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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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To introduce a panel at a panel discussion or employees to a group, you can create a slide with their photos, name, title, and so on.
Because you want to speak about each person in turn, you can use animation to display each person’s photo and name when you click. Here is one approach you can use.
Follow these steps:
Do you have another slide technique for introducing panel members, employees, executives, or colleagues during a presentation? If yes, do send your feedback here.
This is a guest post by Ellen Finkelstein, a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP and author of several PowerPoint, Flash, and AutoCAD books. In this post, Ellen explains how you can create a slide to introduce a panel of speakers.
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.
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Guest Posts
Tagged as: Ellen Finkelstein, Guest Post, PowerPoint
Chuck Dietrich is the CEO of SlideRocket, an online presentation platform founded in 2006 with the vision that provides for every part of the presentation lifecycle and helps you make great presentations. Chuck holds a BA from University of Colorado in Economics and an MBA from University of Utah.
In this interview, Chuck discusses the VMWare acquisition of SlideRocket.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the VMware acquisition of SlideRocket, and how it affects existing SlideRocket users?
Chuck: VMware is helping power a new way to work—tapping cloud computing to provide access to the applications people need when they need them. The acquisition of SlideRocket – the leader in online presentations – moves this vision forward. SlideRocket’s reinvention of the way people build, deliver, and share engaging presentations is a testament to the potential of modern applications to change how business users work, providing them with technology that makes them happier and more productive. Building on VMware Zimbra e-mail collaboration, SlideRocket is another step in VMware’s mission to deliver engaging workforce applications that are collaborative, mobile-optimized, social and even fun.
In terms of the customer experience, SlideRocket will continue to operate independently within our applications business unit. SlideRocket’s thousands of subscribers, including the Discovery Channel, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, ZenDesk, University of San Francisco, Oprah Winfrey Network and the International Olympic Committee, will continue to access and create innovative, interactive presentations via the website or app on the Google Chrome Web Store.
Geetesh: What synergies does the SlideRocket acquisition by VMware bring to both entities?
Chuck: The acquisition expands VMware’s application capabilities for modern end-user computing, delivering next generation applications across any device via cloud computing. VMware is providing an increasing number of technologies that bring the cloud’s capabilities directly to end users and foster a new way to work in this post-PC era. An era where collaboration and social interaction define the way people will work. VMware will deliver this new way of working naturally, from any device, location or time zone.
You May Also Like: SlideRocket: An Interview with Chuck Dietrich
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Interviews
Tagged as: Chuck Dietrich, Interviews, PowerPoint Alternatives, SlideRocket, VMware
No, not Jon Stewart’s right as in “correct;” and, given the liberal point of view of the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, certainly not as in “right wing.” I’m referring to Jon Stewart’s right side where he shows the video clips of people and events he satirizes or mocks. Is this positioning arbitrary or intentional?
Because audiences in Western cultures read from left to right, you should design, animate, and display your presentation graphics so that—depending on the message you want to convey—your graphics follow or fight that predisposition. Movement to the right creates positive perceptions, movement to the left negative.
In Microsoft PowerPoint animation, the left and right movements occur in two general options: between slides (Slide Transition) and within a slide (Custom Animation). Although the direction of movement is the same in each option, each has a different nomenclature. Movement to the right in Slide Transition is called “Wipe Right;” movement to the right in Custom Animation is called “Wipe from Left.” Because your audiences’ eyes are accustomed to the left-to-right movement, make your default animation follow that same natural movement.
Movement to the left in Slide Transition is called “Wipe Left;” movement to the left in Custom Animation is called “Wipe from Right.” Use this counterintuitive effect when you want to send a negative message such as the shortcomings of competing products, past problems your company has conquered, or market forces that pose major obstacles for your industry.
Moreover, whenever you present, be sure that the screen on which you display your slide show—whether a large projection screen or a small laptop—is located to your left as you face your audience. This positioning creates the familiar left-to- right movement for your audience. Every time you click to a new slide, their eyes will travel from you to your words and images in a smooth, fluid movement. If you present with the screen to your right, every new slide will cause your audience to make a resistant move to the left that would force them to read your words backwards.
Jon Stewart positions the images of the targets of his humor to his right, forcing his audiences to move to the left—with friction—to see the images. Friction in the movement produces a fractious perception.
Is this positioning arbitrary or intentional? Is Jon Stewart sending us a message?
To use the words of one of his favorite targets, “You betcha’!”
