Category Archives: PowerPoint

Presentation Summit 2010

The last time I went to a convention in San Diego, I was 14 and it was a convention for magicians. So now I’m geeking out in a different way in that city.

In October for the first time I’ll be attending The Presentation Summit, the one and only annual conference dedicated to presentation.

Run by Rick Altman, who is the author of the awesomely titled,Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck & How You Can Make Them Even Better, the conference began under the title, “PowerPoint Live.” I’m happy they made the change since there is far more to on screen presentation than just one piece of Microsoft software.

From what I understand, the conference is targeted at presentation professionals at all levels. There will be sessions on how to use and make the most of PowerPoint (including special sessions for “beginners”), but there will also be talks on visual communication, webinars, digital photography and the business of the business.

And featured speakers include Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds, the two leading thought leaders when it comes to effective presentation.

Though the conference has sold out in the past, there are still spots open if anyone is interested in attending. Drop me a line if you decide to go. We’ll grab daiquiris by the pool. I mean, we’ll talk about serious presentation stuff…

Categories: Books, PowerPoint, Presenting Live.

Hardware Graphics Acceleration for Smooth Transitions

Full-screen fades actually use a lot of computing power, and if you don’t have a super powerful machine, you may find animations (and video) acting sluggish: everything from hesitation to start to chunky instead of smooth fades.

There are a number of best practices for presenting such as plugging your computer in, running no other applications and running your presentation from your hard drive as opposed to a network or flash drive. But the simplest “boost” you can give your PowerPoint presentation is to enable “Hardware Graphic Acceleration.”

You can find it under the “Slide Show Tab” under “Set Up Show.” By default this is usually unchecked. In theory, this setting travels with the file, but it can easily get unchecked if you crash or for other unknown reasons.

I would only enable this if you are having performance issues as it sometimes can actually cause complex animations or some video to run worse. That’s Microsoft for you.

Note that there is also a “Hardware Graphics Acceleration” control for Windows itself which needs to be fiddled with in some cases (such as playing video on IBM Thinkpads.) If you need help with these larger performance issues, just email me and I’ll be happy to help where I can.

Categories: Animation, PowerPoint.

Hardware Graphics Acceleration for Smooth Transitions

I would only enable this if you are having performance issues as it sometimes can actually cause complex animations or some video to run worse. That’s Microsoft for you.

Categories: Animation, PowerPoint.

Slide Transitions

PowerPoint offers over 50 different slide transitions. And I don’t think I’ve ever used 45 of them.

I have one simple rule for using animation:

Animate only if helps tell your story

Sometimes, animating in elements on a slide or moving things around with motion paths actually does help convey your meaning. But a checkerboard transition from slide to slide usually says little more than, “Look at me! Look at me! I found the transition function in PowerPoint!”

If you’re thinking about using the Wagon Wheel transition, I’ve got a rule of thumb: If you don’t see Spielberg or Scorsese using it, don’t use it for your presentation. Actually, I’ll amend that slightly.

While 99% of video, TV and film edits are hard cuts, they have the advantage of sound, music and dialogue to link shots together. For presentations, I prefer simple fades from slide to slide to give a slight sense of movement and to prevent things from feeling like an old-time carousel slide show (“next slide…next slide…next slide…”)

Rarely, I’ll use a push transition as part of a trick for a larger animation effect. Rarely.
The soon to be released PowerPoint 2010 will offer new transitions. Yes, they will be cool (as they attempt to keep up with Appple’s Keynote), but I beg you—practice some restraint…

Categories: Animation, PowerPoint.

Be Like Ken Burns: Zoom and Pan Your Photos

Ken Burns, the documentary film-maker behind The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz and others, knows something about telling a story with images and voiceover. He’s brilliant at presenting information on a screen.

Because many of his films involve subject matter with little or no video footage (and because he never does reenactments), Burns relies heavily on the use of historical still imagery. And to bring this imagery alive, he makes heavy use of a film technique called pan and zoom in which the camera moves closer or farther away from the image and/or moves across the image.

