I have read all about the new iPad, watched the videos, read the white papers, held one in my hands, and test-drove it.

And I am disappointed beyond belief.

While I’m a Windows guy to the core, I own seven iPods and two iPads. I think it’s marvelous the way the user community invents uses for the iPad, and I credit Apple with this. The big gamble with the iPad was that its developers didn’t really know how consumers would use it. In many ways, they left it up to us to figure out what its purpose and applications would be. That gamble paid off, as restaurant servers now take our orders with it, hotel sales managers show rooms and suites to meeting planners with it, shoppers can dress up virtual manikins with it.

We users have largely determined how the iPad is to be used, and that’s the actual definition of “application.” In a sense, we are the killer apps for the iPad.

But through this wonderful epiphany, the presentation community has been left out in the cold, and it is with sadness that I must conclude that the third iteration of iPad does nothing to address this.

I have written about this before (The iPad Predicament, Feb 2011). I was dumbfounded to discover that the original iPad offered no support for remote advancing of slides. Here’s an excerpt from one year ago:

I got so close — I transferred all of my slides, converted them accurately, and successfully projected them on screen. And now when it comes time to actually deliver the presentation, I am required to stand behind a lectern so I can stay close to the device? I have spent the last five years advocating against the use of lecterns. This little gadget was about to turn me into a hypocrite.

Here is where the irony becomes almost too much to bear. Can you imagine if Steve Jobs were tasked with presenting from his iPad? The master of modern-day presentation, having to stand behind a lectern?? Apple’s decision to not include a USB port with the first generation iPad has effectively prevented me from using it in my profession.

The iPad 2 was a much better device than the original and I have enjoyed using mine. I am confident that I got a job the other day because I showed my portfolio on it — I looked cool doing it. I love leading small meetings with it, where we can all gather around it. And we all heard the rumors of Microsoft’s imminent support for Office on the iPad. This, coupled with the announced of the third iteration, buoyed my hopes that this most significant of omissions would be addressed.

Instead, the iPad 3 has given us a nicer-looking screen, a faster processor, and a better camera. I’m still trying to find a single user who thought that the screen resolution was deficient, the processor slow, or the camera weak. Apple improved three areas that nobody felt were lacking in the first place.

And still no USB port.

To the legions of presentation professionals, who watch technology with rapt interest, the iPad remains a curiosity and a toy. To the community of writers like me, who offer comment on the state of our art, the iPad remains on our can’t-recommend list. That’s a shame, because it could be so much more.

Sigh.

As the Presentation Summit enters its tenth season, we continue the happy tradition of our Design-a-Template contest. From several dozen entries, we will award a trip to the conference (Oct 7-10, Scottsdale AZ) to the person whose work is chosen as most appropriate to serve as the conference template.

For nearly a decade, we have created a tradition that includes: brilliant work by exceptionally talented people; the discovery of a unique challenge when creating a template that is to be used across many dozens of seminars; spirited debate between our own versions of Simon, Paula, and Randy (now Randy, J-Lo, and Steven, of course); and the requisite dose of comic relief that accompanies it.

Be Noticed…But Not Too Much

Conventional wisdom would suggest that your first order of business as a contestant would be to stand out from the crowd—to make sure that your design is noticed.

That would probably disqualify you in the first five seconds, as it did for one of our first entries in our inaugural contest in 2005.

This template is very creative...but how attractive would it be the 30th time you see it?

No doubt a lot of thought and effort went into this design, but the one piece missing is the notion that these slides needed to serve as the backdrop for all of the brilliant ideas of our team of experts. Our template needs to wear well; it will be seen eight hours a day for three consecutive days. A design like this one would promote eye fatigue as it competes for attention with the foreground elements or tries to integrate with those elements. As attractive as Steve Rindsberg and Jennifer Card are (the two people waiving on the title slide), we would grow weary of their greeting by about the third hour of the first day.

