PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Apply Reflection Effects to Shapes in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows

This tutorial is part of the effects series for PowerPoint 2007. We already showed you how you can apply a shadow effect and tweak the shadow options. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how you can quickly add a reflection to a shape.

Note: Although you can add both a shadow and reflection effect to any object in PowerPoint 2007 or higher versions, it’s good to use just one of these two effects.

Learn how to apply Reflection effects to selected shapes in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Effects, PowerPoint 2007, Shapes, Tutorials

PowerPoint Slide Design in 2009: Conversation with Olivia Mitchell

Olivia Mitchell has been a Toastmaster, a management development trainer for a major bank, and a political candidate. Now she teaches others how to become more confident and effective presenters – through face-to-face training courses in New Zealand at Effective Speaking and her blog Speaking about Presenting.

Geetesh: Can you tell more about what got you interested in design changes for PowerPoint slides? And how did the idea of a group blog come about?

Olivia: Most of my course participants and visitors to my blog already know that bullet points are awful, but they don’t know what to do about it. I want to make it easy for people to transition from bullet-point slides to visual slides.

Many presentation design bloggers have a particular design style, and that comes through on their blogs. So I see my role as digesting all the great design styles that are out there and showing people how they can adopt those styles. For example, see my post The Top 7 PowerPoint slide designs.

The group blog came about because of a post by Laura Bergells from the Maniactive blog. Laura argued that in some cases, we need a return to more detailed slides. I started composing a blog post to respond to what Laura had written but realized that initiating a wide-ranging debate would be more interesting. I broadened the debate by suggesting that the theme of their posts should be “What you’d like to see in PowerPoint slide design in 2009.”

I invited presentation bloggers and selected experts to contribute. There’s now a total of 40 contributions. It seems to be an issue that people wanted to write about.

Geetesh: What’s your opinion about changes in design?

Olivia: I totally support the move away from bullet-point slides.

But I think there is an issue with integrating new design approaches into everyday business culture. It’s all very well to say that businesses should put as many resources into their PowerPoint slides as their brochures or annual reports, but that’s not going to happen. The reality is that everyday business people will continue to put together the majority of PowerPoint slideshows. They are not going to read design books or read the archives of Presentation Zen. They need quick and simple ways of putting together slides that don’t suck.

Geetesh: Can you quote some opinions from the numerous blog posts that have been put up as part of this group blog initiative?

Olivia: Here are some of the themes that have come through.

First, from the presentation bloggers who are in the trenches working with business people, there comes the theme that most presentations still suck. Here’s Bert Decker:

I would estimate 90% of all types of presentations are created by people who go to their computers and start the process by using the PowerPoint outliner or going right to writing text and bullets on the slides themselves. So, the end result is totally PowerPoint-driven, and we have information without influence and data without emotion.

Many other bloggers echoed this.

There are two main controversies that came through. The first one is “Does Design Matter?”. On the one hand, you have Joey Asher saying:

But ultimately, my position on PowerPoint is this: it’s largely irrelevant to whether you accomplish your goals. That’s because PowerPoint and other visuals, no matter how graphically pleasing, don’t inspire audiences, sell ideas, or win business.

and on the other, Ellen Finkelstein:

I’d like presenters in 2009 to know that design is important. Good design provides a professional, custom look that says that the presenter cared enough about the audience to do more than slap on a default background. Companies hire professionals to design their websites and printed brochures; why not their presentations, which are just as important?

The second controversy is “Simplicity versus Detail”. This is the issue that Laura Bergells discussed in the post that sparked the project. The majority suggested that there should be one idea per slide and that should be supported by a visual.

But there was also a significant minority who suggested that it should depend – this from Brent Dykes:

I am concerned that rather than adding the simple, visual approach to presenters’ “toolboxes,” presenters will use it as a hammer for all presentation situations. Just because bullet points may be perceived as the duct tape of PowerPoint design (inelegant and ugly), it doesn’t mean bullet points aren’t effective in certain situations.

Many bloggers used this opportunity to reiterate key design principles – there’s a lot of unanimity around these — which will provide clear guidance to presenters. For example:

• Remove extraneous detail from your slides
• One idea per slide
• Put details in the handout.

Finally, many bloggers also looked at what might be ahead. The most interesting theme here was the influence of social media techniques on PowerPoint and presenting. Laura Bergells suggested that:

The brevity of Twitter can make you a better designer. A better headline writer. A better presenter. Using and studying Twitter can be a powerful exercise in how to get your point across swiftly and succinctly.

I’ll be publishing four round-up posts to highlight these themes. The first one is already published: PowerPoint Slide Design in 2009: Does Design Matter?

You May Also Like: Slide Design in 2009: Changes, by Geetesh Bajaj

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Design, Interviews, Olivia Mitchell, Opinion, PowerPoint

Visual Presenter: Conversation with Damian McDonald

Damian McDonald is the founder of Visual Newmedia, which has over 15 years of experience in developing communication solutions for a number of leading global brands. Damian heads the team in the development and implementation methodologies of Visual’s presentation management solution – Visual Presenter.

Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the problems being faced by folks who create and deliver presentations?

Damian: We’ve been developing presentations for corporate clients since the mid-nineties and have found that the issues businesses face in the area of presenting to their own clients have remained pretty consistent throughout that time.

Obviously, the most-widely used presentation application is Microsoft PowerPoint, which is simple enough that most presenters can construct a basic piece of work within it. The problem lies in a more macro sense: in particular, the management and control within the business of the various presentations that have been created.