You might want to order a copy of Jerry’s new book, Presentations in Action. You can also read an exclusive, extensive interview with Jerry where he talks about this new book, and explains why he wrote this book, and how you can benefit the most.
Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix and many others.
Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO road show. 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 500 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.
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Tagged as: Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, PowerPoint
Cinema and presentation graphics, although miles apart in complexity, share many common aspects. One is movie stunts. Matt Zoller Seitz, a freelance film critic, wrote an article about movie stunts on Salon that provides a valuable lesson in presentation design. Mr. Seitz noted that the latest cinema technologies, while creating imaginative and exciting action, have lost the important element of continuity. He wrote that the modern movie “seeks to excite viewers by keeping them perpetually unsettled with computer-enhanced images, fast cutting, and a camera that never stands still.” As a result, he claimed, the film denies “the viewer a fixed vantage point on what’s happening to the characters.”
In contrast, Mr. Seitz cited a 100-year old silent film of a man jumping out of a burning hot air balloon into the Hudson River. Although the film itself is lost, the key shot lives on in a Topps bubble gum card. The point of Mr. Seitz’s historic reference is that the image is “a sustained wide shot that showed the diver in relation to the balloon and the Hudson River,” thus providing context for the action and for the viewer. If that scene were shot today, he added, “We’d more likely see a flurry of shots, only one of which showed us the big picture.”
The operative words above are “in relation to.” In today’s films, computer animation and fast cutting move the story along so quickly, audiences overlook or are unaware of the lack of context. In today’s pitches, presenters hurriedly cobble together a set of their company’s existing slides, giving their presentations s a one-after-another sequencing, in which no slide has any relationship to the preceding or following slides—and therefore no continuity for the presenter or the audience. At first, an audience might try to figure out what one slide has to do with another but, after a very short while, they give up and turn their attention to their smartphones.
One solution is for the presenter to make verbal links between slides; another is to create continuity in the slide design using a technique called Anticipation Space. In the slide below, you see two boxes side-by-side, one filled and one empty—the empty box creates a sense of anticipation.
When the empty box is filled with a set of parallel items, it sends the message that your company’s solution fulfills every requirement.
Anticipation Space creates relationships, continuity, and much more: it makes your presentation easy for your audience to follow. So easy, they might even look up from their smartphones.
You might want to order a copy of Jerry’s new book, Presentations in Action. You can also read an exclusive, extensive interview with Jerry where he talks about this new book, and explains why he wrote this book, and how you can benefit the most.
Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix and many others.
Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO road show. 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 500 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, PowerPoint
In 1845, the American author, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau felt the need to get away from it all. He sequestered himself at an idyllic lake in the Berkshire Mountains for two years and wrote Walden; or Life in the Woods in which he famously observed,
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Mr. Thoreau’s words are applicable to business people today who lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation every time they have to make a presentation. Of all the many reasons for their desperation—time pressure, workload, and the fear of failure—perhaps the most pressing is the self-imposed practice of using their PowerPoint slides as not only the presentation graphics, but also as speaker notes, send-aheads, and leave-behinds. This multitasking approach produces images of encyclopedic detail that serve none of the functions.
This bane of presenters has become a boon for another constituency: professional designers and authors who offer solutions to help business people create simple, expressive, and purely illustrative graphical images. The best of the breed is Garr Reynold’s marvelous book, Presentation Zen, which offers readers design concepts based on the principles of Japanese minimalism.
These polar opposites of the graphics spectrum leave a largely underserved area in the middle made up of presenters who want to break away from those encyclopedic slides but find Mr. Reynold’s Zen ideal is too far a reach for them. At one end of the spectrum, some presenters protest,
But I’m not a designer!
At the other end, others protest,
We don’t have the time to do that!
For that large majority, here is a simple set of guidelines for the two most basic types of garden variety graphics used in presentations today: bullet slides and bar charts.
The guiding principles of this simple but effective bullet slide can be summarized in four bullets:
The guiding principles of this simple but effective bar chart can be summarized in four bullets:
Or to paraphrase the last bullet in terms that Mr. Thoreau would appreciate, help your audience to lead lives free of desperation.
You might want to order a copy of Jerry’s new book, Presentations in Action. You can also read an exclusive, extensive interview with Jerry where he talks about this new book, and explains why he wrote this book, and how you can benefit the most.
Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix and many others.
Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO road show. 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 500 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, PowerPoint
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