My daughter Jamie is a capable and confident softball player, having just completed a third consecutive all-star season. This fall, she tried out for a competitive traveling team, comprised of highly-skilled eighth- and ninth-graders, and in her own words, “I used to be one of the best players on my team—now I suck.”

I’m not sure if she was angling for sympathy, but if so, she didn’t get any from her dad. I think this is one of the best things that she could have possibly done. The humility, the wake-up call, and the realization that she now has to work harder will all serve her well. Perhaps we’ll look back and see that the comfortable little bubble of being the big fish in a small pond was holding her back.

We aren’t suggesting that you use the S word to describe your proficiency with presentation development, but we love to watch our patrons leave their own comfort zones. “I can’t believe I called myself advanced when I signed up,” one woman said last year. “There is so much I don’t know. Can I please change that to beginner?”

Oh, the parallels I can draw, watching Jamie bunt for the first time. She can’t just stick the bat out there any longer; now she has to read the motion of the shortstop to determine where to bunt the ball. Now she can’t just hit; she needs to know how to hit the ball to the right side of the infield to move a runner from second to third. Now she must know to hit the cutoff or throw through to a base. She had no clue about any of that before she was pushed.

Lest you think you have signed up for boot camp or something, we won’t bark at you as Jamie’s new coach does. We find that our patrons supply their own motivation to further their skills, and we consider it pure joy to be witnesses to it. We love watching you make your first custom show, identify an “audience-centric” message, post your slides online for sharing, and a couple hundred other pearls and nuggets that together we will uncover across these four days.

So many in the presentation community are content with the skillset they have now, comfortable knowing that they meet their deadlines and perform their tasks.

Comfort zones are overrated. Stepping outside the box is where the action is, and we are so incredibly pleased and grateful that you have chosen to take that journey with us.

We promise to make you dizzy with new ideas and to encourage you to rethink everything you took for granted about presentation design, creation, and delivery. And we promise to do it without once telling you that you suck or making you run the bases blindfolded.

We give lots of presentations for small groups (a few of us and a few of them). Our primary audiences are financial institutions where our product would be a good fit for their customers base, and we are trying to convince them to partner with us to offer our products.

In these meetings, we might be able to offer handouts, but not likely to be able to access a screen to have a “live” show. Sometimes, it is challenging to even crack open the deck as the audience members just don’t want it. Do we try to force it or just go with the flow?

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Never, ever force a slide deck upon someone. The members of your audience are reluctant enough to sit through them on their own volition. The implicit formality of projected material makes it less than ideal for small meetings which tend to be more like conversations. While it is possible to create a scenario in which it is comfortable to show slides in that environment, it would require a willing partner. If the partner is not willing, it is never going to feel right.

Presenters in small gatherings should ALWAYS be prepared, ready, and able to speak off the cuff, off script, and without aids. From there, they could introduce them gradually, starting with one or two printed sheets, working up to a handout or leave behind. And maybe, in the course of conversation about a deep topic, you could flip open your notebook to show a visual that would help illuminate the topic.

But trying to get to the slide deck misses the real objective. In small meetings, eye contact is the promised land. You don’t want anything to take away from that while you are trying to engage and connect.

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Follow up from Ed:

In a small group, if you feel you need to hand something out to get the conversation going, would you hand out a two- or three-page summary for conversation, and then leave a more detailed presentation behind?

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I would not hand anything out to “get the conversation going” — I would try to make that happen myself. Remember, you are the presentation. And in small groups, your eyes are everything.

Once going, then yes, I would be ready with a short summary, preferably by directing them to the summary section of the handout. I am unconvinced as to the wisdom of having two separate leave behinds, given the likelihood that one of them would be misplaced. My instincts would be toward a single handout with an executive summary in place.

Jeffrey Kontir of Deloitte LLP asked an interesting question the other day on the Powerpointers group at LinkedIn. “How do you print a final copy of a slide deck that has a lot of builds and animation?”

