Keep Your Presentations from Ending up on WikiLeaks

This past week brought news of another leaked PowerPoint presentation. The US Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America (the latter under threat of an embarrassing WikiLeak revelation about the company) hired private security firms to launch a counteroffensive against WikiLeaks and its supporters including sabotage, disinformation and general discredit the messenger type stuff.

And, of course, with PowerPoint being the way businesses communicate, the group of security firms created a PowerPoint proposal to pitch their services.

There’s way more to the story including the fact that both the PowerPoint and thousands of emails from the security firms were hacked by Anonymous (doesn’t say much for the security firms’ security…), but the moral is that in the age of WikiLeaks and rapidly diminishing digital privacy, you probably want to think about securing your presentations.

Here’s how:

#1 – Password Protect your PPT File

When you’re in the editing phase and need to keep your sensitive presentation in PowerPoint, add a password to the file—and, of course, do not distribute the password by email.

In PPT 2010, go to File: Info: Protect Presentation: Encrypt with Password… and enter a password that will be needed for anyone to open and edit the presentation.
In PPT 2007, go to Windows Button: Prepare: Encrypt Document…
On the Mac: Historically, Mac versions have provided no support for password security. PowerPoint 2011 allows you to open previously password-protected presentations, but currently the only way to implement security is the Microsoft Rights Management and restricting permissions.

#2 – Convert to PDF and Password Protect File

I always recommend converting PowerPoint files to PDFs before sending to clients or outside of their offices even if security is not an concern. But if the document is sensitive, Acrobat can also apply various levels of security requiring passwords for everything from opening to editing and printing. Unfortunately, adding this kind of security requires Acrobat Pro (not just Acrobat Reader). But if you’re working with sensitive files, you might want to drop a few bucks on Acrobat Pro…

#3 – Encrypt via Zipped Folder

If you’re still on Windows XP, you can apply password protection after you have zipped a presentation, but sadly, this functionality is gone in Windows 7.
Turn to third party software such as SecureZip.

Of course, it goes without saying that any hacker group that can infiltrate governmental websites can probably also crack a Microsoft password, but if you’re not quite engaged in James Bond international intrigue, password protecting files is probably a smart thing to do to deal with the laptop left at a Starbucks…

Further PowerPoint Security Issues & Solutions

There are a few more ways that a PowerPoint file can get you into trouble. Here’s how to avoid them:

Remove Speaker Notes, Comments, Off-Slide Data: You might want to distribute your slides to others, but not your speaker notes or comments. You know, the ones that say “Client is being an idiot about this number. Just make them happy.” PowerPoint can wipe all of these (and a few other things) away for you with a few clicks. In PPT 2010, go to File: Info: Prepare For Sharing: Inspect Document… In PPT 2007, go to Windows Button: Prepare: Inspect Document…
Avoid the Excel Data Surprise: When you copy and paste an excel chart into PowerPoint, you have options as to whether embed or link the data sheet or to paste as picture. In either of the first two cases, you might be surprised to learn that PowerPoint now has a connection not just to the chart data, but to the ENTIRE EXCEL FILE. What this means is that if you have a company salary data Excel file on your desktop (which you think is secure), but embed in PPT just a cumulative chart from that file, then anyone with access to the PPT file now has access to the entire salary data for your company. This has actually happened more than once, and it can be devastating. Imagine sending a client an embedded file with all of your markup information. The workaround is to paste as a picture (which I generally don’t like doing) or create a separate Excel file from which to link or embed.

Categories: PDF, PowerPoint.

Steal

Picasso is famously to have once said that “good artists borrow, but great artists steal.”

Not that I’m a Picasso of presentation, but stealing is exactly how I create many, many presentations.

For years now I have maintained a digital file of good and interesting presentations and graphic design that I come across. And often when I feel the need for inspiration, I’ll browse through my collection for an idea.

