PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Higgs Boson, Comic Sans, and Bad PowerPoint!

OK, the title of this post is a little confusing, and I wish there was a simpler title I could use — but in all fairness to the three nuances of this post, I had to have them all in the title!

Let’s start with some introductions:

1. Higgs Boson, often called the “God particle” is a proposed elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics — let’s just say that scientists have called this a great breakthrough.
2. Comic Sans is a typeface released by Microsoft in 1994 — the typeface is hugely popular and has been severely criticized for its lack of aesthetics. That criticism though has made no dent in Comic Sans’ huge popularity. It often shows up on PowerPoint slides — and people either love it or hate it — almost no one is indifferent to this typeface.
3. Bad PowerPoint is well, just a bunch of really bad PowerPoint slides!

Look at this article on the Guardian site. The article explores criticism caused by the use of Comic Sans in all the Higgs Boson slides. Love this comment on the same page:

I don’t get this rabid hatred of Comic Sans. However, many scientists are scared that if their presentation looks anything less than boringly stiff and formal with standard Helvetica, someone with influence on the grants committees will see it and mark down their next application. Never mind the science … he, she or it uses Comic Sans.

Kudos to CERN for bucking this trend, although I suspect it’s just down to an individual assigned to making the slides and no-one bothered to change this aspect.

Memo to self: as Comic Sans p*ss*s people off, must remember to use it more often.

So that was about Higgs Boson and Comic Sans. But it looks like Comic Sans was the least of the problems on the CERN slides. The slides themselves were very, very bad. In fact they are great examples of bad PowerPoint — so bad that PowerPoint designers would love to create makeovers with them!

Don’t believe? Take a look yourself — the CERN folks have these slides available on their site for public to download. Here’s a link to a great example of a bad presentation — it’s a 25 mb download for the PPTX file.

For those of you who would rather not download the PowerPoint slides, you can see them on SlideShare:

Thanks to Echo Swinford, Ellen Finkelstein, and Julie Terberg.

You can also follow this discussion on our LinkedIn group.

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Opinion, PowerPoint

LinkedIn’s SlideShare Acquisition: Conversation with Amit Ranjan

  Amit Ranjan is the Cofounder and COO of SlideShare, the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web. With 50 million monthly visitors, SlideShare is amongst the top 200 most visited websites on the web. Recently SlideShare was acquired by LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network site.

In this interview, Amit discusses LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare.

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Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Amit Ranjan, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint, SlideShare

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Exit Effects for Animations

Now that we have explored both Entrance Effects and Emphasis Effects for animation in PowerPoint 2011, let us take a look at Exit Effects. Exit Effects determine how the animated slide object leaves the slide area. For example, the slide object can fade or fly out the screen area, or use any of the many other Exit Effects available within PowerPoint. Typical Exit animation effects are Disappear, in which an object just vanishes or Float Down, in which a slide object mimics the setting sun. You can also apply Exit animation effects to text objects so that words Spiral out of the slide. In all, there are 50 or more Exit animation effects that PowerPoint provides — however, make sure you use animation sparingly to emphasize rather than to distract.

Explore Exit Effects for animations in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Concept Slides: Four Segment Circle

This slide with four matrix-like segments within a circle can be used to illustrate an idea or a relationship – you can also rotate the entire concept graphic to place the segments differently. This graphic has been created using basic PowerPoint shapes — in this four segment circle included within the sample presentation you download, all segments are editable. We have included two separate slides – one of them contains segments with picture fills and the other one is just filled with a solid color. To use these slides in your presentation, just copy-paste them to your presentation, and later edit them as required.

Download and use this concept slide in your presentation.

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

Indezine News: PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts

For all of you who work with PowerPoint too little or too much, there’s no debate about the fact that getting a task done quicker always results in great satisfaction. And getting your PowerPoint tasks done quicker is just one of the benefits you will gain by using keyboard shortcuts. Just the other day, someone in one of the several PowerPoint forums asked about a keyboard shortcut to get the Paste Special dialog in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows — and someone actually recommended that you hold the Alt and E keys at the same time, let them go and quickly press S. And that answer response was chosen as the best answer! Well, you could have just pressed Ctrl+Alt+V together and saved the trouble — and you would still see the Paste Special dialog box. This is just one instance — trust me there are PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts that are not documented on Microsoft’s own site or even in the program’s Help.

Read the newsletter here.

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