Central to Jeffrey’s dilemma is the nature of object animation. Unlike a slide transition — where motion takes place only after all of the slide is visible — animation on a slide involves objects coming and going and objects often being layered one atop the other. Were you to print the slide, you would see every object on the slide, without regard for when and where the objects made their entrances or exits. If an object were supposed to fly in from the left and then exit stage right, neither of those events would be represented accurately in print. If Jeffrey wants to represent the builds in a printout, he needs to be able to print a slide while right in the middle of it.

The stock answer to this problem is to tear down the animation on a slide and instead create a series of slides, each one representing a part of the build. That would be a perfectly fine approach were you to think of it before you started, not so good as a mid-course correction. But who ever thinks of these things out of the gate?

The strategy I would suggest instead does not require a total upheaval to your normal slide-creation style. All it requires is screen capture software, such as TechSmith’s Snagit and the following procedure:

1. Configure your screen capture software to activate with a hotkey and to save to sequentially-named files on your system.
2. Run the slide show.
3. At the critical points in a build, capture the screen image.
4. Keep capturing as the build of a slide progresses, pressing the hotkey at the appropriate times.
5. When done, locate all of the JPG files that represent the builds. It will be easy to follow the sequence, thanks to the sequential filenames.
6. If you own Adobe Acrobat, combine the JPGs into a single PDF file and print.

1. INCREDIBLE LEARNAGE: You can’t possibly imagine how much you’ll learn at this conference, with dedicated tracks of seminars for PowerPoint technique, presentation design and delivery, and our Special Delivery track, focusing on all forms of presentation delivery. Check out the schedule of seminars.

2. UNPARALLELED EXPERTISE: It’s one thing to know PowerPoint; lots of people know that. It’s another thing to know about creating a compelling presentation; far fewer people know that. And it’s yet an altogether different thing to be able to teach these concepts; only a select few know how to do that. How few? Let’s see…Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, Rick Altman, Julie Terberg, Carmen Taran…what a coincidence, they’re all on the conference team…

3. AWESOME HELP: The conference’s Help Center is quite simply the finest opportunity for support with presentation software and technology anywhere on the planet. It’s free, it’s drop-in, it’s all hands-on, and it’s open from morning ‘til night. Some come to the conference just for the Help Center.

4. BECOME PART OF A COMMUNITY: At the Presentation Summit, you do more than learn; you develop contacts within the presentation community that you’ll keep for the rest of your career. When you put 200 passionate people together under one roof, the bonds created go way beyond that of a webinar, a discussion forum, or a faceless trade show. People who have met at our conferences have gone into business together, hired one another, visited each other during trips, and have even married.

5. MEET THE DEVELOPERS: Microsoft’s PowerPoint development team never misses this event. They take copious notes, they schedule late-night schmooze sessions, and they attend all of the seminars. They know the value of having so many earnest users of their product together at once and they place extraordinary value on your input.

6. THE EXPO: You’ll be the kid in the candy store when you visit the Summit Expo on Tuesday of conference week. Over a dozen vendors, all of them offering goods and services dedicated to the presentation marketplace. Lots of show specials, lots of giveaways, lots of opportunity to meet the people who make the products that make your life easier as a presentation professional.

7. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: This is not a huge, faceless trade show — nobody enjoys attending those. The Summit limits enrollment to 225 so everyone is assured of receiving personal attention. Conference organizers are experts at hosting events of this size — they know exactly the type of programming and scheduling that fits.

8. YOU RUN THE PLACE: You pick and choose which seminars to attend; you do not have to commit to any one track ahead of time and you can cross tracks at will. Furthermore, several of the sessions could feature you! Submit work that you are particularly proud of or believe needs work and you could find yourself being showcased or made over. Sign up for the Trivia Contest and you could be part of a team participating in a unique blend of Jeopardy and Family Feud. Sign up early and you could venture out for an exclusive digital photography field trip to a San Diego landmark.

9. YOU WILL BE WELL FED: You’ll get robust continental breakfasts each morning and a fully-catered sit-down lunch on Monday and Tuesday.

10. YOU’LL HAVE AN AMAZING TIME: The Presentation Summit is like summer camp for adults; you would not have thought it possible to have such a good time at an event where you also learn so much. With relaxing meals where you don’t have to scurry out to the restaurant, evening socials, and a fabulous resort hotel perfectly situated on San Diego’s Mission Bay, you will remember the four days that you spend with your colleagues probably for the rest of your life.

