PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

How To Present a Fireside Chat in 4 Easy Lessons

By Jerry Weissman

Creative Commons: Image by National Archives and Records Administration

In case you haven’t heard, presentations delivered standing behind a lectern are out and fireside chats are in. Whether it is an effort to emulate the format originated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt or an effort to avoid the curse captured by the old Jerry Seinfeld joke: To the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy, chats are the new way to present.

FDR, whose patrician voice and dignified manner made him sound formal and distant, developed the fireside chat to create a more intimate bond with the public. But the format has another equally important benefit and, although FDR didn’t need the help, it reduces the pressure that presenters invariably feel when they are the sole center of attention. Yikes! They’re all looking at me!

In my pre-presentation coaching career, I was a producer/director of public affairs and news programs at WCBS-TV, and I used the chat format to reduce the pressure that our guests—from the business, scientific, academic, and governmental sectors— invariably felt when they appeared in front of live television cameras. “Yikes!”

We put our guests in dialogues with professional anchorpersons or hosts. The format is still used today and has broadened from in-studio to two-way split-screen exchanges from remote locations. Today, I use the same conversational approach in coaching presentations.

If you are invited to give a fireside chat, here are four simple recommendations to help you do it well:

1. Set a roadmap

Determine the key points of your chat in advance and organize them in a logical progression—including the length of each segment and the whole. Announce the structure at the beginning of your session and track the milestones as you proceed. Sound familiar? It’s telling them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and…

2. Interact with your chat partner/interviewer

All too often, chats tend to fall into the celebrity interview mode where the interviewer merely serves up questions to feed a virtual monologue. Avoid that trap by involving your chat partner’s point of view.

3. Involve the audience

Bring the audience into the discussion by opening the floor to questions either during or after the chat.

4. Eye Contact

Of course, engage with the interviewer, but also involve the audience further by addressing some of your remarks to them.

Above all, be conversational. It’s the best way to calm your nerves and avoid the Jerry Seinfeld curse.

This blog post by Jerry Weissman was first published on his site at Forbes. He has written five books on presentation skills. His most recent, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations, published by Pearson, is available now from Amazon.

     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 roadshow presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market.

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

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Delivery, Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, Opinion

What’s Your Best Indicator of Success, in any Profession?

Public Management Magazine reports that the #1 indicator of success – in any profession – is how often you are asked to deliver presentations. The report found that those who are consistently asked to present not only earn more money, but they also advance further in their careers. On top of that, the American Salesman publication found that 75% of the executives surveyed deemed presentation skills to be three times more important than writing and aptitude for career advancement. That’s why I’m excited to be teaming up with one of the most creative PowerPoint pros on the web – P-Spice – to bring you an exclusive Indezine-only training opportunity.

Find more here.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Indezine, Nuts and Bolts, Offers, P-Spice, PowerPoint

Font Dialog Box in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Fonts are more than just pretty characters, although your choice of fonts can have a profound effect on how readable your text is to the audience. We have already explored how you can format font styles to make your text bold, italicized, underlined, etc. Beyond these basic offerings, PowerPoint 2016’s Font dialog box offers some advanced format options for the selected text. You can still change the font type, set the font size, color, and other font attributes in this dialog box, and you can also do more.

Explore options within the Font dialog box in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Fonts, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Text, Tutorials

Practice Your Presentation: TJ Walker with Geetesh Bajaj

Last week, we released the first podcast that I recorded with TJ Walker. In today’s podcast, we will look at this topic:

Many presenters spend considerable effort and time to create their slides—but they do not get the time to practice. Did you know that PowerPoint has had a built-in practice tool?

Do note that the video embedded here contains the podcast content of two posts. This is the second post, and you can find the transcript of the first post in our Prepare Your Presentation feature.

Advanced PowerPoint Creation Tips August 5 and 6, 2016 from Geetesh Bajaj on Vimeo.

And here’s the second part of the transcript:

TJ: We are speaking with Geetesh Bajaj, who is one of the most renowned experts in the world on PowerPoint: PowerPoint slides, PowerPoint creation. This is a special coproduction between Speaking with TJ Walker and Indezine.

Geetesh, many people are constantly enamored with the latest special effects, dissolve, build, animation features on PowerPoint. There are a lot of older tricks, gizmos, buttons that can be even more helpful to people. Walk us through one of them—for example the Rehearse mode.