This is not unlike some of the auditions that we regularly see in the first few episodes of an American Idol season—the people who want to make the most of their 30 seconds of fame. Some of them can actually sing a few bars, but that gets lost in the flash and dazzle that they choose to lead with.

The winner that year, Karen Giblin or Largo FL, authored a much more understated design motif and its quiet elegance impressed our versions of Randy (yours truly), Paula (slide:ology and Resonate author Nancy Duarte), and Simon (the then-product manager of PowerPoint, Ric Bretschneider). Its even background would not compete with the ideas of our presenters and would facilitate showing large-sized slides.

Less flashy and easier on the senses...

A Picture is Worth How Many Words?

Paying homage to the age-old adage, we offer many seminars on the value of using an evocative photo in place of a paragraph of words. We think there are few things better than transcending the conventional bullet slide. This advice was taken a bit too far by this 2006 entrant who was apparently trying to make a slide that was worth about 15,000 words.

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but too many pictures is probably worthless.

On the title slide, they all faded in on a meticulously-created cascade, giving rise to the question of who exactly would see that effect. Only those who entered the room the moment that the presenter started the show? Or would the presenter wait until everyone was there before “presenting” the title slide? Sorry, animation on a title slide just doesn’t work…unless it is on a loop…and then it is working way too hard…

The winner that year did not try so hard. Deb Shenenberg of Scottsdale AZ produced this smart and inviting design that won over all the judges.

Trying softer is often better than trying harder.

As one of the presenters, I especially appreciated all of the small boxes on the content slides that I could use to create hyperlinks to other slides or other files.

Local Knowledge

In 2007, our conference (known at the time as PowerPoint Live) journeyed to the heart of the French Quarter as our effort to help restore the New Orleans economy. We expected many of the entrants that year to use the storied city as the basis for creating themes. And many of them did…they just took their sweet time doing it…and I panicked…two weeks before the deadline and there were only two entries, neither of them any good…so I created my own entry to the contest…unbeknownst to the judges…until this very moment.

Desperate conference hosts often resort to desperate measures, like crafting their own contest entries.

Randy thought it was the best thing he had ever seen in his life (wait, who was Randy again? Oh…right…). Paula felt as if the design was a bit heavy, and Simon called it juvenile and horrific, a complete embarrassment to the competition, and a miracle that I wasn’t arrested for it. Okay, so Ric didn’t react in character quite to that extent, but the end result was that my disguised entry did not make it out of the quarterfinals.

And my fear was unfounded, as we soon received a flood of entries, including many fine New Orleans-inspired designs. The winner, belonging to Liane Fuji of San Francisco CA, might not have been received with as much enthusiasm in another city—it might have been thought of as too loud. But the judges agreed that with a host city like New Orleans, special consideration was called for. And any concern that the design would get tired across the conference was completely eliminated when Liane agreed to create three separate designs, one for each day.

This multi-themed design was perfect for a New Orleans-based conference.

Analog and Digital

The notion of creating multiple designs was never part of our criteria, but Liane seemed to have started something in 2007, because our 2008 winning entrant, Lindsey Strobel of Austin TX, went so far above and beyond the call of duty, we felt guilty. She created six separate designs, each sporting a wonderful two-world quality merging the analog and digital environments in which we all live.

This potpourri of slide masters guaranteed fresh visuals morning, noon, and night.

While these title slides are full of personality and energy, the interior slides were clean, consistent, and in keeping with our quest for these slides to sink into the background. And with these title slides, our presenting team felt like kids in the candy store when allowed to choose which motif was the best to use for which seminar topic.

Matching the Carpets and Drapes

Last year’s winner, Tany Nagy, cornered the market on talent and luck. Her creative design was full of charm, local flavor, and an uncanny sense of decor, as the colors she chose matched perfectly with the carpeting and accent colors of the conference hall. We were so tickled, we used the design for the cover of the conference guide, the t-shirts, and the posters.

Our 2011 winner made us wonder if she had traveled to the conference venue and matched the decor.

