What Has Happened to Spontaneity?

I had mixed emotions while watching Tiger Woods’ mea culpa moment two weeks ago. Same with the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. And a recent presentation that a client gave. All of these events shared a common thread.

Several dozen politicians could have learned from Tiger on how to issue a public apology, and the Canada’s Olympic Committee crafted a breathtaking show. So did my client.

This is unfair to the Olympics, it’s only sin being the timing of all of this. The carefully-crafted performance came around the same time as so many others that I either watched or was in the room for. It got me thinking…

Does everything have to be staged these days?
What would happen if public figures went without a script?

The Woods spectacle was so tightly controlled, the Golf Writers Association of America chose to boycott the event. If they couldn’t ask questions, they argued, it was not a true news event and not worthy of their participation.

And then there’s my client. So focused was he on the performance aspect of his presentation, he had it timed to the second, and one of his slides had 13 builds on it. The slide was scheduled to be displayed for roughly 20 seconds. And it was just a quarterly update to a management team!

I don’t get it. Have we forgotten how to engage an audience without a stage director? Have we lost sight of why people attend a presentation? Do we think that audience members walk into a room just dying to see our slides?

Perhaps Carmen Taran said it best at last year’s PowerPoint Live (now the Presentation Summit), when she spoke of the importance of, to use her words, “presenting naked.” This speaks to the value of being genuine and having no barriers between presenter and audience. While I acknowledge the value of theater (and again, the Olympic festivities were phenomenal), I wouldn’t want to see the message lost in the medium, and all too often, my clients are ready to do just that.

We need less staging and more speaking. Less theater, more engagement.

Living with Bullet Points

This from one of our readers, Melanie Bozzelli of Twinsburg OH:

I hope you can help settle a friendly debate we are having over the use of bullet points. In your book, you argue that bullet points should be displayed all at once on the slide, and then the presenter will discuss them with the audience.

We prepare many presentations for an online audience and our research and testing have shown that if the slide loads all at once, then the user may go off and look at other things online, and not pay attention to the presentation. They typically scan the bullets, realize they have a few minutes to wander off while the narrator is speaking, and then check in to see if the presentation has advanced to the next slide.

If the bullets load one at a time and are “spoon-fed” to audience members, they stay engaged with the online presentation.

Since our presentations are often created with multiple contexts in mind (live audience,on-demand online, etc), I wonder if there may be a solution to accommodate each audience, without losing or insulting them.

Melanie brings rise to a very interesting point: how the webinar culture influences conventional thinking. A lot of this comes down to your take on protocol during webinars; here is mine: I don’t try to fight the impulse that webinar audience members have to multitask; I consider it to be a fact of life.

This has been a liberating conclusion for me. Instead of fighting it, I try to cater to it. If my audience members are going to multitask anyway—and if they can’t, they might choose to tune out altogether—I feel as if I can make it easier on them by doing an all-at-once slide build. If I try to string them along, they might resent it. If I give them the download all at once, they can then keep one ear on me while they are checking their email or hanging out on FaceBook. Then when I change topics, they are in a position to tune back in.

I’m not sure this is a majority viewpoint; I’m sure there are some who tilt at this windmill and hope/expect to garner 100% attention from their webinar audience members. I just don’t think that’s realistic.

Better to swim with this tide than against it, I say. Should you adopt that point of view, your life is made easier by not having to create multiple decks for multiple audiences.

Other principles of presentation design still prevail, I must add. This is not permission to overload your slides with superfluous verbiage. Keep those on-screen points short, sweet, and pithy!

Images by Committee

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. Despite scouring all of my standard stock photo houses, 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.

This is a common problem when trying to integrate an object into a photo that it didn’t come from originally. The room is pretty well lit, but where are the shadows? They need to be added, and for that you would need to return to your image-editing software…or be using the current version of PowerPoint, 2007.

Version 2007’s upgraded graphics engine offers support for realistic shadowing of any image or object. By applying a soft shadow to the woman and then a slightly darker shadow where she would be touching the floor, we have done a much better job of faking this scene:

This effect can be produced in any version of PowerPoint that can import transparent PNG files, with the help of your image-editing program of choice. But this is an instance where the edge clearly goes to Version 2007 for its built-in ability to shadow an object.

