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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What if a law were passed prohibiting bullets from exceeding three words in length? Could you abide by it? Perhaps not, but humor me on this one, because it stands as one of the best exercises you can do, whether you are the presenter, the content creator, or both. The value of this is so high thanks to two universal axioms for presentation professionals:

1. If a slide contains complete sentences, it is practically impossible for even the most accomplished presenters to avoid reading them word for word.
2. And when you read your slides word for word, you sound like an idiot.

Here is a classic culprit, taken straight from my client files—in this case, a major pharmaceutical company. Somebody simply did an idea dump right into his or her slides, and anyone who tries to speak to this slide is doomed to become a drone and guaranteed to turn the audience members into zombies.

The fourth bullet is quite different than the first three, suggesting that it shouldn’t be a bullet at all. But set that aside for the moment — before you read on, I want you to clean up this slide by mentally reducing each bullet point down to three words. Ditch the adjectives, jettison the pronouns, eliminate the flotsam.

Even with your sharpest knife, you might not be able to cut all the way down to three words, but the reward is in the effort. Here is my attempt at what I refer to as the Three-Word Challenge.

You can see that I failed to get within three words in most cases, but the result of my losing effort is an unqualified victory. The slide is much stronger now, and even though I have no familiarity with the subject, having gone through this process, I feel as if I could almost present on it now.

Several important things take place when you make an earnest attempt to get within three words:

• Your slides are friendlier: With just that one task, you create slides that are much easier on the eyes of your audience. Eye fatigue is the silent killer of presentations. When you ask your audience to sit in a dimly-lit room for 30 or 60 minutes, their eyes are going to be the first to go. The more words each slide contains, the quicker the onset of fatigue. Fewer words, less fatigue. Your bullets might not be as descriptive, but that’s okay—it’s your job to do the describing.
• Your pace improves. Something almost magical happens when you reduce the amount of words on a slide. Everything seems snappier. The slide draws more quickly, audience members absorb the information more efficiently, and you most likely project more energy.
• You create intrigue: In three words, you are not going to be able to fully explain your points. But that’s not bad; it’s good. In fact, it’s terrific! Without having to ask them, you invite audience members to use their imaginations. Once you get good at the three-word rule, you will become a better writer of bullets. You will begin to write with color and humor; you could become coy, even mysterious. These literary techniques serve to command attention. They help to engage your audience on an emotional level. And that, dear reader, is the holy grail of presenting.
• You learn your material better: Of the many bad things associated with dumping complete sentences onto slides, perhaps the worst is how lazy it makes the presenter, whether it is you or someone for whom you create slides. Excess verbiage sends a subtle but powerful message that you don’t need to prepare as much, because everything you want to say is already there. Parsing the words increases your burden as a presenter, but once again, this is a noble burden. Adhering to the three-word rule forces you to learn your content at a level you otherwise might not have reached.

One of my favorite quotes about presenting comes from Mark Twain:

“If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready today. If you want me to speak for just a few minutes, it will take me a few weeks to prepare.”

The three-word challenge is a microcosm of the wonderful dynamic that Twain articulated. In order to get down to three words, you really need to study the text. You need to truly understand what you intend to communicate and you need to pick three words that create the perfect backdrop for your ideas. Getting down to three words requires that you practically get intimate with your text.

While the second of these two slides is certainly a better place for your audience to be in than the first, the most significant point to make is the potential that the second slide creates. Now, perhaps for the first time ever, you, the content creator, have an opportunity to think like a slide designer. With all of that flotsam on the slide, what chance did you have previously to create an attractive slide? How could you be evocative? How could you stir emotion? You couldn’t!

But now you have a canvas; you have white space. And it doesn’t require an advanced degree in visual communications to find a stock photo or company image that might support your message. In this particular exercise, it took my pharma clients barely a half-hour to reach this point:

In our workshop that day, we had already discussed the value of creating semi-transparent shapes to better blend imagery with text and this was a perfect opportunity to use that technique: the text lower-left is in a rounded rectangle, filled black with 50% transparency, allowing the photo to show through but still ensuring good contrast. You only see one rounded corner because the rectangle is hanging over the edge of the slide. Margin controls on the shape ensure that the text appears centered in the visible space. There is also the question of the fourth point, the “Who owns the decision?” question. Changing it to italic and separating it with a simple white rule serves to reinforce its role as the summarizer of the ideas. Having eliminated the bullet character from these bullets helps, too.

