the blog for presenters and public speakers
PowerPoint and other packages
Good slides; bad handouts
1212 days
Errrmmmm… that’s it really. Â Nothing more to add. Good slides make bad handouts… there’s just not enough detail on them. Â What we do is create a bespoke document to use as the handout which may (or may not) include the slides.
If you’re doing that in PowerPoint, then there’s a good, brief ‘howto’ here. Long term readers will know much it hurt me to point to something good on the Microsoft site! 
 Thanks to @24point0 on twitter for pointing it out to me.
Pictures for presentations – review of fotolia
4398 days
I seem to be spending a lot of my time reviewing things at the moment. Â My last one was a “Good, but….” kind of affair (and it was a big but! Â ). Â It’s nice that this one can be pretty much purely positive! Fotolia.com
Regular readers will know that I’m a strong advocate of using pictures in presentations – they’re less boring and more effective that streams of bullet-point slides so it seems a bit of a no-brainer for the serious presenter, to me. The question arises again and again, of course, about where to get images from that are of high enough quality and of the right subject matter… and to do so in a way that doesn’t cost you so much time you begin to lose the will to live while you search!
It’s an added bonus, as far as I’m concerned, if the images aren’t the standard ones you see a million times around the web!
Let’s start at the beginning and go through things formally…
Costs – I’ll get this one out of the way at the start because to be fair, I can’t really comment all that much on the cost of the pictures as I haven’t been paying for them for this review. Looking at them, they seem reasonable and in line with everyone else’s but I’ve not gone into this in anything more than a superficial basis. Â Me? Lazy? Guilty as charged.
Interface – smooth. Â I liked it at first sight. Friendly and informal with a style that I like. Response times were a bit variable but that could very easily have been at my end, so to speak. But here’s where I had my first problem…
On the other hand… I don’t know about you, but I tend to use sites like this by using the ‘search’ function.
Champagne
On the plus side it’s obvious, easy to use, and fast. Â On the downside I’m not sure it gives me the results I was expecting! Â On a whim, my first search was for ‘explosion’. The first image I was offered was a heavily photoshopped image of a semi-distant city and the second was this image of champagne flutes. Â It’s a lovely image, absolutely lovely, but…. … but what the heck has it got to ‘explosion’?
A few rows of images down there are fireworks and so on, which I could just about see as linked to ‘explosions’ but seriously… Champagne flutes? Eh?
Taken a bit by surprise by this, I went for something more traditional in my next search “microphones”. Â The results this time were stunning – simply stunning. Â Stunning to the point that I downloaded one of the images with a view to using it in a slidedeck I have because it’s better than the image I have in there right now by quite some way. I’m not sure what more I can say by way of praise: I’m going to change my slides to include this image.
I tried a few other searches and came away pretty impressed overall.
Downloads are a little clunky at first but once you get into the right way of thinking, very simple.
The images themselves – well what can I add to the comments above about downloading a microphone image? Well, some general impressions, I guess. There’a fair smattering of naff images – particularly if you search on something that is likely to attract naffness, such as ‘motivation’. Do this and you’ll get the usual stuff like a clockface counting down to midnight with the text ‘the future is now’.
Pass the sick-bucket, please.
You’ll also get some stunning stuff. And I really mean stunning.
Not only is the resolution good but the contrast is generally excellent – at least on the pics I looked at – which is important for a presenter like me, because data projectors often leach colour out of images. An additional advantage from my perspective, is that a significant number of the images I looked at had a ‘sensible border’ from a presenters point of view. What do I mean by a sensible border? Â Something that I can blend into my slides using something like Instant Alpha to make colours transparent.
The advantage is that the image doesn’t just sit there, looking like a semi-intended transplant on your slide, the way the image above does on this review!
Size choices were sensible and resolution was good enough to print.
What more can I say?
Odds and ends – to the left of the screen, as you look at your images is the similia box. I haven’t bothered to look at the technology behind it, but it claims to be looking for images you might find useful, based upon your search history. Â It did a reasonable job too.
All in all? – a few quibbles but I loved it.
There’s something about Keynote presentations
4500 days
Mashable is reporting the most popular presentations for 2010 (see here) and while I just laugh off a few of the statistics they cite (apparently women’s presentations are shorter than men’s on average – oh, yeah? 18 slides to 20 – Wow!) and the reasons for some things are obvious (such as the fact that Africa submits fewer presentations than America) there are some interesting observations worth thinking about.