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Why the Summit is Different (video)

Official FAQ page

How to convince the boss to let you attend

I have created a complex animation in version 2003. A group of photos appears in a grid and then the date of an event fades in next to the photos. When I click the Play button in the Animation task pane, the date appears as expected. However, when I view the full slide show it doesn’t appear. I have a lot of animation on the page and this is the last one to appear before the show transitions to the next slide. Is there some kind of limit to the number of animations on a slide? But even if there were, why would it work with the Play button but not in full screen?

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Lori gave two important clues here to the problem:

• The animation in question behaves properly when viewed by the preview button in the animation task pane, but not when the slide is played.
• The animation is the last one scheduled to play on the slide before the slide transitions away.

First, if there is a limit to the number of animations that can appear on a slide, no human has reached it without first being felled by his or her own sanity limit. We have literally seen hundreds of animations placed on a slide. So that’s not it. If the animation previews properly, it almost certainly means that Lori created it correctly. But what is different about previewing a slide and running a show? In the case of the former, you only watch one slide’s worth of animation. In the case of the latter, you watch the concert of slide business and transition business, and as Lori points out, the slide is designed to transition away to the next automatically.

Lori has been victimized by PowerPoint’s inconsistent behavior when slide transitions are set to Automatic instead of the more typical On Mouse Click. They become TOO automatic—the entire slide marches down the street, without waiting for anything. When a slide’s transition is set to Automatic, any animations set to On Click behave like After Previous, and any duration time that the slide is supposed to wait for before transitioning is often ignored. Lori thought she was covering her bases by adding five seconds to the slide transition:

This should have allowed the final animation to do its thing and have its affect before the slide changes. However, PowerPoint 2003 is prone to failure. Slide advancement set to Automatic is just too automatic.

Lori’s animation of the date actually does play; it’s just that the slide transition happens at the same moment so nobody sees it. She could see this for herself by setting the slide transition back to On Mouse Click.

Lori needs to outsmart PowerPoint and its tendency to not wait before transitioning. This is a job for the “invisible rectangle” strategy:

1. Set the slide transition wait time to 0 (because every so often, that setting is honored, and then it becomes even more infuriating).
2. Draw a small rectangle off the slide.
3. Animate it with Appear, After Previous, and a delay of five seconds.

No matter how impatient PowerPoint is, it won’t transition away from a slide until all of the slide’s business has been conducted. Therefore, this slide will not transition away until the rectangle “appears” and while PowerPoint waits for it to appear, the event date will have its five seconds of fame. Instead of asking PowerPoint to wait the five seconds AFTER all of the slide elements appear, PowerPoint waits the five seconds BEFORE the final animation takes place. That final animation is invisible, taking place off the slide, seeming to us to be a delay before transition.

You’ll find many useful purposes for the invisible rectangle. It can be used to great effect within a series of animations set to With Previous when careful timing is required. Slip in these rectangles just like a carpenter adds shim to a home project.

These people never had any reason to complain about their File, Edit, and View menus, and yet Microsoft took them away. These people regard Microsoft Office as an appliance—a device that they don’t have to think too hard about before using. And then the appliance became unfamiliar. With all of your projects due yesterday, the last thing you want is for your toaster to suddenly start operating like a food processor.

My friends at Microsoft will look unkindly upon my equating PowerPoint to a $35 kitchen appliance, while my friends in the PowerPoint community have taken a dim view of Microsoft’s failure to do the same. Both sides should rejoice, therefore, in the likelihood that Version 2010 promises to put an end to all of the toaster talk. With five years to have become accustomed to the Ribbon, users of PowerPoint 2010 can focus not on how it looks, but on what it does. And when they do, odds are they are going to like what they find. You can see for yourself in the ongoing public beta.