I should clarify that I don’t actually steal other designs, but rather I look for interesting elements, colors and use of typography or images that provide a spark for working with my own presentation’s content. I would find it difficult to truly copy another’s presentation design completely, as my approach is always to design content itself, not just graphics around content. And since my content will always be different from my design inspiration, so will my design. (I should point out too that my collection contains some of my own work as it never hurts to be reminded of something that worked well in the past.)

These are slides from 2 presentations I designed. The one on the left had its genesis in a small 2″ web ad. All I remember of the ad was that it used a blue/white gradient that I liked. I copied the gradient, darkened it to allow for white text headers, then started playing with contrasting colors and glossy effects. Eventually, my own design emerged once I began working with content. The one on the right was inspired by a presentation I saw that used red type on a white background. Years of designing financial presentations has made me cautious of the color red for numbers, but I liked the boldness of it for my client’s story, and before long I had a design that “stole” the colors white and red. (Sue me..)

People make bad presentation because they see bad presentations. If you see well-designed, effective presentations regularly, you can’t help but be inspired and follow suit. And you shouldn’t feel bad about appropriating some of those design elements and principles.

There is, of course, a line between inspiration and design theft. But if you are genuinely designing your content, I think you’ll find that even if you start off wholesale copying someone else’s design, you’ll quickly find that you will make it your own as your presentation develops. And just as art students are taught to literally copy master paintings, making an initial copy of another’s effective presentation can teach you how to effectively display information on a screen.

And here are some places where you can find well-designed presentations to serve as inspiration…

SURF
Note and Point — a great new site that showcases well-designed presentations
Slideshare‘s featured and top presentations
Slideshare’s Best Presentation Contest 2010
Duarte Design’s portfolio – The leader in presentation design (and not a bad company to hire if you’re in the market…)

WATCH
TED Talks — Simply the most riveting presenters in the world. And nothing more than 18 minutes long
Steve Jobs keynotes on YouTube

READ
Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
Presentation Design Zen by Garr Reynolds
Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte

Categories: Visual Thinking.

Andy Bernard’s PowerPoint

Take a look at the whole pres here.

Categories: Visual Thinking.

The State of Our Union on a Bagel with a Schmear

What the American public remembers of Obama’s SOTU…

Categories: Visual Thinking.

Governor PowerPoint

About 2pm yesterday afternoon I started getting emails… “Are you watching Cuomo? He’s using PowerPoint!”

Andrew Cuomo was inaugurated yesterday as the next Governor of New York, and he gave a State of the State address. His speech was certainly not on my radar, but I eventually watched it all (you can watch it here). And yes, he did indeed deliver a presentation filled with on screen slides.

It could very well be the first time PowerPoint was used for such an address.

So, how did he do? I give him a “B.”

I’m still not 100% decided as to whether PowerPoint was appropriate for the occasion, but what I do know is that from a purely presentational standpoint, he did a lot right. (And expect him to continue to get a lot of press on this one.)

THE GOOD

The slides supported the well-scripted message he was delivering; they were not the presentation itself (remember, nobody comes to see your slides)
Template-less slide design (and no State of NY seal in the corner!)
One message per slide
Limited text
Strong, full screen imagery (mostly)
Speaker as focus: Cuomo faced front and never read his slides; he began and ended without slides.
Well-rehearsed: Cuomo used a stage manager, and the slides followed him.
Humor: He committed 100% to a silly animated battleship slide that garnered laughs while illustrating Albany political problems. Goofy? Yes. Sticky? Absolutely. This was his memorable moment.
Pacing: Cuomo used humor, visuals and special guests to vary the pace and keep the audience engaged

THE BAD

Too much text: Some slides still had too much text and asked to be read, taking attention away from the speaker
Too many slides: Normally I’m agnostic about number of slides, but using 82 slides forced too much focus on the screens, instead of the speaker. Additionally, many slides that just displayed a textual talking point seemed extraneous.
Animation: It wasn’t horrendous, but just because you can animate on individual elements of a slide doesn’t mean you always should; the subtle entrance animations made this feel more “PowerPoint-y” than it needed to be.
PowerPoint chops: Very few would notice, but many animations could have been created more elegantly if the designer just knew some tricks…

THE UNDECIDED

Credibility: Is the use of slides befitting the very serious nature of the situation, speaker and content? Did it feel like a pharmaceutical sales meeting? Your thoughts?

