More on PowerPoint Live 2007
By Ellen FinkelsteinEach year the participants meet with representatives from Microsoft and get to ask lots and lots of questions. This is very fulfilling! (Haven't you wanted to tell Microsoft what you think about PowerPoint?) Not only did we get answers, but we learned a lot about how the PowerPoint team thinks and why some requests are hard to fulfill.
Nancy Duarte, of Duarte Design, gave the second keynote presentation, called "Shift Happens: New changes in global technology will impact presentations". Some of the talk was inspired by her recent visit to India. Nancy worked on Al Gore's famous presentation, "An Inconvenient Truth". She spoke about several trends that are affecting presentation design today, including the global economy, the proliferation of electronic devices, and social networking. She also mentioned an interesting study showing that companies that consider design important ("design-driven companies") do better financially than those who don't emphasize it. This is the importance of branding and presentations are a part of it.
George McCaskill, CTO of Perspector, a 3D add-in for PowerPoint, gave a fascinating talk called, "Lessons from the Rocket Scientists: Building presentations that take off". It looked at presentations from a systems point of view, including:
- Thinking about the problem before the solution
- Focusing on the presentation as well as the slides
- Understanding the role of modeling
Glen Millar, of PowerPoint Workbench, introduced a fantastic, new animation technique, which I'll reveal later on! Keep an eye out for it. He calls it the false background.
Rick Altman, of R. Altman & Associates, also the organizer of PowerPoint Live, and Sandy Johnson produced a "play" to show how a PowerPoint expert in a company could respond to poorly-made slides that come from presenters. Topics included:
- How to convince them to reduce the amount of text on a slide (pity the poor audience!) - highlighting main concepts, changing bullets to headings, using animation, and splitting content into several slides.
- Creating charts that are comprehensible, including formatting, animating, and ungrouping them
- Transforming text into "infographics," which use graphics and animation to develop a model and tell a story
- Introducing tables to start with the concepts and then bring in the data.
- A tip on converting a presentation to a text file when there's text in text boxes and AutoShapes. This is helpful when a presentation is so awful that you want to start from scratch, but without retyping all the text!
- The importance of structured content for understanding
- Why contrast and color selection are important
- How to choose the right font
- How to calculate the minimum font size that your audience can read
- The process of selecting what to present for maximum retention
- Ways to transform text to visuals, or, how not to annoy your audience
- Types of visuals that you can use, depending on your content: trends, processes, comparisons, stories about people and locations, and so on.
- Making the point stand out without using a laser pointer, and why
- The importance of rehearsal, or, why not to tweak those slides just before you present!
If you need to create effective, memorable presentations, I highly recommend attending PowerPoint Live next year.
