| So please repeat after me: “Today, I will
make sure to annoy no one with PowerPoint.” We’ll worry
about tomorrow tomorrow, but that boomerang animation you were thinking
about adding to all of your titles today? Let’s talk…
There is little doubt that this could be the first of a 500-part
series, and interest willing, we will add as many installments as
is necessary. Here are four candidates for just about anyone’s
list of deadly PowerPoint sins.
Sin Number One:
What else…Obnoxious Animation
Just when I thought that experienced users were finally starting
to get a clue about this, the following email arrives from a potential
client whom I advised to remove the pinwheel entrances that he applied
to many of his objects:
“That begs the question of why PowerPoint has so much technology
invested in animation if there is little or no appropriate use
for it in
presentations that are supposed to be hip.”
I am reminded of the time that I quizzed my four-year-old daughter
in math, asking her to add 3+2 and she answered “apple.”
It’s like we are speaking a different language altogether,
and I wondered if the only response to my soon-to-be-former potential
client was to whack him upside the head and say, “Look, just
don’t do it, okay??”
Eliminating bad animation begins with defining it, and we will start
with two broad categories of animation:
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Animation in which an object actually moves across the screen.
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Animation in which an object makes an entrance of some sort,
but only occupies the space in which it will ultimately reside.
Most bad animation belongs to the first category. If you ask your
audience to track motion across the screen, you are implicitly saying
that this action is worthy of merit, that there is some important
reason why you are taxing their attention with its entrance. If
the only payoff is a series of bullets or some other garden-variety
object, then you have violated their trust. If you continue to violate
trust, you will lose credibility and worse, your audience will wonder
if you know the difference between what is important and what is
inane. And if that happens, just leave the room, because all is
lost.
No matter how ornate an animation is, if the object remains in
its place, it will not be as distracting as those that move through
space. A zoom-in or a dissolve is not as bad as a fly, a bounce,
or a spiral. Better still, see if you can limit yourself to wipes
and fades, two animations that are understated enough to qualify
as elegant when used appropriately.
Misused slide transitions can even be worse, as entire screenfuls
of objects are made to checkerboard, spiral, or commit some other
crime against your eyesight. Why is it so important to notify everyone
that you are changing slides? Instead, take the opposite challenge:
see if you can change slides without anyone noticing.
The simple point is this: If you reserve ostentatious animation
for content that truly merits it, you say something very important
about your own sensibility, and that, in turn, helps your message.
If you create a covenant with your audience that you will direct
their attention in a responsible way, you create a connection and
you contribute to rapport. You make them want to listen to you,
and there is no price tag that can measure the value of that.
Stick to wipes and fades. Anything else…WHACK…just
don’t do it, okay??
Sin Number Two:
Lousy Contrast
We find that more often than not, this sin is perpetrated by women
and upon men. Women are more likely than men to create slides with
the kind of subtle contrast that would be award-winning in a kitchen
design…and invisible to some men. Women tend to have a more
refined sense of color schemes, and if you object to that generalization,
let’s just skip straight to the statistics: colorblindness
is 17 times more prevalent in men than in women.
The other factor that works against us is PowerPoint’s typical
output device. Unlike print and ink, which can be counted on to
produce consistent results, everyone’s monitor is different
and rented projectors are often unpredictable. If a monitor’s
red output is off or a projector’s contrast control has been
tweaked, that slide that you were certain had crisp colors could
wilt by the time it is shown.
Never in the history of PowerPoint usage has a big contract or
sale been lost because someone used white text against a black or
navy background. You simply cannot go wrong with this choice and
if you read no further, we’ve done our jobs. However, there
are appropriate occasions to go with less contrast and it would
be a shame to have to compromise your design because of the seven
percent of us who are unable to appreciate it or because of a faulty
projector.
Sin Number Three:
Stupid Sounds
Let’s all say it together: If we hear one more whoosh accompanying
the entrance of an object, we will low-level format the drive of
the perpetrator. And if we catch you using that insipid camera click
to change from one slide to another, when there is no camera or
photograph in sight, we’re sending the MyDoom virus your way.
We have two problems here, because usually when one decides to
add a whoosh to an object, one also decides that it is best to make
that object fly in, checkerboard out, crawl up, or spiral downward.
Two sins for the price of one.
This one should be easy: Does the object in question really make
a sound? Are you showing an airplane coming in for a landing? If
so, then go on to the next question; if not, then WHACK…just
don’t do it, okay?? Next question: Can you create a realistic
replica of the sound? Third: Can you integrate the audio clip in
a smooth way, so it doesn’t seem as if you scotch taped a
bullhorn to the projector?
Many users are drawn to the typewriter sound that comes with PowerPoint,
but usually the effort ends up sounding
like this. People do not type as if they are using a machine
gun, rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat-tat. If you are trying to represent a paragraph
being typed onto the screen, ask yourself how it would sound if
you were typing it. Short of getting a microphone and recording
your own typing (which is a good idea, by the way), you will need
to recreate the rhythm, pattern, and the pace of real typing.
Adding sound to a presentation is about much more than just going
to Insert | Movies and Sounds. That’s the easy part—the
challenging part is making the audio clip sound as if it belongs.
Too often, inserted sounds start harshly and end abruptly, calling
far too much attention to themselves. If you intend to use audio
clips in professional presentations, you will need to do what PowerPoint
itself does not know how to do: refine the sound. You might need
to fade the sound in and/or fade it out, add an echo to the end,
and adjust its volume.
There are dozens of free and try-and-buy wave file editors available
to you, and it almost doesn’t matter which one you choose;
just that you do choose one. Relying on PowerPoint to make an audio
clip sound good is delusional, and relying on the few measly ones
that come with Office…WHACK!
Sin Number Four:
Using and Abusing Photos
Before I give anyone the wrong impression, let me say that I am
a huge proponent of integrating photography in presentations. The
digital photography revolution has been the best thing to come to
PowerPoint in the program’s history. Photos are better than
clipart in almost every situation.
But let’s please remember what a photograph is: it is a literal
depiction of something. When you use it, it means that you are literally
depicting something. Therefore, you must make sure that the thing
you are literally depicting is related to the thing you are talking
about.
I give you Defense Exhibit
1 This ocean horizon photo is quite attractive, even when seeing
it for the zillionth time. The problem is that it has absolutely
nothing to do with technology. At best, it is bereft of context,
and at worst, disingenuous. It sends an instant disconnect to the
audience—here is some bling for you, please be impressed…maybe
you’ll even think I took the photo myself in my private helicopter.
It wouldn’t take much to save this situation, as the second
slide in Defense Exhibit 1 shows. When you use a photo at full saturation
(normal brightness and full intensity), any text you place atop
it becomes linked to it—they become one. In this case, the
text and the photo need some separation, which we achieved by sinking
the photo into the background. To do this, we placed a blue rectangle
over the photo and gave it a touch of transparency. And just putting
the word “horizon” into the subtitle at least tells
the audience that you tried to connect the photo to your message.
•
You can erase a career full of PowerPoint sins by considering the
following: there is more than one way to show off. You can show
off in PowerPoint by loading up on gratuitous effects, or you can
show off by not. With the latter approach, you show off your sense
of restraint—you proclaim that you know what is important
in a presentation and what is not. That is an invaluable commodity
for modern-day PowerPoint users. And one less person that we’d
have to whack upside the head.
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