This slide becomes a completely different experience for everyone involved in the equation—the content creator, the presenter, the audience member. The content creator gets to think creatively (perhaps for the first time); the brevity of the text allows the presenter (again, perhaps for the first time) to get out from under the slide and truly communicate directly to the audience; the audience member is more likely to feel the weight of the message. Photos help that cause, just because of the way that our brain receives and processes visual information, but the most important part of the equation is the presenter being able to tell a more impactful story, delivered from the burden of all of that text on screen.

So why doesn’t every organization create slides this way? Why doesn’t every boss see its value? At the Presentation Summit this October,  I will devote an entire keynote address to this question. Here is the digest:

• Bad handouts: The revised slide will not function well at all as a leave-behind document. Good. Great! You should never try to create one slide for these two purposes. See my post, [intlink id="1161" type="post"]The Lunacy of the Leave Behind[/intlink] for my rant on this topic.
• Won’t work as an emailed presentation: Same problem, same response—you shouldn’t try to have it both ways. Bite the bullet and create a second version.
• The boss refuses: This, of course, is the far greater challenge and victory here is a marathon, not a sprint. Changing company culture is never easy, and we will devote a post to just this topic later in the year, after the Summit. In short, be patient, be persistent, seek allies, and be ready to conduct an intervention.

In the case of idea slides, less is so much more. Taking the three-word challenge is one of the best devices to get you to less. It took four passes and over 45 minutes to create the distilled version of the slide above. Mark Twain would have been proud.

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The workshop begins next Wednesday, Sep 15, with a 60-minute webinar by yours truly, and continues with seven more, each covering a different topic on the presentation landscape. Here is the complete schedule (all webinars begin at 1:00PT / 4:00ET):

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I’m writing a book about use of PowerPoint in business, and one question I have is: how much decoration on a slide is too much? I define decoration as graphic elements that do not convey meaning to the reader.

On one hand, Edward Tufte and other information designers say “design, don’t decorate”. If it doesn’t add meaning, take it off. On the other hand, educators have learned that irrelevant but interesting details can increase emotional interest and make learners more motivated to learn.

What do you think? Is a little decoration on a slide okay (drop shadows, etc). And when does a “little” become “too much”?

“…irrelevant but interesting details can increase emotional interest… I disagree with this statement to my very core. Perhaps if you are teaching a group of first graders, but not intelligent adults. Irrelevant is not interesting and it is not emotional. Irrelevant is irrelevant and it has no place in visual communication.”

Next came Adam, a comedian and a man with some stage experience:

“‘Interesting’ is never irrelevant. A detail might not carry any facts, but if it increases engagement, that’s a great thing. You sound a lot like you are saying that emotion is for kids and facts are for adults. I hoped we had moved on from that nonsense.”

Me: “I am not saying that. I am saying that emotion is for everyone but irrelevance is rarely emotional.”

Konrad from Dallas TX: Why would you include elements that convey no meaning? Anything that does not contribute to your message only interferes and distracts. That said, part of your message is your personal or corporate brand. For example, you probably want to convey that you are a trustworthy person worth listening to. This is where overall style, consistency and design come in – not ‘decoration’ as you have defined it.”

Adam: “Because meaning is not everything. I also work on stage. Why do I bother with costume, lights, stage sets? Why do I have background music? Why do I even act? Why not just read the script clearly to the audience, or print it out for them? Because all these ‘irrelevant’ elements can increase engagement, emotion, interest, attention.”

Me: “Adam makes strong points, which I respect on their face. So I had to ask myself: Why do I disagree so fervently with them? Are Adam’s use of costume and stage sets similar to a presenter’s decision to adorm a slide with clipart or to add a boomerang entrance to a title? Does Adam’s use of props speak to his true purpose any different than a presenter’s use of decor?

“In a word, yes.

“However similar they might be on one level, Adam’s role as a stage performer carries important distinctions to a presenter’s role as a presenter. The elements that Adam cites above contribute to his role as an actor: he is adopting a personna, he is playing a role, he is taking on a character that is different than his actual person. It is vital to a presenter’s success that he not do that; that she be utterly genuine. Naked in front of their audiences. Decor does not contribute in any way toward that. And I suspect in a different setting, where we’re not debating as a matter of course, Adam might acknowledge that it is possible for a stage performer to go overboard with decor, as well.

