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Archive: PowerPoint Live 2007 Report

Rick Altman

PowerPoint Live offers 3 sessions at a time, for 3 days, and I couldn't attend all of them, of course. The 3 tracks are:

You'll be seeing some tips, techniques, and articles come out over the next few months that are based on what I learned. For now, I'll review some of the highlights of the sessions I attended.

Jim Endicott of Distinction Communication, Inc., gave the keynote address on Monday morning, "We've Come a Long Way: The Coming of Age for the Presentation Professional." An important point was that we need to switch from focusing on "giving" presentations to focusing on audiences "getting" them. He made the point that companies spend $100,000's on printed materials and their Web site, but often don't do the same for PowerPoint presentations, even though those presentations are just as crucial to the company. He said that companies are just starting to realize how much is lost with bad presentations.

Julie Terberg of Terberg Design spoke about developing PowerPoint templates for larger corporations. However, the points she made were useful for anyone who creates many presentations that have shared features. She explained how to create sets of slides for various situations and concepts that can then be used over and over. One point that she made that I heard several times was the importance of not putting too much content on a slide. This is because people simply can't grasp so much at one time. The solution is to split up the content into multiple slides.

Julie Terberg and Nancy Duarte

Sandy Johnson of Presentation Wiz did a session called, "Living with Bullets: When you must use bullets in your slides." The title says it all: bullets are not the ideal format for slides. However, she went through some pointers that can help make bullets a little more palatable, including:

For designers who are told that they must use bullets, she recommended an excellent technique; return to the person with a bulleted slide and an optional graphics slide (containing the same content). He or she will almost always choose the graphics slide.

Julie Terberg of Terberg Design also gave a fascinating demonstration of some of her animation work, slides that were done in PowerPoint but looked like they were done in Adobe® Flash®. She works in a precise way, using a grid and guides to precisely position objects, and then adding multiple animation effects to the objects. She plans these complex animations on paper first, and some take many hours to complete. You had to witness these creations to appreciate just what PowerPoint can do.

Jim Endicott of Distinction Communication, Inc., also gave a second session, "The Mother of All Makeovers: Using images, not words, to tell a story." Jim talks a lot about telling stories and about the fundamentals of persuasion. To make the point that slides shouldn't be overloaded with content, he related a 2000 study at Columbia University. Here's an article, "Too many choices?" about that study. When people had a choice of a table with 24 jars of jam and another with 6 jars of jam, more people went over to the table with more jars of jam, but they bought less jam from that table! The table with fewer jars of jam had fewer visitors, but sold more. Jim spoke about the importance of finding out what the audience wants, and knowing what you want the audience to do after the presentation. Buy something? Call for a consultation? He covered his "Seven-Step Persuasive Message Model," which shows a presenter how to organize an effective message.

Each year the participants meet with representatives from Microsoft and get to ask lots and lots of questions. This is very fulfilling! (Haven't you wanted to tell Microsoft what you think about PowerPoint?) Not only did we get answers, but we learned a lot about how the PowerPoint team thinks and why some requests are hard to fulfill.

The Microsoft PowerPoint Team

Nancy Duarte, of Duarte Design, gave the second keynote presentation, called "Shift Happens: New changes in global technology will impact presentations." Some of the talk was inspired by her recent visit to India. Nancy worked on Al Gore's famous presentation, "An Inconvenient Truth." She spoke about several trends that are affecting presentation design today, including the global economy, the proliferation of electronic devices, and social networking. She also mentioned an interesting study showing that companies that consider design important ("design-driven companies") do better financially than those who don't emphasize it. This is the importance of branding and presentations are a part of it.

George McCaskill, CTO of Perspector, a 3D add-in for PowerPoint, gave a fascinating talk called, "Lessons from the Rocket Scientists: Building presentations that take off." It looked at presentations from a systems point of view, including:

He discussed Requirements Management, which involves collecting the requirements, or needs, for the presentation and managing the process to meet those needs. It uses processes like project management to ensure a higher rate of success.

Glen Millar, of PowerPoint Workbench, introduced a fantastic, new animation technique, which I'll reveal later on, perhaps next month! Keep an eye out for it. He calls it the false background.

Rick Altman, of R. Altman & Associates, also the organizer of PowerPoint Live, and Sandy Johnson produced a "play" to show how a PowerPoint expert in a company could respond to poorly-made slides that come from presenters. Topics included:

Dave Paradi of Think Outside The Slide wound up with an excellent talk on "The Research Behind Effective Visuals." He explained the research and reasoning behind the following principles:

As you can see, the overall message was that effective presentations consider the audience first and design around them. Just shoving text and data out there doesn't work very well.

If you need to create effective, memorable presentations, I highly recommend attending PowerPoint Live next year.