PowerPoint tracker pages - empty screen real estate

Tracker pages - they originated in the days of the overhead transparencies. You would take the content page of the document (very detailed bullet points), make a number of copies and draw a red arrow with a pen to the left of each menu item. I don't like tracker pages, it's a sign that either your presentation is too large, or the structure of your story is so unclear that you need a forced framework to remind the audience how many menu items they still have to sit through. "Pause" slides can help though. With a huge font, you cant put up a question, take a break in your story, build up excitement. What to do with the white space in the background. These type of slides are a great opportunity to insert images that do not fit into the presentation story, but offer great additional background. For example, in a company presentation of a consumer goods manufacturer, I used high-quality, page-covering images of typical Israeli supermarkets, bars, cafes, etc. Put a little white line in the background with subject, time and place. Other ideas (all related to company introduction presentations): close-ups of random employees, office locations that give a sense of the city you are located, etc.

How to start your presentation

The first slide of a presentation is even more difficult to construct than the last one. The worst introduction slide is a list of bullets that tells the entire presentation story - in a boring way. Because the presenter wants to be quick, generic, hollow statements are used:

• "we have a great team
• "we will have $100m revenues in 3 years"
• "our architecture is scalable and flexible"

The audience has heard them before, these messages will not stick. Moreover, they can read faster than the presenter can speak, so after having read the first slide, it's time to check email on your mobile or take a call in the corridor... Staying in the context of a start-up pitching for fund raising, what should be included in an introduction slide (could be more than 1):

• Who are you? People are trying to figure you out in the first seconds
• What is this company about "roughly"
• A teaser or interesting story that gets the audience interested in hearing the actual presentation

Then the (short) presentation itself should do the work of delivering the messages, not the summary slide. Exception. I have seen good presenters get away with a bad opening slide. They put it up and start presenting a compelling story about their company, not using the PowerPoint presentatino at all!

Sticking logos / PowerPoint objects on 3D images

As promised in a previous posting, here a little secret. The Rolls Royce solution to this is the "vanishing point" filter in Adobe Photoshop (see one of many YouTube videos that explain the trick). In PowerPoint you can imitate it as follows.

Create the 2D object in Powerpoint by either

• Combining PowerPoint shapes and text, and group it.Do control-X to cut and and "paste special" as a GIF
  
• Copying an image (a logo) with a very clear outline and blank out the white surroundings using (after selecting the image): Format, Recolor, Set transparent color (PowerPoint 2007)
• Taking a logo, copy it on a rectangular white box, group, control-X and paste special as a GIF

Now take the image and use the shape "special effects", "3D rotation" to move the thing in place in the 3D image.

Why write a heavy business plan that nobody reads?

Many of my start-up clients that go into a fund raising round want to develop a "heavy" (i.e., many pages) business plan in reality is nothing more than expanding a 30-page PowerPoint presentation into 100 pages of full text. "The potential investor asked for it". A waste of time.

• People don't read it
• It takes a lot of time and money to write it
• It takes a loft of time and money to update it
• Nobody updates it

I prefer maintaining and updating a good PowerPoint presentation with a special appendix (not to be presented on a big screen) that provides more detail on financials, workplans, etc.

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...