Technique

PowerPoint 2010: Building a better toaster

May 13, 2010 By Rick Altman 8 Comments

To say that Office 2007 weathered difficult conditions in its five-year run is an understatement. Despite an impressive feature set and relatively high stability and performance, legions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint users resisted the move, in some cases with all their will and might.

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.

_____________________________

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.

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: PowerPoint, Technique

Can a Notes Page Have no Notes?

April 20, 2010 By Rick Altman 2 Comments

This from Janice, a presentation coordinator for Wisconsin-based AMSOIL, INC, makers of synthetic motor oil:

“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.

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: PowerPoint, Technique

Images by Committee

January 12, 2010 By Rick Altman 1 Comment

There will be times in the life of any content creator when the desired image doesn’t exist and needs to be created. Those are the times when it’s good to know about objects—photographic images that consist only of a central foreground object, removed entirely from its background.

Our quest is to create an image of a healthy woman working out. Despite scouring all of my standard stock photo houses, we were not able to find the perfect image. But we did find the perfect woman:

She is an object; she has no background. And once we imported her into our image-editing program of choice, with one click of the automatic selection tool, we had her being sent out as a PNG file, the format that supports transparent objects like this one. Then we searched through traditional photographs for a dance studio or a clean, well-lighted gym, and found a great one. And by marrying the two photos, we ended up with this:

We had succeeded…and we had failed. The woman came in transparently atop the studio, all right, but she appears to be floating, as if she doesn’t really belong.

This is a common problem when trying to integrate an object into a photo that it didn’t come from originally. The room is pretty well lit, but where are the shadows? They need to be added, and for that you would need to return to your image-editing software…or be using the current version of PowerPoint, 2007.

Version 2007’s upgraded graphics engine offers support for realistic shadowing of any image or object. By applying a soft shadow to the woman and then a slightly darker shadow where she would be touching the floor, we have done a much better job of faking this scene:

This effect can be produced in any version of PowerPoint that can import transparent PNG files, with the help of your image-editing program of choice. But this is an instance where the edge clearly goes to Version 2007 for its built-in ability to shadow an object.

Your eye is probably drawn right to the vulnerable parts of this photo (shadow underneath the ball is perhaps not dark enough) and that is always challenging when trying to create realism: you’re your own worst critic. Pretty good chance, however, if you didn’t know what to scrutinize, you wouldn’t notice anything wrong. Your goal is not accuracy but plausibility and realism.

Download the version 2007 PowerPoint file to see how shadows are handled natively within the application.

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: Design, PowerPoint, Technique

The Lunacy of the Leave Behind

November 17, 2009 By Rick Altman 1 Comment

I am a pragmatic being. At my core, I understand the values of efficiency and expedience. I embrace the art of compromise and understand that life often gets in the way of ideals and theories. Reality is often harsh and not adjusting to it often harsher.

Yet there is one principle relevant to our community on which I do not yield. One ideal to which I hold stubbornly. At this windmill, I gladly tilt: it is the notion that a presentation content creator can create one set of slides that will function ably for the projected content and for the printed material.

This is an impossible notion. Everything else in life might be possible if you work hard, but not this one thing. In my 15+ years as a presentation consultant, I have not once seen it done successfully.

Not once!

When you set forth to create content for a presentation, you work with two forces that are fundamentally at odds with one another. You want to create projected content that is compelling and you want to provide information that is useful. The pragmatic being in you usually prevails, and in the interest of time, you look for a happy medium.

Unfortunately, that twain shall not meet. Nary.

As discomfiting as it may be for content creators, a properly-prepared set of visuals for a presentation will fail as leave-behind collateral. Your slides are supposed to be incomplete; they are supposed to be no more than the tease for the words that you will speak. If they say too much, they inhibit your ability to tell the story.

My colleague and friend Dave Paradi (www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com) conducts an annual survey of the most annoying qualities of a PowerPoint presentation. The current survey lists the following as its top three:

Speaker reads the slides to the audience
Speaker creates full sentences instead of bullet points
Text is too small to read

All three of these annoyances are inevitable when content creators attempt to have their slides double as printouts. In other words, this one issue might be responsible for ALL THREE of the sins that have been voted most egregious.

And I’ll go one step further: overladen slides that try to tell too much turn otherwise smart people into blithering idiots. Can PowerPoint make you stupid? When there is too much blather being projected, the answer is most decidedly yes.

It is practically a litmus test that we all must take. How are your visuals? Would they make really lousy printouts? Yes? Great, you’re all set to go!

We live in a world of compromises, but this is one place where you cannot succumb to the expedient route. You must think of your projected content and your printed content as two distinct projects. Otherwise, they both might fail, and you will fail.