Would you like to show off your creativity to your peers? This year’s contest is open for business and the winner is awarded with a free trip to the conference and the thrill of seeing his or her work showcased before over 200 of the most passionate and dedicated members of the presentation community. We use the phrase “his or her” generously: so far, all of our winners have been women. Guys…c’mon…maybe it’s time to break up this sorority party…

Details on how to enter can be found at the conference website—just click the Design-a-Template Contest link. We look forward to seeing the product of your inspiration…!

Did you watch the Grammy Awards last week? Winners for Best Rock Performance, the Foo Fighters provided the most memorable moment of any award show in years when lead singer Dave Grohl accepted the award on behalf of the band. Grohl shared with the world how the band bypassed a modern studio, choosing instead to record songs in his garage, “with microphones and a tape machine.” Listen to how he describes the process:

Could any of us in the presentation business possibly have said it any better? That was an incredible (dare I say perfect?) summation of the importance of humanity in human endeavors. I’m sure it is as easy for musicians to get lost in studio gadgetry as it is for presenters to get lost in PowerPoint features, and in both cases the result is the subordination of the human to the technology. (It was with mild disappointment that I learned that the band had to post a retraction/clarification on its Facebook page, as a result of the flak they received for implying that this style of music was better than modern, studio- and technology-driven music.)

As Jim Endicott has said on many occasions to Presentation Summit patrons over the years, audiences don’t want perfect presenters. They want to feel that presenters are just like they are. That they are part of the human condition, they deal with life’s struggles, they get nervous, they forget stuff. That they, like Grohl, would have to ask a spouse for permission before converting a garage into a music studio. The genuine display of human emotion and the honest portrayal of the human condition can never be supplanted as the most important components of any storytelling experience, including a presentation.

In my travels as a presentation consultant and in my experiences as the host of the Summit, there are plenty of opportunities to focus on tools and techniques. In fact, the other day, I mentally reviewed a few of the pieces of advice that I regularly dole out over the course of a day-long presentation skills workshop:

• Use semi-transparent shapes over photos to blend text with them
• Extend photos all the way to the edges of slides for a better look
• Rename objects so it is easier to animate them
• Use custom shows to help create menus for better navigation through a slide deck
• Stand on the audience’s left side
• Exaggerate upper-body gestures, minimize lower-body movement

I believe each of these to be valid suggestions that could improve one’s performance with slides or help one’s comfort level in front of an audience. At the conference, we will offer over 40 seminars, focusing on message, design, creation, and delivery, and from them will flow several hundred tips and tricks like the ones above.

But the day that I make any of this more important than how one person can communicate more honestly with others is the day that I must contemplate retirement.

In other words, this is the absolute worst time to ask for new features.

In other words, only a fool would publish his wish list now.

So right on cue…here we go…

1. Total Overhaul of the Handout Master

One of the leading causes of Death by PowerPoint is users loading up their slides with too much text. One of the primary reasons for that is because they intend to use those slides for projection as well as printout. And the reason for that is because they have no good alternative. PowerPoint users need a way to produce dedicated handouts, separate from their visuals, and miniature replicas of the slides do not qualify. Let me reiterate: Printing slides as handouts is a bad idea!

The Handout engine is so deficient, my workaround for clients is to poach the Notes page. You can use the Notes master to add visual branding, headers, footers, logos, photos, optional slide thumbnails, and a multitude of text. It’s really quite well-suited for printing handouts…too bad you have to give up your speaker notes to do it.

PowerPoint needs something like the Notes page, dedicated to the design and creation of leave-behind materials and handouts. It should be called the Handout master, and the pathetic thing that currently bears that name should be rolled into the Print engine where it belongs.

It’s almost scary to think how much better our community’s slides would be if people had a viable alternative to creating one set of slides for both visual projection and printouts.

2. Styles Brought to Animation

How is it that Microsoft Word has styles for text and Excel has styles for cell content but PowerPoint has no global styles for arguably the most important output that it produces — the motion of elements across the slide? I appreciate that the Format Painter tool has migrated to the Animation engine, but picking up the attributes of one element and copying them to another is not good enough. We need to be able to define a group of animation attributes, save them, recall them, and apply them.

