More Uses for Disappear with Previous animations

Footnotes and page numbers are the most most common elements to apply a Disappear With Previous animation, but there are other things on your slides that you might want only to appear in a print deck and not on screen.

Remember, there is just so much text that can be processed and read when presenting on screen.

So, let’s say you have a slide with three bullet points, each with 3 sub bullet points that you may not be specifically talking to when presenting, but that you would like to be in your printed handouts.

Create individual text boxes for each bullet and for each set of sub bullets. Then apply a Disappear With Previous animation to each of the sub bullet boxes. The result is that your audience will only see the large primary bullets on screen and you still have your visible talking points. The less important (and much harder to read) sub bullets in their smaller font size, will only appear in the printed deck.

If you are creative, and if you can lay out your slides appropriately, you can use this technique to keep your on screen show cleaner and easier to read.

What else truly doesn’t need to be viewed in screen?

Logo bugs?
Legal disclaimer?
Copyright notice?
Sub heading?
“FPO” notations?

Categories: Animation, PowerPoint, Reducing Text.

Do You Really Need Footnotes and Page Numbers?

I’m a minimalist, so I’m always looking for for what I can remove on a screen, always looking for what’s not truly needed to tell or aid a story.

Page numbers and footnotes most often do absolutely nothing to tell your story on screen.

So, let’s just get rid of them. Well, okay maybe you need them sometimes.

But before we decide when we need them, we really need to be honest with ourselves about how our presentations are being used. There are 3 primary situations:

On screen presented deck (speaker support)
Printed deck
Emailed/personal viewing

1. On screen presented deck (speaker support)
Let’s assume we are presenting on screen for an audience of 25. You do not need page numbers. (Except maybe for the writing and editing process, in which case you should delete them prior to presenting.)

How about footnotes? Nope, don’t need them either. “But what about my legal team’s insistence?” Well, you can’t read 8pt text in 99% of presentation situations, which means you’re not actually using footnotes. You’re just adding graphic junk to your screen. (Assure your legal team that you will provide citations in your distributed material.)

2. Printed Deck
First, are you sure this shouldn’t be a Word Document…? Do you have paragraphs and paragraphs of text and little imagery… Still has to be PowerPoint…? Legal is still insistant?

Solution? USE ENDNOTES. Remember those from college?

3. Emailed/Personal Viewing
In effect, a deck that is meant to be viewed by one person on their own screen is nearly identical to the needs of a printed deck. And you never know if the person is simply going to print it out for easier reading anyway. See above.

The Multipurpose Deck
In an ideal world, a presentation should fall only into one of the above categories. But too often, we want our decks to serve all three purposes. Understand that this is like designing a magazine ad and then using the exact same ad as a billboard…and as a web banner ad…and as a subway ad…It’s no shame to not have the resources to create different decks for different purposes (although if you were designing an ad campaign, you’d make the effort, right?)

So, if you must have a multipurpose deck, and in its printed form, you need your page numbers and your footnotes (you’re sure you can’t use endnotes…?), here’s a PowerPoint technique for having these things be invisible on the screen, but visible when printed:

The “With Previous Disappear” Animation
For page numbers, you’ll need to go into your master page(s) and select the page number text field. Bring up your custom animation panel and apply a “disappear” exit animation and set it to animate “with previous.”

What you have just done is tell PowerPoint to immediately animate out the page number on every page as soon as you advance to the slide in slideshow mode. Regardless of the type of slide transitions you apply (and you’re just using “fades,” right…?), you will never even see a glimpse of the page number as long as you’re in slideshow mode. Of course, the page number still appears in layout mode and thus will always print.

Similarly, for footnotes, you can apply this same type of animation on each individual slide. Or, if you’re using PPT 2007, you can set up a custom placeholder text box in a master for footnotes and apply the animation in the master.

I should point out that if for any reason you have to move backward in your slideshow to a previous slide, you may be surprised to see your “invisible” page numbers or footnotes start appearing just before moving back to the previous slide. This is because PowerPoint is reversing the animations, and there’s no real way around it.

Also, this technique unfortunately does not work in Keynote as you will see a flash of the page number each time you arrive on the slide.

Categories: Animation, PowerPoint.

Be Like Gallagher: Use Props

Remember this guy?

Say what you will about whether or not he was actually funny, but you can’t deny that he was memorable.