From a business point of view, there tends to be no brand consistency across this multitude of presentations, both visually and within the content itself. This is an issue even for smaller organizations. With individuals ‘going it alone’ to create presentation collateral, the brand messages are mixed, confused, personalized, and worse, often obsolete. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the end-user — another issue we find time and again is that those presenting cannot find the information within the company’s network drives to even update what they are going to present. This is especially true for those working remotely who, ironically, tend to be in the kinds of roles that have to deliver most of the company presentations, and so they simply create and recreate ‘individualized’ presentations, and the information being delivered becomes more and more off-brand, off-message, and out of date.

We also find that even if businesses want to keep their front-line personnel updated with the latest information for client presentations, they often have no mechanism with which to do this. Or you’ll find they can get information to one business channel, but not others, so you still have a frighteningly inconsistent brand message being communicated to clients and prospective clients. So it becomes a vicious cycle, in a sense. These are all issues that we created Visual Presenter to address.

Something else we worked on while developing Visual Presenter was addressing the issues in PowerPoint when it comes to linking associated media files. Clients no longer accept sitting through ‘Death by PowerPoint’ bullet point after bullet point. People expect multimedia, and any effective presentation will include this.

Unfortunately, as multimedia technology has evolved with PowerPoint, media formats such as video, audio, and Flash struggle to maintain valid media links. For example, if you import a video over the network and then disconnect from the network when it then comes to presenting, PowerPoint can’t play the video as it tries unsuccessfully to search for the file on the ‘non-existent’ network location. Very frustrating for the presenter, and very unprofessional.

And how do you merge interactive custom shows? Again, we’ve frequently found that those presenters who do begin to get a bit smarter with the advanced functionality of PowerPoint are hampered by the fact that currently, there is no way to merge interactive presentations without losing this functionality and having to recreate it. Again, very restrictive and very frustrating.

The end result, invariably, is that presenters give up trying to create dynamic presentations, they find they can’t customize material to suit a particular audience, they can’t access new information, and so they go out to the market with tired, inaccurate, unprofessional-looking material, despite the best of intentions. And the organization suffers accordingly.

Geetesh: How does your Visual Presenter product help them in the problem scenarios you explained?

Damian: Working for such a long period of time in this area, and with a large range of businesses, has enabled us to address all these problem scenarios effectively. We also continue to develop Visual Presenter to address issues that we anticipate could affect businesses in the future. At a one-on-one level, we work with the organisations to use this knowledge to address their specific needs. Thankfully, not every business is affected by every problem we were talking about in the first question!

Specifically, where we help is in addressing the needs at both ends of the problem, if you like: those of the business itself, and those presenting.

With Visual Presenter, users can create presentations in minutes that automatically tailor the content and design to their audience. Content that is relevant to a user is automatically updated from a centralized server. This is one of the key pieces of functionality of Visual Presenter: it operates as a Master Library of presentations: easy to access, easy to update, easy to control.

We’ve also designed Visual Presenter to allow users to create presentations remotely while flying or in between appointments without internet or network access. Everything they need to create presentations is cached locally.

From the viewpoint of the organization, if messaging changes or if there’s an entire brand ‘look and feel’ change out, it is simply a case of applying a new PowerPoint template to the library of presentations. Visual Presenter automatically reformats the required content to the correct design format. For larger organizations or those that manage multiple brands, Visual Presenter also enables them to have information dynamically represented with different template designs across the library.

When any changes are published to the main library – and it’s a very simple process to make alterations to the content – online users are automatically notified that updates are available. Through a “one-click” update process, all required content for the user is updated to enable them to create presentations on or off the network.

We did a lot of work around the media file issue, and the effectiveness of our solution is that it automatically tracks media content supported by PowerPoint. If media is found that is not stored locally, Visual Presenter will automatically copy down the media and make sure it is tracked with the presentation, the key point being that this ensures that media always plays effectively during a presentation, whether you are on or off the network.

A concern often raised with us is the inability that companies have to tailor presentations to suit their audience. This is where Visual Presenter, as an Agenda-Based Presentation Management Solution, is streets ahead of Slide Management Solutions. When a presentation is created, it automatically selects the appropriate information and structure for a given audience. This allows companies to better manage how information is communicated to different target audiences. Further to that, if a presenter wants to tweak the content while they present, Visual Presenter has a unique agenda-based interface that allows additional information to be made available while presenting, giving the presenter a new level of control.

And to complete the process, Visual Presenter makes it simple for companies to get accurate presentation feedback. They can define what they would like to report on, e.g., presentation results, content feedback, next action and date, market feedback, etc. As with the other features of Visual Presenter, this works to ensure a company is delivering the best presentations possible to an ever-demanding market.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Damian McDonald, Interviews, PowerPoint

TrainSignal Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Training: The Indezine Review

On the surface, PowerPoint looks like an easy program to learn. In fact, plenty of users have been able to create PowerPoint content within a few minutes of starting using this program, and most of them then believe that they are now PowerPoint savvy. Nothing can be further from the truth. Unfortunately, most users will never be aware of the fact that behind its simple interface, PowerPoint provides tons of features and options that make creating and delivering everyday presentations so much easier and rewarding. Clearly, there is a need for some well-designed and conceptualized PowerPoint training.

This review looks at one such offering from Train Signal’s CBT (computer-based training) on PowerPoint 2007.

Read the Indezine review of TrainSignal PowerPoint 2007 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, Review, Training, Tutorials

PowerPoint Rebellion: One Professor’s Pioneering Experimentation with Interactivity

This article by Robert Lane and Dr. C. June Maker explores how the human brain handles visual input and the implications for PowerPoint presentations. We recommend eliminating most of those carefully thought-out words on slides and replacing them with certain kinds of rich imagery.

Doing so efficiently feeds the brain what it likes to see, and allows you to communicate messages in ways not possible with words alone.

Explores how the human brain handles visual input.

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Design, Dr. C. June Maker, Guest Post, Opinion, PowerPoint, Robert Lane