Many Eyes - "Flickr for data visualization"

Weekend reading. The NYT pointed me to Many Eyes, a site for sharing of data visualization. You can upload a data set (or use an existing one), pick a visualization and publish it to the world. Many Eyes is part of one of IBM's fundamental research programs. Some visualizations are the standard charts also available in PowerPoint, others are more unusual, for example tag cloud generators, and maps (countries, world) which are always tricky to create in PowerPoint. A shame though that it is not possible (at least I have not discovered it) to take visualizations off the site and use them offline in your own presentation.

Multi-layered slides: the selection pane

It can become almost impossible to edit complex animated slides that have layers and layers of objects on them. My solution used to be to spread the chart out over multiple pages. Recently, the selection pane tool in PowerPoint 2007 was pointed out to me. You can find it hidden away under the arrange menu. Click on the image for more detail. Life has just become easier. Thank you Glen Turpin.

Google Chrome - technology explained via cartoons

Google is using a cartoon book to explain the benefits of its new Chrome browser. This just opened my eyes. A lot of work I do for Israeli high-tech clients is helping them explain complex technology to potential investors. Until now, I never considered using a cartoon. Maybe it's time to change that. As an example, the attached illustration is a fragment of the explanation of the concept of a multi-threated browser. Still, the cartoon format is more suited to a presentation handout than an on-screen presentation, where you almost cannot avoid investing in an animated cartoon to get a similar effect. Gary Reynolds posted broader thoughts today about using cartoons in professional presentations.

Book review - slide:ology by Nancy Duarte

A copy of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentationsfinally made its way across the Atlantic. (Disclosure link via Amazon Associates program) Nancy Duarte is managing Duarte Design, a company that has created some high-profile presentations (Al Gore is one of the clients). They (her husband is the company's CFO) started out in the 80s when the Apple Macintosh brought desk top publishing and graphics design to the masses, and have now become one of the big brands in professional presentation design. This is the perfect book for those who have mastered the PowerPoint (or Apple Keynote) technical skills and need to make the final jump to master concepts usually taught in art schools (rather than software manuals):

• Picking pleasing color schemes
• Slide composition
• Typography
• Etc.

The trained eye can extract almost everything there is to know about presentation design. However, this is not the book that will teach you magic that will turn your beginner-level PowerPoint edits into a professional presentation. Many subjects discussed in this books are covered in other material as well (minimal bullet points, cut words, use professional images, etc. etc.) However, there are some very specific things that I picked up in this book that were new to me:

• Thinking about cinematic movement for animations or slide composition
• Creating one big map and using the PowerPoint push transition to navigate it: one presentation - one big slide
• A large library of chart concept sketches, there were many new ones I did not use before
• Stressing to adopt a "designer" mentality to presentations

Things that I found less useful/interesting (personal preference):

• (Many) direct references to the services Duarte Design can offer
• Case examples (many of which are the same as on Duarte's site) are not always useful
• The section on data charts was relatively weak

But overall, a warm recommendation to purchase this book. It is well written, nicely illustrated and brings all the presentation design essentials together in one place, including many references to further reading and almost all the big presentation "brands" in the industry.

Slideshare presentation contest winners

The results of the contest are out. Here are the winners. The winning presentation is this one:

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: crisis design)

These are beautiful presentations, but all of them are written in a similar style (high pace, big image, big words) that is only suited for a specific set of topics/presentation settings. UPDATE. I tend to agree with many of the comments on Guy Kawasaki's blog (he was one of the jury members). These slides are beautiful, they adhere to the maximum graphics / minimal text rule. But, the result is a presentation that is great for high-paced clicking online, but probably not the ideal format for a big live presentation. I particularly liked one observation that these slides are in fact disguised bullet point slides: 0.5 bullet points per page instead of 5 bullets per page.

