PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Presentation Summit 2016: Conversation with Carmen Simon

    Carmen Simon is a cognitive neuroscientist, bestselling author, and leading expert on using memory to influence decision-making. Her most recent book, Impossible to Ignore: Create Memorable Content to Influence Decisions, has won the acclaim of publications such as Inc.com, Forbes, and Fast Company, and has been selected as one of the top ten books of the year. Simon speaks frequently to industry, academic, and government audiences on neuroscience research findings related to the future of the human brain against the background of automation. She has over 20 years of experience in the fields of computer interface design, and multimedia, and holds doctorates in both instructional technology and cognitive psychology.

In this conversation, Carmen discusses her keynote at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2016 series.

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Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: Carmen Simon, Events, Interviews, Presentation Summit

Text Pane For SmartArt Graphics in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

We explored how to convert your normal bulleted text to a SmartArt graphic with just a click or two — however, you’ll soon discover that it is neither easy nor intuitive to edit, add, or delete text within a shape inside a SmartArt graphic. Fortunately, all the text edits can be easily performed within the convenient Text Pane of the SmartArt graphic. In this tutorial, we’ll help you explore options for working within the Text Pane for SmartArt graphics in PowerPoint 2013.

Learn how the Text Pane helps add text content to your SmartArt graphic in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Microsoft Windows, Office 2013, PowerPoint 2013, SmartArt, Tutorials

Presentation Summit 2016: Conversation with Ric Bretschneider

Ric Bretschneider is a technologist, troublemaker, and problem solver. Professionally, he helps people raise the quality of their business communications, mainly presenting. At Microsoft, Ric spent 17 years working on PowerPoint, designing and molding the program that became a juggernaut in business communication. Shortly after leaving Microsoft, Ric was awarded PowerPoint MVP status, a recognition held by only a dozen or so people in the US. In his spare time, Ric runs the San Jose California branch of the Pecha Kucha presentation event, writes, blogs and podcasts. He’s also a huge geek; his obsessions are hidden away on his site.

In this conversation, Ric discusses his sessions at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2016 series.

Geetesh: Your sessions at this year’s Presentation Summit are the ones associated with you and identified with your personal brand. Can you tell us more about The Late-Night Guru and The Wonders of Pecha Kucha sessions? Also, what do you believe the attendee will take away from these sessions?

Ric: Wow, I guess you’re right. They’re also two of the longest-running Presentation Summit regular sessions I guess. Maybe Julie Terberg’s Slide Makeovers has been around longer. Hadn’t ever given that any thought before, I just enjoy doing them and always get a lot of good feedback from participants and audience members.

Certainly, there’s a high amount of fun in the Late Night Guru Session. The first time we did it, it was the second year of the conference, and it was a spontaneous thing – nothing planned about it at all. I was still working for Microsoft, attending the convention as an official representative of the PowerPoint team. About a dozen of us were walking back from a late dinner and looking for a place to hang out. We found a conference room that was open, with a projector, and luckily one of us was dragging around a laptop. So we spent the rest of the evening and into the morning just hanging out and talking about the weird and wonderful things we could do with PowerPoint. It was a part tutorial, a part love fest, and no small part group therapy session.

The next morning it was kind of legendary. Everyone who was there was telling those who missed it how much they’d missed! Word got around and there was this impression that that Microsoft guy has spilled a bunch of secrets but that wasn’t really the case. The next year I told Rick Altman we should make it official, he agreed, and we’ve done it every year since.

It was Rick who named it The Guru Session first attaching that label to me. It stuck, but I try to make everyone understand that we’re all the gurus, everyone has something to share, and that you can’t predict where the next revelation will come from. At its weakest, it was about Microsoft touting new stuff, and now they’ve got their own session for that this year to do just that. The strength of the session comes from everyone who comes to the party, everyone with a problem, a solution, or just something that makes us all laugh and become a stronger community.

Pecha Kucha is another thing entirely.

I met Nancy Duarte at one of the first Presentation Summits, called PowerPoint Live in the early days. I watched her session and was so impressed that afterward, I had to go up to gush a bit. So funny too when we discovered that her team’s office was literally minutes from mine. We’ve been friends ever since. One evening in 2007, Nancy and I and a couple of Duarte folks went to San Francisco to see what this Pecha Kucha presentation style was all about. I’d heard about these short presentations that were given in bars to packed houses, but wasn’t actually prepared for how mind-blowing it was to be part of the audience. The subjects were all over the board, from the art of cartography to transit solutions to a dozen other amazing little presentations.

You see the gist of the Pecha Kucha style is that presenters prepare 20 slides or images that will be projected for them as they speak. Each slide automatically advances after 20 seconds. So the presentation moves along at a good clip and is over in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. It’s kind of a blend of standard presentations, iron man competitions, and performance art. You really have to know your stuff to make it work in front of a live audience (of course, they’ve usually been drinking so they’re a happy bunch.)

There was so much enthusiasm in the car on the drive back. Everyone knew they’d seen something new and special. When I got home I decided that San Francisco was too far to go to attend these things on a regular basis, so I contacted the Pecha Kucha organization in Japan and founded the branch in the Silicon Valley, San Jose being the hub. After a couple of years of running local shows, it seemed natural to do a Pecha Kucha event for Presentation Summit.

Now, a couple of months before the conference, I work with a number of Presentation Summit attendees who will be part of the session. I explain the format and history, and we put on a mini PK show. Both the presenters and audience get a solid introduction to how accepting the constraints of the format forces you into a mode where clarity and focus benefit your message. Again, fun, accessible, and informative; the best way to learn.

Geetesh: Ric, is The Late-Night Guru session completely open? What rules are there about the questions asked?

Ric: Hah! Yes, entirely open. Any question can be asked, with no rules whatsoever. Of course, that doesn’t mean all questions will be answered!