Most effective stories, presentations and performances that are effective are memorable (although the reverse cannot always be said).

The use of props will go a long way towards making your presentation memorable. Words alone just can’t compete.

Do you remember what Gallagher said, or do you remember his sledgehammer? How about these guys?

Okay, enough with the comedians. That’s not your gig.

This past week we were discussing a recent very successful winning pitch we designed and its use of props. Apparently, though the client was impressed with our entire approach and team capabilities (and screen presentation), they kept talking about the props we brought which included actual lapel pins and necklaces of a logo we were proposing as part of a campaign and which were handed out to the clients. Most would have stopped at just designing the logo and putting it on screen. Maybe some would go ahead and make t-shirts to hand out. But our team actually created a wearable piece of jewelry that, like Gallagher’s sledgehammer or Steve Martin’s arrow-through-the-head, effectively encapsulated the entire story being presented.

Here are 3 more examples–maybe the most famous and effective use of presentation props of the last 25 years:

You probably recognize Colin Powell’s UN presentation in which a small vial of fake anthrax effectively told his entire story. Similarly, Johnnie Cochran didn’t just rely on oratory (“If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit”), but he used the actual gloves as props to accomplish his goal. Good or bad outcomes,props made these presentations unquestionably effective and memorable.

Okay, so who’s the 3rd guy and what’s he doing? That’s the physicist Richard Feynman testifying before Congress about the Challenger explosion. You may remember that blame was ultimately laid on the rubber O-rings of the booster rockets that were compromised at the freezing temperatures on the launch pad. Well, to prove this, Feynman didn’t present PowerPoint slides, but instead took out one of the O-rings and submerged it in a glass of ice water. He then showed how the piece of rubber lost its resiliency at low temperatures–something NASA’s managers had denied and which ultimately proved disastrous for the shuttle. Edward Tufte devotes a whole chapter to Feynman’s presentation in his book, Visual Explanations.

So, what props are you going to use in your next presentation?

A Memorable TED Talk

If you’re not familiar with and a frequent viewer of the various talks given at theTED conferences, you should be.

In her essential book on presentation, Slide:ology,Nancy Duarte talks about a presentation given by brain researcher Jill Bolte-Taylor as one of the most memorable TED talks to date.

To see why this speech is one of the most talked about of recent years and to see just how effective a single prop can be in making what you have to say memorable, watch Jill Bolte-Taylor speak about her own stroke.

Categories: Visual Thinking.

The Most Powerful Slide, And Anyone Can Create It

Just today a client expressed disappointment because a slide’s design failed to “Wow” him. Last week someone else felt that my design department didn’t earn their keep because a template was “too simple.” (“We have to blow people away with this pitch,” she insisted…)

Both of these people shared a desire first and foremost for a presentation that was visually “impactful,” strong and full of “Wow” factor. What they didn’t care about was whether their presentations were EFFECTIVE.

Perhaps I’ll save my feelings about those awful heavily layered and Photoshopped background templates for another day (even though I’m guilty of having designed hundreds of them in my day), but regardless of what your template looks like or how many bullets you’re jamming onto a slide, there still remains hope for every presenter to create without any design skill at all The Most Powerful Slide Possible…THE BLACK SLIDE…

Stay with me here.

Remember when you were sleeping in biology class and the teacher suddenly slapped the table with a ruler? Got your attention, didn’t he? I bet you paid attention to whatever it was he said right at that moment (and for at least a minute after).

A black slide in the middle of a series of slides filled with imagery and charts and text has this same effect.

It’s different, and it’s eye-catching, but it doesn’t bring attention to itself. It brings attention to YOU and to your story at that moment.

Here are just a few ways you can make use of a black slide in your next presentation:

Bring attention to a prop in your hands
Give focus to someone in the room who has something to add
Show printed boards, a mocked up advertisement, poster or marketing item
Throw focus to your audience and ask them a question (audience participation)
Make sure everyone really pays attention to your big statement
Make the moment about YOU and not your slides

A black slide doesn’t have to be an earthquake moment. I designed a pitch once in which 8 people tag-teamed different sections for an hour. One presenter showed a series of web designs and videos, but at the end of her section, simply requested a black slide so she could wrap up her part and say thank you to the audience personally. It was such a nice rhythmic break to the whole hour that I still remember that 20 seconds more than any part of the rest of the pitch.