Imagine how much more productive we would be if we could create styles called, say, Two-Second Fade After Previous, and Wipe Right On Click, or Grow 200% and Move 200 Pixels Left (which we would call Pan and Zoom, which would otherwise be on my wish list). And imagine how powerful it would be if you needed to adjust animation settings across several dozen elements and all you had to do was modify the style that controls them.

My graphic drawing program has been doing that since 1995; it’s time that PowerPoint did it, too.

While the developers are working on that, I sure would appreciate being able to Tab through the settings in the Animation task pane. Presently, it is a mouse-centric activity. Together, these two shortcomings create needless tedium and excessive mouse-clicking, resulting in measurable loss of productivity and increased risk of repetitive-stress injury.

Oh, and while they are under the hood, when I ask for an animation to be one second in duration, and I then decide it should be a fade instead of a wipe, I would really appreciate the software not changing the duration to its arbitrary default of a half-second without consulting me.

3. Table Animation

Before we leave the subject of animation, how come I can animate charts and graphs but not tables? I think it’s terrific that I do not need to break apart a chart in order to animate its series values and categories. That’s way cool! How come something so much simpler — text that is placed in rows and columns — does not have the same privilege? Why must I convert the table to a metafile and then methodically ungroup just to sequence its entrance?

This contributes directly to Death by PowerPoint– tabular data is too complicated to show all at once and audiences check out when we presenters do it. But the solution is so punitive, most people surrender to it. My clients laugh at me when I show them the almost-juvenile workaround of creating solid objects in front of the rows and columns and applying exits to them. I don’t blame them.

4. More Precise Motion Paths

Okay, one more on Animation. We really, really, really need to be able to designate motion paths by screen coordinates instead of by a blunt mouse push of a low-resolution arrow. Really.

5. Rethink Object Alignment

At the Presentation Summit, we regularly preach the importance of precision alignment of objects for corporate slides. And then we need to award an advanced degree to those who learn how to do it. I acknowledge that the recent addition of on-screen guides is helpful, but they cannot compensate for brain-dead alignment.

Here is an example. Let’s say that you have three elements that need to be lined up:

A headline here

A rule here

A text box here

You need to left-align the three of them so they start where the headline is positioned, but if you select these three elements and use the Align Left command, they will all line up with the rule. Why? Because that is the left-most element and you asked for a left alignment. That’s brain dead! To accommodate this, you must first move the rule to its right so that the headline is the left-most element and then try again. That’s brain dead!

And don’t even get me started on how the software decides how to align three centered objects. Which one is more in the center than the others??

Microsoft cures PowerPoint of all of this brain-deadness by allowing the user to determine the anchor during the selection process. Here’s a simple rule: the object that you select last is the one to which the others are aligned. If you are marquee-selecting, the anchor is the one at the top of the stacking order. There…problem solved.

6. Evolve Bookmarks

I love the Bookmark feature introduced in PowerPoint 2010 — it opens up entirely new creative pathways for those who import audio and video clips. Now it’s time for them to mature in two important ways: we need to be able to rename them and we need to be able to adjust their position.

7. Redesign How One Slide Deck Plays From Within Another

I would love to shout to the whole world about the value and the power of calling one slide show from within another one. I’m not just talking about creating a hyperlink, which is a perfectly fine feature but requires that I get to the mouse and click on an object. I am talking about how I can be 20 feet away from the computer, advance once with my wireless remote, and suddenly be showing slides from a different deck. When the secondary slides finish, I return right to where I was in the primary deck.

Did you know that you can do that within PowerPoint? Probably not, because it requires an undocumented and antiquated Windows function that probably only the baby boomers among our readers remember as Object Linking & Embedding. Using OLE, you can embed an external slide deck onto a slide and designate that it be shown as part of the animation sequence of that slide. This capability has been literally transformative to the way I produce my presentation skills workshops. I’ll happily share with you upon request all of this geeky-tweeky stuff and why I love placing one slide deck inside of another. As soon as I stop shaking in my boots in mortal fear that Microsoft will remove OLE functionality from the program.

