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A neat little psychology trick for quickly laying out messy slides

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taylor-croonquistThis is a guest blog post by Taylor Croonquist. Taylor is the co-founder of Nuts & Bolts Speed Training, a website delivering actionable PowerPoint training and speed strategies, helping professionals cut their build time in half (at least). Prior to Nuts & Bolts, Taylor lived and worked in China for 10 years in finance and consulting. Learn more at www.nutsandboltsspeedtraining.com

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If you’ve ever had a lot of stuff you want to include in your slide but couldn’t figure out what to do with it all, then you will love this neat little psychology trick when applied to your slides.

This neat little psychology trick has 3 distinct advantages:

Advantage #1: As the slide builder, it makes your slides easier to lay out and design .

Advantage #2: As the presenter, it makes your slides easier to present.

Advantage #3: As the audience, it makes your slides easier to understand.

The answer is chunking.

Chunking is a psychology memory technique whereby large groups of information are broken down into meaningful chunks that are more easily memorized; and it works great for complicated slides.

As an example of chunking in the real world, just think of your own phone number. Instead of memorizing it as a single 10-digit number (XXXXXXXXXX), you probably have it memorized as three different chunks of numbers (XXX-XXX-XXXX), right? That’s chunking in action!

And when you start applying this neat little trick to your slides, you’ll find that almost EVERYTHING in PowerPoint is easier when it’s thought of in chunks of information.

Chunking with Shapes / Pictures

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Resetting a slide: A quick fix for awful slides

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Do you have to fix up slides that other people made a mess of? I do. For some reason, I get a lot of slides on which people ignored the Layout feature of PowerPoint; instead, they inserted text boxes anywhere on the slide—in a different location on each slide!

Often, the first thing I do is to check the layout of each slide, change it if necessary, and reset the slide. Why is resetting so valuable?

When you make changes on individual slides, PowerPoint remembers them. As a result, even if you change the layout, the changes remain. Often the best way to get such a presentation into shape is to reset the layouts. When you do so, PowerPoint moves the placeholders into the position specified by the slide master.

On this slide, the title placeholder was probably in the original location, but the text placeholder that contains the bulleted text was centered. The slide has no alignment, so the eye has to move in a disjointed fashion. Talk about stress on the brain!

Original slide

Original slide

In short, it’s a mess. By resetting your slides, you can start with a consistent layout, and work from there.

To reset in a slide, follow these steps:

  1. Right-click the slide and choose (Slide) Layout, then choose the Layout you want.  (Tip: Select as many slides as you want in the left pane, right-click any of the slides and do the same, to change the layout for all those slides. No need to go slide by slide!)
  2. Right-click the slide and choose Reset Slide. (In PowerPoint 2003, click the selected layout in the Slide Layout task pane, click the down arrow, and choose Reapply Layout. (Again, you can select several slides at once.)

Here you see the result after resetting the slide and left-justifying the title.

Of course, now I can make other changes. In this situation, I ended up replacing the text with a SmartArt diagram, but at least I had a presentation full of slides that were consistent! Here’s my final slide.

(I want to mention that this presentation was about research done on children with ADHD and the effects of teaching them the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique. If this presentation had been created for the purpose of presenting the research at a scientific conference, I would not have made the last slide; I probably would have left the slide with the bulleted text. But this presentation was made to show parents of children with ADHD the research on the TM technique. For a non-technical audience, the last slide was more appropriate.)

So, when you need to quickly whip a presentation into shape, reset the slides!

Related tips:

Improve your slide design by trying layout variations

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In my “Create an Outstanding Presentation” workshops and self-study course, I teach four layouts that always look good. I taught them again recently in a presentation skills class for college students.

I find that many presenters who create their own slides struggle with slide design. Not being artists, their efforts are clunky. They usually know this, but don’t know what to do about it.

In March, I’ll be giving a training webinar, Slide Design for Non-Designers, that will provide many more solutions that anyone, even the artistically challenged (like me!), can use.