Your eye is probably drawn right to the vulnerable parts of this photo (shadow underneath the ball is perhaps not dark enough) and that is always challenging when trying to create realism: you’re your own worst critic. Pretty good chance, however, if you didn’t know what to scrutinize, you wouldn’t notice anything wrong. Your goal is not accuracy but plausibility and realism.

Download the version 2007 PowerPoint file  to see how shadows are handled natively within the application.

The Lunacy of the Leave Behind

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 our 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 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.

My colleague and friend Dave Paradi (www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com) conducts an annual survey of the most annoying qualities of a PowerPoint presentation. The current survey lists the following as its top three:

• Speaker reads the slides to the audience
• Speaker creates full sentences instead of bullet points
• Text is too small to read

All three of these annoyances are inevitable when content creators attempt to have their slides double as printouts. In other words, this one issue might be responsible for ALL THREE of the sins that have been voted most egregious.

And I’ll go one step further: overladen slides that try to tell too much turn otherwise smart people into blithering idiots. Can PowerPoint make you stupid? When there is too much blather being projected, the answer is most decidedly yes.

It is practically a litmus test that we all must take. How are your visuals? Would they make really lousy printouts? Yes? Great, you’re all set to go!

We live in a world of compromises, but this is one place where you cannot succumb to the expedient route. You must think of your projected content and your printed content as two distinct projects. Otherwise, they both might fail, and you will fail.

A perfect example of this dynamic came to us recently during our ongoing invitation to see work from the presentation community. One organization created a short slide deck on the all-important topic of tire safety. There is probably a lot that you do not know about tire maintenance; I learned several things from surveying a few slides in this deck. Any soccer mom or softball dad would be heavily emotionally invested in this topic. Here was the first slide in the deck:

When this first figure arrives on screen, is it going to have an impact? Of course not. And when the well-intentioned presenter begins to speak, it will be almost impossible to avoid reciting the slide. And before you know it…instant Death by PowerPoint.

Set aside the dubious design motif used here—the real crime committed was when the creator tried to have it both ways and create a presentation deck that could double as printouts.

Here we see the continued decline in what could have been a noble effort: educating an audience about the different qualities of tires and how understanding them would make your car safer.

All of these words make it impossible for a presenter to get to where he or she really needs to be: appealing to the emotional side of a story and getting the audience to feel its weight. Very few audience members are moved to action by what their brains tell them; there must be an emotional component to the story. Tire safety is low-hanging fruit to any parent of a young child who needs to be driven hither and yon to this playdate and that gymnastics class.

My makeover of this deck attempts to make the emotional case, while allowing the presenter to inform the audience on the important specifications of tires.

If these slides were printed and delivered, they would not be very helpful. They require more complete leave-behind information.

Here are a few ideas and techniques to help you deal with the unavoidable fact that you will need to prepare your material twice—once for the presentation and once for printouts.

1. Acknowledge it early

The best time to prepare the detail for handouts is before you go anywhere near PowerPoint. Taking notes…composing your thoughts…fleshing out your ideas…these are all great things to do long before you think about how you might engage your audience on multiple levels. When you prepare the meat of your presentation first, you are more likely to pick a better tool for the printouts, like a publishing application or a word processor with a good design template. And having poured over the details to this degree, you are in a better position to then choose more compelling visuals to help you tell the story to your audience.

2. Use Notes View

If you or your boss committed the popular sin of writing out an entire speech on the slides themselves, you are just one cut-and-paste maneuver away from salvation. That verbiage belongs in the Notes view, but this is not to suggest that it be there for the speaker to refer to. Having complete sentences in your notes is just as dangerous as displaying them on screen—it could turn you into a drone either way.

The idea here is that your Notes pages become your printouts, to be delivered to your audience members during or after the presentation. Notes view has its own master and can be customized far beyond what most users realize.

Here you see the degree to which Notes view can be designed for optimized leave-behind material. The text here is a direct splice from the original slide.

3. Use Version 2007 Slide Masters

The current version of PowerPoint—still foreign and unfamiliar to many—has several compelling features that merit your taking a closer look. One of them is the flexible layouts that are now part of the slide mastering creation process.

 In this scenario, you would either keep hidden the slides that are part of the printouts, or create two custom shows, one for display and one for print.

The value of these strategies, using Notes view or V2007’s slide masters, is your ability to keep the printout material in the presentation file itself, instead of having to deal with two separate files.

