Chart concept - the final presentation slide

It's always difficult to leave the audience with a good punch line (chart). Things I prefer not to do:

• Explicitly ask for questions - there could be none (anymore)
  
• Read out "summarizing" bullet points from a slide that re-run the entire presentation in a very boring fashion

Instead, I often put a page-filling "uplifting" picture on the page (or repeat a key image from the presentation) and repeating one key message of the presentation, maybe spiced up with a bit of humor.

As an example, I found the above image of a man sky diving off a sky scraper in Bejing on iStockPhoto.

Powerful presentation - Girl Effect video

It shows even better on the Girl Effect web site. I see more and more presentation experts migrating towards this big font, high paced presentation format. Still, I believe that it can only work for certain presentation settings. The final presentation of the results of the customer database data cleaning project will look different....

Professional presentation design - impossible skill mix

A good presentation involves good substance,a good presenter, and finally good supporting graphics. Many people are in the business of presentation design, but it is hard to find people that combine all skills under one roof.

1. Statistician - visualization of data in charts
2. Illustrator - for beautiful illustrations and images, consistent colors
3. Designer - someone that can take a (business) concept and translate it into an original graphical metaphor, i.e. using an image of a rope that is about to snap to show a business being torn apart by 2 forces
   
4. Story writer - for an engaging argument
   
5. Rhetorician - for the perfect logical argument
6. Strategist - for understanding a business audience and making the business content actually makes sense
   

I am 6. (by training), mixed with a bit of 1., 3. and 5., trying hard to learn more about 2. and 4. In my work I usually come across the "pure 6." writing bullet point charts distilled from a 100 page business plan, or the "pure 2.": great at designing graphics but with limited business understanding.

The 60/20/30 rule of PowerPoint?

The relationship between the number of slides and the length of a PowerPresentation presentation is changing. Seth Godin claimed to have gone through 154 slides in 54 minutes "without a sweat". At a rate of 1 slide every 3 minutes, we could change Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule (10 slides, 20 minutes, font 30 or bigger) into 60/20/30. The "10" refers to the number of ideas you can handle in a presentation, not the number of slides. Obviously slides need to look completely different for a presentation like this, nothing like the bullet point loaded "overhead projector transparencies" we still see in too many presentations today. UPDATE: Today I stumbled on this interesting blog posting by Andrew Abela that clearly separates 2 types of presentations: ballroom-style (big audiences, beautiful graphics, few words, high page turnover, the 60 i.s.o 10) and conference room-style (the classical consulting project final report full of dense facts and figures).

The 19 buttons you need in your PowerPoint toolbar

The PowerPoint 2007 ribbon is nice, but for certain commands that you need to access all the time I miss the good old PowerPoint 2003 toolbar. The quick access toolbar in the very top of the PPT window is your solution. Click the little triangle right to the last command to customize it.

Here are the 19 buttons that I use all the time:

• Save
• Send to back
• Group and ungroup
• Distribute horizontally, vertically
• Allign center, middle, top, bottom, left, right
• Crop
• Set transparent color
• Recolor (images)
• Flip horizontal, vertical
• Rotate 90 degrees left, right
  

Screenshots: PNG, TIF, GIF or JPG?

I stumbled across a really useful post on Digital Inspiration addressing this issue here. To keep file sizes down I usually save images to disk before re-importing them in the presentation. Use PowerPoint to extract screenshots:

• CTRL and PRT SCR to make a screenshot
• Open a blank PPT page (or open any graphics software)
• CTRL and V to paste the image in
• Right-click and do "save as" in the desired format

Chart concept - skipping over a cliche

There is no need to preach to the converted. Obvious points do not need your time, energy and PowerPoint slides. If you have to spend 1 slide, do it almost as a place holder, and add a bit of humor if you can to "pooh pooh" the cliche point you are just making. Next slide! I often use the above image for this using Addletters that allows you to put in any text you want.

Chart annoyances - align, align, align

There are 2 important tool bar button categories in PowerPoint: aligning objects and distributing objects. Put them in your main tool bar, use them all the time. Align everything. Distribute everything evenly. If you can, give boxes the same height, the same width, balance, balance. All of this will create a much more tranquil page layout. Strangely enough, misaligned objects are most annoying when they are just out of sync...

