April 29, 2009 by Jerry
The Microsoft Office Online site offers users of PowerPoint 2007 a variety of graphical templates for download, one of which is to combine picture and text in one frame, as in the image above. I have taken the liberty of editing the image by reversing the position of the picture and the text as below. Feel the difference? Now let’s raise the ante by increasing the amount of text in each picture and text combination into four short bullets, as is often done in presentations. Feel the
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April 28, 2009 by Jerry
In yesterday’s post you read about the importance of the pause when introducing graphics—particularly animation—during a PowerPoint slideshow. Here’s a vivid example of how pausing helped that most mission-critical of all presentations, an IPO road show, and the case in point: Dolby Laboratories. I was privileged to coach the company’s CEO, Bill Jasper, and his executive team to develop their pitch to potential investors. We spent the better part of five days together focusing on every aspect of their presentation including the narrative structure of their story, the design and animation of their slides, and body language and voice of
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April 27, 2009 by Jerry
Mark Twain’s 19th Century adage, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” is applicable to 21st Century business presentations. What everybody talks about in business today is Microsoft PowerPoint, the medium of choice for presentations, and how to avoid making a visual hindrance of what is supposed to be a visual aid; how to avoid being guilty of the all-too-common opprobrium: Death by PowerPoint. Multiple Amazon listings, abundant bookstore shelves, countless web sites, and numerous state-of-the-art graphics studios, are all bursting at the seams with advice about how to design slides for presentations. Yet nobody is
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April 24, 2009 by Jerry
The default for building text in Microsoft PowerPoint—and the universal practice in presentations—is to dim the outbound bullet by turning it gray, making it almost disappear into the background, as if to say, “I’m done with that item.” Small problem: you’re not quite done with it; for it is still partially visible to your audience. If they should want to refer back to a prior bullet, they would have to squint to see it. A slight discomfort, but a discomfort nonetheless for your audience. Please click below and see the effect in animation: Get the latest Flash Player to see
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April 23, 2009 by Jerry
I am grateful to Geetesh Bajaj, and his excellent site, indezine.com, for last month’s feature story about The Power Presenter. It provided the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the site after a delinquent gap. It was particularly satisfying to read a recent article called “Show Me! What Brain Research Says about Visuals in PowerPoint,” written by Robert Lane and Dr. Stephen Kosslyn. Dr. Kosslyn chairs the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and his 35 years of research have focused on how the brain recalls visual stimuli in the form of mental imagery. In his article, Dr. Kosslyn provided scientific
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April 22, 2009 by Jerry
In yesterday’s post you read about how using Microsoft PowerPoint for both presentations and documents creates many inefficient variations of the latter: speaker notes, uniform messages, leave-behinds, and send-aheads. Hopefully, yesterday’s post banished send-aheads forever; today we’ll aim to do the same to speaker notes. A woman who is a senior engineering manager at a public telecom equipment company was one of the participants in a recent Power Presentations program. True to her technical nature, she wanted to be as accurate in her presentation as in her work; so when she headed up to the front of the room
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April 21, 2009 by Jerry
As part of our continuing quest to drive a wedge between presentations and documents, you read in yesterday’s post about how, in the pressured world of business, multi-tasking and repurposing are equated with efficiency. These practices result in the inefficient use of Microsoft PowerPoint for both presentations and documents—with multiple variations of the latter: speaker notes, uniform messages, leave-behinds, and send-aheads. Of all the many shortcuts the worst is the last: using PowerPoint for both the presentation and a preview of the presentation, as in “Send me your slides in advance.” The primary perpetrators of this duality are the solicited—the
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April 20, 2009 by Jerry
In May 2004, following the release of Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, I wrote an article for The Toastmaster magazine in which I took to task the critics who faulted the software for poor presentations. No less an authority than Edward Tufte, the well-known graphics guru and the author of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, contends that “PowerPoint routinely disrupts and trivializes content.” That point of view, I noted at the time, is akin to blaming the Mont Blanc pen for illiteracy and illegibility. Disruption and trivialization of presentation graphics are the fault of the user. Five years and another release of
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April 17, 2009 by Jerry
Because of the creative aspect of presentation development, we can often find guidance in other related fields of communication such as writing, television, and music. In yesterday’s blog, you read advice from Mark Twain, and in previous blogs from such diverse sources as Oprah Winfrey and Fred Astaire. Today, we focus on a creative technique used by Mike Nichols, the noted director of big Broadway theater comedies (his most recent is Spamalot) and hit Hollywood films (his most recent is Charley Wilson’s War). This week, Nichols was the subject of a retrospective of his earlier films (The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge)
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April 16, 2009 by Jerry
This month marks the publication date of yet another book by Mark Twain, the great American writer. Amazon lists 8,517 Twain items consisting of various editions of his own works and works about him. The current release, Who is Mark Twain?, is a collection of twenty-four previously unpublished pieces that were handpicked by Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Hirst had plenty to choose from. So prolific was Twain, his quotes alone—some actual, some apocryphal—have become a cottage industry. One of the most famous—and quite applicable to presentations—came from an
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