PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

The Future of Presentations: Conversation with Martin Conradi

  Martin Conradi is managing director of Showcase Presentations in London. Educated at Oundle School and Lancaster University, he spent 10 years in advertising and marketing companies and doing more than his fair share of presentations. He became fascinated by the potential for small computers as business tools and set up Rainbow Software in 1980 — probably the first company in the world entirely dedicated to computer-based business presentations. He formed Showcase Presentations Ltd in 1986 to specialise in computer-based presentation services.

In this conversation, Martin looks at the future of presentations, from a past perspective.

Geetesh: You’ve been involved with presentation software for a long, long time. Tell us more about the historical perspective and where you believe the future of presenting is headed to?

Martin: Imagine watching slides on a large monitor screen with a range of properly designed proportionally spaced fonts in rich RGB colour. When you want video, it switches in automatically. And you can print out the individual slides.

Familiar? But this was our Showcase Presentation System in 1981, the first such system in the world.

We used an Apple II (16k of RAM, a 1Mhz 8-bit processor and a pair of 5-1/2″ floppy disc drives) which was in those days a pretty cool machine; we developed proportional fonts (long before the Mac); and discovered monitors capable of using RGB, so developed programmable cards to drive them. Add some great software and a remote control, and you had the world’s first computer presentation system.

And with no rules for designing computer slides we had to invent them too.

Clients claimed the system paid for itself in a single presentation.

The advent of the PC with its very basic graphics slowly strangled the Apple II as a business purchase, so in 1985 we reinvented ourselves as a service company and after over 30 years, Showcase is still going strong. We switched to General Parametric’s VideoShow — an external graphics and presentation box for the PC — and remained with this for the rest of the 1980s until the “clamshell” laptop, Windows 3, and Freelance appeared in the early ’90s; it was time to switch again.

Since then nothing fundamental has changed. Of course, both hardware and software are much more powerful while at the same time easier to use. Viable alternatives to PowerPoint have continued to emerge–though mostly for only a short time. The trade-off between simplicity (for office users) and capability (for designers and other professionals) continues to tax software designers.

In 1970, I worked in a bright young ad agency and we put pictures and text on a rectangular screen to help get our arguments across to our audience. It cost a fortune and took 3 days to get the slides back. Now it costs virtually nothing to do the same thing in a few hours. The difference in technology is huge, but the outcome is basically the same.

One advantage today is that the speaker can alter the presentation right up to the last moment but this is a double-edged sword. When presentations were slow and expensive, a lot of thought went into what was said and how it was presented. As the price of presentations has become negligible, the quality of thinking has all too often kept pace, and all the power and brilliance of the underlying technology which can produce marvels of insightful graphics to support a speaker, much too often delivers lazy argument, badly presented.

We did some research to understand better why people come to live presentations when they can often see them online much more easily. The answer was very clear: “We want to see the whites of their eyes”.

So the speaker is still–and will always be–the center of attention; presentations will become more visual, picture-driven rather than bullet-point driven. They may even become more interactive as a younger and more computer-literate generation of management, teachers, etc., rises through the ranks.

But in 10 years’ time, we will still be presenting; and the rectangular screen with words and pictures and a (mostly) live audience will still be the way to do it.

Geetesh: Presentation design moves at a much faster pace now than 10 or 20 years ago, and that clearly is an advantage. Do you have thoughts you would like to share about what we can do to make this process better now, and in the future?

Martin: How often have you heard people leaving a presentation saying “great slides”? “Great speaker” yes, but “great slides”, no.

A well-designed presentation–like a well-designed book–is in a sense invisible, subsumed into the unfolding story told by the presenter. A well-designed presentation helps make any competent speaker look good–thoughtful, considered, and professional.

Badly designed slides confuse the audience and risk making the speaker appear muddled and not really in control of his subject.

Good presentation design is a compromise between three things: the needs for a presentation to look consistent and coherent and present a unified argument; the need for an individual slide to “work” despite the constraints of the presentation as a whole; and the inevitable real-life pressure of last-minute edits that can wreck the integrity of carefully worked slides.

