5 ways PowerPoint mirrors life

PowerPoint is one of the most maligned pieces of software in the world – who among us has not heard (or repeatedly used) the phrase “Death by powerpoint?” The problem, however, lies not in the tool, but in the way the tool is used. And, surprisingly, many of the ways that PowerPoint is misused have their roots in “life.”

1) Just because something is easy, doesn’t mean it is right

It might be a relationship or job we stay in too long because staying is easier than leaving. Or perhaps it is watching passively as someone gets bullied. Or maybe it is letting some egregious piece of legislation move forward instead of getting involved in the fight to stop it. There are lots of instances where we take the easy way out, even when we know that doing so is wrong.

We see this same tendency – to take the path of least resistance – when we use PowerPoint. The most egregious example is bullet points. We know that text bullets are quite possibly the least efficient way to get your point across in a presentation: the audience reads the text instead of listening to you, it entices people to simply read their slides instead of adding value, and the audience does not remember text nearly as well as it remembers images.

And yet most presentations we see are little more than cue cards that we share with the audience – slide after slide of bullet points. Why? Because it easy. When a new presentation opens up in PowerPoint it defaults to bullet points. Finding or making relevant images or data plots takes time and effort. And by using text bullets we “save” ourselves the effort of practicing to help remember the presentation.

But just like so many things in life are easy but wrong, so is using text bullets instead of taking the time and effort to include relevant imagery and to practice in order to keep your audience engaged and to help your audience remember the points you make in your presentation.

2) Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
        
The prototypical example is yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theatre. Sure you can but you certainly should not. Other examples abound. You can heap abuse on the referees at your kid’s sports game, but you certainly should not. You can use Comic Sans in your companies annual report, but you should not. And you can randomly mix metaphors in your writing, but you should not.

In PowerPoint you can use a different transition for every slide. You can have all of your text fly in from different directions on the screen. And you can alternate six different colors for every letter in your text. But – and I hope I do not have to tell you this – you certainly should NOT. The basic “appear” transition will always serve the purpose, flying text is a desperate attempt to add life to poorly constructed presentation, and using one color for most text with another contrasting color for emphasis is all you need.

And for crying out loud, never use Comic Sans in your presentation.

3) Go big or go home

The meek may inherit the Earth, but until then it is the loud and the strong that will possess it. Not everyone needs to be Donald Trump (or, really, anyone for that mater), but it is the larger-than-life types that often succeed. Being just another engineer in your company will not lead to a promotion. Staying silent in meetings is a sure path to being ignored. Thinking small yields small results.

The same goes for PowerPoint – you have to think big or you might as well not show up. Fonts? Make them as big as possible. Images? Expand them to fill the whole screen. Data? Make it big and easy to see, even from the last row. When you are on stage your point is to draw attention, not shy away from it. If you do not want to do so, get off the stage.

4) Never Assume

Oh lordy – how often does making assumptions screw us over? Maybe it was the time you assumed there was enough cash in your account to cover the rent cheque? Or the time that you assumed that the car approaching the intersection knew that they had the stop sign? How about the time you assumed that your parents were out of town for the weekend and you threw that house party? Boy, was that a disaster….

Making assumptions with PowerPoint has the potential to result in ugliness also. Consider when you develop a presentation on one computer, but deliver it on another. You make the assumption that the fonts in all versions of powerpoint will have the same fonts, only to find that all the text in your presentation has been transformed into “wingdings.” Or maybe you center your presentation to the CEO around video clips that run fine on your machine, but the presentation machine does not have the codec you need. Or it could be the presentation that you borrowed from a colleague, only to find out that he had put automatic timings in and your presentation is six slides ahead of you. Whatever the problem, the root of it is often that you made an assumption of some sort.

So do not assume anything. Always give yourself time to test drive your slides on the presentation machine. Bring your own laptop and try to use that if you can. Backup your slides on a memory stick and online, and make a copy in PDF format in case all else fails.

5) De-clutter

We all know that life can get cluttered. We take on too many responsibilities. We have people in our lives who make their problems our problems. Our homes become filled with “stuff” that we hardly use. We even find it hard to do simple things like cooking healthy meals and keeping our living spaces clean become difficult.

