PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PresentationNext: Conversation with Rick Altman

Rick Altman, a presentation consultant based out of Pleasanton, CA, USA is well known as the host of the annual Presentation Summit and is the author of 15 books on presentations and graphics. His upcoming PresentationNext workshop series features stops in eight U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Chicago, Newark, and Baltimore.

In this conversation, Rick discusses these workshops.

Geetesh: What is PresentationNext?

Rick: It is the name of my series of one-day workshops for the spring of 2011. I will be in eight cities across the United States from March through May.

Geetesh: What are the topics covered? How do you split it between theory and practice?

Rick: Carefully (laughs)! When you ask people to sit and listen for an entire day, it is vital that you create an active blend of topics and of treatments. Also, this is not a multi-track event like my annual conference; it is a single track of seminars, so you have to pick topics that will be of benefit to a wide majority, without being so general as to be useless and vague.

Geetesh: So how do you do that?

Rick: Like I said, carefully! I’ve been doing this for a while now, and I have a pretty good idea of the issues that most content creators and presenters face. If you are involved in presentations today, you likely have little or no formal background in graphic design, yet you are asked to design presentations, perhaps on a daily basis.

You spend untold hours inside of PowerPoint and yet you probably had little training on it past the basics offered by a local training center. You maybe avoid use of animation because you know how easy it is to misuse it, you have a passing familiarity at best with the software’s global controls, such as slide masters and layouts, and more important, you are constantly being asked to include large volumes of content on slides, perhaps against your better judgment. You probably never went through Toastmasters or similar programs, yet you or others in your department are asked to stand up in front of a group of people you don’t know very well and deliver a message that is vital to your organization. Oh, and message — most people do that all backward: they focus on how great their company is instead of on the issues and needs of audience members.

Geetesh: You’re going to cover all of that in one day?

Rick: They’ll leave tired!

Geetesh: You are best known for your annual conference, in which everyone meets at one place. This seems like quite a departure for you.

Rick: I can see why you would think that, because the Presentation Summit is well-known. But really, the other 51 weeks out of the year, this is what I do — I give workshops, I teach presentation design and delivery skills, I coach on advanced PowerPoint technique. The difference is that normally I do this in private settings, in organizations, instead of open to the public.

Geetesh: How does that make these different?

Rick: (laughs) They’re a lot cheaper!

Geetesh: I’m sure that’s not the only difference.

Rick: No, but I should start there. Because when I am hired by private companies, they are going to spend several thousands of dollars on the program. Here, any person can attend for $295. Also, large organizations often fill a room with 300 people for these workshops, but at any one city, we won’t go over 45 people. Finally, when you bring together several dozen people from different companies, they really get a chance to share stories and compare notes.

Geetesh: So it’s much more personal.

Rick: That’s right — we even invite the attendees to send us their slide decks ahead of time so that we might use them in the workshops.

Geetesh: Why did you choose the cities that you did?

Rick: Because they’re big! They are major urban centers around the country, so they are near large concentrations of businesses or easy to get to by car or regional flight.

Geetesh: But only in the States. No London or Frankfurt on the schedule? How about coming here to India?

Rick: I know that you have an international readership and I’m mindful of overlooking many of them. If I were still 22 years old, I’d do this in every continent, because I really love meeting presentation pros from other countries. We had over two dozen international patrons at the Summit this year and it was a wonderful experience. But my wife would divorce me and my kids would disown me. Eight cities and one country is all I can handle.

Geetesh: What is the one thing you want people to leave your workshop with?

Rick: Empowerment! Most people who work on presentation content don’t get many opportunities to expand their horizons. You become entrenched in the daily grind, you use only the software skills you have, everything is due yesterday, and you find it difficult or impossible to push your own envelope. This day will give you a completely different experience. It will be an opportunity to blend best practices with honest critique of your current methods. You spend this day with me and you will change permanently the way you approach and tackle presentation projects. And you’ll like the change.

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: Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Shape Union

I have already explored three of the four Combine Shape commands in PowerPoint: Combine, Intersect, and Subtract — and now I show you how you can use Union, the fourth and the last command of this quartet. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can take two or more shapes and unite them.

Learn how you can unite shapes in PowerPoint 2010 using the Shape Union command.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Shape Subtract

PowerPoint 2010 lets you change how your shapes merge with its four Combine Shape commands: Combine, Intersect, Subtract, and Union — you can end up with some seriously impressive results. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can subtract one shape from another. For example, I placed two shapes over each other — with these shapes selected, I could use the Shape Subtract command that I explain later in this tutorial to create an entirely different, subtracted shape.

