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PowerPoint Live was in sunny San Diego from Sept. 21-24. As usual, I learned a lot. I would say that the theme this year was Intentional Design.
What does Intentional Design mean? It’s the concept that everything on your slide should be there for a purpose, to further your message, persuade the audience, or communicate information. The quick way to manage this issue is to remove anything that isn't necessary. The principle also applies to color. Choose colors for a reason, rather than haphazardly. In the same way, your content, images, and layout should have a purpose. It being a presidential election year, Rick Altman, our host, had some fun with the political environment (after making us promise that we wouldn't take anything seriously). He talked about effective communication with a mock presidential candidacy of his own and had us laughing within minutes of the start of the conference.
Rick Altman addressing the entire group Jim Endicott's Keynote: The politics of visual communication Jim Endicott started off with the Monday keynote on “The Politics of Visual Communication: Changing the hearts and minds of a nation.” He discussed the need to persuade, motivate, and inspire in a presentation. Jim started with Misconception #1: Data is always persuasive. While data is necessary, content that emphasizes relationship – stories, interaction, video, discussions – is processed by the right side of the brain, which supports long-term memory and fosters decision making. By contrast, purely factual content designed to prove, inform, and justify – bullets, charts, graphs – is processed by the left side of the brain, which supports short-term memory and has low persuasive value. Jim then outlined his 7-Step Persuasive Message Flow Model:
Jim's Misconception #2: Knowledge always creates influence. Instead, personal authenticity and even vulnerability is more effective than polish. Misconception #3: Good messages trump marginal design. Instead, poor design degrades a good message. Misconception #4: All design is subjective. Specifically, Jim talked about the importance of color contrast for legibility, avoiding color combinations that color-blind people can't distinguish, and how people make quick judgments about people and products based on color. The key point was to use color with purposeful intent, as I mentioned at the beginning of this report. E-learning track I attended several sessions in the e-learning track. Paul Clothier and Dr. Carmen Taran did most of these, while Rick Altman contributed one session. They focused on self-paced, non-synchronous learning, in which the trainee learns on his or her own, without a live trainer. Because of the circumstances of this type of learning, the following are important when designing the training program:
Paul and Carmen mentioned a number of 3rd-party tools that work with PowerPoint to create e-learning content. These offer the ability to create quizzes and convert the content to SWF (Flash movie) format. They emphasized Adobe Presenter and Articulate Presenter, because these are the programs they have used. They also listed some other options: All of these programs offer free trials, so try them out and compare the results. Rick Altman gave a session on using PowerPoint for live training, including techniques for using hyperlinks, inserting objects, and creating a hidden menu. Julie Terberg: Animation in the afternoon This session is a standard of PowerPoint Live and always eye-opening, because Julie is a master PowerPoint animator. Julie discussed techniques for reusing animation, including copying animated objects. (The copied objects also include the animation.) She recommended pptXtreme Effects Library for saving animation effects. She is working on a library of effects templates that will be available from Microsoft Office Online in the fall. She also explained the 2007 Replace Picture feature, a zoom technique, and more.
Julie Terberg Geetesh Bajaj: Surviving version hell With more and more people upgrading to PowerPoint 2007, users are having to deal with presentations that are moved back and forth between versions. Another issue is incompatibilities between PC and Mac presentations. Geetesh thoroughly covered this topic. First, he explained what happens when you have a 2003 presentation with many masters, open and save it in 2007, and then open it in 2003. The connection between the title and slide masters is lost, and they become separate masters. If you have presentations with multiple masters, the solution is to create a separate set of templates and prototype presentations for 2003 and 2007. If you have presentations that some people use in 2003 and others use in 2007, keep separate PPT and PPTX versions. Geetesh also covered issues with charts in a multi-version environment. Finally, he talked about the differences between the PC and Mac versions. In this situation, he recommended using simple graphics, industry-standard media formats (MPEG, not Windows Media or QuickTime; MP3, not iTunes or Windows Media). Other cross-platform issues involve fonts, graphics, and animation.
Geetesh Bajaj Nancy Duarte: Tuesday keynote: Tapping into your natural-born storyteller Nancy's keynote was about visual storytelling. She's the author of slide:ology, a book on presentation design. She started off by telling us to put on the slide only what the audience needs to remember the point. Slides are a mnemonic for the audience, not for the presenter. She explained that there are 4 kinds of stories:
Nancy recommended creating a meta-narrative, mapping out the beginning, middle, and end of the story. You might include more than one type of story. For example, you could start with a narrative, then go to a demo, follow up with a logical argument, and close with a pitch. For charts, she explained that you need to find the story in the data, and then emphasize that, rather than dumping everything onto the slide. Garr Reynolds: Wednesday keynote Garr Reynolds called in from Osaka, Japan, where he lives, to discuss presentation design. He's the author of Presentation Zen, a book on presentation design. He gave the audience several principles:
Garr recommended learning from the world around us, finding alone time to create, and combining beauty with function. Dave Paradi: Secrets of web-based presentations Dave discussed his experience creating webinars and provided us with the benefits of his research into audio methods, video issues, and delivery. This session was quite technical but extremely useful for someone who wants to start creating webinars. He uses GoToWebinar with a free audio bridge for the long-distance call. He also discussed recording the webinar for later sale. Rikk Flohr: Real-world image editing Rikk followed up on a digital-camera field trip and showed us ways to edit images in Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) to emphasize the purpose of the image. Each image tells a story and it's the editor's job to edit the image so that the story comes out. He discussed cropping, de-emphasizing, emphasizing, correcting color and saturation, and more. The rest As with any conference, there was more: lots of networking, good meals, and entertainment.
Sunset on the Pacific
Lisa Lindgren and me
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Copyright Ellen Finkelstein, Inc.
Microsoft product screen shots reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.