Seriously though, as I think we’ve done about a dozen of these over the more than a decade of Presentation Summits, I really can’t think of a question that was totally out of bounds. The concerns are much more about the value of what we talk about, and where conversations go. I moderate the session with the mind that everyone should be heard, but no one should monopolize the conversation. And some questions just can’t be answered because they’re formed wrong, based on misconceptions.

A favorite example of that is “What are the most slides you should have in a presentation?” Typically this comes from a management edict – some executive trying to manage an event without understanding how communication works. It’s a favorite topic of lazy presentation pundits, especially if they can rhyme it. “No more than ten.” “Twenty is the max.” Ridiculous. You need exactly as many slides as you need to support your message. No more, no less. And you should keep working on that message to keep your slides to a minimum, your argument focused, and your audience attentive. But that’s a purely situational thing. Your slides should move along briskly, nimbly, each exactingly supporting your arguments as you lay them out. One definite answer is that if you’re going to read every word on your slide to the audience, maybe you should keep your presentation to one slide. And you should send it out in an e-mail and stop wasting people’s time.

But “the correct number of slides” is an example of something we’d still take on and in just that manner. Without breaking any confidences, I can say that there’s no Microsoft secret number of slides to use. Heck, I wish there had been because frankly, I sat through some pretty horrendous presentations at Microsoft. And so the secrets we expose in the Late Night Guru Session are just that; wisdom we all have but need the courage to apply. Because you need the courage to fight back against the mistakes and misconceptions about presentations in your organization. And that courage can find its foundation in a community, a community like you find at The Presentation Summit, and at The Late-Night Guru Session.

Wow, I’m really looking forward to this year! Thanks for asking Geetesh.

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: Events
Tagged as: Events, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit, Ric Bretschneider

The Sixth Success Factor for Startups: The Perfected Pitch

By Jerry Weissman

“Startup Veteran” sounds like an oxymoron but it describes Bill Gross perfectly. Fresh out of Cal Tech in the 1980s, he started, grew, and sold three of his own companies. In 1996, he founded Idealab, a Pasadena-based organization to create and operate pioneering technology companies. Since then, Idealab has fostered the development of 125 companies, 40 of which have gone public or been acquired. That track record clearly qualifies Mr. Gross to offer advice to startups.

He did so in a six-minute TED talk last March, listing and discussing what, in his estimable opinion, are the five reasons why startups succeed:

• Idea
• Team
• Business Model
• Funding
• Timing

Valid reasons all, but with all due respect—and the full disclosure that I have a vested interest in Idealab as a shareholder, as well as the fact that I am a presentation coach—I propose that Mr. Gross should add a sixth success factor: the perfected pitch.

Stories about startups financed on the basis of a single, short PowerPoint deck are legion, but those are “unicorn” cases. Most startup companies have to hit the road where, according to a study reported in TechCrunch, fledglings must dial for dollars an average of 40 times before their call is answered. Competition is keen and venture capitalists are demanding. The same study in TechCrunch also reported that the average amount of time investors spend looking at pitch decks is 3 minutes and 44 seconds!

So the pitch becomes a matter of life or death for a young company. The best idea, team, timing, or business model cannot succeed if the presenter of the startup company does a poor job of communicating the value of its worth to potential investors. A poor pitch can move a startup from cradle to grave in less than four minutes.

My firm, Power Presentations, Ltd., along with countless other consultants, incubators, online resources, magazine articles, books, and even the venture firms themselves, offer plentiful advice on how to deliver a pitch. Much of that advice has been with us since Aristotle, but presenters, particularly at startups, often have to be put back on track because they are impeded by a single, seemingly insurmountable obstacle: the performance anxiety that comes from the pressure of that 3 minutes and 44 seconds time frame.

Heaven help us! And, as the Bible tells us, “seek and ye shall find” remedies for that universal condition. An internet search produces 21 million solutions, among them deep breathing, beta-blocker drugs, belts of vodka, and even tapping your fingers. But the most effective solution of all is practice. Of course, everyone knows that practice makes perfect, but to be cool, calm, and collected when asking a time-challenged and challenging VC for an investment of several million dollars, it takes practice beyond practice, in what is known as “hyperpractice.”

Athletes are excellent role models for hyperpractice. The Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry, who won the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award for two consecutive years, is known for his uncanny ability to sink three-point shots almost at will. In practice, however, the New York Times reported that Mr. Curry and his teammates “warm up by launching a series of court-length shots — heaves that graze light fixtures and ricochet off shot clocks.” 94 feet in practice makes the usual 20-, 30- or 40-foot three-pointer in a game easy by comparison.

Jerry Rice, the former superstar wide receiver of the San Francisco 49ers football team—the NFL career leader in thirteen categories—is another role model for hyperpractice. It was said of Mr. Rice that when he caught his first pass in any game, it was the 200th pass he caught that day.

Whether you are in a startup or a public company, hyperpractice the first 3 minutes and 44 seconds of every pitch you make. Everything that follows is icing on the cake.

You do not have a second chance to make a first impression.

  Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentation coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, RingCentral, Mobileye, OnDeck, CyberArk, and many others.

Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco IPO roadshow. Following its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco’s Board of Directors, attributed “at least two to three dollars” of the offering price to Jerry’s coaching. That endorsement led to more than 600 other IPO road show presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock 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: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, Opinion, Pitch Decks, Startups

Inserting SmartArt in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

SmartArt in PowerPoint allows you to replace bullet points with info-graphic content using shapes that contain text. This approach is more logical in the way that we view and present content. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to insert a SmartArt graphics within PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Learn how you can insert SmartArt graphics in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Microsoft Windows, Office 2013, PowerPoint 2013, SmartArt, Tutorials