library is, we were not able to find the perfect image. But we did find the perfect woman.

She is an object; she has no background. And once we imported her into our image-editing program of choice, with one click of the automatic selection tool, we had her being sent out as a PNG file, the format that supports transparent objects like this one. Then we searched through traditional photographs for a dance studio or a clean, well-lighted gym, and found a great one. And by marrying the two photos, we ended up with this:

We had succeeded...and we had failed. The woman came in transparently atop the studio, all right, but she appears to be floating, as if she doesn’t really belong.
To see how we addressed this problem, visit our editorial archive

A Blast from the Past...and the Tyranny of PowerPoint

2008-06-24T11:02:00-07:00

One of the finest live presentations I have ever witnessed featured a man and a microphone. It was in 1989, the debut event of the CorelWORLD User Conference, the precursor to the PowerPoint Live User Conference. John Meyer, the president of Ventura Software, was the keynote speaker. He did not speak from a script, yet it was obvious that he knew what he wanted to say. He began at a podium, but frequently moved to the edge of the stage where nothing separated him from his audience. He was always looking into someone’s eyes, and regularly journeyed from one side of the room to another.
He spoke of the company’s beginnings, but resisted all temptations to proper the dreadful “corporate background” speech. He shared with us through anecdotes how customers had influenced the product, but did not give in to the air-puffed “we are responsive to your needs” cliches. And he shared with us his goals for the software, but never once used words like “proactive,” “vision,” “innovative,” or any other buzzword that sounds good but means nothing at all.
The crowd of 300 was utterly riveted. They watched his every move, and hung on his every word. All the focus was on John, as the lights were up and there were no multimedia distractions behind him.
One year later, Xerox had taken over the software. Instead of entrepreneur John Meyer giving the opening keynote address, it was corporate journeyman-turned-president Larry Gerhardt. He began with a corporate backgrounder, offered his own resume, talked about how Xerox would be responsive to our needs, and spoke of being proactive and innovative. For the attendees at this conference, this wasn’t a speech; it was a punishment.
It was bad enough that this address was everything that conference goers didn’t care about, and delivered with the energy and charisma of a potato. What made it worse were the slides—those dreadful slides. Instead of working the room, Gerhardt was working the projector, fiddling with transparencies and trying not to put his face in the light.
This leads to a question that has been nagging me for the last two years: Where have all the good presenters gone? Because I refuse to believe that there aren’t any left, there must be something else going on, and I’ll tell you what it is:
Presentation software

The tyranny of presentation software is what it does to skilled speakers. It takes good speakers, able to carry an audience with their voice and their language, and it dummies them down.

I wrote these words in October 1998. It is both entertaining and troubling to see how far and how little we have progressed in the span of a decade. You can read the entire article at
http://www.betterppt.com/editorial/archive/98oct.htm

What do you think — have we learned anything? Are we better off today? Or just more endowed with technology and toys...?

Hillary Clinton Commits Death by PowerPoint

2008-05-12T16:13:00-07:00

As part of her narrative on being the more electable candidate, the campaign for Senator Hillary Clinton distributed a PowerPoint slide deck to Democratic members of the House of Representatives, to be viewed, she hoped, by many uncommitted superdelegates.