A perfect example of this dynamic came to us recently during our ongoing invitation to see work from the presentation community. One organization created a short slide deck on the all-important topic of tire safety. There is probably a lot that you do not know about tire maintenance; I learned several things from surveying a few slides in this deck. Any soccer mom or softball dad would be heavily emotionally invested in this topic. Here was the first slide in the deck:

When this first figure arrives on screen, is it going to have an impact? Of course not. And when the well-intentioned presenter begins to speak, it will be almost impossible to avoid reciting the slide. And before you know it…instant Death by PowerPoint.

Set aside the dubious design motif used here—the real crime committed was when the creator tried to have it both ways and create a presentation deck that could double as printouts.

Here we see the continued decline in what could have been a noble effort: educating an audience about the different qualities of tires and how understanding them would make your car safer.

All of these words make it impossible for a presenter to get to where he or she really needs to be: appealing to the emotional side of a story and getting the audience to feel its weight. Very few audience members are moved to action by what their brains tell them; there must be an emotional component to the story. Tire safety is low-hanging fruit to any parent of a young child who needs to be driven hither and yon to this playdate and that gymnastics class.

My makeover of this deck attempts to make the emotional case, while allowing the presenter to inform the audience on the important specifications of tires.

If these slides were printed and delivered, they would not be very helpful. They require more complete leave-behind information.

Here are a few ideas and techniques to help you deal with the unavoidable fact that you will need to prepare your material twice—once for the presentation and once for printouts.

1. Acknowledge it early

The best time to prepare the detail for handouts is before you go anywhere near PowerPoint. Taking notes…composing your thoughts…fleshing out your ideas…these are all great things to do long before you think about how you might engage your audience on multiple levels. When you prepare the meat of your presentation first, you are more likely to pick a better tool for the printouts, like a publishing application or a word processor with a good design template. And having poured over the details to this degree, you are in a better position to then choose more compelling visuals to help you tell the story to your audience.

2. Use Notes View

If you or your boss committed the popular sin of writing out an entire speech on the slides themselves, you are just one cut-and-paste maneuver away from salvation. That verbiage belongs in the Notes view, but this is not to suggest that it be there for the speaker to refer to. Having complete sentences in your notes is just as dangerous as displaying them on screen—it could turn you into a drone either way.

The idea here is that your Notes pages become your printouts, to be delivered to your audience members during or after the presentation. Notes view has its own master and can be customized far beyond what most users realize.

The Notes page's formatting rivals that of a full-featured word processor.

Here you see the degree to which Notes view can be designed for optimized leave-behind material. The text here is a direct splice from the original slide.

3. Use Version 2007 Slide Masters

The current version of PowerPoint—still foreign and unfamiliar to many—has several compelling features that merit your taking a closer look. One of them is the flexible layouts that are now part of the slide mastering creation process.

Here is a layout that is actually rotated 90 degrees, making it optimal for standard printouts. When you apply this layout to a slide, all of the content is rotated to fit a standard portrait layout.

In this scenario, you would either keep hidden the slides that are part of the printouts, or create two custom shows, one for display and one for print.

The value of these strategies, using Notes view or V2007’s slide masters, is your ability to keep the printout material in the presentation file itself, instead of having to deal with two separate files.

But that’s the only free lunch you get here. If you try to cut a corner with leave-behind content, you are guaranteed to fail. If you just suck it up and accept the fact that you need to go the extra mile, your audience will love you for it, and your presentations will be much, much better as a result.

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: Delivery, PowerPoint, Technique

Thriving with Animation

September 12, 2009 By Rick Altman Leave a Comment

Animation might be single-handedly responsible for more PowerPoint annoyance than all the other annoyances combined. Between Edward Tufte and Dilbert creator Scott Adams, PowerPoint animation is publicly flogged more often than our politicians are.

And at the same time, when done correctly, animation isn’t noticed at all. It’s not unlike being a major league baseball umpire, who gets no respect for doing a good job.

Indeed, good PowerPoint animation is so seamless that you are unaware of it. It reaches its zenith when it allows audience members to become lost in the story you are telling.

I approach this posting with the same fear and trepidation that I do our seminars on the topic at the Presentation Summit, our annual conference for the presentation industry. I know that your appetite for the subject is insatiable, and that your zeal could send you across the bounds of good taste a few times. And when that happens, it’s my fault. I’m helping you commit Death by PowerPoint. So please repeat after me:

I will use custom animation wisely and appropriately.
I vow not to offend the sensibilities of my audience.
I promise not to use an animation technique simply because I just discovered it.
I swear never to make stuff move on screen just because I like to watch my audience members’ heads bob and weave like zombies.

Wisely and Appropriately

Good animation promotes increased understanding and appreciation of a topic. It calls attention to the topic, not the tool. I sometimes wish that the function were called not animation, but “sequencing,” as that is more descriptive of the higher purpose of animation.