* * *

And since we’re talking political PowerPoint, it’s a good time to remind everyone of what PowerPoint might have enabled at Gettysburg…

Categories: PowerPoint, Presenting Live.

The Education of Bill Gates

I finally saw Social Network over the Holiday break and took special note of a scene in which Bill Gates returns to Harvard to deliver a talk to an audience that includes Mark Zuckerberg—”the next Bill Gates.” It reminded me that in my seminar on presentation design, I come down pretty hard on Bill Gates as a presenter. The theme of my seminar is creating a contemporary and new style of presentation, not dated-looking “PowerPoints.” And just as I use Steve Jobs as an exemplar of good presenting and design, I use Bill Gates often as an example of bad, dated presentation design.

The problem is that my Bill Gates examples are largely 5-15 years old. Are my comparisons fair…?

You see, Bill Gates used to deliver some horrendous looking and ineffective “PowerPoints” while running Microsoft. His slides often looked like this.

The list of sins is lengthy: Jargon, little negative space, decoration instead of communication, poor use of imagery, death by bullet points, etc.

But is condemning Gates for these slides like condemning me for wearing parachute pants in high school? (No emails on this, please.)

So, I decided to take another look at what Gates has been up to lately with regard to presentation. I watched again his last two TED talks: the 2009 Malaria presentation and the2010 Energy Innovating to Zero talk. The 2009 talk is (in)famous in that Gates created a coup de presentation in releasing a jarful of mosquitos in the auditorium. That’s what people remember, and he should be lauded for creating such a memorable moment (that garnered great press). But watching the talk again, I saw too much old thinking on the screen. These are some of the slides from 2009…

While there is progress for Gates here (some full-screen imagery, one message per slide), the presentation suffers from chart junk, unclear data messaging and tiny type. The mosquitos rocked; the slides did not. They barely looked designed. Not that everyone should need a presentation designer, but you think Gates might have afforded himself the luxury…

But then I watched the 2010 talk which included slides such as these:

It seems that in the span of a single year, Bill Gates found religion. His 2010 slides are downright gorgeous. They’re simple, elegant, well-designed graphically and above all: clear. They tell a visual story instead of obfuscating it. This time, Gates’ memorable moment (“releasing” fire flies) was kind of a dud. But his slides kicked ass.

Bill has got a lot of catching up to do, but I’m glad to see that he has turned a corner.

So, will I continue making fun of him? Yes. Until he calls over to Redmond and makes the PowerPoint team fix the page numbering glitches…

Categories: PowerPoint, Presenting Live.

Downloading Online Videos for a Presentation

I love well-placed and well-used video in presentations.

Like a quotation, a video clip can sometimes make a point much more succinctly than you are able to. Or, it can add humor where you might not be capable yourself. Whatever the ultimate goal, a video is just great for breaking things up and re-engaging your audience.Remember, every ten minutes you should find some way to shake things up.

I often see people insert YouTube hyperlinks into their presentations. And I often see them uncomfortably navigate to a browser window and then back to their presentation. And that assumes that the presenter actually has an internet connection when and where they need it.

Whenever possible, videos need to be local—whether linked in PPT 2007 and earlier or actually embedded as in Keynote and PPT 2010 (the new version of PowerPoint takes a huge step forward with regard to video.)

In order to download online videos, I used to jump through a number of complicated hoops involving screen capture tools and fiddling under my Mac’s hood. But I was just turned onto a great add-on for Firefox that makes downloading internet content fairly idiot-proof. It’s called Video DownloadHelper. You can learn more about the freeware from their website, but the easiest way to install and get going with this is to visit this Firefox add-on page and just follow the directions.

