Top takeaways from the PowerPoint Live conference

The first part of this post is here.

Cliff Atkinson‘s keynote empowered us to be evangelists for better presentations: better results, a better story, better graphics (in that order). He gave suggestions for presentation professionals who need to convince presenters to improve their presentations:

• Improve the core template
• Provide before and after examples
• Educate
• See the story beneath the bullet points
• Envision the presentation from both the speaker’s eyes and the audience’s point of view

Apply the rule of 80/20: quick tips that give you 80% of your results with 20% effort:

• Use the B key
• Add Twitter credentials and the event hashtag to the title slide
• Ask the audience a question
• Know the last slide # (in case you need to cut your talk and get to the last slide quickly-enter the slide number and press Enter)
• Use F4 to repeat formatting and other actions
• Reduce file size

Geetesh Bajaj spoke on creating and sharing presentations on the Web. Some services let you create presentations from scratch online; others let you upload in PPT or PPTX format. You can then store and share presentations online. Some leet you download in PowerPoint or other formats. Here are some of the tools we discussed:

• Slideboom: for sharing. Geetesh says this site has the best support for animation. However, this site doesn’t have the reach or quality of presentations that you’ll find at other sharing sites.
• Slideshare: for sharing. The largest share of the market
• Authorstream: for sharing. Good support for sound and animation.
• Powershow: for sharing
• Sliderocket: both authoring and sharing, with free and paid versions
• Google Docs: Basic tools for authoring, good for collaboration, can export to PowerPoint format
• Microsoft Office Live Workspace: Can upload PowerPoint files, edit on your computer, the re-upload. Share using the Public folder or keep private.
• Zoho Show: Create and collaborate
• Prezi: Create and share
• Slidesix: For collaborating and sharing. Can include video and audio

Cliff Atkinson‘s session on The BackChannel was mostly new for me. He’s coming out with a book by that name. He talked about audiences tweeting (mostly on phones) during a presentation and how presenters could best deal with it. Cliff mentioned some recent disasters and some ways presenters successfully handled challenging situations. Overall, he recommended embracing this trend. He suggested including tweetable remarks (pithy, short sayings), putting the presenter’s Twitter address and the event’s hashtag on the first slide, including Twitter breaks, and getting help from a moderator to track the trend of the back channel comments. He introduced us to BackNoise, a chat tool that incorporates Twitter but also allows anonymous comments.

Julie Terberg’s Five Faves (best practices) were:

1. Consistency: Keep text away from the edge of the slide, work with guides on the slide, keep placement of objects in the same locations so the audience can quickly know where to look
2. Palette: Create a graphic palette slide. I sometimes call this a sampler slide.
3. Variety: Build variety with custom slide layouts (a feature of 2007)
4. Choose and use images for maximum effect: Use an accent color in photo as an accent line, don’t put lots of text in front of a photo (even a faded one), select images that work well together
5. Think outside the slide: Push transitions and other tricks that seem to extend the slide

And the conference was lots of fun, too! I reconnected with many old friends.