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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
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
Comments Off on The Graphics Spectrum — Lives of Quiet Desperation
American Apparel, Staples, Knoll Furniture, and Lufthansa Airlines all share a common denominator with the New York subway system: each of these diverse organizations uses the same popular typeface in its signage: Helvetica. A book called Helvetica and the New York City Subway System describes why their decision-makers chose the font style:
For years, the signs in the New York City subway system were a bewildering hodge-podge of lettering styles, sizes, shapes, materials, colors, and messages. The original mosaics (dating from as early as 1904), displaying a variety of serif and sans serif letters and decorative elements, were supplemented by signs in terracotta and cut stone… Efforts to untangle this visual mess began in the mid-1960s, when the city transit authority hired the design firm Unimark International to create a clear and consistent sign system. We can see the results today in the white-on-black signs throughout the subway system, displaying station names, directions, and instructions in crisp Helvetica.
Helvetica is best suited for signage because it is a sans serif font which, with its clean, straight strokes, commands attention. In fact, sans serif is used for two of the most universally familiar signs: EXIT and STOP.
Serif font, with little hooks at the ends of the lines, is better suited for text documents because the hooks help a reader’s eyes to distinguish individual letters.This distinction was validated in a book called Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaenev, a neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris. In a review of the book for the Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer, the author of the newspaper’s Head Case column, explained why raising the bar of difficulty in visual information improves retention.
Unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra cognitive work wakes us up; we read more slowly, but we notice more. Psychologists call this the “levels-of-processing” effect, since sentences that require extra levels of analysis are more likely to get remembered.
The point here for presenters is to draw an indelible boundary between documents that are meant to be read and graphics that are meant to illustrate. If you are creating a document, by all means use the unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation that Mr. Lehrer described. And use serif font.
But if you are creating presentation graphics, treat the text in your slides as signage or headlines. Look at any newspaper or magazine and you’ll see that headlines are composed mainly of key words such as nouns, verbs, and modifiers, with very few articles, conjunctions, and prepositions; the latter are only needed for complete sentences in reading text.
Unlike readers of text, your presentation audiences cannot process your ideas if you assault their eyes with dense information on your slides. And unlike readers, your presentation audiences must process not only what you are showing but simultaneously what you are saying. Their eyes, ears and, ultimately, their brains go into sensory overload. Instead, compose the text in your slides as headlines and do so in san serif font—then provide the body text in your narrative.You are the presentation; your slides are the signage.
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
Comments Off on Signage versus Documents—Drive Your PowerPoint Home
Considering the universal condemnation by critics, audiences, and even presenters themselves, why would anyone use PowerPoint? The software—and its usage—have developed a negative reputation, ranging from the common epithet, “Death by PowerPoint,” to the pointed opinions of Edward Tufte, the well-known graphics guru and author of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint in which he contends that “PowerPoint routinely disrupts and trivializes content.”
After all, the most memorable speeches of history did not use PowerPoint.
So why, indeed, would anyone use PowerPoint? The simple answer lies in the aphorism,
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Those familiar words are backed by a wide array of scientific evidence. One of the most thorough is an HP publication titled, The Power of Visual Communication,—which cites nine learned sources, among them Mr. Tufte—and concludes that:
Recent research supports the idea that visual communication can be more powerful than verbal communication, suggesting in many instances that people learn and retain information that is presented to them visually much better than that which is only provided verbally.
Even more to the (Power) point is the opinion of Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, the author of the popular book, Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, based on his work at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. As Dr. Kosslyn put it in one of his academic studies:
The timeworn claim that a picture is worth a thousand words is generally well-supported by empirical evidence, suggesting that diagrams and other information graphics can enhance human cognitive capacities in a wide range of contexts and applications.
The newest guru of visual expression is Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor and statistician, whose revolutionary methodology electrified the high profile TED conference and made him an instant media and talk circuit rock star. Ten thousand words would not be adequate to describe his technique, so see for yourself in this YouTube video.
A New York Times article about Dr. Rosling described the impact of his graphics:
The goal of information visualization is not simply to represent millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension, moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more.
This is not to say that you should attempt to scale Dr. Rosling’s heights. In fact, he developed his own specialized Trendalyzer software (that you can download from his site for free), but to be inspired by his simple yet animated approach to depicting statistics. Be inspired even more by his “Five Hints for a Successful Bubble Presentation” that he offers with the download. Especially his second hint:
Explain what is shown on the vertical and horizontal axis by color and size of bubble before you start moving the bubble.
In that one sentence, even Dr. Rosling, his dynamic software notwithstanding, validates the primacy of the presenter over even his graphics.
Now you know not only why, but how to use PowerPoint.
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: Death by PowerPoint, Edward Tufte, Guest Post, Hans Rosling, Jerry Weissman, PowerPoint, Stephen Kosslyn
Among the least used PowerPoint options is the ability to make changes to your Notes pages — of course very few people print Notes pages at all in the first place, and fewer than those numbers ever realize that the look of the printed Notes pages can be modified in the Notes Master. To make any of these changes, you need to access the Notes Master view in PowerPoint 2011. Any changes you make within the Notes Master view affects how they appear in Notes Page view, and the layout of printed Notes pages.
Learn about the Notes Master view in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
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FillSlammer is a very interesting PowerPoint add-in that allows creating blends between the shapes you insert on your PowerPoint slides. These blends can be between shape fills (including solid color fills and picture fills). Other than creating blends between shape fills, FillSlammer can also enables you to blend the shape outline, font color, etc.
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Reviews
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Review
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