“One of the emotional appeals of stage performers is in their total immersion into a character. Perhaps the most important emotional appeal of presenters is in their avoidance of same — in their absolute authenticity and genuineness.”

Adam: “Great thoughts, thanks. But now I have to jump in with both feet. When I am preaching the application of theatrical thinking and technique to the business world (or to presentations), I often hear the criticism that I ‘want people to be fake, to pretend to be something they are not.’ This criticism is based on a fundamental and massive misconception of theater — the idea that theater is a form of pretense.

“This is manifestly not the case. Great actors do not ADD anything to themselves in acting. Instead, they selectively REVEAL. On stage — whether acting or presenting — I am never someone else. I reveal some aspect of myself to the audience. I reveal my genuine enthusiasm for the theme, or my real worries about the situation. Only thus can I be genuine, be authentic.”

Jon from New York City: “There is obviously a gray area where we can’t pinpoint the exact moment that an aesthetic becomes a distraction. Just as we can’t say when life actually begins or what pornography actually is. It’s more of a ‘you know it when you see it’ feeling.

“When I look at a slide with horrible clipart and meaningless animations, I know that it’s wrong and can easily pinpoint what to remove or change. But I can’t say that the imagery or animation needs to be removed because they are bad. The difference has to do with application, quality, and sensibility among others.

“Of course costumes, props, and set design are important to theater when used effectively. Of course imagery/decoration/aesthetics are important to presentations when used effectively. But I can’t put a clear definition on effective. I just know it when I see it.

“Adam and Rick, you’re both right, because this is an impossible question to answer.”

Me: “Jon’s right — we recognize it when we see it. And because the presentation community has been subject to such a high volume of misuse and abuse, because Death by PowerPoint is practically the norm today, we have become more aware of red flags around gratuitousness. If our trigger finger for decorative baubles is a bit sensitive, there is good cause.”

Angela from the UK: “You have to go back and redefine the term ‘relevant.’ If the graphic or decoration subconsiously leads the audience to a line of thought you wish them to go on, then it has relevance. Personally, I do not add anything which does not have relevance. I might use a picture as a background, but that picture will be part of the message I want to get across, and will convey a theme throughout the presentation.”

At this point, Adam offered up a link to a humorous video in which he shows how to storm a castle with his bare hands. It is fine physical comedy and he makes the point that he is all the decor that is needed in the presentation. No labeling is required to create relevance.

Mike from Florida intervenes to argue that “a lot of presentations are speaker support, not speaker replacement.”

At which point, Adam makes the point on which he and I can find complete agreement:

“What you call a ‘presentation,’ I call a ‘slide deck.’ For me, the word ‘presentation’ refers to the whole thing — presenter, props, script, visuals, sound, handouts. etc. I agree that the slide deck is speaker support, not speaker replacement. It can be valuable, even priceless. But I believe it is seldom essential and it is never the presentation.

“Whatever the situation, whatever the audience, my basic philosophy remains the same: The PRESENTER is the presentation.”

Amen to that…

My daughter Jamie is a capable and confident softball player, having just completed a third consecutive all-star season. This fall, she tried out for a competitive traveling team, comprised of highly-skilled eighth- and ninth-graders, and in her own words, “I used to be one of the best players on my team—now I suck.”

I’m not sure if she was angling for sympathy, but if so, she didn’t get any from her dad. I think this is one of the best things that she could have possibly done. The humility, the wake-up call, and the realization that she now has to work harder will all serve her well. Perhaps we’ll look back and see that the comfortable little bubble of being the big fish in a small pond was holding her back.

We aren’t suggesting that you use the S word to describe your proficiency with presentation development, but we love to watch our patrons leave their own comfort zones. “I can’t believe I called myself advanced when I signed up,” one woman said last year. “There is so much I don’t know. Can I please change that to beginner?”

Oh, the parallels I can draw, watching Jamie bunt for the first time. She can’t just stick the bat out there any longer; now she has to read the motion of the shortstop to determine where to bunt the ball. Now she can’t just hit; she needs to know how to hit the ball to the right side of the infield to move a runner from second to third. Now she must know to hit the cutoff or throw through to a base. She had no clue about any of that before she was pushed.