I’m sure there is a better and more accessible way to offer this capability than from 22-year-old technology that Microsoft conceded was a failed initiative over a decade ago.

8. Allow Marquee Zooming with the Mouse

Please!!

9. Scrub the Notes page

I don’t share slides very often in a conventional presentation setting (see my rant earlier about creating handouts), but I often do in my PowerPoint workshops, when I want students to be able to open, dissect, and reverse-engineer a technique that I have shown them. But they don’t need to see all of my speaker notes just like they don’t need to read my diary. I want a native, no-plug-in-required, method of eliminating all of my notes. What…you can already do that? With the Document Inspector from File | Check for Issues?

Oh. Well, one out of nine is a start…

To an audience, there are few things more powerful than a presenter who offers a true apology. Showing that level of humanity, sincerity, and vulnerability is difficult to do and proves endearing on many levels. So let’s talk about what qualifies as a sincere-sounding apology.

If you include “I’m sorry” in a sentence, there is no guarantee that it will be interpreted as an apology, and in fact, the exact opposite effect is in play. Take these examples:

“I’m sorry that you feel this way…”

“I’m sorry that you took offense…”

“If my advice upsets you, well, I’m sorry…”

These are unfortunate word choices that could backfire. In the first case, you are not taking responsibility for making the person feel that way; you’re only expressing dismay that he or she does. In the second example, you are allowing for the suggestion that the person is wrong to have taken offense, and the third example sounds downright defensive. All three of these statements could make a situation worse, not better.

Being sorry is really a mediocre commodity. It could be thrown into dozens of phrases, in which it loses all resemblance to contrition. One of my standard lines when discussing people’s expectation of PowerPoint is: “Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.” This phrase does not get me into trouble because nobody interprets it as an actual apology. The “well sorrrrree” remark is universally interpreted as sarcasm. And that’s precisely the point: being “sorry” is really not worth much.

It is far more difficult to misuse the words “I apologize” or “forgive me” and therefore they carry more weight.

“I apologize for making you feel that way.”

“I apologize for any offense taken.”

“Please forgive me for that upsetting advice.”

What a difference! These sentences acknowledge accountability — they show you know that your actions or words made something bad happen. They deal with real pain and real awareness. They are more genuine and more impactful.

To strengthen my argument here, I look to a portion of my audience for whom this advice is implausible. I have clients who work for city governments, planning commissions, public utilities, and in political arenas. For many of them, the public apology could be politicized and used against them. This is why you often hear the watered-down phrase of “regret.”

“We regret the actions that caused the local grocery to close down.”

“We regret that 50 people lost their jobs.”

If you regret something, it could mean little more than that you wish it hadn’t happened (definition: to feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over). Don’t use language like that unless you are blatantly dancing around an apology. The fact that issuing an apology could get politicians into trouble is exactly why I want you to use it when warranted. It is real, it is raw, it is powerful.

The next time you have to offer up a mea culpa, don’t just be sorry. Apologize!

As a professional observer of the craft, I admit to feeling a bit cheated. But not because I will never be able to witness him in action again; I feel cheated because I will not be able to watch him realize his potential. Indeed, I believe Steve Jobs was only half as good as he could have been and I believe he was about to find that other half.

Why was Jobs such a great speaker? It’s a bit easier to answer that if you start with the end result: he compelled audiences to feel the weight of his message. He made people around him feel better about themselves, and he inspired others to look beyond their own perspective. He did all this with an impossible-to-imagine ease of accomplishment that defies explanation. This made him fascinating beyond proportion.

What I find equally fascinating about the man is the qualities of great public speaking that he did not exhibit. If you were to add up all of the reasons why he was effective, compile lists of his qualities, there would be one that is conspicuously absent:

Himself.