Upgrade to PowerPoint 2007

There a few features inside PowerPoint 2007 that are extremely useful and often not advertised as key reasons to shell out money for a version upgrade of Microsoft Office.

Some of these comments might come across as a bit detailed, but believe me, they do make a big difference.

• Much improved color management. Once you have defined your color schema, PowerPoint makes it very easy to apply intensity levels of the same color in your presentation
• Adding a monochrome color overlay to images
• Sophisticated drop shadows. There are many useless graphical effects in PowerPoint (Microsoft had a look at Adobe products), the drop shadow is the one I actually use
• 3D text rotation. In a later post I will explain how to stick a 3D logo/text on an image (update: here it is), PowerPoint has a more basic function now that more or less does the same
• PDF conversion plug, one that is free, and better than Adobe Acrobat (see this post)
• Smaller file size
• Much improved editing of data charts, fully compatible with Excel. Creating beautiful, simple and clean data charts used to require a lot of "hacks" in 2003. It's not perfect in PowerPoint 2007, but a lot better.
• The proportion of tip of an arrow does not change anymore when you re-size the object
• The selection pane tool that allows you to edit charts with many overlapping objects, without having to send them to the back all the time.

All these good things come in exchange for some dollars and a few days of getting used to the new interface.

Animations - a waste of your and the audience's time

I don't like them. Bouncing transitions between slides. Flying bullet points zapping in like a space ship. It annoys the audience and does not help get your message across. More over, they are impossible to edit. There are exceptions:

• Complicated technical diagrams that require a build-up to explain (still, putting them in as a sequence of slides will make your life easier
• Perpetual motions such as slowly turning wheels or a high-way of moving arrows to support a concept of a never-ending force

Chart annoyances - round those numbers

Most of the time people cut and past numbers straight from Excel into a PowerPoint slide. Take a few seconds and round numbers, what looks better: 2007 sales: $3,496k 2007 sales: $ 3.5 million

Avoid pompous templates - colors do the work

Many PowerPoint templates waste a huge amount of screen real estate with big logos and/or graphics. I prefer the opposite approach. Through the consistent use of the template colors on the slide, the audience will immediately recognize the corporate identity of the presenter. As an example, a slide that I use in my own introduction presentation:

The power of professional images

Images can amplify the message of your chart by a factor 10. Use a professional stock image site such as iStockPhoto instead of Google image search:

• It's legal, you pay copy right
• You can search images precisely with keywords
• You can download very high resolutions

Garr Reynolds created an extensive overview of other image sources.

Be bold - make your audience remember...

Due to PowerPoint overload, business audiences find it hard to get excited about facts that sound the same. For example: the fragrance industry is saturated and it is hard to launch a successful new brand.

Here is a series of slides that could support the point in a more dramatic way:



Rather than putting just a bullet point with text, the slide actually provides a (partial) list of new product launches to drive home the point (click on image for larger picture).



An image amplifies the message (click on image for larger picture).

Photo composition rules applied to PowerPoint

A presentation slide is like a photo, or like a painting: the basic rules of composition apply.

• Rule of thirds. Put your screen guides so that they divide the page in 3-s, creating a 3x3 box of 9 rectangles. Place and align objects alongside these lines

• Balance. Make sure charts don't "tilt": heavy graphical objects one side of the chart should be compensated on the other. If the slide is out of balance: move things around or give them a lighter color

If you are interested, read more about the Golden Ratio and use it instead of the Rule of Thirds.

Finding a beautiful PowerPoint color scheme

Nothing determines the look and feel of a presentation more than its colors. Not all colors go well together. A matter of personal taste, but there is also hard science. How to find a color scheme that suits your situation?

• From an image. Good images have a natural harmony of colors. There are great online tools that allow you to upload an image and extract colors from it (kuler, colr, etc.). This image could then feature prominently on the title page of your presentation.
  
  
• From a corporate logo. Many companies have not installed PowerPoint templates with the proper corporate colors. Take a hi-res image of your company's logo and subject it to a similar process as you would do with an image.
  
  
• From a color you like. Pick one color you like/is appropriate and let a tool generate matching colors automatically. For example, move the slider in the color wheel in kuler.

Once you extracted the desired colors, write down their "RGB" codes and enter them as a color template in PowerPoint.

For example, for my own web site I was inspired by the fresh colors of an apple and generous amounts of water.

The resulting color scheme can be viewed here.