Outstanding Presentation Webinar Series

Posted by Rick Altman on September 7, 2010 · Leave a Comment

The Outstanding Presentations
Webinars Begin September 15

Free eight-week series showcases
a who’s who in the industry

What’s the next best thing to a live conference? A free webinar series that features the best of the best. Get your questions answered from top presentation, PowerPoint, and speaking experts by joining on to the Outstanding Presentations Workshop webinars, hosted and organized by Ellen Finkelstein, presentation specialist, author, and Microsoft MVP.

The workshop begins next Wednesday, Sep 15, with a 60-minute webinar by yours truly, and continues with seven more, each covering a different topic on the presentation landscape. Here is the complete schedule (all webinars begin at 1:00PT / 4:00ET):

Sep 15	Rick Altman	Host of the Presentation Summit and author of Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck
Sep 22	Nancy Duarte	Author of slide:ology
Sep 29	Olivia Mitchell	Blogger at Speaking about Presenting
Oct 6	Robert Lane	Author of Relational Presentation and Founder of Aspire Communications
Oct 13	Dana Bristol-Smith	Founder of Speak for Success and the Speak for Success Women’s Leadership Institute
Oct 27	Jim Endicott	President of Distinction Communication
Nov 3	Scott Schwertly	Author of How to Be a Presentation God and CEO of Ethos3
Nov 10	Ellen Finkelstein	Author of PowerPoint for Teachers and PowerPoint MVP

The webinars are completely free, but they do require advance registration. For complete details and to sign up, visit

www.outstandingpresentationsworkshop.com

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with Delivery, Design, PowerPoint, Technique

Slide decoration: how much is too much?

Posted by Rick Altman on August 2, 2010 · Leave a Comment

There is a great conversation taking place right now in the Presentation Designers group at LinkedIn. Someone more LinkedIn savvy than I would have to say how to send you there via link, when membership into the group is required, so instead, I am excerpting a few of the comments here. Bruce Gabrielle of Insights Works in Seattle, asked the following question:

I’m writing a book about use of PowerPoint in business, and one question I have is: how much decoration on a slide is too much? I define decoration as graphic elements that do not convey meaning to the reader.

On one hand, Edward Tufte and other information designers say “design, don’t decorate”. If it doesn’t add meaning, take it off. On the other hand, educators have learned that irrelevant but interesting details can increase emotional interest and make learners more motivated to learn.

What do you think? Is a little decoration on a slide okay (drop shadows, etc). And when does a “little” become “too much”?

That was all that we needed to open up a small floodgate, and I was the first to turn on the water:

“…irrelevant but interesting details can increase emotional interest… I disagree with this statement to my very core. Perhaps if you are teaching a group of first graders, but not intelligent adults. Irrelevant is not interesting and it is not emotional. Irrelevant is irrelevant and it has no place in visual communication.”

Next came Adam, a comedian and a man with some stage experience:

“‘Interesting’ is never irrelevant. A detail might not carry any facts, but if it increases engagement, that’s a great thing. You sound a lot like you are saying that emotion is for kids and facts are for adults. I hoped we had moved on from that nonsense.”

Me: “I am not saying that. I am saying that emotion is for everyone but irrelevance is rarely emotional.”

Konrad from Dallas TX: Why would you include elements that convey no meaning? Anything that does not contribute to your message only interferes and distracts. That said, part of your message is your personal or corporate brand. For example, you probably want to convey that you are a trustworthy person worth listening to. This is where overall style, consistency and design come in – not ‘decoration’ as you have defined it.”

Adam: “Because meaning is not everything. I also work on stage. Why do I bother with costume, lights, stage sets? Why do I have background music? Why do I even act? Why not just read the script clearly to the audience, or print it out for them? Because all these ‘irrelevant’ elements can increase engagement, emotion, interest, attention.”

Me: “Adam makes strong points, which I respect on their face. So I had to ask myself: Why do I disagree so fervently with them? Are Adam’s use of costume and stage sets similar to a presenter’s decision to adorm a slide with clipart or to add a boomerang entrance to a title? Does Adam’s use of props speak to his true purpose any different than a presenter’s use of decor?

“In a word, yes.

“However similar they might be on one level, Adam’s role as a stage performer carries important distinctions to a presenter’s role as a presenter. The elements that Adam cites above contribute to his role as an actor: he is adopting a personna, he is playing a role, he is taking on a character that is different than his actual person. It is vital to a presenter’s success that he not do that; that she be utterly genuine. Naked in front of their audiences. Decor does not contribute in any way toward that. And I suspect in a different setting, where we’re not debating as a matter of course, Adam might acknowledge that it is possible for a stage performer to go overboard with decor, as well.

“One of the emotional appeals of stage performers is in their total immersion into a character. Perhaps the most important emotional appeal of presenters is in their avoidance of same — in their absolute authenticity and genuineness.”

Adam: “Great thoughts, thanks. But now I have to jump in with both feet. When I am preaching the application of theatrical thinking and technique to the business world (or to presentations), I often hear the criticism that I ‘want people to be fake, to pretend to be something they are not.’ This criticism is based on a fundamental and massive misconception of theater — the idea that theater is a form of pretense.

“This is manifestly not the case. Great actors do not ADD anything to themselves in acting. Instead, they selectively REVEAL. On stage — whether acting or presenting — I am never someone else. I reveal some aspect of myself to the audience. I reveal my genuine enthusiasm for the theme, or my real worries about the situation. Only thus can I be genuine, be authentic.”