You can't hurry presentation design

I discovered that the subconscious mind really works, and it changed the way I design presentations. Partly driven by my experience as a strategy consultant at McKinsey where presentations are mostly associated with presenting recommendations at the project deadline, presentation design used to be a focused and exhausting sprint to the finish line. I changed my approach: dropping work on a presentation for a day, doing a few detailed charts, taking a break, sketching high-level stories, sleeping on it, working on the color scheme, working on a different project, finding a great closing image, etc. Maybe you should try it as well.

Avoid jumping slides

"Jumping" is caused by slight differences in the position of similar items on consecutive slides. When you flick through your presentation quickly, it looks like these items "dither" (like in a cartoon). Try to avoid it for a calmer presentation. Jumping often happens in:

• Slide titles
• Vertical (y) axes of data charts
• Animation buildups spread over multiple slides

To avoid it:

• Use the drawing guides
• Control-C an object on 1 page and copy it using control-V on the next to create the exact same position
• In the worst case use size-position to set the exact coordinates of an item

Chart concept - look-through white board

I used this image today in a presentation. Great to put on the side when drawing black shapes, or support informal, hand-writing font text on a white page. Make sure the pen touches the last "shape" or "word" she drew.

Better PowerPoint title pages

Title pages are important, they are the first impression you make on your audience. Some suggestions on how you can make them better.

• Write an interesting title (like a newspaper heading that invites to read), followed by a small subtitle explaining what your presentation actually is (i.e., the 2nd quarter financial results)
• Include information for the people in the audience wondering who this person is on stage adjusting his/her microphone (your name, company, function, presentation occasion, date and place)
• Avoid heavy bold fonts, they use "fat" when used in big font sizes, instead use bigger regular fonts, they look more elegant. If necessary use a darker (or lighter) shading of the text color (preferably not black) to emphasize.
• Use a page-wide image, preferably in colors that are similar to the ones you use in your presentation (you could add a color overlay if you can't find the right image). Make sure the image has enough empty space for text. If not, leave bars either above or under the image (movie on 4:3 screen look), or a rectangle to the left or right. I like images of people looking into the lens, but they are not suitable for all types of presentations.  
• Align text left or right (not centered) somewhere along the "golden proportion" of the slide

Obviously, if you are bound by the prescribed PowerPoint template of your company there is not much room for chance.

Aligning bullet points in PowerPoint

One of the PowerPoint annoyances is that bullet point paragraphs are not aligned properly when overflowing to the next line. It's easy to fix.

Display the ruler (view menu), select the text, and move the little markers, leaving the top one to the left, and the bottom one at the desired indent. (See the image to the right).

That bullet points are NOT the main design concept to make PowerPoint presentations is clear, but a completely separate subject.

Slideboom - more online PowerPoint sharing

Mashable features a brief review of Slideboom. There are now many, many of these services for sharing presentations out there (Mashable listed some here). Criteria to evaluate them are usually:

• Do they actually have enough capacity to work (Slideboom seems to be suffering from the attention last night)
• Do they convert all possible PowerPoint features and effects including animations (Slideboom seems to be doing good here)
• Do they have their own proprietary presentation design interface: Slideboom just takes PowerPoint presentations, which makes sense I think, teaching people a completely new user interface might be too much of a challenge (maybe with the exception of applications that focus on specific features, such as Flypaper and Flash)
• Do they have a big and rich following and sharing community (Slideboom as at a disadvantage from players that are already established)

This looks like a useful service, but the worlds only needs one or two good ones. These good ones should be able to deliver presentation quality that can be put on an overhead beamer and allow for Webex-style meeting/presentation orchestration features. Let's wait and see how the shakeout plays out.

Flawed 12 August PowerPoint update

Microsoft admitted that some versions of the latest PowerPoint security update were wrong. It only seem to affect people who have downloaded patches manually from the Microsoft Download center though, automatic updates were correct. Maybe run Office Update again just to be sure.