The image below shows a chart that can greatly benefit from well-conceived use of animation. This chart looks at the time requirements of an email campaign and the relative merits of doing it yourself or using an outside service to assist you.

This is a simple chart, but it is still too much data to give to your audience all at once.

There are two things that are noteworthy about this data: 1) If you use an outside service, the time required is the same, irrespective of whether you send out a handful or an ocean full of emails; and 2) the time required to send out 10,000 emails by yourself is literally off the charts—we created that bar outside of the graph to illustrate that.

Proper animation of this chart can make a world of difference to your audience’s appreciation of the point you are trying to make. Most content creators recognize that something should be done to charts like this, but they don’t think it through—so instead, they give the entire chart some weird animation, like a box in, or diamond out, or those Venetian blind thingies.

Calling attention to the chart is not necessary; it’s the only thing on the slide. What is needed here is to direct attention, and that requires more thought. If using an outside service requires 10 minutes irrespective of quantity, that becomes the baseline for the point to be made. Show all of those at once, instead of showing the data in pairs across the five quantities.

Once that point has been driven home, then you can turn the audience’s attention to the task of sending out the emails without outside assistance. Each of those five bars in the graph can be introduced on a click, the last one set on a long slow wipe from bottom to top for drama and comic relief.

Several good things happen when you use animation this way:

Your audience really gets it: I’m a big believer in separating form and content to promote understanding. Offering up the empty chart is a great way to prepare your audience for what they are about to see.

You control the pace: Charts are usually displayed too quickly, leaving audience members with the feeling that they’re drinking from a fire hose. If you suspect that members of your audience are not clear on what it is you’re about to show them, you can wait until they understand before continuing.

You become more confident: You have control of your audience in the palm of your hand (perhaps literally, if you use a wireless remote). Without being too crass about it, this position of advantage will likely manifest itself in a positive way.

You create trust: This is a great way for you to bond with them, by assuring them that you are not going to hurry them through data-heavy content. PowerPoint audiences are so often on guard in case a presenter does something ridiculous with animation or obnoxious with content, it’s amazing that they remember anything. Give them a soft landing with a heavy slide and they’ll remember it. They’ll relax and be more receptive to your ideas.

With that example under your belt, think about how you might animate the infographic below, a progression of prices based on level of service.

Can you use animation to better deliver this information?

If you throw it all out there at once, you jeopardize potential impact, understanding, and appreciation. Furthermore, you will have to play catch-up and will likely find yourself explaining the slide more than sharing your ideas.

Instead, show your audience the continuum of pricing first, without offering any specifics. They’ll get it right away: it’s going to be a comparison of services, based on price. Now bring in each price point, one by one, speaking to it as you go. This is the kind of pace that promotes understanding and appreciation.

Oh, and once you determine how best to sequence your data, don’t blow it by choosing some screwball animation choice. Pick Fade, Wipe, or maybe Ascend, but resist all temptation to pick one that causes objects to move across the slide. That commands attention to a degree that has you crying wolf. Just use Fade and call it a day.

“Must I?”

With any project that offers dense content, your use of animation must pass a litmus test of necessity. Is it needed, is it helpful, will there be benefit? If you can’t answer yes to these, the animation fails the litmus test and shouldn’t be used.

Even if it passes this litmus test, continue to scrutinize its use, asking yourself repeatedly what would be the best sequence, the best pace, and the best animation choice to create a blended and seamless presentation of an otherwise complicated topic.

You do that and you use animation in the best way. And if you do that, you distinguish your presentation visuals from just about all others out there today.

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: Delivery, Design, PowerPoint, Technique

Click Here…

August 23, 2009 By Rick Altman Leave a Comment

I was browsing through images at an online stock photo service, when I came upon a section of photos that were devoted to dials, buttons, knobs, and other gizmos that looked like they were supposed to do something. Here was one of many:

I wondered to myself why there would be so many photos like this of generic dials and then I began to wonder what one might do with them.

I downloaded the one above, which appears to be a speed setting for…something. So I made up a device that might have this knob on its face—I called it a Turbometer—and then pretended that I was in charge of creating a self-running tutorial PowerPoint file for it.

It is not exactly common knowledge that you can assign actions to items that you draw in PowerPoint, allowing them to function just like hyperlinks on a website.

The numbers around the dial are not objects onto themselves, but as you can see below, it is a simple matter to draw little circles over them.

Using the Action Settings dialog box, each circle can become a hyperlink to another slide in the file. Once you assign the hyperlinks, make the circles invisible by removing any fill and outline. Actually, I have gotten in the habit of setting a solid fill color to 99% transparency, as there are certain circumstances in which a completely invisible object causes problems during interactivity. A 99% transparent object will never be seen so it is for all intent and purpose an invisible object.