Better Multimedia

Topping the headlines is dramatically better handling of audio and video. Simply put, PowerPoint now knows what the heck to do with imported media, instead of pawning the job off on Windows Media Player and going into virtual hibernation. Taking ownership over multimedia has enabled PowerPoint to join the 21^st century. To wit:

• The range of formats supported is much wider.
• Files can either be embedded or linked to, and you get to choose at the time of import.
• Clips can be trimmed within the program, with intros fading in and outros fading out.
• Videos can run simultaneous to other slide events and objects can be placed atop a video.
• You can insert videos directly from YouTube and other online sites (done live, requiring an Internet connection).
• When embedding a clip, the Optimize Media Compatibility command automatically improves playback quality.
• Slide decks can be saved out as stand-alone video files.
• Videos can be cropped and placed inside non-rectangular shapes.
• Bookmarks can be defined within a clip and other elements can have their animations triggered to those bookmarks.

This last feature is the likely sleeper in the bunch as this brand new concept will be foreign to many. But the creative control that bookmarking a video can give you over training material or mood-evoking content is potentially dramatic. Those who are already working with the beta (or who just downloaded it—see link above) can see an example I have created at

http://www.betterppt.com/media/version2010.pptx

In this file, I use techniques that would never have occurred to me prior to version 2010.

PowerPoint 2010’s improved support for video includes a dedicated ribbon and on-slide playback controls.

Customization: Baby Steps

Of those who have shown disdain for the Office Ribbon, many have done so simply because the Ribbon is not as flexible as version 2003 menus. Indeed, in version 2003 you can place a command anywhere you want; in version 2007 you can only add a command to the Quick Access Toolbar, the row of tiny icons along the top.

In version 2010, you can add a custom group to a ribbon and place commands there. It would be better if commands could be added to existing groups—for instance, the cool new Shape commands belong in the Drawing group, and instead I had to create a new Shapes group to house them. I wish that I could remove elements also, as program developers do not know as well as I which commands I use and do not use. And ideally, we could turn off the auto-switching of the Office Ribbon and then make one killer ribbon with everything we normally use that would always be visible. (LOL, this would get us back to version 2003 functionality!)

But this is progress—we can now create better access to critical commands. The version 2010 interface is also more keystroke-friendly. That’s like tactile gold for us keystroke-aholics.

The Customize dialog box includes dozens of commands that you won’t find on the standard interface. To add them in, you create a custom group on your ribbon of choice.

Slice and Dice your Slide Deck

Another potential sleeper in the new version is Section control. Would that I could have earned a nickel for every time a client has moved slides within a deck and messed it all up. By adding sections to a deck, you make it easier to modularize and organize your slides. You can move entire sections around, hide them from view when they are not relevant to the task, rename them, and see an organized structure of your deck in Slide Sorter view.

This is not the same as a custom show, which defines a subset of slides that you could treat as its own slide show, and it is not the same as hiding a slide. This is strictly for organizational purposes, and as such, promises to preserve the sanity of those who create slide-heavy decks.

This slide deck has been defined by four distinct sections, each of which can be named, hidden from view, and moved to another place in the deck.

Insert Screenshot

Using PowerPoint to create technical documentation or application tutorials just got much easier with this cool new feature. Go to Insert | Screenshot and you will be greeted with a small drop-down of thumbnails of every application that you have open (must be displaying, not minimized). Choose the desired one and in arrives a clean bitmap image of that app window. No cursor or freezing a menu while it is being pulled down—for that you would need dedicated screen capture software like TechSmith’s SnagIt—but for 90% of screenshot work, this new function makes the task a breeze.

The Insert Screenshot command is now the fastest way to get a picture of an app onto a slide.

Clone Animations

Like the Format Painter command that clones visual attributes from one object to another, the Animation Painter will pick up the animation of one object (the one you select) and apply it to any other object (the one you click on). The Animation Painter will not pick up triggers, but it will pick up multiple animations. For instance, if an object has both an entrance and an exit fade applied to it, the new object will inherit both when being painted. While I continue to wait impatiently for a set of animation styles that can be defined and applied to objects, the Animation Painter will do for the time being

Alas, my other big wish-list item for animation was not addressed, either: directional fade. If Wipe and Fly can both move in a specific direction, why can’t Fade? My favorite text animation—a cascading fade, whereby each element fades in a moment before the previous one is finished—remains a tedious maneuver using With Previous and careful timing. If I could designate that a string of bullets are to fade in from the top to the bottom, I could save hours of tiresome mousing per project.

