A lot of people are talking about telling stories during a presentation. Why is that?
Stories are
- A powerful way to evoke emotions, which is important because people remember emotionally-charged experiences better and longer
 An age-old way of making a topic interesting, so the audience pays more attention- An alternate way to make your point, helping people to understand better
Here’s a related post from Garr Reynolds, “We learn from stories and experiences.”
I majored in History in college and one of the few things I remember from all my History courses is a story about Czar Peter the Great traveling to Europe, but wanting to remain anonymous. The problem was that he was 6 feet tall, unusual in those days, so everyone had to pretend they didn’t know who he was. Why do I remember that story, having forgotten thousands of other statements? It was interesting and funny. It wasn’t boring. It was a story.
You can incorporate stories about customers, people who make a product, and so on. A story can tell the background behind your main message.
But fewer people talk about a storyline. By that, I mean the structure of your presentation. Just like a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, so does a presentation. Just as a story is about people, your presentation should be about people, sometimes the audience, but sometimes other people. (Even if your presentation isn’t about your audience, like a history lesson about ancient Greece, it should be for your audience.)
Think about how you organize your content in terms of a storyline. It doesn’t have to be a story, per se, but there should be a storyline. There’s the:
- Beginning: Your opening, explaining the situation and why it’s relevant to your audience.
- Middle : How you develop your points
- End: The conclusion and a call to action, if appropriate
Try labeling your script to mark these 3 parts of the presentation. It will help you understand your structure better and, ultimately, improve your presentation.
How do you use a storyline structure in your presentations? And how to you incorporate actual stories in your presentations?
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
 Do you buy electronics and more on Amazon, Newegg, or other sites? If so, I’d like to introduce you to a new, free service that will help you get the lowest price.
Many people don’t realize that prices fluctuate constantly, particularly on websites like Amazon, which allow third party vendors to continually undercut one another.
For example, consider the price variations for a Samsung 59-Inch 1080p 3D Plasma HDTV over three months (Jul 10 to Oct 10, 2011): $1,850, 2,251, 1,920, 2,000, 2,251, 2,145, 2,218, 2,225, 2,145, 2,200
You could have spent as much as $2,251 — or as little as $1,850!
Wouldn’t it be great if you could catch these price fluctuations at their lowest point? Now you can, with a free, easy to use tool called BuyLater (You can install it quickly at www.BuyLater.com). BuyLater is a browser extension (compatible with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari) that adds a button to Amazon and several other shopping websites. Simply click the BuyLater button to track an item and you will receive an email when the price drops. The best part is that you don’t ever have to leave the site you’re shopping on.
BuyLater supports many websites, including Amazon.com, Newegg.com, Zappos.com, and more. New websites and features are added frequently.
BuyLater is a great tool for anyone who shops online. You can track prices on Amazon and other websites for every type of product imaginable. BuyLater is especially useful when you’re waiting to make a large purchase. For example, the price for a Cartier Women’s Pasha Stainless-Steel Ceramic Black Dial Watch over three months (Jul 10, 2011 to Oct 10, 2011) has ranged from $4,092 to $3,783 — a variance of $309!
BuyLater makes it easy to be an informed shopper and save where it counts, which means that you can focus less on shopping and more on what you love. I’ve used it to track food items, soy candles, electronics, and more and was amazed at how often the prices changed.
Why is it free? The company makes its money as an affiliate of Amazon (and other sites that offer an affiliate program), so you pay nothing!
Here’s my take on it. Just as buyer reviews on Amazon and other sites have changed the way you decide what you buy, BuyLater will change when you buy.
Full disclosure: My son is one of the developers of BuyLater and I’m so proud!
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
Here’s a quick way to improve the design of slides that include some text and a photo. This type of slide is very common. But it doesn’t look very striking.
Here’s the principle: Make the photo touch 3 sides of the slide. When you do this, your slide will look bolder and clearer. The impact will increase. And it will simply look better. There are 3 ways to make this photo touch at least 3 sides of the slide:
1. A vertical image covering 1/2 of the slide
2. A horizontal image covering most of the slide
3. A horizontal image covering the entire slide
Try making over your picture slides in this way. You’ll be pleased with the results! Leave a comment and let me know your experience.