For example, presentations written in English tend to have few slides in them than those than any other language. Japanese and Korean come in biggest and second biggest, so I’m guessing this has more to do with the structure of the language as much as anything, but it’s an interesting bit of trivia, never the less.
However, there’s something which really caught my eye as I scrolled through the slides: only 2% of presentations were written in Keynote (which is a surprising small number to me – but that probably says more about me!) but fully 16% of the top presentations were written in Keynote. Â That’s a massive over-representation!
Now, I fully take the point that the definition of ‘best’ is somewhat tenuous here but, even so……
So what is it about Keynote that creates better presentations? Â Well, it’s not totally a technical issue, in the sense that anything Keynote can do, Powerpoint can also do (more or less). Somethings are massively more simple to achieve in one of the programs than the other, however. Â Maybe it’s that – the things which make for better presentations are perhaps easier to do in Keynote.
In my experience, things like inserting images  and positioning images is much, much easier in Keynote. Perhaps it’s things like that….?
Certainly a conversation I was involved with on twitter (@presentations), kicked off by a review pointing out that Powerpoint had more ‘features’ in many areas the consensus was that many of these features weren’t really much ‘benefit’ to the typical user and that in some ways they were actually a hinderance, as they ‘clarted up’ (as we say in the North of England) the interface.
Interface is a word that’s banded around a lot WRT to Keynote (well, Macs in general!, TBH) and a lot of the people I talk to (professional presenters or professionals who present) suggest to me that the clean-ness of the way Keynote works means they can concentrate a lot more on the content/format/structure of their presentation and less on the mechanics of how to make that happen.
I’m inclined to agree – though I should also point out that things like content/format/structure should be decided using pencil/paper away from the keyboard!
Maybe it’s not the software at all but the people – perhaps people who tend to write better presentations tend to use Keynote, not that Keynote leads to better presentations per se… How about that for a controversial question! 
What say you, gentle reader, why is it easier to produce a good presentation in Keynote than Powerpoint – or is it?
Presenting on the road
0503 days
It’s very rare that we have the luxury of being able to control everything about our equipment when we’re presenting. Â My experience is that only about half the time are my clients presenting on ‘home turf’ – the other half of the time they’re in client’s offices or some shared conference room or (horror!) hotel room.
There are problems-a-legion with working in strange venues and any professional will tell you two things. Firstly you should get there as early as you possibly can to make sure nothing can go wrong and secondly that no matter how early you get there, something will go wrong. Â Let me give you an example from a recent event I attended at the conference centre at St James’ Park (for those of you who don’t live in the UK, St James is the home stadium of Newcastle United, a football (soccer) team).
The room layout wasn’t helpful, and it wasn’t possible for everyone to see the screen. No doubt the fitters thought they were being very helpful when they then put a set of large TV screens onto pillars – because it did at least mean people could see what was on the screen, even if they couldn’t see the presenter!
But take a quick look at the problems that resulted in the colour balances of the two types of screen are very (very!) different. Â (Forgive, please, the shoddy photography – I had to grab quick shots on my iPhone when I could)…
On this occasion it didn’t make too much difficulty for the presenter because the slides were (boring) text – but imagine if the presenter had been trying to use (shock horror!) pictures in his presentation!
My solution is to take our own projector(s) with us when we’re not familiar with the venue and its equipment (if that’s possible). That means that we can be as sure as possible that things will work out for us. Â Not everyone’s got the luxury of having their own projector, I know, but they’re reasonably cheap these days so if the presentation is important, or you’re going to make a few presentations it’s probably worth the investment.
On the other hand, if you can’t use your own equipment, there’s a VERY simple piece of advice that should help – and which, I suspect will be obvious when you think about it!  :)
Don’t rely on subtle colour in your slides – by all means use colour but make sure that the images work pretty much, no matter how the projector damages them. Â The way to check is to play around with the colour-balances on your computer before you bung them into your slides. Â Pretty much any graphics software will allow you to do that easily enough and it won’t take you more than a couple of minutes. Â (Actually it can take you a lot longer if you start to get carried away, doing things for fun, to see what people look like with green faces and so on, but you know what I mean! Â :D Â )
As a rule of thumb – no more – if you slides work in shades of grey, you should be fine to use them in colour no matter how bad the projector!