Once installed, the software adds a small icon to your Firefox browser bar which animates anytime you are on a page with video that can be downloaded. The add-in is cross-platform, but if you are on a PC, Video DownloadHelper can be further configured via an additional install to convert your videos to various formats including MOVs and WMVs. The software isn’t 100% perfect and cannot download from certain sites like Netflix, but it works brilliantly for YouTube and most other videos.

And of course, I assume we are all downloading and using videos within fair use laws…

I want to thank Joe Tandle, a fantastic PowerPoint trainer from New York Interactive Mediafor this tip. If you are looking for on or off-site Microsoft Office training, I highly recommend Joe and NYIM.

Categories: Video.

Emotional vs. Analytical Presentation

What’s the best pitch I’ve seen in recent years?

Easy. Don Draper’s Kodak Carousel pitch from Season 1 of Mad Men. For those who are not fans of the show, take a work break right now and watch the scene.

Don’s presentation very clearly uses emotion to persuade—in fact, it’s probably 100% emotion.

What kind of speaker are you?

Emotional or Analytical?

Looking at another presenting Series of 2, nearly every part of a presentation can be classified as either emotional or analytical, as can an overall style and approach. Don Draper or Martin Luther King are certainly more on the emotional end of the spectrum while your high school math teacher was probably mostly analytical. But a presentation need not and should not choose one or the other.

A successful persuasive presentation should be a mix of the emotional and analytical.

So, what is the right proportion? It will be different for every presenter and for every audience and subject matter. I would guess that the vast majority of business presentations are mostly if not all analytical. But just because you think your material dry or your audience overly serious, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t inject emotion. People are rarely moved to act absent emotion. Colin Powell’s UN presentation prior to the Iraq war included a lot of analysis, diagrams and data. But probably the biggest “selling point” was the prop vial of anthrax he held up. There may be no greater emotion than fear…

So, what types of content fall into each category?

ANALYTICAL

Data • Hard Facts • Tables • Diagrams & Charts • Processes • Analyzed Solutions

EMOTIONAL

Stories • Theatricality • Props • Fear • Humor • Personal Experiences

I placed a few famous presenters on an Analytical/Emotional continuum. Where do you think you land on this as a presenter?

There’s a danger in veering too far to the left or right on this scale in that your credibility and effectiveness can be harmed. Jim Cramer receives a lot of criticism for thinking too much with his gut and not enough with his head with his financial advice to viewers. (Of course, Alan Greenspan never had his own TV show.) Similarly, Glenn Beck receives criticism for too many tears, not enough facts. And finally, Barack Obama was a very emotional candidate, but many feel as though he has lost a lot of that inspirational fire since moving to the White House. Has his presenting style changed?

And now, for one last example out of Redmond, WA. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer…

Categories: Presenting Live, Storytelling.

Nancy Duarte’s resonate and the Presentation Story Construct

I’m a big fan of series of 3’s, but lately I’ve been far more interested in series of 2’s. So much easier to remember, right…?

To that end, Nancy Duarte is out with her new book called resonate. Hopefully you have all read her first book slide:ology and my endless praise for it. Resonateis not a sequel, but as Nancy herself explains: a prequel.

Slide:ology focused on the visual design of a presentation, and it is probably the best book ever written on the subject. But presentation design is only one part of creating an effective presentation. And it’s part 2. Part 1 is writing the story. Enter resonate and Nancy’s codification and method for writing a clear and effective presentation story—a form which, she explains, lies somewhere in between a factual report and a dramatic piece of fiction.

In trying to identify a repeatable structure for effective presentation, Nancy reverse engineered and analyzed successful presentations by Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King and others. What she discovered is that persuasive presentation is about moving from where we are today to where we want to be tomorrow. From pain to gain. From what is to what could be. And a dynamic persuasive presentation constantly moves us back and forth (contrast = engagement) ultimately resting in the world of tomorrow where hopefully our audience picks up the gauntlet we have laid down for them: Hire our company, approve our ad campaign, restructure your business, fund my research, etc. A presentation should be about moving your audience to a new and better tomorrow.