Geetesh: Sure. Now, that’s not a gizmo. The Rehearse mode has been there in PowerPoint for the last twenty years, or maybe more. And very few people have actually gone and looked at it, or are even aware that something of that sort exists.

So why would you want to go and rehearse? First of all what happens is, you have seen it and everybody has seen it—that when you have a 60-minute slot to give a presentation, and the speaker or presenter takes an hour and a half. That’s not very uncommon. The audience is not too happy about that, and they are not very interactive. They do not ask too many questions because the time is already up, and they don’t want to extend it by another half an hour. So essentially when you take too much time, you are sending your audience away, and making sure they don’t remember what you are trying to tell them because they are not “accepting” at that point in time.

Copyright: Image by StockUnlimited

TJ: Walk us through where is the button. What does it really do when…?

Geetesh: Sure. See, essentially what happens if you go to the Slide Show tab of any of the newest versions of PowerPoint, you’ll find an option there called Rehearse Timings and you will find a second option called Record Slide Show.

They are pretty similar. But what the Rehearse Timings button does is only records the timings, whereas the Record Slide Show option; what it does, it also records your voiceovers if you have a microphone connected. It also records your animation timings, and it also records when the next slides move in, timings and everything else.

So with that, you just go and sit in front of your computer, laptop and have a PowerPoint ready over there, play with your presentation. But make sure that you play with your finished presentation because you want to not really make too many changes at that point in time unless you find that you are going beyond your time allotted to you and, and then you want to cut-down on something.

Copyright: Image by StockUnlimited

So once you do that, what PowerPoint is going to do is it’s going to record all timings over there, animation, and everything else as I told you. So it’s a very good idea, at that point in time to open your presentation, and choose the Save As option. And save that presentation as a new presentation so the presentation that you have and the new presentation that you have saved at this point in time they are identical.

So you will leave the original presentation alone and then take the copy of the presentation and press the Rehearse Timings (option) if you only want to look at the timings, or the Record Slide Show option if you want to record everything else, and then at every slide you would actually imagine that there is an audience in front of you, and speak exactly how you want to speak about.

You know, this is very refreshing because, when you actually go across the presentation this way, a lot of things that you had never imagined before, you will actually think about them at this point in time. When you look at figures, you will go and substantiate them, and make sure that everything is accurate. And a lot of this stuff is something that the speaker actually encounters at the time of presenting to the audience. And he is not very well prepared for stuff like that. So that decreases his or her confidence level. So if they go and practice it at that point of time, they actually do a revision of everything they want to go and say. And, just proceed this way.

Go to the end of your slides, and you can hit the Escape key on your keyboard. And then PowerPoint may prompt you with the dialog that says, “Do you want to save your timings”, and you would say Yes. And then, what you will do is you will go to Slide Sorter view where you can see all the slides in one screen, and right below each of the slide, you will see a time slot mentioned over there. So that is the exact amount of time that you have taken for each slide. And you can go and study that, and find out where you take too much time, where you take little time. And if there’s something that you spend a lot of time above on, is it important enough to break it into more than one slide? And what are the slides where you don’t take much time about? What about… can you remove them? And also you can see the total time you spent over there. And you can play back this presentation. Your voiceovers are recorded, your animation timings are recorded. And your slide timings are recorded. You know exactly where you are doing well and where you are not doing well.

This is the process that can be repeated over and over again. Now, there is one thing that you have to remember, that you are not going to play the presentation, the copy of the presentation you created when you are actually going and delivering that. Because slide timings are recorded in that and you may be on slide number 2 and because they are automatic timings, it might go to slide number 3 or 4 before you know it. And that’s the reason I suggest you that you keep an original copy of the presentation unaltered without the timings.

TJ: Geetesh Bajaj, thanks for being our special guest. Fantastic insights today!

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: Thoughts
Tagged as: Geetesh, Podcast, PowerPoint, Prepare, Presentation Skills, TJ Walker

Format Font Attributes (Styles) in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

The appearance of text makes a huge difference to any presentation. The font typeface used within your slides is dictated by the active Theme or Theme Fonts set of your presentation. You can certainly override these defaults and choose another font typeface and also change the font size. However, there are times when you need to highlight a word or a phrase contained within your text so that it stands apart and commands attention. To do so, you can apply font styling attributes such as bold, italics, underline, etc.

Learn about applying various font attributes such as bold, italics, underline, and more in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Fonts, Formatting, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Text, Tutorials