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
PowerPoint 2007 introduced background styles, which are solid or subtle gradient backgrounds based on some of the colors in your theme colors. They can create a cool, Zen-style look. You can use them alone, or in conjunction with your theme.
Use background styles on their own
Open PowerPoint 2007 or 2010 and you’ll see the default theme, which uses the default Office theme colors.
Click the Design tab and choose Background Styles to see the options.
 Now, click the Colors button to expand the list of colors. You’ll see that the Built-In Office set of theme colors is highlighted.
 Note that 2 of the colors always match:
- Color 2 of the background styles is the same as Color 2 of the theme colors (here a very light gray, almost white)
- Color 3 of the backgrounds styles is the same as Color 1 of the theme colors (here a dark blue)
The other two colors of the background styles are always white and black, because those colors are so often used as backgrounds.
Here’s another example, using the Essential set of theme colors. I chose it because the colors are so strikingly different.
Again you can see that
- Color 2 of the background styles is the same as Color 2 of the theme colors (gray)
- Color 3 of the backgrounds styles is the same as Color 1 of the theme colors (dark red)
As you can see, each background style color has 3 variations:
- Solid
- A radial gradient with the lighter shade at the top
- A radial gradient with the lighter shade in the middle
Combine background styles with themes
You can combine your customized theme or background with background styles. So even if you add something to your background, you can use a background style to supplement it. Here you see a simple heading bar combined with a background style.
Have you used background styles? What ideas do you have for using them to create cool, subtle backgrounds for your slides?
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
I did a webinar for Brainshark.com and mybrainshark.com, a presentation-sharing website. It was called “3 reasons most presentations fail and 3 ways to fix them.” Over 500 people attended!
The 1-hour webinar included makeovers of slides that attendees submitted. You can watch the presentation for free here. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment!
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
Many people present to teach or train and sometimes the topic is complex. It may be technical, have many parts, or just be difficult. What can you do to help your audience understand and remember what you say?
I think there are four steps you can use to get the best results.
 Simplify
The more complex the subject, the more you need to simplify. This sounds impossible, but what it means is that you must break down the information into smaller pieces. Even rocket science is made up of small principles that are simple. Yes, when you put them together, they’re complicated, but if you start with the complication, you’ll lose everyone.
You might have to remind people of topics they’ve already learned. But if you clearly build the blocks that make up the entire topic, you can make learning easier and more successful.
Repeat
Repetition helps people remember, but you need to repeat in the right way. Each repetition needs to have the focus of the learners. This is why writing the content on the slide and reading it makes learning harder, even though it’s repetition. The two messages compete and make focus harder.
Instead, speak out the information and show it with some sort of relevant graphic. Or black out the slide (you can do this by pressing the B key while in Slide Show view). And of course, repetition is one of the values of homework exercises.
Connect
Our brain has an easier time learning if we can connect a new subject to something we already know. So connect what your saying to a familiar or simpler topic. Provide examples of the principles you’re teaching or use metaphors. Let’s say that you’re talking about various ways that insurance companies calculate health insurance premiums. You talk about community-rated insurance (one of the types) and say that it’s used for small companies that are just starting to offer health insurance to their employees. Then you give an example, saying, “Let’s say you’ve owned a small company with 10 employees for a few years and now you think you can offer your employees health insurance. You go to an insurance company and they tell you that because they don’t know anything about the health of your employees, they”ll use community-rated insurance.”
There’s another side to connecting. We often don’t think of teaching as an emotional activity but learning definitely is. Studies show that people remember incidents better when they are connected with a powerful emotion. You don’t have to artificially add a sappy tinge to what you teach, but when you connect with your learners, they will pay more attention and value what you say more highly. Both attention and perceived value will help learning. Explaining why your topic is important will add emotional power. Showing that you care about your students will do the same.
 Apply
Provide an opportunity for your learners to apply what you teach. Homework exercises are one way. Assigning a group project that simulates a real-world situation is another great technique. When an audience does some activity, even a small one, to use what they’ve learned, they’re more likely to carry the information over into their work or life.