He gave very little of himself. As wonderful as they were, his product announcements and state-of-the-technology addresses were consistently devoid of personal glimpses. It is clear that he worked very hard at them, that he practiced diligently, that he mastered the craft, and that he dedicated untold effort to this mastery. But you would not come away from them with any heightened sense of knowing better the man. He almost never made his speeches personal; he almost never let you in.

Those who knew or studied Jobs would attest to his being intensely private. Most of us learned more about his personal life in the five days since his passing than in the previous three decades. His having been an orphan, his having fathered a child prior to his marriage to Laurene Powell, his having dated Joan Baez. While these personal factoids were not closely guarded, neither were they well known. With few exceptions, Steve himself offered none of them. I always wondered how amazing it would have been if he had.

I chalked it up to the crafted facade of the CEO of arguably the most enigmatic corporation in the world. I really wanted to believe that it was calculated, that the Jobs mystique would make product launches, and the products themselves, all the more tantalizing. And as a result, a part of me actually looked forward to his resignation. As is so often the case, once people are out of the game, they tend to let a bit more of their hair down. They open up more, they share more, they are more honest with and about themselves. I was so looking forward to Jobs’ first public appearance post-resignation. I had it in mind that it would be a true coming out, that he would make it more about himself.

Were that to have happened, I believe his speeches would have become even more powerful. Is that even possible? That’s the scary thing — I think Steve Jobs could have been twice as effective as he was. Imagine all of the personal stories he could have shared about his time with Apple, about those heady early days, about creating all of that insane greatness. All of the things that he never allowed in his product demos and MacWorld keynotes.

It is the exception that proves the rule: watch this under-the-radar speech he gave for 2005 Commencement from Stanford University. It is more formal than his keynotes, as he stands behind a podium and reads from a script. But focus on the substance — listen to how he weaves his personal stories into his message. And imagine if he had done that at MacWorld all those years.

It’s almost scary to imagine how impactful his speeches could have been. And I feel cheated that we will never know.

YIN: Julie Terberg returns for her incredible makeover sessions, creating something wonderful from something…less than wonderful.
YANG: Sandra Johnson shows how to create complex shapes in PowerPoint, creating something from nothing.

YIN: Connie Malamed returns to discuss the significance and impact of visual communication.
YANG: Nick Morgan makes his debut to expose the hidden communication, the so-called “second conversation.”

YIN: Wayne Michael wants to talk to you about freshman orientation.
YANG: Nigel Holmes wants to talk to you about hot dogs and helium balloons.

YIN: Olivia Mitchell flies in from New Zealand to show you how to create a presentation in one hour.
YANG: Ric Bretschneider wants to show you how to give a presentation in six minutes and 40 seconds.

YIN: Ric will also go until nearly midnight in his traditional Guru session Monday night.
YANG: Garr Reynolds will start his keynote address right about then, from his home in Osaka Japan.

YIN: Troy Chollar will show you how to design for wide screens and large impacts.
YANG: Dave Paradi will show you how to reduce your environmental footprint.

YIN: You’ll learn amazing amounts all day long.
YANG: We’ll go out for amazing evenings in downtown Austin, including a fully-hosted private reception on the ultra-happening Sixth Street Tuesday night.

All of the components that have made our conference famous will be in place: The ever-accommodating Help Center, for free, drop-in technical support; the flexible scheduling that allows you to pick and choose seminars as you go; the delicious meals; and perhaps above all, the friendly and intimate atmosphere that we create for the presentation community, facilitating true relationship-building and bonding — unmatched at any other business conference you will attend.

We have about 30 seats left and we would enjoy nothing more than to see you reserve one of them.

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Now in its ninth season, the Presentation Summit has offered seminars and workshops on such far-reaching topics as software automation, simultaneous projection on multiple screens, presenting in non-native languages, and dealing with unfriendly audiences. Since its inception in 2003, however, no seminar topic has been more popular than the traditional makeover — where a member of the conference design team reviews and redesigns slide decks.