While Nancy explores mythic structure and Joseph Campbell in the book (don’t worry, it doesn’t get too heady, and there are lots of Star Wars references), it is simply this elemental series of 2, Today/Tomorrow construct that is at the heart of resonate. Here it is.

Every word and piece of information from your presentation can now be categorized as either “today” or “tomorrow” in this simple series of 2. Of course, this is the basic construct upon which can be layered your various points and presentation techniques. And Nancy uses this basis to create sparklines that analyze presentation and ensure that enough contrast in content and form is used to maintain engagement. Here’s a simple sparkline for an absolutely wonderful and entertaining TED talk by conductor Benjamin Zander.

The book is filled with much more than the construct itself including numerous case studies, sample presentation slides and various dramatic techniques for creating a memorable presentation. If anyone is interested in viewing a one hour webinar that Nancy gave on the material from the book, click here and enter the password “webinar”. It’s very good. And if you ever have the opportunity to see her speak live as I did a few weeks ago at the Presentation Summit 2010 in San Diego—take it. (Yeah, she’s a pretty good speaker herself.)

The Summit was a well-produced conference, and I got to meet with many of the leading players in the world of presentation software and design. Microsoft was even generous enough to send their PowerPoint product development folks who allowed themselves to be grilled endlessly on missing, requested and frustrating features. (Yes, they know the page numbering in 2007/10 sucks, and they’re working on it…)

Categories: Books, Storytelling.

Food Stories

Can a restaurant’s menu present a visual story?

The signage, the decor, the level of service, the napkins even the lighting all contribute to an overall story being told by a restaurant to its diners. But the menu, I would argue, is a prime vehicle for that telling. And some restaurants are using their menus in new ways to communicate.

Recently, I had dinner at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an astonishing restaurant at the forefront of the farm-to-table food movement. Blue Hill’s acknowledged story is one of natural, local and sustainable foods. I’m not sure I’ve eaten anywhere else where the ingredients mattered more than the food—as odd as that might sound.

And perhaps because of that dynamic, the menu contained not a single of those standard overwritten course descriptions filled with endless adjectives and place names (as mouth-watering as those things sometimes sound.) The right side of the menu contained only the two price-fixe options, an additional cheese course option and a great deal of white space. But the left side was filled with a simple listing of every fresh ingredient that would be part of the evening’s dinner. Blue Hill’s story is their collection of daily-changing ingredients, and it couldn’t have been more clearly told.

Another restaurant that has recently reimagined the restaurant menu by focusing on ingredients is the newly-redesigned Eleven Madison Park. Here, from what I have read, the restaurant wants to establish trust with their diners and “take them for a ride.” Though I have not been to Eleven Madison Park since the relaunch, I imagine the restaurant’s story to be more of an intimate conservation between the kitchen and the table, facilitated by the staff. And the minimalist menu, intended to be read left to right with each line constituting a course, seems to open up that conversation. Or maybe I’m wrong? Is this menu the opposite of a clear story?

A menu, almost by definition, has traditionally been a choose-your-own-adventure situation for the diner, so it’s interesting to see restaurants using their menus to tell their own narrative.

In other food presentation news, I was just turned on to this fantastic talk by food guru Michael Pollan. There are many things to note in Pollan’s presentation, which was designed by Duarte Design including simple visuals, limited text, making it personal, video, large-full screen images, and “sticky” stories, but my favorite technique he makes use of is that of props. Take a look at the 5:00 mark where Pollan shows how much oil goes into the making of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. This is a technique Nancy Duarte calls a “S.T.A.R. Moment” (Something They’ll Always Remember) and Carmine Gallo calls a “Holy Shit Moment.” Whatever you call it, it’s far, far more effective than a series of bullets, and will most likely be the one thing I remember from Pollan’s talk 5 days and 5 years from now.

PopTech 2009: Michael Pollan from PopTech on Vimeo.

Categories: Visual Thinking.