Powerpoint can also get cluttered. Clip-art that is used to fill up empty space on the slide. Multiple bullets on a slide, all with multiple lines of text. Slides that try to show 25 separate sets of data on a single page. Transitions and effects on slides that make us long for the simplicity of the 1990s vintage “blink” tag on web pages. The number of ways that slides can get cluttered simply boggles the mind.

The trick, in Powerpoint as in life, is to simplify. Limit each slide to a single point. Remove “slide junk” (useless images and clipart) from the edges of the slides. Use a single main color and a simple “appear” transition. Resist the urge to show all your data and show only the representative/important bits.

So – are there any other ways that PowerPoint mirrors life? Drop a comment if you can think of any that I’ve missed!

        

[Technique] The importance of the narrative

A few days back Nancy Duarte authored an opinion piece on presentations. I was reluctant to read it at first because I was afraid it was going to be yet another article that extoll the virtues of slide design but does not address other – more important – aspects of excellent presentations. When I finally forced myself to read the article I was pleasantly surprised to find that the piece was not on the importance of design, but on the importance of the narrative.

This excited me because the narrative is arguably the most powerful type of presentation. We are surrounded by narratives in our life. There are the obvious ones such as the childhood stories that will stay with us until we die, and the movie arc that had us glued to our seats. But there are also less obvious ones: the come-from-behind victory that our favourite sports team pulled off, the rags-to-riches stories of a favourite entrepreneur or entertainer, our child’s explanation of his/her day at school (and the even more interesting explanation for why the missing cookies are hot his/her fault).

And because narratives are all around us, we are used to the patterns and conventions in the stories. The introduction and set-up, the conflict, the rising drama that leads to a climax where the conflict is resolved, and finally the denouement where everything is wrapped up – all of this is ingrained in our psyches. And because they are ingrained into all of us these patterns are something that presenters can latch onto.

Why? The fewer demands you can place on your audience, the more room the audience has for the message you are trying to get across. When you use a non-narrative presentation format your audience has to first understand the format before they can assimilate the message. I have found myself in presentations where I was lost and had to take time to work backwards in order to understand why the speaker was talking about whatever it was he was talking about. And while I was doing that, the speaker was moving on and I was not paying attention. Had the speaker been using the narrative style I would not have had to backtrack and would have kept track of the what he was saying.

So how do you use the narrative? Look for the story. Look for the main problem that you had to overcome or the problem that you set off to solve. Then describe how you solved it – the steps, the problems you encountered, your minor victories. Use that arc in your presentation.

And watch as the audience follows along to see how story ends.

[TIPS] Want to make better presentations? Read classic Sci-Fi!

A couple of weeks ago I had to do some flying – two consecutive 6 hour flights to be exact. Normally I bring along some magazines or other non-fiction but, for the first time in years, this time I brought along a science fiction book by Robert A. Heinlein.

Please understand, I used to be a serious Sci-Fi geek and my walls and floors were lined with hundreds of softcover Sci-Fi books. All sorts of authors, but my tastes ran to “hard” science fiction – the kind of story where the plot hinged on some sort of physics or astronomy (there was very little in the way of biology-based Sci-Fi at the time). As a result I was a serious fan of the “Big Three” writers – Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Over time my tastes changed and I moved away from science fiction to science fact. The softcover books were left behind and/or sold as I moved, and were replaced by hardcovers covering a wide range of topics. Genetics took place of pride in my library, and I started to look down on my Sci-Fi past.

But not everything was left behind. There were a few books that I kept, and three of them were Heinlein titles. The titles are not important, but when I last had to travel I picked up one of the books. In addition to vastly enjoying the story – and marvelling at his open mind and seeming prescience in many areas – I made a realization:

Heinlein (and the rest of the Sci-Fi authors I read) helped shape my ability to share my ideas through speaking.

This came as a surprise, but in retrospect it should not have been.

In science fiction – and especially in the “hard” version of it – the author has to quickly bring the reader up to speed on the necessary science. Since the author cannot assume that the audience is knowledgeable in the area in question the author has to be skilled in teaching the science to the reader quickly, clearly, and in an engaging manner.

Quick, clear, and engaging. Kind of what you need in a presentation, don’t you think?

This realization hit me several thousand feet above the Pacific, and took me a few minutes to absorb. But it appears that – quite unintentionally and very much by osmosis – I had picked up many communication techniques simply by reading experts in the field.