Lest you think you have signed up for boot camp or something, we won’t bark at you as Jamie’s new coach does. We find that our patrons supply their own motivation to further their skills, and we consider it pure joy to be witnesses to it. We love watching you make your first custom show, identify an “audience-centric” message, post your slides online for sharing, and a couple hundred other pearls and nuggets that together we will uncover across these four days.

So many in the presentation community are content with the skillset they have now, comfortable knowing that they meet their deadlines and perform their tasks.

Comfort zones are overrated. Stepping outside the box is where the action is, and we are so incredibly pleased and grateful that you have chosen to take that journey with us.

We promise to make you dizzy with new ideas and to encourage you to rethink everything you took for granted about presentation design, creation, and delivery. And we promise to do it without once telling you that you suck or making you run the bases blindfolded.

Jeffrey Kontir of Deloitte LLP asked an interesting question the other day on the Powerpointers group at LinkedIn. “How do you print a final copy of a slide deck that has a lot of builds and animation?”

Central to Jeffrey’s dilemma is the nature of object animation. Unlike a slide transition — where motion takes place only after all of the slide is visible — animation on a slide involves objects coming and going and objects often being layered one atop the other. Were you to print the slide, you would see every object on the slide, without regard for when and where the objects made their entrances or exits. If an object were supposed to fly in from the left and then exit stage right, neither of those events would be represented accurately in print. If Jeffrey wants to represent the builds in a printout, he needs to be able to print a slide while right in the middle of it.

The stock answer to this problem is to tear down the animation on a slide and instead create a series of slides, each one representing a part of the build. That would be a perfectly fine approach were you to think of it before you started, not so good as a mid-course correction. But who ever thinks of these things out of the gate?

The strategy I would suggest instead does not require a total upheaval to your normal slide-creation style. All it requires is screen capture software, such as TechSmith’s Snagit and the following procedure:

1. Configure your screen capture software to activate with a hotkey and to save to sequentially-named files on your system.
2. Run the slide show.
3. At the critical points in a build, capture the screen image.
4. Keep capturing as the build of a slide progresses, pressing the hotkey at the appropriate times.
5. When done, locate all of the JPG files that represent the builds. It will be easy to follow the sequence, thanks to the sequential filenames.
6. If you own Adobe Acrobat, combine the JPGs into a single PDF file and print.

1. INCREDIBLE LEARNAGE: You can’t possibly imagine how much you’ll learn at this conference, with dedicated tracks of seminars for PowerPoint technique, presentation design and delivery, and our Special Delivery track, focusing on all forms of presentation delivery. Check out the [intlink id="466" type="page"]schedule of seminars[/intlink].

2. UNPARALLELED EXPERTISE: It’s one thing to know PowerPoint; lots of people know that. It’s another thing to know about creating a compelling presentation; far fewer people know that. And it’s yet an altogether different thing to be able to teach these concepts; only a select few know how to do that. How few? Let’s see…Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, Rick Altman, Julie Terberg, Carmen Taran…what a coincidence, they’re all on the conference team…

3. AWESOME HELP: The conference’s Help Center is quite simply the finest opportunity for support with presentation software and technology anywhere on the planet. It’s free, it’s drop-in, it’s all hands-on, and it’s open from morning ‘til night. Some come to the conference [intlink id="1533" type="page"]just for the Help Center.[/intlink]

4. BECOME PART OF A COMMUNITY: At the Presentation Summit, you do more than learn; you develop contacts within the presentation community that you’ll keep for the rest of your career. When you put 200 passionate people together under one roof, the bonds created go way beyond that of a webinar, a discussion forum, or a faceless trade show. People who have met at our conferences have gone into business together, hired one another, visited each other during trips, and have even married.

5. MEET THE DEVELOPERS: Microsoft’s PowerPoint development team never misses this event. They take copious notes, they schedule late-night schmooze sessions, and they attend all of the seminars. They know the value of having so many earnest users of their product together at once and they place extraordinary value on your input.

6. THE EXPO: You’ll be the kid in the candy store when you visit the Summit Expo on Tuesday of conference week. Over a dozen vendors, all of them offering goods and services dedicated to the presentation marketplace. Lots of show specials, lots of giveaways, lots of opportunity to meet the people who make the products that make your life easier as a presentation professional.

7. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: This is not a huge, faceless trade show — nobody enjoys attending those. The Summit limits enrollment to 225 so everyone is assured of receiving personal attention. Conference organizers are experts at hosting events of this size — they know exactly the type of programming and scheduling that fits.

8. YOU RUN THE PLACE: You pick and choose which seminars to attend; you do not have to commit to any one track ahead of time and you can cross tracks at will. Furthermore, several of the sessions could feature you! Submit work that you are particularly proud of or believe needs work and you could find yourself being showcased or made over. Sign up for the Trivia Contest and you could be part of a team participating in a unique blend of Jeopardy and Family Feud. Sign up early and you could venture out for an exclusive digital photography field trip to a San Diego landmark.

9. YOU WILL BE WELL FED: You’ll get robust continental breakfasts each morning and a fully-catered sit-down lunch on Monday and Tuesday.

10. YOU’LL HAVE AN AMAZING TIME: The Presentation Summit is like summer camp for adults; you would not have thought it possible to have such a good time at an event where you also learn so much. With relaxing meals where you don’t have to scurry out to the restaurant, evening socials, and a fabulous resort hotel perfectly situated on San Diego’s Mission Bay, you will remember the four days that you spend with your colleagues probably for the rest of your life.

_________________________

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I have created a complex animation in version 2003. A group of photos appears in a grid and then the date of an event fades in next to the photos. When I click the Play button in the Animation task pane, the date appears as expected. However, when I view the full slide show it doesn’t appear. I have a lot of animation on the page and this is the last one to appear before the show transitions to the next slide. Is there some kind of limit to the number of animations on a slide? But even if there were, why would it work with the Play button but not in full screen?

___________________________

Lori gave two important clues here to the problem:

• The animation in question behaves properly when viewed by the preview button in the animation task pane, but not when the slide is played.
• The animation is the last one scheduled to play on the slide before the slide transitions away.

First, if there is a limit to the number of animations that can appear on a slide, no human has reached it without first being felled by his or her own sanity limit. We have literally seen hundreds of animations placed on a slide. So that’s not it. If the animation previews properly, it almost certainly means that Lori created it correctly. But what is different about previewing a slide and running a show? In the case of the former, you only watch one slide’s worth of animation. In the case of the latter, you watch the concert of slide business and transition business, and as Lori points out, the slide is designed to transition away to the next automatically.

Lori has been victimized by PowerPoint’s inconsistent behavior when slide transitions are set to Automatic instead of the more typical On Mouse Click. They become TOO automatic—the entire slide marches down the street, without waiting for anything. When a slide’s transition is set to Automatic, any animations set to On Click behave like After Previous, and any duration time that the slide is supposed to wait for before transitioning is often ignored. Lori thought she was covering her bases by adding five seconds to the slide transition:

This should have allowed the final animation to do its thing and have its affect before the slide changes. However, PowerPoint 2003 is prone to failure. Slide advancement set to Automatic is just too automatic.

Lori’s animation of the date actually does play; it’s just that the slide transition happens at the same moment so nobody sees it. She could see this for herself by setting the slide transition back to On Mouse Click.

Lori needs to outsmart PowerPoint and its tendency to not wait before transitioning. This is a job for the “invisible rectangle” strategy:

1. Set the slide transition wait time to 0 (because every so often, that setting is honored, and then it becomes even more infuriating).
2. Draw a small rectangle off the slide.
3. Animate it with Appear, After Previous, and a delay of five seconds.

No matter how impatient PowerPoint is, it won’t transition away from a slide until all of the slide’s business has been conducted. Therefore, this slide will not transition away until the rectangle “appears” and while PowerPoint waits for it to appear, the event date will have its five seconds of fame. Instead of asking PowerPoint to wait the five seconds AFTER all of the slide elements appear, PowerPoint waits the five seconds BEFORE the final animation takes place. That final animation is invisible, taking place off the slide, seeming to us to be a delay before transition.

You’ll find many useful purposes for the invisible rectangle. It can be used to great effect within a series of animations set to With Previous when careful timing is required. Slip in these rectangles just like a carpenter adds shim to a home project.

These people never had any reason to complain about their File, Edit, and View menus, and yet Microsoft took them away. These people regard Microsoft Office as an appliance—a device that they don’t have to think too hard about before using. And then the appliance became unfamiliar. With all of your projects due yesterday, the last thing you want is for your toaster to suddenly start operating like a food processor.