I wish she had hired me as her presentations coach -- at a minimum, I would have pushed for an entirely different approach, and if I'm being completely honest, I would have advised against sending out the slide deck at all.
As you can see from the PDF version of the deck, the slides contain consistent branding via a header but otherwise lack any sort of cohesion at all and are devoid of any effective design. Headlines all have underlines, bullets are misplaced and used inconsistently, photos are used gratuitously, and charts are overladen with information. Slides 6 - 8 contain charts that have obviously been pasted in as graphics: their top borders cut into the text. In the case of Slide 8, it is downright embarrassing.
We did not receive the actual slide deck, only low-res JPGs of the slides, so we cannot say for sure whether the Clinton team attempted to create builds to sequence some of the chunkier data, like the charts and graphs. If we give her content creators the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did create builds for the more dense slides, then they are guilty of creating no navigational assistance whatsoever for the viewers working through the slides.
The photos used are unimaginative and mostly shoved into corners of slides, with no thought whatsoever given to how they might be more evocative and more emotional. The irony here is that there are some truly excellent photos available at the Clinton website. In about one hour, I was able to produce an entire makeover of this slide deck, relying even on low-res screen grabs of website photos:
http://www.betterppt.com/blog/hillary/before_and_after.ppt
Above all, this should not have been sent as slideware; it should have been a PDF document. Without a live person advocating these positions, the bulleted content is insufficient for fleshing out the argument. Given Clinton's position as underdog, these arguments are too nuanced to be made by static bullet slides, especially poorly-designed ones. This deliverable should have been a completely-formatted document, created in InDesign or Xpress, or at a minimum, Publisher, with evocative photos, fully-formulated paragraphs, and integrated data charts.
The data and the argument are potentially compelling, but I score this as a missed opportunity for the New York Senator...
Read our more extensive writeup on our makeover at our editorial archive.

Why websites suck? Same reason as with presentations

2008-05-01T00:56:00-07:00

When you write a book with a title such as mine, you would be drawn to an article entitled: "Why Your Website *Sucks*".
This incisive and well-written article could just as easily have been written for the presentation community, as its principal message resonates with most of us:
It's not about you. It has to be about them.

Anyone struggling with message, or struggling with someone who is struggling with message, will enjoy this fine article from Chris Hadad.

Mad about Matzah...

2008-04-19T08:12:00-07:00

What do you do when you have one of the pickiest eaters in the world living under your roof, and you are about to enter into a religious observance that prohibits the consumption of two of the only three food items she’ll eat, pizza and pasta?
The Passover ritual is proof positive that wonders shall never cease. As we seek to identify with our ancestors who fled from Egypt many thousands of years ago, we rid our home of all food with yeast. After all, if the ancient Hebrews could eat cakes of unleavened bread for the months and years that they fled through the desert, certaily we could do it for eight days.
But how will Jamie eat matzah, the second coming of tasteless cardboard? And will she go anywhere near a hard-boiled egg dipped in salt water? Horseradish, literally cut from the root? And gefilte fish?? The Red Sea should sooner part than we should watch our 12-year-old resort to such torture.
But wonders never cease. “Hey Dad, can we buy some matzah early?”
“What, you want to get it over with? It doesn’t work that way!”
“No, I like it.”
“________”
“Dad?”
“________”
“Are you okay, Dad?”
She likes matzah. She who eats around anything red or green in her salad, she who would declare anything she doesn’t recognize to be inedible, she who would be fine with macaroni morning, noon, and night, she for whom we must buy pulp-free orange juice...she likes matzah?
It’s a miracle! Wait...that’s the wrong holiday. It is some sort of incredible affirmation of the mysterious power of faith-based rituals.
As for the gefilte fish...well, let’s not press our luck.

Resolution Confusion

2008-04-14T14:49:00-07:00

This from Chantal, a friend and regular patron of PowerPoint Live...

“I am developing a presentation for a customer’s yearly meeting. Room specs: 120 feet long (around 700 people), maximum image width of 26 feet. My big worry is about image resolution. We know PPT is using a 96 dpi value but will my image resolution be a factor if the final projecting width is indeed 26 feet?”

What would you have told her? I didn’t exactly mince words in my reply:
“Dots per inch is bull----!”

There is simply no such thing when working with screen content. There is no such thing as a dot and there is no such thing as an inch. How would you measure the inch — across the display of your 15-inch notebook monitor or across the width of a 26-foot screen? You see what I mean? You cannot make sense of an inch in a screen projection, so don’t even try.
You will need a projector bright enough to pump out an image that will be sprayed so wide, and if you are not confident that it will be able to project well enough across 26 feet, make sure you create a color scheme with plenty of contrast. If you can test it in the venue beforehand, always a plus!
But for the rest of your PowerPoint lifetime, pretend you never heard of dots or inches. I refer you to the following article for details:
http://www.betterppt.com/editorial/archive/07mar.htm