Good presentations design–like that well-presented book is based on a set of rules for fonts, colors, layouts, pictures, and so on. Templates and masters do a pretty good job with this provided they have been properly designed in the first place. This is easier said than done as very few designers know anything about presenting–as a group they almost never do it; and they are trained and practiced in designing for paper. Web designers are a little better as their skill is in designing for individuals close up to and in control of their screens, not for audiences.

But as we move away (hopefully) from the era of the bullet point and “death by PowerPoint” into a more graphic and emotionally intelligent way of presenting, the conventional template will need to develop to be less bullet-based and more picture-oriented. What will be needed will be a way of finding pictures to replace words, of integrating conceptual search engines into the heart of the program to help the user come up with visual ideas. It is pictures rather than words that get remembered. As Generation Y moves up the business ladder, this sort of shift will accelerate.

Individual slides will always be (and of course should be) susceptible to breaking away from the template in order to be made to “work” better. And I am all in favor of the “money-shot” slide which stands out from the rest and defines the presentation visually. But you can have too much a good thing and as more and more slides are treated a specials, a presentation can quickly become incoherent. Maybe someone will come up with a “confirm” button and a sliding scale that can bring the slide back — intelligently and perhaps in small steps — in line with the master.

Most speakers rightly develop their own content, but many will often undermine good ideas by insisting on putting too much on a page as if quantity equates to depth. There will and never should be a mechanism for stopping people putting what they want on a slide. But less here is more, much more; progress will come from training, fashion and example–the better TED presentations should be on every manager’s viewing list.

As for the speaker spoiling it all at the last moment, that is their privilege. I firmly believe that — all things being equal — a speaker who is happy with their slides will perform more confidently than one who feels uncomfortable with them.

In the end, it is always the speaker who matters most.

Because if they feel good, look good, and enjoy what they do the audience generally will too.

See Also: That Presentation Sensation

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Death by PowerPoint, Interviews, Martin Conradi, Opinion, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Tweak Bulleted Paragraphs with Left Indent Marker

You have already explored how you can use the First Line Indent Marker and the Hanging Indent Marker to tweak bulleted paragraphs in PowerPoint 2010. The next and last of these indent markers on the Ruler is the Left Indent Marker — this acts like a lock on the First Line Indent Marker and the Hanging Indent Marker. Funnily enough, it is called the Left Indent Marker even though it is placed at right-most of the three markers!

Learn how to adjust the position of bulleted paragraphs using the Left Indent Marker in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Text, Tutorials

Segment Circles: One Circle

In this component of our Segment Circles series, we have brought you an non-segmented full circle. You can use this circle in your presentation like a picture container. We have used basic PowerPoint shapes to create most of these conceptual designs. Also, some of them are imported from other graphic programs and converted to PowerPoint shapes. The sample presentation that you download comprises one unsegmented circle within two separate slides — one with a picture fill, and the other with just a solid color fill. Copy these slides to your PowerPoint presentation and change the fills and effects of individual segments as well as the thin donut shaped circle around the segment.

Download and use this concept slide in your presentation.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Graphics, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Animation Delay

Once you add animation to a slide object, you can make the animation happen slower or faster using its speed properties. You can also cause the animation to happen on a click, or automatically by changing its event. However, you can do much more — did you know that you can set a delay time after which any slide object animates? So, why would you add a delay? There are several reasons and primarily, delay can be beneficial if you want to maintain a time limit between two animations — as in having the second animation occur 10 seconds after the first one concludes. Of course, that was just a simple example and animation delay can be helpful in many other scenarios.

Learn about Animation Delay in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Animation, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials

Problems with 3D Charts

By James M. Smith

Anyone who has heard me speak about charts knows that I’m not a fan of three dimensional (3D) charts. Here are the reasons why.

All charts can present problems in conveying information if used improperly. What makes 3D charts unique is that their major problem is inherent in the chart design itself — namely, the confusion induced by the depth of field effect.

Conveying a third dimension on a two-dimensional surface creates difficulties for the eye and the brain. Just look at some of the fantastic optical illusions that prey upon the brain’s bewilderment when confronted with a 3D simulated image on a 2D plane. When you try to get information from a three-dimensional chart, you have to use mental gymnastics to make allowance for the depth of field effect.

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Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: 3D, Charting, Guest Post, James Smith, Opinion, PowerPoint