Trends from the 2013 Presentation Summit

I just returned from the annual Presentation Summit, held this year in Ft. Lauderdale. The only conference of its kind, the Summit is a unique gathering of professionals who make their living in the world of slides and screen information. The event used to be called “PowerPoint Live,” and indeed there is a primary emphasis on PowerPoint: Representatives from Microsoft attend as do most of the PowerPoint MVPs—the top thinkers and champions of the program. But the name change also reflects a recognition that PowerPoint is just one tool (albeit the most prominent) in this world.

This year I again presented my “In The Trenches“ session on real-world presentation solutions to day to day corporate challenges, but I also presented sessions on data design and Apple’s Keynote software (my preferred presentation software.)

Here are some visual notes from my sessions taken by the attendee Stephy Lewis…

Emerging Themes

As both a speaker and an attendee, some themes emerged this year on the state of presentation including increased attention on data visualization and increased use of software that isn’t PowerPoint. And I am not just saying that because those were my session topics—two highlights for me were Danielle Jotham who spoke on the many presentation software solutions employed by her design team at TBS and Matt Stevenson from Fathom Creative who gave a killer talk on Prezi.

But by far the biggest theme for me was much PowerPoint was being used for things other than traditional slide presentations—specifically print layout.

PowerPoint for Print Documents

It has become clear that PowerPoint is the primary software tool of corporate America. Excel is still a powerful solution for working with numbers, but the relative ease of use of PowerPoint is leading many to abandon the bloated, clunky and buggy world of Microsoft Word in favor of the slideware’s greener pastures. 

At Edelman, we increasingly use PowerPoint for text-heavy documents and proposals. When we can’t use Adobe CS for various reasons, we’ll use PowerPoint to create white papers, proposals and all types of text-heavy documents (ultimately saving these out as PDFs.) At the Summit, I presented a number of our solutions for creating print-only presentations with PowerPoint. And I was pleased, but not surprised to see that I was not the only one pushing the software in this direction. Ric Bretschneider gave a session entitled “Insider Secrets for Paper Presentations.” I also spoke with numerous people who told me that their companies were abandoning Microsoft Publisher and Word in favor of PowerPoint as a layout tool.

PowerPoint will not replace design programs such as InDesign anytime soon. But I think the folks at Microsoft may be realizing that there are millions of users who require a basic (and inexpensive) layout tool for more visually dynamic print documents. And when those users choose from among the tools on their desktop, they choose PowerPoint.

Here’s hoping the PowerPoint dev team implements text box linking, image wrap, drop caps, grids and more layout tools in future releases…

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Even though I now attend the conference as a speaker, I continue to learn a great deal from other presenters and attendees. I’ll be writing future posts on some of these things at PresentYourStory.com, so come on by and check the site out. There is a lot more on the site than what you’ll read in the newsletters!

And if I’m convincing you to attend the Presentation Summit, mark your calendars for next year: Oct 12-15 in San Diego!