New Transitions…Run for the Hills!

Objectively speaking, PowerPoint’s transition engine has received a nice infusion of functionality. Most important is the ability to set the duration of the slide transition in fractions of seconds, instead of the comically-blunt choices of slow, medium, and fast.

Subjectively, the new transitions will get more attention. In fact, they might steal the entire show, as thousands of users will not be able to resist adding the Vortex, Shred, or Ferris Wheel transition to one of their slides.

Oy vey.

In fairness, existing transitions have been improved and several have more choices and options. And a few of the new ones are quite useful—I have long wanted a transition like Cube (where the slides appear to be pasted onto two adjacent sides of a cube while it rotates) to show that two slides are closely linked by a common idea. But the amount of abuse that will result from this is likely to be staggering, so brace yourself.

Get ready for a whole new round of transition abuse…

Broadcast a Slide Show

You can stage mini webinars from within PowerPoint 2010, thanks to this new feature. When you broadcast a slide deck, it is sent to the Officeapps Live server and you are provided with a URL to share. All those who ping the URL can watch in real time as you drive the slide show. In order to broadcast, you must have a Windows Live ID, but your audience needs only the URL and a browser.

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Add to this list about two dozen small tweaks, such as better nudging, laser pointer control via the mouse (good for webinars), better editing of points on a curve, refinement to the Crop tool, better Paste, and a true SDI interface, where each open file gets its own interface.

With version 2010, Microsoft builds on the development successes of version 2007. Whether Microsoft is guilty or not of forcing a user interface upon users that didn’t want it is an open question. It is also a moot one: the Ribbon is here to stay, and with version 2010, Microsoft makes a credible effort to make it more accessible and usable to the masses. You might go kicking and screaming or shrieking with delight; either way, version 2010 is likely to make the new Office user interface everyone’s everyday appliance.

What struck me about this whole affair is not so much the article itself. Those of us in the presentation community are used to semi-annual PowerPoint is horrible articles. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, and dozens of online outlets have all written on this subject.

What impressed me the most about this recent article was the reaction. By all of you. At last count, I have received over three dozen emails from friends and colleagues, four postings on my FaceBook wall, a half-dozen text messages, and three requests for interviews from journalists writing follow-up articles.

What was different this time? “It made it to the highest echelons of government,” answered my friend Charlotte. “Even Jon Stewart did a bit about it.” But the first fact isn’t new and the second fact proves my point. This is not the first time that Death by PowerPoint has touched our political leaders. NASA was on the hot seat for poorly-crafted visuals that might have masked the inherent flaws in the Space Shuttle’s tile design. Colin Powell used PowerPoint-derived charts to make his case for war to the United Nations, prompting Newsweek to suggest that a set of slides drove us into Iraq. And when that happened, Jon Stewart did not consider it worthy of a satirical response. This time, he did.

This time, you all did. This time, you all considered this worthy of conversation. Why is that? Why did you all care so much this time? We are experiencing a collective rise in our consciousness about bad presentation design and I see it everywhere I go. My client list has lots of new names on it, our registration numbers are up for this year’s Presentation Summit, and this week on the softball field, my centerfielder asked me about it…and he’s a plumber.

It’s as if we all reached a simultaneous collective saturation point on bad PowerPoint and we’re not going to take it anymore. But why do we treat PowerPoint differently than other software tools that we use? When you write a bad letter, is Microsoft Word to blame? If you crunch numbers poorly, do you curse Excel? That crappy email you just composed…all Outlook’s fault? And what about all of those ridiculous tweets about what you had for breakfast…okay, well, maybe that is Twitter’s fault, but you see where I am headed here.

It is rarely the violin responsible for the performance — it is almost always the violinist. But we hold in different regard our relationship with PowerPoint. We even use it as a generic — “please create a PowerPoint for next week’s sales meeting.” Few tools have permeated our way of thinking as has this one, and perhaps that is because, unlike with Word and Excel, we practice this craft in public. You create slides as part of an extroverted activity and many people bear witness to your success or lack of same with the tool.