Check it out for yourself. Pick up a “hard” Sci-Fi title. Start reading. And when the characters or narrator start talking science, pay attention to the tricks that they are using to communicate the ideas. You will find that they simplify the science and focus on the core while staying engaging. Paying attention to how they do this is almost as entertaining as the story itself.

And afterwards, ask yourself how you might be able to use these same techniques to your advantage in the future.

[TIPS] Learning from others mistakes

I should really go to more seminars.

I do not know if this is really a surprise, but I do not go to many seminars at my day job. It is not that I am uninterested in the topics (generally). Rather, it is simply that the average quality of the talks is so low that I end up not paying attention to the talk. Instead, I spend my time doing something useful over  trying to force myself to listen to a poorly implemented talk.

The other day, though, I realized why I should go to more talks, if only for a few minutes. Just as a good speaker can show you what to do to improve your skills, a poor speaker can show you what not to do. For example, at the last seminar I attended (and left part way through) the speaker spent her time reading from – and talking to – the screen. There was no looking at the audience, no eye contact – nothing.

What made this worse was that the speaker was very soft spoken, so it was hard to hear her at the best of times. Further, she had a thick accent that made her harder to understand. Any one of the three aspects – talking to the screen, being soft spoken, a thick accent – could have been bearable, and possibly even two could have been coped with, but all three? Nope. As soon as it became clear that things were not getting better I left.

The point I want to leave you with, though, is to try to learn from others mistakes. If you find yourself zoning out, mentally step back and ask yourself “why.” Chances are good that, even if you do not learn what the speaker wants you to learn, you will still come out with something to benefit your self.

Even if it is simply another thing not to do.

Analog first – *then* digital

So, I’ve got a presentation lined up for next week. I’ve talked about this stuff before. Take a couple of slide decks, add a few slides to reflect new work… This is gonna be *easyyyy*

First, lets find those decks. Hmmm…. where did I put them? Okay – let’s try this directory. That one sounds right. Fire it up…. Nope – not what I was thinking of, but I like those slides – let’s keep this one open.

Now the next directory… Aww – forget it. I’ll use my desktop search. Great. 25 matches. Wait – that’s the one that I want. Terrific. And those two – yep – they’ve got some slides I want.

Great. Now, let’s take my base presentation and change the name. Now let’s import some possibly useful slides. Okay… can I just copy/paste? No – weird things happen with the formatting. Let’s import slides from file… great – what directory are those other slides in? Bring them to the front, one by one. Get file info. Okay… Browse…. what slide numbers do I want? Okay – there they are. And now they are in. Other slides packages, same dance.

Finally – I’ve got my slides. Let’s look at these. Oh geeze – Times New Roman in some slides, Arial in others, and what’s this other font? Nope – can’t use that one – I don’t trust the machine I’m going to use to have the fonts. Okay – let’s make it all Arial. I *hate* arial, but it’s sans serif and every machine has it. Let’s go to slide master, change all the fonts. Apply. Good. How’s that?

Damn – I forgot the text boxes. I have to go and fix those individually. Geeze..*how* many slides? Okay – gonna have to cut that back. And what’s with all those damn bullets? I gotta have a graphic that’ll work better than that.

Hold on – what did I want to talk about? Oh geeze – this is all crap. Damn. Okay – let’s start over. File… New Presentation….

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I don’t know about you, but all to often I go through something like the above. A presentation that should be a”gimmee” becomes an hour of busywork before I realize what I’m working on is total garbage. It shouldn’t be that way though. It doesn’t *have* to be that way.

Go analog first. Turn off your screen (you’ll only be distracted by the e-mail anyhow). Get out a pad of paper and a pen. Find a comfy spot if you can. And start thinking about what you want to say. Don’t worry about the slide decks you already have. Just sit down and write out a few points. Now lay them out into the order you want. Make a few notes about the graphics you want. Maybe sketch out an arrangement. If there are some key phrases or themes you want to use, write them down.

Make a mistake? Scratch it out. Rip up the paper, start over. Doesn’t matter.

Note what is happening here. By going analog you are concentrating on your content, not on the fonts, not arguing with your slide software, not searching for a missing slide package. Sure – you may end up doing that later, but at least you will have a clear idea of what you want. The presentation has taken precedence. After you’ve sorted out the presentation, then turn your screen back on and work on creating the slides.

In the end you will have saved time, and your presentation will be stronger because you focussed on it early and clearly. Try it.

Analog first. Then go digital. Your audience will thank you.