Jon from New York City: “There is obviously a gray area where we can’t pinpoint the exact moment that an aesthetic becomes a distraction. Just as we can’t say when life actually begins or what pornography actually is. It’s more of a ‘you know it when you see it’ feeling.

“When I look at a slide with horrible clipart and meaningless animations, I know that it’s wrong and can easily pinpoint what to remove or change. But I can’t say that the imagery or animation needs to be removed because they are bad. The difference has to do with application, quality, and sensibility among others.

“Of course costumes, props, and set design are important to theater when used effectively. Of course imagery/decoration/aesthetics are important to presentations when used effectively. But I can’t put a clear definition on effective. I just know it when I see it.

“Adam and Rick, you’re both right, because this is an impossible question to answer.”

Me: “Jon’s right — we recognize it when we see it. And because the presentation community has been subject to such a high volume of misuse and abuse, because Death by PowerPoint is practically the norm today, we have become more aware of red flags around gratuitousness. If our trigger finger for decorative baubles is a bit sensitive, there is good cause.”

Angela from the UK: “You have to go back and redefine the term ‘relevant.’ If the graphic or decoration subconsiously leads the audience to a line of thought you wish them to go on, then it has relevance. Personally, I do not add anything which does not have relevance. I might use a picture as a background, but that picture will be part of the message I want to get across, and will convey a theme throughout the presentation.”

At this point, Adam offered up a link to a humorous video in which he shows how to storm a castle with his bare hands. It is fine physical comedy and he makes the point that he is all the decor that is needed in the presentation. No labeling is required to create relevance.

Mike from Florida intervenes to argue that “a lot of presentations are speaker support, not speaker replacement.”

At which point, Adam makes the point on which he and I can find complete agreement:

“What you call a ‘presentation,’ I call a ’slide deck.’ For me, the word ‘presentation’ refers to the whole thing — presenter, props, script, visuals, sound, handouts. etc. I agree that the slide deck is speaker support, not speaker replacement. It can be valuable, even priceless. But I believe it is seldom essential and it is never the presentation.

“Whatever the situation, whatever the audience, my basic philosophy remains the same: The PRESENTER is the presentation.”

Amen to that…

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with PowerPoint, Technique

Comfort Zones are Overrated

Posted by Rick Altman on July 20, 2010 · 1 Comment

This is the greeting that I offered in the published proceedings from last year’s conference. In the run-up to this year’s Presentation Summit, we think it makes for interesting reading…

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.

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with Design, PowerPoint, Technique

Printing Animations: Can you spell oxymoron…?

Posted by Rick Altman on June 9, 2010 · 5 Comments

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:

Configure your screen capture software to activate with a hotkey and to save to sequentially-named files on your system.
Run the slide show.
At the critical points in a build, capture the screen image.
Keep capturing as the build of a slide progresses, pressing the hotkey at the appropriate times.
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.
If you own Adobe Acrobat, combine the JPGs into a single PDF file and print.

There are plenty of ways to print JPG files, but the little-known technique with Acrobat is the best. Versions of Acrobat released within the last four years place a command on the Windows context menu (the right-click menu) named “Combine supported files in Acrobat.” That is perfect — gather and print, and you’re set.

Essentially, you are converting each build to a static image, much like if you were to convert each build to its own slide. But this is done on the fly and does not involve any tearing down and rebuilding of the slides. Try it the next time you encounter the challenge that bedeviled Jeffrey.

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with PowerPoint, Technique

What Happened to My Animation??

Posted by Rick Altman on May 19, 2010 · 1 Comment

Lori Gauthier is with St. Clair County Community Health in Port Huron MI. She shared her latest angst with us:

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?

___________________________

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:

Set the slide transition wait time to 0 (because every so often, that setting is honored, and then it becomes even more infuriating).
Draw a small rectangle off the slide.
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.

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with PowerPoint, Technique

PowerPoint 2010: Building a better toaster

Posted by Rick Altman on May 13, 2010 · 8 Comments

To say that Office 2007 weathered difficult conditions in its five-year run is an understatement. Despite an impressive feature set and relatively high stability and performance, legions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint users resisted the move, in some cases with all their will and might.

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.

_____________________________

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.

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with PowerPoint, Technique

It’s Never the Violin

Posted by Rick Altman on May 7, 2010 · 5 Comments

I was on the road all of last week when the New York Times published its article about the Pentagon and its commission of Death by PowerPoint (“We have met the enemy and it is PowerPoint.”) This is my first opportunity to comment on it, which suggests that my blogging techniques are below subpar if I can’t post from the road. (I know, I’m pathetic.)

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.

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with PowerPoint

Can a Notes Page Have no Notes?

Posted by Rick Altman on April 20, 2010 · 2 Comments

This from Janice, a presentation coordinator for Wisconsin-based AMSOIL, INC, makers of synthetic motor oil:

“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.”

Upon reading Janice’s email, I figured the answer would be simple. Perhaps not obvious, but simple: remove the notes placeholder from the notes master. I was wrong.

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.

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with PowerPoint, Technique

Images by Committee

Posted by Rick Altman on January 12, 2010 · 1 Comment

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.

Filed under Editorial · Tagged with Design, PowerPoint, Technique

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