How do you teach complex subjects?
Have you successfully used these 4 techniques to teach complex information? What has worked for you? Leave a comment!
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
For those of you who celebrate holidays at this time of year, I want to wish you a happy holiday season. For everyone, a happy New Year.
Please keep us in mind for your presentation-related training needs in 2012. Get more information here.
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
I started working with a new client doing a series of 1-on-1 coaching sessions. In the first session, we were going over a slide and I needed to select 2 objects to move them together.
Use the Shift key to select more than one object
Since we were working via webinar software, he couldn’t see what I was doing on my keyboard. So I explained, “I’m selecting this photo, then pressing Shift and selecting the text box with the caption, so I can move them together.”
He exclaimed, “I didn’t know that! Do you know how much time I spend moving individual objects? That tip is worth the price of all the sessions together!”
In the slide on the right, you see 2 objects, a photo and a text box, selected.
Hopefully, my client will get more value that that! But it made me think how small tips can be hugely valuable.
 Select multiple objects with a selection box
If you want to select more than 2 objects, a selection box may be quicker. Click and then drag to create a box. Everything inside the box is selected.
But when you have an underlying object that covers all or most of the slide and want to select objects on top of that object, clicking on the slide will select the underlying object. In this case, the trick is to click off the slide and then drag across the slide. Be sure to include only the objects you want to select inside the selection box.
Cycle through overlapping objects
For another selection scenario, see my separate tip on selecting individual objects when they are overlapping — and you want the one on the bottom.
Do you have any selection tips? Did you find these tips helpful? Leave a comment!
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
 I see lots of presentation files and have started to notice that when people start designing slides, they go into a formal mode that makes the presentation less personal — and less effective. The negative impact is especially pronounced when the presentation is put online, because the audience doesn’t see the presenter (although there might be narration).
Some presentations cry out for a personal touch. If you’re inviting the audience to join you in some way — join your company or participate in a program — you need more than words. Here are a few ideas to connect more effectively with your audience:
- Include a photo of yourself on the first and last slides
- Insert a short video of yourself
- Take photos of real employees in your company and use them on several slides. Be sure to get their permission.
I have particularly noticed the effect of eyes in a photograph. Here’s a photo (from Microsoft’s ClipArt Gallery) that is effective if you’re talking about listening or connecting.
Because she is looking right at you, you feel that she is connecting with you.
What do you do to create visuals that connect with your audience, especially if you’re presenting online — via webinar or a slide-sharing site?
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
SmartArt was a new feature of PowerPoint 2007 and is a way to quickly create professional-looking diagrams from bulleted text. In the Tell ‘n’ ShowSM method, you put a meaning title that tells the point on the slide. Then you add an image, graph/chart, or diagram that shows the point.
Just like the boy’s picture book. One side tells the story and the other side shows it, with a BIG picture. (If you’ve heard me present, you’ve probably seen this slide and heard my explanation of it. It’s my signature slide.)
But a photo is not always appropriate. SmartArt helps you when you need a diagram. Some categories of diagrams that PowerPoint includes are:
- List
- Process
- Cycle
- Hierarchy
- Relationship
- Matrix
- Pyramid
- Picture
Sometimes, a SmartArt diagram is just a way to make bulleted text look pretty, but even then it’s an improvement. By making your text more graphical, people are more likely to remember what you’re saying. The best use of SmartArt is to show relationships, while bulleted text shows none.
Here’s a simple before and after example:
 
The arrows show that there is an order: first you develop content, then you design slides, and finally you deliver the presentation. The bulleted text doesn’t indicate the relationship as clearly, even though the words are in the same order.
Some of the SmartArt choices let you insert pictures and I use these a lot as icons. I take an image of another slide and use it as an icon. Here’s an example of a simple agenda slide for a webinar I gave:
When I get to each topic, people see the same image, so they remember that I’m staring one of the 3 major topics of the presentation.
Here’s a video tutorial, showing how to convert bulleted text to a SmartArt diagram
Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.
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