And we’ve had it. We all say no mas.

The disconnect continues, however, with our view of the solution. You would consider it foolhardy to take a class in Word in the hopes of becoming a better writer, and would take a similarly dim view of the notion that accomplishment with Excel qualifies you as an accountant. But that is precisely the expectation people have for PowerPoint: they expect that learning it will turn them into good public speakers. No mas.

Your goal as the presenter is to remove all barriers between you and your audience members so you can share your ideas and expertise with them in the most natural and direct way possible. Conventional slides rarely contribute to that pursuit; they usually become a barrier. They usually work against the presenter, and our first impulse is to blame the slides. Connecting with an audience and delivering a compelling message has very little to do with the software you choose. It has everything to do with how prepared you are to speak to the facts, how in tune you are with your audience, and how much passion you bring to the process.

If we could think of that first, before creating slides, there would be no more Death by PowerPoint.

With a larger audience, the scenario is more realistic, and Dave used last year’s PowerPoint Live as an example. We established #pptlive as the hashtag for use across the four days so patrons at the event and interested community members not attending could stay current.

Even in this environment, backchanneling remains challenging, and this is why I do not share the enthusiasm that some of my colleagues hold for Twitter as a viable vehicle for audience interaction. That said, I want to offer up two scenarios in which it could provide a useful service.

1. In a webinar

While evolving, most webinar plumbing offers deficient means for real-time interaction. Worse, many of the hosting agencies who hire me to give webinars do not allow questions during mid-session, insisting that I wait until the end of a 90-minute webinar before taking them. They tell me that it is too difficult to monitor the questions and selectively unmute phones. When I suggest the onscreen chat module as an alternative, they tell me that for my own protection, they do not enable it, citing too many presenters who have gotten derailed by it.

A Twitter hashtag circumvents all of this foolishness. I can take questions from my audience members and there is not a darn thing that the moderators can do about it…um, I mean I don’t have to trouble my hosts at all. Nobody sees me when I look down at my phone or on my second monitor, I can keep a browser window open for minimal distraction.

2. At a well-staffed conference

Even in a larger venue, using Twitter for audience interaction is problematic. My presenting style is hardly formal; I regularly engage in banter and repartee, even with an audience of over 200. Nonetheless, the few times that I have monitored a backchannel on my handheld, it has taken me out of my rhythm. To say nothing about having to put my damn reading glasses on in order to read a tweat, I find the experience to be more of a barrier before my audience than a bridge to them. And if I feel this, with my loose speaking style, I suspect that a majority of other presenters will not warm to it, either.

The missing puzzle piece is to have savvy room monitors. At the Presentation Summit, we normally ask our room monitors just to greet people as they enter a seminar ballroom, check for badges, and assist the presenter with any various and sundry needs. Not anymore—now we will ask our room monitors to monitor the Twitter tag and report on any questions or comments that they think would add to the fabric of the particular seminar. I think that’s a much better solution than the presenter trying to do it him- or herself.

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I’m not sold on Twitter and FaceBook as a means to reach a presenter in real-time. I might never be, and in that regard, I’m with Dave Paradi on this one. But it deserves the benefit of the doubt, and the above two scenarios are ones in which I am willing to extend it. I’ll keep you posted…

“I need to print the notes pages of a PowerPoint slide deck without the notes. I know that sounds silly — why not just print the slides? I need the slide at the top of the page, just as it appears when you print the notes page, and I need the space at the bottom, where the notes usually are, to be blank.

We are doing handouts this way so that our students can take down their own notes in those blanks as opposed to reading along during presentations. If we print out just slides, it prints the slide large and in the center. I’ve tried messing around with page layout, but haven’t had any luck.”

First, let’s review. The appearance of the notes pages in a slide deck is controlled by a notes master, just as the look of your slides is governed by the slide master. Few people pay much attention to the notes master because they rarely care about redesigning their notes. I don’t spend much time there, either, and my first inclination was hasty. I figured that I could instruct Janice to enter Notes Master view, select the placeholder that holds the notes, and delete it.