Burns is so associated with this film technique that at one point, Apple actually called it’s automatic pan and zoom feature in iMovie the Ken Burns Effect.

So, what does this have to do with your PowerPoint?

In replacing a series of bullet points with an image, you’ve most likely increased the effectiveness of your message and presentation. But at times, static imagery might start to feel a little…static.

By using PowerPoint’s “Shrink/Grow” and “Motion Path” animation effects (or Keynote’s “Move” & “Scale”), you can be just like Ken Burns and add a sense of movement, depth and drama to your imagery.

Even just a slight pan, zoom in or zoom out can help give a sense of depth and movement to an image. Let’s say you’re talking about NASCAR. A full screen image would be good, but zooming and panning adds a bit of drama.

Keynote allows you to visually size and move your image end state when applying “scale” and “move” which is a very nice feature. In PowerPoint, there’s a little trial and error involved as you’ll have to make some initial guesses when typing in sizing percentages and setting a motion path. If you do want to zoom and pan simultaneously (which you’ll often want to do to focus in on the perfect part of the photo as an end state), you need to set both animations to run simultaneously by setting the second animation to happen “with previous.” Additionally, if using a motion path you’ll want to select “effect options” and deselect “Smooth start” and “Smooth end.” Otherwise, you’ll get a dizzying effect on screen.

I should point out that if you’re zooming in by a large percentage in PowerPoint, your image will start to pixelate no matter how large the image was when you inserted it on your slide. This is because PowerPoint unfortunately “sets” the image prior to the animation. So, if you grow it by 300%, it will become 1/3 as crisp. Depending on the image and the zoom percentage, you may not notice any difference, but you would not want to use this technique to grow a logo by 500%. Zooming out on an image has no effect on quality, and you don’t have to worry about this issue in Keynote. I will point out that there is a somewhat complicated workaround for this image zooming problem. I won’t go into here, but if there are any power presenters who are interested in learning the trick, just email me and I’ll explain it.

Remember that whole “a picture is worth a 1,000 words” thing? Try it next time you’re putting together a presentation. Take the on screen text from a slide like this, and put it into the speaker notes…

Make your image full screen, and then animate it a bit…

Make your image full screen, and then animate it a bit….

If you want to see an example of this effect in action from one of my presentations as well as a couple of ways to tell distinct stories with a photograph and this technique, download this file. And, of course, if you have any questions about this topic or anything related to presentation, just drop me an email anytime at nolan@nolanhaims.

Categories: Animation, Keynote, PowerPoint.

You Don’t Need a Header Bar

Yes, I have a lot of pet peeves with regard to presentation design, but at the top of the list is header bars. Often–though not always–it is necessary and/or helpful to have a title to your slide (a “header”). But when it comes to designing a “look” or a template for a presentation, it is almost never a good thing to design your slides so that they require a header. We’ve all seen templates like these…

Designs with dedicated headers should be avoided because they…

Waste valuable screen real estate

Force the user to write headlines when they may not be necessary, leading to cluttered and over-written slides

Create an inorganic “PowerPoint-y” look

Even good presentation designers often fall into the header bar trap, and I place the blame largely on Microsoft. PowerPoint is the only program I can think of in which the default “empty” page tells the user what kind of information should be placed on the page. Open up a blank PPT doc and you are immediately told to insert a header and body copy. Microsoft Word doesn’t tell you what kind of words to put down; it just gives you a white page. Photoshop doesn’t give you a page at all, less they bias you against a teal or a zebra-striped canvas.

But back to the waste of space. Take a look at this Microsoft-design template that comes pre-installed with PPT.

If you used this template for each page, after you inserted your mandatory header, you would have only 51% of your entire page left for actual content. If you always used Microsoft’s recommended “click to add text” content area, you’d only have 38% usable space! Note that on this template, Microsoft has added in a further, unnecessary gray bounding box (your screen should be your bounding box…) that further reduces usable area after you account for needed padding on the edges–text will always need a cushion of negative space around it to be readable.

