Quick takeaways from Presentation Summit 2011–Day 1, Part 1

Ellen — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:38:25 +0000

I’m at the Presentation Summit 2011 conference in Austin, TX and thought I’d share some quick takeaways from the speakers so far. I’m behind on posting, so you’ll see more content over the next couple of weeks.

First, Austin is a pretty city on the Colorado River. It has a great music scene and an interesting motto, perhaps unofficial. Here’s a tee-shirt that was for sale in a store in the Austin airport.

Wayne Michael on “Keeping your audience on the same page”

My first session was with Wayne Michael, a CPA who creates graphics for presentations to clients of the Accounting firm he works for. Without being an artist, he does a great job of visualizing complex tax-related topics.

He spoke on how to keep your audience on the same page as you are by providing visual cues that show relationships and avoid disorientation. Specifically, he showed us ways to avoid the look of one slide going to another, which creates a complete break in content.

Some of his techniques were:

Keeping a menu along the side of the slide that highlights the current section
Shrinking to a corner — Zooming an image out and moving it to the corner of the slide, then introducing new content, so that the previous content is still visible
Faded layering — covering most of the content with a semi-transparent rectangle to focus the audience on one section of a complex process and then adding some explanatory text about that section
Creating a tab — a rectangle that slides in from the edge of the slides, displays some text, and then disappears, allowing the image to cover the entire slide.
Using transitions that create continuity — He especially recommended the Push and Pan transitions

Tip: In PowerPoint 2010, when you apply the Pan or Push transition in a direction, let’s say Push Right, and then you go to the previous slide, the transition reverses, becoming Push Left in this case. And the Pan transition keeps content on the slide master still, moving only the content on the individual slides. Try out these techniques!

Sandy Johnson on “Normal shapes, extraordinary icons”

Sandy Johnson, a top presentation designer, showed us some techniques for creating icons and buttons in PowerPoint. She used simple clip art and shapes to create professional-looking graphics. Some of her techniques were:

Inserting a circle, and going to Format tab, Shape Effects, Bevel, 3-D Options and increasing the top Width and Height values to get a 3D look
Using the Subtract Shapes tool to create cutouts (See my tip on this tool.)
Creating highlights (See my tip on creating highlights.)

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.

Back from the PPTLive conference!

Ellen — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:20:27 +0000

This year, PPTLive was in Atlanta. I’m still processing all that I heard and learned. Overall, it was a great conference, as usual. My husband wonders how I can learn anything more about PowerPoint, but I can. And I learn best practices, design principles, and new concepts. I’ll be posting tips that I learned over the next few weeks, but here is an overview. By the way, to vicariously attend the conference, go to your Twitter account and search for #pptlive, the hash tag for the conference. You’ll see my tweets as well.

Rick Altman is a great host and organizer; he makes the conference both a learning and a fun experience. Everyone is informal and friendly so the feeling is comfortable, even for new attendees.

Keynotes

Cliff Atkinson (www.beyondbulletpoints.com), author of Beyond Bullet Points, opened the conference with a keynote called, “The Presentation Evangelist: How to change the world, one deck at a time.” He challenged the audience, many of whom consult or provide internal presentation advice within their companies, to become superheroes in the quest for better presentations. For example, presentation specialists can pull a meaningful story from a bunch of bullet points and help presenters understand design elements and the audience’s point of view. He said that the value of a presentation specialist is in getting results and urged the audience not to think in terms of x dollars per hour. By the way, Cliff is coming out with a new book, The Back Channel, about Twitter, chat room and other comments that go on while a presenter is talking. He told us about some of the events where the back channel became an event in itself. One example, from the SXSW conference is discussed here.

The second day, Carmen Taran (www.reximedia.com), author of Better Beginnings, spoke on the topic “The Naked You: Presenters have nowhere to hide—can you turn that into a blessing?” Carmen talked about finding the real you and letting that show when you present. In other words, she talked all about authenticity. Carmen uses striking images on her slides that are hard to forget—she advocates using what she calls “edgy” and top-quality graphics.

Dave Paradi (www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com), author of The Visual Slide Revolution, spoke on how to “Recession-Proof Your Career.” He explained how to measure the value of what you do, especially in terms of results, and make sure that others know about it. For example, Dave talked about using internal newsletters, industry publications, and corporate blogs (including Twitter) to mention successes. As a group, we developed a list of thought leaders in the areas of speaking and presenting, which I’ll share in another post.

Sessions

Most of the sessions are 3 at a time, so you can’t attend them all. Here are the ones I chose:

Peggy Duncan & Geetesh Bajaj near the Help Desk

Glen Millar (www.pptworkbench.com) showing off his over-the-top animations that you can’t believe he did in PowerPoint. I wrote a tip about one of his techniques, “The magic of false backgrounds,” a while back. I’ll share another with you in a future post.
Julie Terberg (www.terbergdesign.com), a Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP), explaining good design principles. Many of her ideas are in my tip, Create a better PowerPoint template.
Geetesh Bajaj (www.indezine.com) talking about “Slides in the Clouds,” meaning ways to create and share presentations online.
Glenna Shaw (www.pptmagic.com) explaining how to create demos using animation
Rikk Flohr on the photo shoot
Rikk Flohr (www.fleetingglimpse.com) doing his annual photo tour and follow-up Photoshop editing session
Peggy Duncan (www.peggyduncan.com) talking about how to get found online with “shameless self-promotion and do-it-yourself PR”