As I said, I was wrong.

When you eliminate a placeholder altogether, PowerPoint does not behave well. Like when a limb gets amputated, the brain wants to believe that it is still there. Remove the title placeholder from a standard slide master and PowerPoint 2003 will defy you and keep the titles on the slide. Remove the slide image from the notes master and PowerPoint puts it back. Remove the notes placeholder from the notes master and PowerPoint pretends that it is still there and continues to show you your notes.

The not-so-elegant workaround requires that you placate PowerPoint by not removing the placeholder: instead, just make it invisible. Shrink it down to a manageable size and park it off the boundary of the notes page, like this:

PowerPoint is okay with it being useless, as long as it exists. Now when Janice prints her notes pages, she gets exactly what she was hoping for: the slide image on the top half of the page, and open space on the bottom half.

As I watch the contestants perform in front of live audiences and large television audiences, I cannot help but try to draw parallels to my chosen profession. But when I really think about it, few exist. American Idol might be a fast track to fame for a chosen few, but the rest have to play by rules that few others have to. Idol contestants are typically victimized by three things:

1. They are amateurs. Most of those who make it deep into the competition have had no experience before large audiences and do not know how to engage them. In many cases, even simple performance skills—such as how to hold a microphone or how to move on stage—elude them. This is not meant as a criticism; the rules require that they be amateurs. Simon Cowell conveniently forgets that fact, a few of the younger girls cry, everyone boos him, and it all makes for good television.
2. The standard is impossibly high. This too makes for good television and these kids certainly learn about poise in the face of pressure and strength of character in the face of criticism. But here is my pet peeve: all you regular viewers out there, what is the most common criticism leveled against the contestants (after being “pitchy,” a word I had never heard pre-Idol, despite growing up around accomplished musicians)? Bad song choice, right? They are constantly being harangued for not choosing the right songs. Yet of all of the teen and young-20s pop stars in the top 100 at any one time, less than  50% of them write their own songs or choose which ones to cover. They have producers and studio executives that do that for them. Why are these amateur singers being asked to do that which most of today’s professionals do not even attempt?
3. The scrutiny is extreme. I need look no further than our family’s debate du jour. One of my favorite singers this season is Crystal Bowersox, an unpretentious and wickedly talented young woman. She is everything that is good about Idol—an unassuming mom from a town in Ohio that would probably never have been discovered were it not for Idol. My wife, Becky, however, does not think as highly of her as I do. While she likes Crystal’s voice just fine, she describes her as “too earthy.” That might be a completely legitimate point of view. Bowersox is not glamorous, does not dress particularly well, and puts on no airs whatsoever.  Becky’s right, she is earthy. But I have to wonder: Of all of the artists in Becky’s iPod, in how many cases does she know what the singers look like? In most cases, we like our singers because they sing well—we have no idea about anything else. For all she knows, maybe half of Becky’s favorite artists are earthy. One of my new favorite bands is called Porcupine Tree and I don’t know the first thing about them. Maybe they look like porcupines. On Idol, if you look like a porcupine, you’re not going to win.

The profession of public speaking is different, and thank goodness! Of course your appearance makes up part of a first impression; this is America, after all, where actors can be elected Governor and President and Sarah Palin can, um, be Sarah Palin. But in most cases, audiences care more about whether you can deliver the goods. In a land where “Death by PowerPoint” is in everyone’s lexicon, business presenters don’t have to do a whole lot to distinguish themselves from others. It is not nearly as important what you look like or whether you know how to hold the microphone properly. If you know how to craft an engaging message, if you can speak with passion, and if you can get out from under their slides, you are going to do well.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are easy things. Getting an audience to feel the weight of your message can be very difficult (especially if you get buried by overladen text slides). But they are much purer challenges than the ones with which Idol and other reality shows saddle their contestants.

All of this said, there is one aspect of American Idol that has made its way to our discipline as presenters. As the legions of Twitterers continue to gain traction, your audience can vote on your presentation as if it were a performance. Imagine, your very own Simon Cowell, telling you that your presentation was self-indulgent and horrific.