PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Finding Your Presentation Metaphor

By Jim Endicott

For most people, creating presentations is not their day job. They sell things. They manage people. They drive projects. They make stuff happen.

So, it’s understandable that when it becomes necessary to actually create a presentation, the process is rarely motivated by an understanding of the science of how our brains actually assimilate information (who has time for that). But more often by what’s easiest and fastest. Creating bullets and sub-bullets – a piece of cake. But for those who have to actually sit through 60 minutes of the stuff, that form of information has become the visual equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard.

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Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Jim Endicott, Opinion, Presentation Skills

PowerPoint and Presenting News: May 17, 2016

Carmen Simon speaks about her new book, Impossible to Ignore in an exclusive conversation. Robert Befus of SlideSource shares ideas on how you should work with too many slides. Sunday Mancini from Ethos3 talks about her project to create story slides. Paul Stannard from SmartDraw discusses the amazing SmartDraw Cloud program that helps you create info-graphics in a browser. Chantal Bossé, a PowerPoint MVP shares her secrets, discussing how you can create gigantic PowerPoint decks. And in our Timelines that are Different series, we explore a timeline sample slide from My Product Roadmap.

PowerPoint 2016 for Windows users can learn more about fills for shapes, such as solid fills, gradients, and pictures. Finally, do not miss the new templates of this week!

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint

Gradient Stops in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Once you add gradient fills to shapes in PowerPoint 2016, you may want to make the gradient fill look a little different — or even a whole lot different. Yes, you can use the More Gradients option to add different types of gradients as fills to the shapes but that only provides more gradient fill types, and does not let you customize the colors within the gradient.

Learn how to work with Gradient Stops and to create new gradients in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Fills, Gradients, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Tutorials

Create Memorable Content: Conversation with Carmen Simon

    Carmen Simon‘s presentations and workshops help business professionals to use communication and presentation skills to increase revenue, train or motivate others, and overall to stand out from too much sameness in the industry. A published author, Dr. Simon is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at various conferences. She is the founder of Memzy, a company that helps business professionals from all fields improve their presentation skills, whether they deliver content face-to-face, online, or create on-demand presentations.

In this interview, Dr. Carmen Simon reveals additional insights from her science-based book, Impossible to Ignore on how to create memorable and actionable content.

Geetesh: Are there specific parts of a presentation that people remember more, compared to other parts?

Carmen: There are quite a few studies that showed the primacy and recency effects, meaning that people may remember items from the beginning and ending a lot more than items in the middle of a sequence (depending, of course, on the speed of the presentation and the length). We must be careful in interpreting these findings because they are typically linked to short-term memory tests. When long-term memory is concerned and given a longer presentation length, studies show that people make a fixed number of searches for items in the long-term store, and the probability of retrieving a particular item is lower when there are more items. In other words, primacy and recency are not so impactful on memory when we deliver long presentations. However, a poor beginning may lead to a negative emotion, which impacts attention, and in turn influences memory or lack of it. So always treat your beginnings seriously.

Consider a study done using Super Bowl ads, where scientists wanted to see which ads would be recalled better. They discovered that commercials presented during the first batch of ads were remembered significantly better than commercials displayed in the middle or at the end of the program. Since alcohol and tedium that may occur during a football game are likely to interfere with a study, other researchers replicated the study in lab conditions and asked participants to view 15 commercials. After a long-term memory test, findings showed that the primacy effect held strong, while the recency effect faded. This means that whenever we create content, we are well served to place the most important information at the beginning of the sequence and not save the best for last.

Place your most important messages at the beginning of a sequence

Geetesh: What other insights have you discovered while writing Impossible to Ignore?

Carmen: One of the insights people love to hear about is that pictures are not always more memorable than text. For example, in a study I completed, the inclusion of neutral images in text-based PowerPoint slides did not improve recall. It is true that there is plenty of research suggesting that a visual stimulus can have a positive influence on memory. And one explanation for picture superiority springs from a theory called dual coding, according to which the representations for pictures and words are stored in two separate memory systems, and pictures are represented by an image code, while words are by a verbal code. Research suggests that pictures often show recall superiority because they are dually encoded (i.e., they evoke both the image and the verbal code) and these two memory traces increase the probability of retrieving an event.

However, other studies, including my own, confirmed that, even though sequences of images are learned better than sequences of words, they are not necessarily retained better over time and especially when audiences’ memory is tested via free recall. There is a difference between asking people, “What do you remember from a presentation” vs. giving them cues, such as, “Which one of these 3 images do you remember seeing in the presentation?”

In studies I conduct, I notice that I do not have to use pictures all the time to impact memory. There are other techniques that can impact memory just as easily, such as breaking a pattern that viewers have learned to expect (e.g., presenting text after a series of graphics) or using words that paint concrete mental pictures in an audience’s mind (e.g., “Imagine what you looked like if you had a third eye behind your neck”).

These two techniques are useful because they can save presenters money since the inclusion of images in presentation content may imply additional design time and cost.

Pictures are not always more memorable than text. Breaking patterns in stimulation and using visual words can also impact recall.

For more information on how the brain processes information, remembers, and decides to act, read Impossible to Ignore, available at Amazon or anywhere else that books are sold.

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: Books, Carmen Simon, Interviews, Memory

More Gradients in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Add a gradient fill to your shape, and you may run into limitations! For one, PowerPoint’s default gradient options choose all the gradient colors for you, and all available gradients seem to be based on the same color family. While this sort of restraint does keep your slides looking consistent and aesthetic, they also prevent you from playing more with gradients. To play more, you must choose the More Gradients option — this option leads you to a detailed gradient editor that’s capable of making changes to the gradient type, direction, angle, color, etc. In this tutorial, we explain these extra gradient options available within PowerPoint 2016.

Explore the More Gradients option for shape fills in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Fills, Gradients, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Shapes, Tutorials