But until then, I thought I’d give you two layouts that always look good. They’re easy to create, too.

Many people use this layout, which I call “everything centered on top of everything else.” The default template seems to encourage centering everything. It’s certainly not horrible, but I think you’ll see that it can be improved.

Here’s an alternative. The heading is on the left, which I recommend for a couple of reasons. (See the Related Tips section below.) The image covers the slide from left to right. Part of the reason this slide looks better is that the image is larger. But it’s more than that; there’s a more pleasing balance. Your eye starts at the upper left and travels diagonally.

Garr Reynolds calls this an “asymmetrical design” in his book Presentationzen. He says, “symmetrical designs are more static than asymmetrical designs and evoke feelings of formality or stability.” If you have his book, look on p. 149 for an example of both types of designs.

A second look is what I call the vertical split. If you have Photoshop skills, you could make the transition more gradual with a transparency gradient, but this isn’t necessary.

Usually, I make the split even, but here the image takes up about 60% of the slide’s width.

You can watch me makeover a text slide into 4 slides in this YouTube video, One Point on a Slide. You’ll see how I create these two layouts.

Take some time to try out layout variations and I believe that you’ll see a vast improvement in the way your slides look and feel.

Related Tips

Create a better PowerPoint template

Put one point on a slide

Reapply the Slide Layout

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powerpoint-tips-reset-slide-1Have you ever seen a presentation in which the text was jumping around from slide to slide? On each slide, the title and text were in a slightly different location. It made your eyes hurt, didn’t it?

Or maybe the presentation’s titles used several different fonts or font sizes. Looked chaotic, yes?

When you’re editing a presentation and trying to get the titles and text to fit, you sometimes move and resize the placeholders a little here and there. But the end result is that your titles and text jump around from slide to slide in a disconcerting way.

Or, you may change fonts or font sizes, but you get a look that just doesn’t hang together.

How do you get your placeholders to all line up exactly again? How do you get all your text to have a single font and font size, just the way it is in the slide layout?

The solution is often to reset the slide. This reapplies the layout to the slide. Follow these steps:

  1. With the slide in Normal view, right-click just off the slide.
  2. Choose Reset Slide

Occasionally, this doesn’t work. In that case, create a new slide with the layout that you want and copy the content from the old slide to the new one.

Tip: You can select multiple slides in the left-hand pane (click one, press the Shift key, and press the last slide that you want to select).  In that left-hand pane, right-click one of the slides and choose Reset Slide.

Create a custom layout

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Layouts help you lay out the components of your slide and PowerPoint comes with many of them. Here’s a sample.
slide components

slide components

Unfortunately, PowerPoint versions before 2007 don’t have a feature to let you create custom layouts that appear in the Layout taskpane.

Suppose you’re a sales manager and create lots of comparison slides to train your sales reps. Here’s an example:

comparison slide

comparison slide

You want the layout to look something like this:
desired layout for the example

desired layout for the example

 

Thankfully, PowerPoint 2007 and later allow you to create custom layouts, using one of 8 placeholders:

  • Content
  • Text
  • Picture
  • Chart
  • Table
  • SmartArt
  • Media
  • Clip Art

Follow these steps to create a custom layout:

  1. Click the View tab, then click the Slide Master button in the Presentation Views group. The slide master appears.
  2. On the Slide Master tab, in the Edit Master group, choose Insert Layout. A new layout appears in the left pane.
  3. Again on the Slide Master tab, in the Master Layout group, click the Insert Placeholder button’s down arrow and choose one of the 8 placeholder types.
  4. Drag on the slide to size and place the placeholder.
  5. Place more placeholders, laying them out as needed.
  6. When you’re done, click the layout in the left pane, and display the Slide Master tab. In the Edit Master group, click the Rename button. Enter a name and click Rename.
  7. The presentation now contains the new layout and you can choose it the same way you’d choose any of the standard layouts for any slide.
  8. If you want to use the layout in the future, save the file as a template (.potx, or .potm if it contains macros) or theme (thmx).