But that’s the only free lunch you get here. If you try to cut a corner with leave-behind content, you are guaranteed to fail. If you just suck it up and accept the fact that you need to go the extra mile, your audience will love you for it, and your presentations will be much, much better as a result.

The “Last” PowerPoint Live

More than any other year, the PowerPoint Live User Conference was all about looking ahead, including the news that the conference made about itself.

In a year in which travel budgets have been decimated and training conferences were canceled at an alarming rate, the 2009 conference was attended by 180, just 10% down from its average across the previous six years. Of that number, over 60% of them were first-time attendees, although many came from companies that had sent other people in previous years.

For my opening remarks, I poked a bit of fun at the growing phenomenon springing up around Twitter—in particular, an audience’s ability to provide commentary about a presenter in real time and even be able to comment directly to the presenter. When my mother texted me about checking the zipper on my fly, it got a good laugh (especially because my mother was in the room—she has been our registration manager since 1989).

Moments later, however, Cliff Atkinson’s keynote address would punctuate the message that Twitter is to be taken seriously by the presentation community. His subsequent session entitled Back Channel (coinciding with a similarly-titled book due out by him soon) provided a compelling argument for monitoring Twitter activity during a conference and even during a particular presentation.

This was an entirely new concept for those in attendance, most of whom had never tweeted at all. During the three days together, quite a few new Twitter accounts were opened, mobile phones configured, and the #PPTLive backchannel quite active.

Another forward-thinking concept that was highlighted at the conference is the notion of the “cloud” and its implication for content creators. With so many online sites available for sharing, storage, and collaboration (living in the ether, the cloud, if you will), boundaries are being redefined for how and with whom PowerPoint users can work. Dave Paradi, Richard Harrington, and Geetesh Bajaj all spoke with authority on this topic.

Many in attendance were familiar with the cloud; few, however, had considered the notion of presenting naked. Tuesday’s keynote speaker, Carmen Taran, advocated that very position. Innuendo aside, she spoke eloquently about the imperative for being genuine and real in front of your audience—naked before the crowd.

Then there were the tried-and-true sessions that have been long-time favorites over the years: Glen Millar’s impressive animation techniques, Julie Terberg’s makeovers, Rikk Flohr’s digital photography field trip, and the guru session, hosted by Microsoft’s Ric Bretschneider. For many, this late-night session (running from 9p until midnight) was a first opportunity to learn about and see Version 2010 of PowerPoint, due out the first half of next year. Patrons were bowled over by what they saw:

• More image-editing options
• New rich slide transitions
• Evolution of the Format Painter tool to be able to apply existing animations to other elements
• Native support for video, offering much better control over playback
• And my favorite, full export of your slides to one of several digital video formats. Hallelujah!

The conference had its share of levity as well, with the annual trivia contest showcasing a hilarious version of PowerPoint Karaoke and the Tuesday evening concert and garden party culminating in a fully-clothed dip in the pool for about a dozen party-goers, including the host. You can live vicariously through our short video:

For many, the biggest news was about the conference itself. I ended hours and hours of speculation (I get asked more about “next year” than anything else at the conference) when I greeted everyone Tuesday morning:

“Welcome to Day Two of the seventh and final season of PowerPoint Live.”

There were a few gasps, some pregnant pauses, a few hoots of derision, and several “yeah right” comments. The sarcasm was well-placed, as I went on to reminisce about the conference’s seven years and our gradual evolution from staid PowerPoint instruction to a broad-based support network for the presentation community, covering all aspects of presentation design, creation, and delivery.

In 2010, we reintroduce ourselves as The Presentation Summit (Oct 17-20), reflecting this metamorphosis. We elaborate on our transition at www.pptsummit.com/faq, and if for no other reason, watch the two-minute slide show just to see our breathtaking oceanside setting for next year at our west-coast home of San Diego CA.

I never tire of marveling over how well our patrons blend and mix over the four days they have together. As mentioned, we were almost 65% first-timers this year, and yet by the second day, it was as if they had known each other for a decade and were attending a school reunion. We don’t exactly know how to explain this phenomenon and would rather not try. It’s better if it just continues to happen magically. And we’re grateful for the magic—it’s what makes our conference different than just about any other business event.

Click Here…

Thanking God

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

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

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

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. <g>

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…

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