Publising a PowerPoint presentation online

There are multiple ways to share PowerPoint content online. To put the content of a presentation online directly, you can use SlideShare (or a similar service), or save the presentation as an HTML file and upload it to your site. In the case of my company website (www.axiom.co.il) I used a PowerPoint presentation (this one) as a basis for the entire web site, adding text and links to explain the slides verbally. To do this. Some basic HTML editing skills are required. Pick a clean open source web site template (I used andreas01 designed by Andreas Viklund) and customize it for your own needs (title image, and content sections). Then take each slide in your presentation and save them as individual JPG images. Put the appropriate images with explaining text in the content sections and your company web site (a copy of your company PowerPoint presentation) is ready!

Chart concept - a new beginning

This image from iStockPhoto is great to illustratie "make-overs". Add minimalist text either in the white or the yellow (depending on whether you want to highlight the old or the new).

Skilled Photoshoppers can change the color into something different than yellow.

To create more yellow space. Make a copy of the image. Crop only the yellow wall, align it to the right of the main image and stretch until the right margin. Again, in PhotoShop this can be done more professionally.

Disclosure: no commercial interest

The McKinsey - or any consulting - presentation

The vast majority of Google traffic that lands on my site is looking for advice on how to write a "McKinsey presentations". Let's discuss them a little bit more, including my logic why they might NOT be suitable for just any communication situation. Why do they look so good and professional? A few reasons (some of which are good recommendations for any presentation you prepare)

• They stick to a strict slide format: every page is laid out exactly the same, making the whole document look very consistent
• Pages have muted colors and no spectacular animations.
• Consulting presentations are almost always all about numbers, and this quantitative data is displayed and structured in simple and clean data graphs (i.e., not an ugly, busy cut and paste from Excel), and numbers are rounded
• Each chart has a single message, which is written out in the chart title and clearly supported by the numbers in the chart body
• They (sometimes over-)use a lot of frameworks to structure information: a time line, the impact of a number of forces, evaluation of pros and cons, strenghts and weaknesses.
• The presentation has a clear logical structure, taking you step by step through an argument. A lot of energy is invested in the PowerPoint slide sorter: re-shuffling charts until the story is lined up the correct way. This process is not only for communication purposes, it is an integral part of problem solving. Trying to articulate a logical story will inevitably highlights flaws in logic, sending you back to the drawing boards to do additional analysis or change your recommendations.
• It is full of summaries. If you have 30 seconds to read a document, you will find the full story on page 1, if you have 5 minutes, you can read the summaries of the next subsections (each section explaining 1 paragraph of the summary in more detail), if you have more time you can read the whole document.

Where do these presentations work best? Not surprisingly: to present the results of a consulting project. The "answer" on page 1 supported by all the backup and analysis for people who need to be convinced, or to find the source of that 1 number a year after the project is finished.

What can you learn from them? Even if you are not a strategy consultant, your presentatations greatly benefit from consistent formats, colors, 1 message per chart, clean data graphs etc.

Where can you be different? Still assuming you are not a strategy consultant, your presentation style could be different in a number of ways.

• Don't completely give it all away on page 1. Especially for large audiences, try to create interest and take people along an interesting story only giving a hint of what you are going to do.
• Structure is not all about logic. A story line should be interesting and surprising for the audience, not a mathematically tight proof of a solution
• (Standard) frameworks are boring. Frameworks are great for solving problems, and not very good for communicating solutions. To be avoided.
• Summaries are not repeats. Don't give your presentation 3 times: on page 1, the body, and on the last page
• Use creative graphics, professional images, be more bold
• Avoid lingo, use your own language

In short, make the presentation your own!

Chart concept - growing a new idea

I have used this sort of image a few times to create a chart for startups that have a new promising idea that is still in an early stage of development. Add a few simple big font words in the white space.