Yes, Microsoft does provide a header-less layout for this template design, but the natural instinct is to keep the background the same for all slides, which then leads to unnecessary and often visually redundant headlines. Last weekend I was at a wine seminar on a Spanish wine region called Ribera Del Duero. I’ve recreated one of the slides showing the growing region. Since we talked about no other geography other than Ribera, my reaction to the use of a header bar on this page was a resounding, “Duh.” The header bar design in the template forced the presenter to include a header even when it was painfully unnecessary, forcing the content smaller, and distracting from it.

Even if you reduce the size of a header bar design, you’re still bound for trouble. The above examples are large enough to account for 2 line headers (if you absolutely must have a 2 line header…), but if you try to minimize the header area as shown here, you’re just going to run into problems with that one slide that just must have 2 or 3 lines for some reason.

So, what’s the solution? Keep as open and blank a canvas as you possibly can that allows for a header or title to come and go as needed. And if you can find or create a design that doesn’t fore the use of headers, you’ll be on your way to making slide headers the exception rather than the rule. Which is a good thing…

Categories: Design, PowerPoint, Reducing Text.

How Not to Fix Afghanistan

It will come as no surprise to anyone when I admit I don’t know the first thing about military or geopolitical strategy. But I’m just having trouble imagining that a recently leaked strategy document on the war in Afghanistan makes use of the right tools to present its findings.

Of course, the strategy plan created by the PA Consulting Group was, as far as we can assume, presented primarily in PowerPoint. And PowerPoint wasn’t used in this case as a word processor the way it often mistakenly is, but to tell a story graphically with minimal explanatory text. Normally, that would be something I would applaud, until you take a look at the deck, and its main slide…

Yes, it does seem like something from The Onion, but MSNBC says it’s legitimate, and you can download the whole presentation from their site here. Perhaps this is a brilliant plan, but if it is, I hope the intended audiences can get past the format to take it seriously. And if anyone out there is familiar with war planning and can tell me that this is the way generals win wars, I’ll be happy to learn something!

Categories: PowerPoint.

PowerPoint Train Wrecks

Network World just put up a cute slideshow of 8 PowerPoint Train Wrecks.

It’s worth a look.

I’ll have to remember to send around one of Bill Gates’ more recent presentations as he should be given credit for dramatically improving.

Categories: PowerPoint.

The Beauty of Shift-Return

As much as I’d like to be, I’m just not a big keyboard shortcut guy. I know one presentation designer who hardly ever uses file menus, and does nearly everything with keyboard shortcuts.

But if you learn only one keyboard shortcut, make it this one:

SHIFT-RETURN

This is the shortcut for inserting a soft return into a paragraph of text. You should always look at how your text looks and reads on a page. If, within a single paragraph or bullet point, you need to move a word or words to the next line for better reading or to visually even things out and fix an orphan*, DON’T use RETURN. This will create a new paragraph which can create a new bullet point and space before the line if your line spacing is set up for this. And DON’T just hit the spacebar 20 times in a row. This will cause even more problems.

SHIFT-RETURN inserts a soft return which maintains the integrity of the paragraph and spacing.

Before…

After Shift-Returns (indicated by blue arrows)…

*An orphan is a word, part of a word or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph.

Categories: Design, Keynote, PowerPoint.

View live websites without leaving your presentation

if you need to show a website during your presentation, often a screen grab will do it. But if you need to show interactivity and functionality, you’ll want Shyam Pillai’s LiveWeb plug-in for PowerPoint, one of the few add-ins that has been properly updated for PPT 2007.

LiveWeb allows you to create a window of any size (including full-screen) right on your slide that will show any website you indicate. In effect, it’s a mini-browser window that eliminates the need for exiting your slideshow to go to a browser or having that browser pop up on top of your slides via a hyperlink.

The best part though, is that LiveWeb is truly just a window, without any browser toolbars, so it shows just the site itself, and nothing else distracting. And since it can be any size, it incorporates itself right into your presentation design.

Two caveats: obviously, you need a live internet connection for LiveWeb to work, and it will only work on computers that have the plug-in installed.

Categories: PowerPoint.