My friends at Microsoft will look unkindly upon my equating PowerPoint to a $35 kitchen appliance, while my friends in the PowerPoint community have taken a dim view of Microsoft’s failure to do the same. Both sides should rejoice, therefore, in the likelihood that Version 2010 promises to put an end to all of the toaster talk. With five years to have become accustomed to the Ribbon, users of PowerPoint 2010 can focus not on how it looks, but on what it does. And when they do, odds are they are going to like what they find. You can see for yourself in the ongoing public beta.

Better Multimedia

Topping the headlines is dramatically better handling of audio and video. Simply put, PowerPoint now knows what the heck to do with imported media, instead of pawning the job off on Windows Media Player and going into virtual hibernation. Taking ownership over multimedia has enabled PowerPoint to join the 21^st century. To wit:

• The range of formats supported is much wider.
• Files can either be embedded or linked to, and you get to choose at the time of import.
• Clips can be trimmed within the program, with intros fading in and outros fading out.
• Videos can run simultaneous to other slide events and objects can be placed atop a video.
• You can insert videos directly from YouTube and other online sites (done live, requiring an Internet connection).
• When embedding a clip, the Optimize Media Compatibility command automatically improves playback quality.
• Slide decks can be saved out as stand-alone video files.
• Videos can be cropped and placed inside non-rectangular shapes.
• Bookmarks can be defined within a clip and other elements can have their animations triggered to those bookmarks.

This last feature is the likely sleeper in the bunch as this brand new concept will be foreign to many. But the creative control that bookmarking a video can give you over training material or mood-evoking content is potentially dramatic. Those who are already working with the beta (or who just downloaded it—see link above) can see an example I have created at

http://www.betterppt.com/media/version2010.pptx

In this file, I use techniques that would never have occurred to me prior to version 2010.

Customization: Baby Steps

Of those who have shown disdain for the Office Ribbon, many have done so simply because the Ribbon is not as flexible as version 2003 menus. Indeed, in version 2003 you can place a command anywhere you want; in version 2007 you can only add a command to the Quick Access Toolbar, the row of tiny icons along the top.

In version 2010, you can add a custom group to a ribbon and place commands there. It would be better if commands could be added to existing groups—for instance, the cool new Shape commands belong in the Drawing group, and instead I had to create a new Shapes group to house them. I wish that I could remove elements also, as program developers do not know as well as I which commands I use and do not use. And ideally, we could turn off the auto-switching of the Office Ribbon and then make one killer ribbon with everything we normally use that would always be visible. (LOL, this would get us back to version 2003 functionality!)

But this is progress—we can now create better access to critical commands. The version 2010 interface is also more keystroke-friendly. That’s like tactile gold for us keystroke-aholics.

The Customize dialog box includes dozens of commands that you won’t find on the standard interface. To add them in, you create a custom group on your ribbon of choice.

Slice and Dice your Slide Deck

Another potential sleeper in the new version is Section control. Would that I could have earned a nickel for every time a client has moved slides within a deck and messed it all up. By adding sections to a deck, you make it easier to modularize and organize your slides. You can move entire sections around, hide them from view when they are not relevant to the task, rename them, and see an organized structure of your deck in Slide Sorter view.

This is not the same as a custom show, which defines a subset of slides that you could treat as its own slide show, and it is not the same as hiding a slide. This is strictly for organizational purposes, and as such, promises to preserve the sanity of those who create slide-heavy decks.

This slide deck has been defined by four distinct sections, each of which can be named, hidden from view, and moved to another place in the deck.

Insert Screenshot

Using PowerPoint to create technical documentation or application tutorials just got much easier with this cool new feature. Go to Insert | Screenshot and you will be greeted with a small drop-down of thumbnails of every application that you have open (must be displaying, not minimized). Choose the desired one and in arrives a clean bitmap image of that app window. No cursor or freezing a menu while it is being pulled down—for that you would need dedicated screen capture software like TechSmith’s SnagIt—but for 90% of screenshot work, this new function makes the task a breeze.

The Insert Screenshot command is the fastest way to get a picture of an app onto a slide.

