I've just returned from PowerPoint Live 2007 in New Orleans. This is my second year, and each time I've felt that I learned so much! This time I'd say that the underlying theme was creating audience-centered presentations. (That's my term; I didn't hear it at the conference.)
PowerPoint Live offers 3 sessions at a time, for 3 days, and I couldn't attend all of them, of course. The 3 tracks are:
- Tools and Techniques
- Design and Deliver
- Beyond PowerPoint
Jim Endicott of Distinction Communication, Inc., gave the keynote address on Monday morning, "We've Come a Long Way: The Coming of Age for the Presentation Professional." An important point was that we need to switch from focusing on "giving" presentations to focusing on audiences "getting" them. He made the point that companies spend $100,000's on printed materials and their Web site, but often don't do the same for PowerPoint presentations, even though those presentations are just as crucial to the company. He said that companies are just starting to realize how much is lost with bad presentations.
Julie Terberg of Terberg Design spoke about developing PowerPoint templates for larger corporations. However, the points she made were useful for anyone who creates many presentations that have shared features. She explained how to create sets of slides for various situations and concepts that can then be used over and over. One point that she made that I heard several times was the importance of not putting too much content on a slide. This is because people simply can't grasp so much at one time. The solution is to split up the content into multiple slides.
Sandy Johnson of Presentation Wiz did a session called, "Living with Bullets: When you must use bullets in your slides." The title says it all: bullets are not the ideal format for slides. However, she went through some pointers that can help make bullets a little more palatable, including:
- Reducing the number of bulleted items on a slide (she recommends 5 maximum of 5 words each)
- Putting sub-bullets into Speaker Notes, not on the slides
- Highlighting important words or phrases
- Being sure not to read the slides (this point was repeated many times during the entire conference)
Julie Terberg of Terberg Design also gave a fascinating demonstration of some of her animation work, slides that were done in PowerPoint but looked like they were done in Adobe® Flash®. She works in a precise way, using a grid and guides to precisely position objects, and then adding multiple animation effects to the objects. She plans these complex animations on paper first, and some take many hours to complete. You had to witness these creations to appreciate just what PowerPoint can do.
Jim Endicott of Distinction Communication, Inc., also gave a second session, "The Mother of All Makovers: Using images, not words, to tell a story." Jim talks a lot about telling stories and about the fundamentals of persuasion. To make the point that slides shouldn't be overloaded with content, he related a 2000 study at Columbia University. When people had a choice of a table with 24 jars of jam and another with 6 jars of jam, more people went over to the table with more jars of jam, but they bought less jam from that table! The table with fewer jars of jam had fewer visitors, but sold more.
Jim spoke about the importance of finding out what the audience wants, and knowing what you want the audience to do after the presentation. Buy something? Call for a consultation? He covered his "Seven-Step Persuasive Message Model", which shows a presenter how to organize an effective message.
Page 2 of What Happened at PowerPoint Live 2007?