When the file is shown, it will seem like the numbers themselves are the click points for navigating through the slide show. Click a number and get information about what that speed means to your health and/or inner being.

If this is your first time working with Action Settings, it might call for a bit of reverse engineering, so download the PowerPoint file and go wild…

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: PowerPoint, Technique

The Debate Over “On Click”

March 2, 2009 By Rick Altman 3 Comments

The Debate Continues
Over “On Click”

A workshop or seminar rarely passes in which I do not have occasion to engage in a favorite controversy: Whether or not to display a list of ideas or bullet points one by one or all at once.

One reason that this issue rubs me wrong is because so many content creators do not give any thought to it at all: They apply animation to their text and they accept PowerPoint’s default setting, which is to have bullets appear one by one (On Click).

Their entire reason for choosing a presentation strategy is because of the program’s default setting.

I would feel much better, and one’s argument would carry more weight with me, if there was some forethought given to this decision. Choosing a path because software suggests it is rarely a recipe for success. Let me hear “I thought about the differences and have decided that this is the better way to go.”

Because she has done exactly that, I will take respectful issue with my friend, colleague, and she whom I describe as the rock star of presentations Nancy Duarte. In her outstanding book on presentation design slide:ology, Nancy writes this on page 145:

I prefer to have text build sequentially as I’m not sure why anyone would want the audience to jump ahead. Remember, if the audience can see your bullets, they know the points you’re going to make. They’ll get bored or agitated waiting for you to catch up with them.

Let’s start with common ground: If you have designed a slide with 15 bullet points on it, then yes, you had better bring those points in gradually. I think Nancy and I would also agree that if you have created a slide with 15 bullets, the least of your troubles is how you choose to display them.

But with a properly-proportioned list of ideas—with a slide that has four or five tersely-worded bullets on it—I believe more good than harm comes from displaying them all at once. You allow the audience to see the forest from the trees and you make it easier on yourself by eliminating altogether the risk that you might forget how many bullets are left and run past the last one.

If I am a capable presenter, I should not be concerned in the least of my audience running ahead. How far can they go?? It’s my job to keep them on point. It’s my responsibility to keep them engaged, and if I can’t do my job, I shouldn’t blame my PowerPoint plumbing for that.

Most of the time, I want them to know where I am going with a story or an argument. I want them to have that context.

My position on this has become only more adament over the past 12 months when I heard from users who are put off—actually insulted—by the practice of revealing bullets one at a time. I don’t blame them—why shouldn’t they have the context for the discussion that I have? What am I trying to hide? Why am I trying to be coy? Do I think my audience can’t keep up? Do I think that they are not smart enough?

These are legitimate questions that are raised by an over-reliance of the On Click in PowerPoint animation.

Now I draw stark contrast to the treatment of dense, chunky data, like an involved chart or a big table. That is an entirely different situation, in which Nancy and just about everyone else who has spoken at PowerPoint Live would agree: Elements like these absolutely need to be sequenced and spoon-fed to an audience.

But when it comes to bullets, my position on this is unconflicted: Life is just too short to worry about them. They're not worth the trouble. Everyone’s life is made easier when you display simple lists of ideas all at once.

I'd love to hear what you have to say about it…

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: Delivery, PowerPoint, Technique

Resolution Confusion

April 14, 2008 By Rick Altman Leave a Comment

This from Chantal, a friend and regular patron of PowerPoint Live…

“I am developing a presentation for a customer’s yearly meeting. Room specs: 120 feet long (around 700 people), maximum image width of 26 feet. My big worry is about image resolution. We know PPT is using a 96 dpi value but will my image resolution be a factor if the final projecting width is indeed 26 feet?”

What would you have told her? I didn’t exactly mince words in my reply:

“Dots per inch is bull—-!”

There is simply no such thing when working with screen content. There is no such thing as a dot and there is no such thing as an inch. How would you measure the inch — across the display of your 15-inch notebook monitor or across the width of a 26-foot screen? You see what I mean? You cannot make sense of an inch in a screen projection, so don’t even try.

You will need a projector bright enough to pump out an image that will be sprayed so wide, and if you are not confident that it will be able to project well enough across 26 feet, make sure you create a color scheme with plenty of contrast. If you can test it in the venue beforehand, always a plus!

But for the rest of your PowerPoint lifetime, pretend you never heard of dots or inches. I refer you to the following article for details:

http://www.betterppt.com/editorial-archive/archive/07mar.htm

Filed Under: Editorial Tagged With: PowerPoint, Technique

Better Multimedia

Customization: Baby Steps

Slice and Dice your Slide Deck

Insert Screenshot

Clone Animations

New Transitions…Run for the Hills!

Broadcast a Slide Show

1. Acknowledge it early

2. Use Notes View

3. Use Version 2007 Slide Masters

Wisely and Appropriately

“Must I?”

Editorial Log