This year, there are three distinct before-and-after sessions: a template makeover and two design makeovers, all from work submitted by conference attendees.

“People love makeovers of all kinds,” notes Julie Terberg, who has starred in enough makeover sessions as to earn the unofficial title of Makeover Maven. “Turn on the TV and you’ll see an endless variety: home makeovers, room makeovers, garden makeovers, personal style makeovers, fitness and lifestyle makeovers. You usually can relate to something in the ‘before’ situations and so you want to see what the experts do with their transformation.

“The same applies with presentation design. How would another designer treat this concept? How will he or she transform the graphics or images? What can I learn to make my own work that much better?”

Conference attendees have several reasons to enjoy these sessions. As Julie notes, everyone can relate to the struggles and issues that are typically represented in the “before” slides and they love being inspired by the metamorphosis. Further, if your slides are chosen for one of these makeover sessions, you will be able to return home with the “after” slides, compliments of the designer. That translates into a takeaway that would typically cost a client several thousand dollars.

This is not to say that there is no reward for the designer, who can measure the return in warm-and-fuzzies. “I love when patrons say how much they learned from the makeovers,” says Terberg. “It warms my heart to hear from them about how they applied the ideas to their own work.”

You can view a snippet of one of Terberg’s makeovers at the conference’s [intlink id="1800" type="page"]video vault[/intlink].

Conference host Rick Altman also stages a makeover session, but he will be the first to tell you that he is not in Julie’s league. “I am not a professional designer,” he says, “and ironically, that is what makes it work. I focus on creating clean and consistent business design and I’m pretty good evaluating message and story. I’m not going to inspire anyone with my design brilliance as Julie does, but I can infuse confidence in people. My hope is that people come away from my sessions saying, ‘I see what he did, why he did it, and I could do it too.’”

Conference patrons pay nothing extra to have their work accepted for a makeover, and with three sessions on tap this year, late registrants can still get in on the action.

The Presentation Summit runs September 18-21 in Austin TX. You can read more about makeover sessions and  see the entire schedule, at http://www.PresentationSummit.com/schedule. Seating at the conference is limited to 200 patrons.

You might think that an opening keynote address for a presentation conference would discuss technology, or PowerPoint, or slide design, or how to speak more effectively.

You wouldn’t normally expect it to focus on how to win an eating contest.

Patrons of the Presentation Summit have come to expect the unexpected, and after his 2010 debut, Nigel Holmes has become famous for providing it. Last year, the former art director for Time magazine squeezed out an entire tube of toothpaste along the stage and later dressed up in a caveman suit.

This year, it will be eating hot dogs. And studying shadows. And, allegedly, helium, and the inhaling thereof.

Last year’s keynote might prove a tough act to follow and Holmes is quick to note that integrating physical performance into a presentation can’t be just about shock and awe. “When thinking about ‘performance,’ never do it just for theatrical effect,” he says. “There must always be a point. When dealing with statistics, the possibilities are endless. It’s a great way to depart from yet another bar chart.” Indeed, last year’s toothpaste caper was in lieu of a conventional chart to show personal hygiene statistics.

“While this kind of presentation is not for everyone, you’d be surprised at what you can pull off, if you relax and try. Presenters are too often tethered to the podium, but it really pays for the audience to become part of your presentation. They will remember being part of it for a long time.”

And the risks of eating hot dogs, sucking in helium, or donning a caveman suit? Holmes is more concerned about being gratuitous than in having something go wrong on stage. “Do not worry if things don’t go according to plan. Mistakes are a perfect introduction to talk about why it went wrong, so I see mistakes as opportunities. It also makes people understand that you are just another human, like them. So to fail slightly and then recover is good, in a funny way.”

Mistakes and all, the Presentation Summit runs September 18-21 in Austin TX. You can read more about Nigel Holmes’ keynote address, and see the entire schedule, at http://www.PresentationSummit.com/schedule. Seating at the conference is limited to 200 patrons.