Disclosure: no commercial interest

Application screenshots in PowerPoint

Inevitably, presentations by technology providers will have to include some of them. The usual approach is to make a full screen dump and paste it as an image in PowerPoint that covers arond 75% of the screen to leave room for title etc. The problem is that for the audience, this slide looks like any PC application open on the screen.
Different approach 1. Think about what feature you would like to highlight. Crop the image to just show that. Expand this very small image to full PowerPoint screen size, put a big bright circle around the area you want the audience to focus, together with a big bright arrow with a few words.
Different approach 2. Keep the big bland screen shot but fade it out by selecting the image, clicking format, clicking re-color and picking a soft grey overlay. Now put a number of bright arrows with 3-4 words to highlight a number of features. It doesn't really matter that the audience can't see the screen detail, what matter is that they understand the 3 messages you want them to understand (which are written in the boxes)

Making these screendumps is easy, press ctrl-shift-prtsc in the application, then press paste in the PowerPoint slide you want to put them in. In case of different approach 2, make sure to crop out your other personal applications from the Windows bar at the bottom of the screen. It is always fun to read private instant message windows in professional presentations.

Managing big PowerPoint files

Increasing use of images creates very large PowerPoint files. Many web hosters cap the size of e-mail attachments at around 10MB, a limit that is now very easy to exceed. Some suboptimal solutions:

• Upgrade to PowerPoint 2007, files are a lot smaller, but many of my (corporate) clients do not have this software yet, so you end up saving in the 2003 format anyway
• Compress pictures: select the picture, in the format menu pick "compress" and select the appropriate DPI rate. I personally don't use it a lot: it does not save that much space if you use larger images, and the quality of your source file deteriorates forever. A big issue, especially when putting your presentation on a big overhead screen.
• Zipping files does not have a big impact when using images

What I end up doing is

• Keep file sizes (and image quality) to the maximum
• Use PDF files to exchange drafts with my clients
• Finally, send the master file across using a file transfer utility such as YouSendIt.com (note that YouSendIt is not secure in its basic version, anyone "guessing" the URL can download the file).

Making a buildup slide with minimal animations

I don't like animations, but in some cases they cannot be avoided. Sometimes I need to make a relatively complex technical diagram, for example for a technology startup needing to explain the IT architecture of their product (obviously for a conference room presentation, rather than a townhall meeting). The only animation effects I use are simple "appears" and "disappears", or the occasional change of color, no flying objects or other spectacular effects here. The problem with complex animations is that they are impossible to edit. Especially when the layers are starting to pile up. Here is what I do. Copy the slide over a number of PowerPoint slides, sometimes going into 10 slides are more. In that way you have the complete overview of what's happening when. The only thing to watch out for is to make sure that objects on each slide are located in the exact same position (control-c on 1 slide, control-v on the other). Old-fashioned, but it works. UPDATE. Glen Turpin pointed me to the selection pane in PowerPoint 2007. It actually solves many of the issues I talked about. You can find it at the bottom of the arrange menu in the drawing ribbon. One more reason to upgrade to PowerPoint 2007.

Design PowerPoint for the 16:9 screen

Picking the screen aspect ratio is an important decision. Changing it is difficult, because it is more than just a simple format adjustment: a long rectangular slide is built up completely different than an almost square 4:3 one. The origins of the 4:3 screen size go back to IBM punched cards: they were 12 rows high and 80 columns wide (see the image attached to this post), a 25x80 screen could nicely fit 2 of those (computers in the early 70s). Only untill recently, we have been stuck with this aspect ratio. Why do I like widescreen:

• I like the "movie screen look" better
• The human eye is more capable of digesting rectangular screens (the reason why Holywood switched over) than square ones
• It is already adapted for use on big LCD screens, more and more available in conference rooms, exhibition centers and increasingly present in PC monitors or laptop screens.
• I like the long format better for "left-to-right" slides, showing a logic in 3 steps that flow from left to right (fitting nicely with the rule of thirds). Also, it supports long slide message titles that still fit in 1 line.