Designing a presentation from scratch
4531 days
Oddly enough, I’m rarely impressed by the results of that kind of thinking. Â The thing is, once you fire up Powerpoint (or Keynote, for that matter), your brian starts to work in a particular way – linearly and logically. It has to, to be able to work the software. Â The less competent you are at using the software, the more significant that problem becomes. Â I’m an expert in Keynote, using it pretty much every week, and even I don’t fire it up until well, well down the design process.
Long term readers will know that we often use a simple set of three questions to get ourselves thinking the right sort of things when we design a presentation (and note here, I’m deliberately using the term ‘design’, not ‘write’!) but the next step is a tricky one. Â The questions tell you what to say in your presentation but not how… which is where things like the diagram I’ve posted here comes in. Â This is a snapshot of the start of some work on a presentation called “Wrestling the Octopus” – it’s going to be about ‘emotional robustness’… in other words how to keep your head up when things around you are going downhill faster than you can say ‘Bobsleigh’.
As you can see, I’ve started to build up ideas, issues and things to mention into groups – and some kind of structure is starting to emerge organically. Â The thin arrows are places where I might want to mention back to something I’ve said before to provide context and the groups of things are, probably, going to be slides (or perhaps short sequences of slides). Â The key point, however, is that I can now put things together in a simple, visual way and mess about with it to my heart’s content before starting to worry about how to communicate the information.
By the say, for those of you who are interested in this kind of thing, the software I used to do this is the excellent (and free!) Xmind. Â Typically, I do this on a whiteboard (a big one!) using post-it notes and things, but on this one occasion I ignored my own advice about not using technology so that I could easily show the process on this blog.
The next step of course, is to figure out how to communicate the information once I’ve got the structure… …but that’s a post for another day. Â Today it’s sufficient to just think about what facts and figures go with what other facts and figures… and what order they should be in.
prezi for presentations? Perhaps
8621 days
I’ve heard a lot of fuss and hype around some presentation software called prezi. Â It’s an alternative to Keynote and Powerpoint, in that it’s designed to create the visual aids (aka a slideshow) that goes with your presentation. Â So far so good – the more packages there are in the market the better.
Always wanting to know more (yes, I know, I’m behind the curve here, but I’ve been busy – so sue me! ) I signed up for the free version to see how it shapes up. Â Hmmmm.
First things first, it looks slick – the demo presentations are well done and (to my surprise, sorry!) pretty interesting. The price isn’t bad, either. Â If you can cope with your presentations being online (only) the free version seems to work nicely and I didn’t have any problems experimenting. Â It imports PDFs and so on very comfortably too, so all in all a nice package.
But so what?
Well, for me, so…. so very little to be honest.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the ‘flying’ and ‘zooming’ effect that was the basis of the demo presentations I watched (such as here, for example). Â Also, I kind of like the way it forces you to work – planning things by jotting notes almost, rather than the rigidity of planning-by-Powerpoint. Â The thing is, as I watched the second demo, I got a sense of deja vu. Â And again with the third… in fact they all looked disappointingly like the training demo I’d watched.
Essentially, I’m gradually concluding that this is because prezi is, essentially, a one trick pony. Â At it’s heart it’s a kind of combined mindmap and flow-diagramme, with pictures/text stuck on it, creating narrative, which is great, but that’s all it is. Â The zooming out to see where you are in the bigger picture is nice, but it gets old really quickly – for me at least. Â (I imagine for anyone who suffers from travel sickness it’ll get old REALLY fast!)
Maybe it’s just me – has anyone used it “for real”?
Going dark
3762 days
Scattered around the web are lots of places suggesting you can/should use the b or w keys to turn you screen black or white when you’re presenting, at times when you want your audience to focus on you. Being slightly tongue in cheek, I’m amazed that there’s anyone left who doesn’t know this tip!
To be honest though, the sudden cutting in and out of black that this gives you is a bit shocking – far better to fade in. Besides, using the b/w keys means you have to be standing right next to your laptop and that’s very limiting… To avoid the problem you need simply to slip a black screen into your slides every now and again – at appropriate moments. My ‘darkest’ slide deck contains fully almost a quarter dark slides!
I know that’s unusual, but it’s the best way (I think!) to work on that particular topic. Certainly there are topics I’ve made presentations about when I’ve never wanted a blank slide, but they’re few and far between. It’s a matter of style and taste, obviously, but if nothing else, having the courage to go to a blank slide does wonders for how cool your audience will think you are!
So far so good, though it doesn’t allow you to go to black on a whim, or when someone asks a question. Your solutions at that point seem to me (I’m sure I’m going to miss things here, so chip in!) either to use a remote control to get a black effect from the projector or do something more subtle with your slide deck.