Clone Animations

Like the Format Painter command that clones visual attributes from one object to another, the Animation Painter will pick up the animation of one object (the one you select) and apply it to any other object (the one you click on). The Animation Painter will not pick up triggers, but it will pick up multiple animations. For instance, if an object has both an entrance and an exit fade applied to it, the new object will inherit both when being painted. While I continue to wait impatiently for a set of animation styles that can be defined and applied to objects, the Animation Painter will do for the time being

Alas, my other big wish-list item for animation was not addressed, either: directional fade. If Wipe and Fly can both move in a specific direction, why can’t Fade? My favorite text animation—a cascading fade, whereby each element fades in a moment before the previous one is finished—remains a tedious maneuver using With Previous and careful timing. If I could designate that a string of bullets are to fade in from the top to the bottom, I could save hours of tiresome mousing per project.

New Transitions…Run for the Hills!

Objectively speaking, PowerPoint’s transition engine has received a nice infusion of functionality. Most important is the ability to set the duration of the slide transition in fractions of seconds, instead of the comically-blunt choices of slow, medium, and fast.

Subjectively, the new transitions will get more attention. In fact, they might steal the entire show, as thousands of users will not be able to resist adding the Vortex, Shred, or Ferris Wheel transition to one of their slides.

Oy vey.

In fairness, existing transitions have been improved and several have more choices and options. And a few of the new ones are quite useful—I have long wanted a transition like Cube (where the slides appear to be pasted onto two adjacent sides of a cube while it rotates) to show that two slides are closely linked by a common idea. But the amount of abuse that will result from this is likely to be staggering, so brace yourself.

Get ready for a whole new round of transition abuse…

Broadcast a Slide Show

You can stage mini webinars from within PowerPoint 2010, thanks to this new feature. When you broadcast a slide deck, it is sent to the Officeapps Live server and you are provided with a URL to share. All those who ping the URL can watch in real time as you drive the slide show. In order to broadcast, you must have a Windows Live ID, but your audience needs only the URL and a browser.

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Add to this list about two dozen small tweaks, such as better nudging, laser pointer control via the mouse (good for webinars), better editing of points on a curve, refinement to the Crop tool, better Paste, and a true SDI interface, where each open file gets its own interface.

With version 2010, Microsoft builds on the development successes of version 2007. Whether Microsoft is guilty or not of forcing a user interface upon users that didn’t want it is an open question. It is also a moot one: the Ribbon is here to stay, and with version 2010, Microsoft makes a credible effort to make it more accessible and usable to the masses. You might go kicking and screaming or shrieking with delight; either way, version 2010 is likely to make the new Office user interface everyone’s everyday appliance.

“I need to print the notes pages of a PowerPoint slide deck without the notes. I know that sounds silly — why not just print the slides? I need the slide at the top of the page, just as it appears when you print the notes page, and I need the space at the bottom, where the notes usually are, to be blank.

We are doing handouts this way so that our students can take down their own notes in those blanks as opposed to reading along during presentations. If we print out just slides, it prints the slide large and in the center. I’ve tried messing around with page layout, but haven’t had any luck.”

Upon reading Janice’s email, I figured the answer would be simple. Perhaps not obvious, but simple: remove the notes placeholder from the notes master. I was wrong.

First, let’s review. The appearance of the notes pages in a slide deck is controlled by a notes master, just as the look of your slides is governed by the slide master. Few people pay much attention to the notes master because they rarely care about redesigning their notes. I don’t spend much time there, either, and my first inclination was hasty. I figured that I could instruct Janice to enter Notes Master view, select the placeholder that holds the notes, and delete it.

As I said, I was wrong.

When you eliminate a placeholder altogether, PowerPoint does not behave well. Like when a limb gets amputated, the brain wants to believe that it is still there. Remove the title placeholder from a standard slide master and PowerPoint 2003 will defy you and keep the titles on the slide. Remove the slide image from the notes master and PowerPoint puts it back. Remove the notes placeholder from the notes master and PowerPoint pretends that it is still there and continues to show you your notes.

The not-so-elegant workaround requires that you placate PowerPoint by not removing the placeholder: instead, just make it invisible. Shrink it down to a manageable size and park it off the boundary of the notes page, like this:

PowerPoint is okay with it being useless, as long as it exists. Now when Janice prints her notes pages, she gets exactly what she was hoping for: the slide image on the top half of the page, and open space on the bottom half.