And the best part of it all is that you don’t even need to create a slide for this…

You can easily toss a black slide into your series of slides, but you can also just hit the “B” on the keyboard at any time to bring up a black screen. Hit it again to return to your presentation. (Works in Keynote as well.)

“W” brings up a white screen.
“H” shows your next slide if it is hidden.

And don’t forget, you can always type in a slide number and hit “enter” to jump to that slide number.

Categories: Visual Thinking.

Jumping to Slide #…

Ever wanted to skip those 10 slides your boss made you put in on the fly? Ever need to go back to a previous slide to answer an audience question?

Instead of clumsily going into slide sorter or hurriedly advancing through slides, just type in the slide number on your keyboard and hit “enter.” This works for both PowerPoint and Keynote.

Don’t know what slide number you want to go to? Keep a handy cheat sheet with you or print out a page of thumbnails.

This tip is also great for accessing appendix slides.

Categories: Keynote, PowerPoint, Presenting Live.

Why You Need a Pickle For Your Presentations

In meeting and event-speak, a “pickle” is a handheld remote that allows a presenter to manually advance slides at his own pace without being tied to a laptop’s keyboard while onstage.

Why is it called a pickle? I have no idea.

For more elaborate presentations, this remote often just cues an offstage operator to advance the slides (sometimes you just can’t trust those CEOs…)

But it doesn’t matter whether you’re presenting to one person or to 10,000. Unless your presentation is scripted, memorized and you’ve rehearsed endlessly with your operator, you should be using a handheld remote, or a pickle. Yes, Steve Jobs uses one.

It allows you freedom of movement on stage (or even around the conference table). It allows you to be natural and not hunched over your keyboard. It allows things to seem less “PowerPoint-y.” But most important, it allows the presentation to be more about YOU and it allows you to focus on your audience and to make more eye contact.

Additionally, it just makes it look like you’ve got your act together and know your material.

There are numerous handheld remotes on the market, but my favorite is Logitech’s Presenter, available from Amazon for about $45.

Though it’s a little large than I’d like, it stores the USB transmitter (which you plug into the computer) within the remote, so you don’t have two pieces to lose. Plus, it includes a timer and a laser pointer all in one. And it uses RF, so you don’t need line of site to your computer. But please, don’t point the thing like a gun at the screen or anywhere else. A soft click is all that’s needed to advance your slides.

And if you want to see a cool “magic” presentation, take a look at this short video. Notice something in his left hand…?

Categories: Presenting Live.

Start your slideshow automatically

A presentation, even in the most informal settings, should be seamless.

Like a good magician, “hide your wires” by saving your PowerPoint “Presentation” (.ppt) as a PowerPoint “Show” (.pps). This will open your presentation in slideshow mode.

A quicker way is to just manually change the extension on the file from .ppt to .pps. (Ignore PowerPoint’s warning about altering the file when you do this.)

In Keynote, select “Automatically play upon opening” in the Inspector: Document panel.

Presenting a PDF? Set the document properties to “Open in full screen mode.”

Categories: Keynote, PDF, PowerPoint.

What a Broadway Lighting Designer Can Teach You About Your Slides

Years ago, in my theatre directing days, I was assistant director on a big show in Chicago. As a young director, I used the opportunity to talk with the designers about how they liked a director to work with them. The veteran lighting designer told me the following story about a scene full of actors that he once lit.

The director of that play requested more light on the lead actress center stage. The designer pumped up the lighting. “Brighter,” the director said. The designer made it brighter. “Brighter!” the director demanded. The designer set the light at 100% “Brighter!!!” the director screamed. The designer added more lights on the actress at 100%. Still, the director yelled that it still wasn’t bright enough.

“I can’t make it any brighter,” the designer explained. “What are you trying to accomplish?”

“I want more focus on the actress,” the director said.

“Oh,” responded the designer.

And he REDUCED the lighting on every actor EXCEPT the lead actress.

When you highlight everything, you highlight nothing.

Don’t try to make ALL the data in a chart “pop.” Don’t bold and underline and increase the point size of all 5 bullet points. What’s the ONE point that needs to be stressed in each slide?

(And don’t try to do your designers’ jobs for them. Just explain what you want to accomplish.)

Categories: Keynote, PowerPoint.