Learn how you can subtract shapes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows using the Shape Subtract command.

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

Saving Themes in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel 2011 for Mac

We already showed you how you can save Themes from within Office 2008 applications. In this tutorial, we’ll now show you how you can do the same from within the various Office 2011 for Mac applications. Microsoft Office 2011 includes plenty of Themes that allow you to change how your documents, slides, and worksheets look. These Themes are available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — in PowerPoint 2011, these built-in Themes can be found within the Themes tab of the Ribbon.

Learn how to save the active Theme in PowerPoint, Excel, and Word 2011.

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

Living Actor: Conversation with Benoît Morel

Benoît Morel is the co-founder and CEO of Cantoche that is located in France and in the USA. Following his career as Sound Engineer and Producer at Radio France, Benoît worked in the video game industry for 10 years producing CGI animation across a variety of formats – notably video games, interactive shows, internet websites, and particularly, character animation. Benoît has published several articles and has contributed a chapter to the book Agent Culture published by Lawrence Elbraum in 2004. Benoît consults multi-national organizations, companies, research institutes, and universities on Embodied Agent design and deployment.

In this conversation, Benoît discusses Cantoche’s Living Actor product, and how it can be used for PowerPoint presentations.

Geetesh: What is Living Actor, and how can PowerPoint presentations be equipped with the capabilities of this product.

Benoît: Living Actor™ is a suite of products that allow users – training and communication managers, webmasters, creative people, and students – to select and direct a 3D full body avatar without any animation expertise and to embed the resulting animation in any PC or mobile application. Living Actor™ is based on a Speech-to-Animation patented technology which creates adapted head and body gestures and not just a phoneme-to-animation approach that only synchronizes the avatar’s lips. This technology analyzes users’ speech and visualizes it by providing the avatar with unparalleled automatic behavioral and expressive abilities that enable it to establish a high-quality mode of non-verbal communication with users that is essential to the communication effectiveness.

In October 2010, we added to the Living Actor™ suite a rapid learning product called Living Actor™ Presenter. Living Actor™ Presenter is a 100% online SaaS (Software as a Service) service that generates avatar video animations. It takes just a minute to arrange what your avatar will say by typing text or uploading your own audio file and saving your video. Our Living Actor™ technology does the rest by synchronizing lips, gestures, and full body behaviors. Living Actor™ Presenter offers also powerful and innovative features to allow you to produce your virtual presenters. Many options will give you the ideal toolkit to become fully autonomous such as a large gallery of avatars and background! Watch this video that shows how it works.

Once you’re happy, you can download the video and import the video into your PowerPoint presentations as you do by importing a video.

Living Actor™ Presenter comes with very high-quality avatars. Whether your communication and training content targets national or international audiences, youth, seniors, or a variety of professions, the Avatar Gallery will offer you a wide range of styles and options. If you can’t find the ideal avatar, feel free to VOTE! Every month the gallery will display new avatars based on users’ requests! Since the creation of the company, we have created more than 600 customized avatars for international companies. We have a strong experience working for Warner Bros (Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck avatars), Michelin (with the famous Michelin Man), Microsoft (we created the Question Mark avatar installed on Windows XP).

Geetesh: What are the benefits of using Living Actor, and how much does it cost?

Benoît: A Living Actor Presenter enhances the effectiveness of your PowerPoint presentation. An Avatar integrated into the user interface creates in the user the illusion to be interacting with the system as if he were communicating with a real person. (Ortiz, 2006). An Avatar uses its graphical representation and also non-verbal communication as postures, facial expressions, gesticulation, mobility, voice to interact with user especially if the user is alone in front of the PowerPoint presentation. This will create an effective link and maintain user’s attention.

You can “humanize” a presentation with a real person but avatars have much more advantages such as their disponibility (24/7), the possibility to update whenever you want and above all the attraction to the young generation.

Everybody thinks that 3D high-quality avatars are very expensive. This cutting-edge solution will allow you to dramatically improve the quality and interactivity of your presentations for a very low price! With Living Actor™ Presenter, you subscribe to an “all in one” service and only pay for the videos you save. The first account allows you to create 20 Videos for only $99.00. The more you want to create videos, the lower the video price is. A 20-second video ranges between $2.85 to $9.95 depending on the number of videos and avatars you need.

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: Interviews, Living Actor, Movies, Narration, PowerPoint, Video