I’m not particularly in favour of the former idea, basically as it involves carrying two remote controls around – one for the projector and one for your laptop. In the heat of the moment I know what would happen to me! Besides, having the second remote in your pocket is going to look bad!
The subtle approach is simple to have a black slide at the end of your slide deck and to know its number. If you need to go to a black slide, simply use your remote to skip to that slide. For goodness’ sake though, check what slide your presentation is currently showing, so that you can come back to it when you need.
Powerpoint presentation templates – shoot me!
1767 days
Rant mode on….
What is it about the (free) powerpoint templates that makes them so bad? Do (probably otherwise good) designers sit there and think to themselves “I’m going to give this one away, so I’ll deliberately make it suck!”?
Okay, maybe I’m over-reacting, but time and time again I find that people come to us with presentations they’ve “written” using a free template they downloaded and we pretty much have to start over from the beginning. To be honest, if we were getting paid to design the slides that wouldn’t be so bad, but we’re supposed to be helping people learn how to to use the slides in their presentation.
I’ve written (ranted?) elsewhere about the vagaries of templates and the fact that they seem to be written to show off the technical abilities of the designer rather than show of the content of the presentation, but one I’ve seen recently takes the biscuit. Not only does it have a ‘busy’ background, in the same colour as the foreground, but it takes that one stage further and has a moooooooooving background.
Fascinating.
Actually, to be honest, it’s quite clever and I had to get hold of it to look at how they’d done it… but that’s the point – I was interested in the background, not the content.
Our homepage has our take on this. We try and think of the presentation as the container, not the content. Think of a whisky glass if you like – it can be a thing of beauty in its own right, sure, but the real reason for the glass is to get the whisky to your mouth. (If you don’t like whisky, think wine-glass or coke-tin for all I care! )
Too many templates have the equivalent of a very pretty lid on the whisky glass – it looks fantastic but it gets in the way of the pleasure of drinking the whisky.
Besides, why would you want a template that looked like everyone else…?
Don’t tell, show!
1770 days
As a hobby, I write short stories for children. My kids love them, and so do my friends and relatives kids. I’m not suggesting that makes me the next JKRowling but it’s a nice thing to be thought of as a “Story Teller” You’d not believe the adventures of Sophie’s Dragon… or the sound effects of dragon wings!
A while ago I put one of my favourite stories onto a site for critique and got the standard response of “Don’t tell; show!“. I soon learned that this was pretty much the only advice given on the site and my suspicion is that it was once given to someone by a ‘real’ or professional writer/critic and has become part of the mythos of the site, if you see what I mean….
It struck me, however, that for presentations as well as stories, this is a fine bit of advice!
Don’t tell me what you think… or what will happen if… or what you found when you… or what it’s like in the country of…. show me. Forget the words, forget the bullet-points; abandon the lists; throw out the dry stuff.
If you want to connect with me, to change me, to have an effect, to make me remember, show me something.
Don’t tell me the Namib desert is dry – show me a picture of the sands.
Don’t tell me the cash-flow forcast is bad – show me a graph
Don’t tell me various ways you got funding – show me a pie chart
Don’t tell me how fast the new computer is – show me a comparison (live if you can!)
By all means have the necessary data available to back up your claims (in a written document to leave behind, perhaps) but please, please please, don’t force me to listen to it verbatim (or worse yet, read it from slides as you read it to me!).
May I give you a personal example?
My younger daughter is off to Namibia for three weeks in the summer and one of the ways she’s raising funding is by giving talks to groups like Round Table and Rotary Clubs. One of the things she wanted to explain was where Namibia is. It’s on the south-west coast of Africa, adjacent to South African. Big deal. However, a satallite image of the continent, slowly re-orientating and zooming in to show the location of the country is more exciting, more interesting and provides not only a strong feel for the location but also it’s world-wide context.
Another example… she wants to talk about the roles in the team while they’re there
In most circles, that would be a bullet-point list. For my daughter it’s a series of carefully edited images, building into a clever montage showing a fork, sergeant stripes, a compass, a pile of coins and a walking boot. (I’m not showing the result here because it won’t work without the subtle build animation for the slide, sorry!)
Imagine the difference!
Perhaps these aren’t the bet example in the world to use (but they’re important in our household right now, so tough! ) but remember the advice of authors: don’t tell, show!