tellingpeople ~ the presentation skills blog

Scattered around the web are lots of places suggesting you can/should use the b or w keys to turn you screen black or white when you’re presenting, at times when you want your audience to focus on you. Being slightly tongue in cheek, I’m amazed that there’s anyone left who doesn’t know this tip!

To be honest though, the sudden cutting in and out of black that this gives you is a bit shocking – far better to fade in. Besides, using the b/w keys means you have to be standing right next to your laptop and that’s very limiting… To avoid the problem you need simply to slip a black screen into your slides every now and again – at appropriate moments. My ‘darkest’ slide deck contains fully almost a quarter dark slides!

I know that’s unusual, but it’s the best way (I think!) to work on that particular topic. Certainly there are topics I’ve made presentations about when I’ve never wanted a blank slide, but they’re few and far between. It’s a matter of style and taste, obviously, but if nothing else, having the courage to go to a blank slide does wonders for how cool your audience will think you are!

So far so good, though it doesn’t allow you to go to black on a whim, or when someone asks a question. Your solutions at that point seem to me (I’m sure I’m going to miss things here, so chip in!) either to use a remote control to get a black effect from the projector or do something more subtle with your slide deck.

I’m not particularly in favour of the former idea, basically as it involves carrying two remote controls around – one for the projector and one for your laptop. In the heat of the moment I know what would happen to me! Besides, having the second remote in your pocket is going to look bad!

The subtle approach is simple to have a black slide at the end of your slide deck and to know its number. If you need to go to a black slide, simply use your remote to skip to that slide. For goodness’ sake though, check what slide your presentation is currently showing, so that you can come back to it when you need.

Rant mode on….

What is it about the (free) powerpoint templates that makes them so bad? Do (probably otherwise good) designers sit there and think to themselves “I’m going to give this one away, so I’ll deliberately make it suck!”?

Okay, maybe I’m over-reacting, but time and time again I find that people come to us with presentations they’ve “written” using a free template they downloaded and we pretty much have to start over from the beginning. To be honest, if we were getting paid to design the slides that wouldn’t be so bad, but we’re supposed to be helping people learn how to to use the slides in their presentation.

I’ve written (ranted?) elsewhere about the vagaries of templates and the fact that they seem to be written to show off the technical abilities of the designer rather than show of the content of the presentation, but one I’ve seen recently takes the biscuit. Not only does it have a ‘busy’ background, in the same colour as the foreground, but it takes that one stage further and has a moooooooooving background.

Fascinating.

Actually, to be honest, it’s quite clever and I had to get hold of it to look at how they’d done it… but that’s the point – I was interested in the background, not the content.

Our homepage has our take on this. We try and think of the presentation as the container, not the content. Think of a whisky glass if you like – it can be a thing of beauty in its own right, sure, but the real reason for the glass is to get the whisky to your mouth. (If you don’t like whisky, think wine-glass or coke-tin for all I care! )

Too many templates have the equivalent of a very pretty lid on the whisky glass – it looks fantastic but it gets in the way of the pleasure of drinking the whisky.

Besides, why would you want a template that looked like everyone else…?

As a hobby, I write short stories for children. My kids love them, and so do my friends and relatives kids. I’m not suggesting that makes me the next JKRowling but it’s a nice thing to be thought of as a “Story Teller” You’d not believe the adventures of Sophie’s Dragon… or the sound effects of dragon wings!

A while ago I put one of my favourite stories onto a site for critique and got the standard response of “Don’t tell; show!“. I soon learned that this was pretty much the only advice given on the site and my suspicion is that it was once given to someone by a ‘real’ or professional writer/critic and has become part of the mythos of the site, if you see what I mean….

It struck me, however, that for presentations as well as stories, this is a fine bit of advice!

Don’t tell me what you think… or what will happen if… or what you found when you… or what it’s like in the country of…. show me. Forget the words, forget the bullet-points; abandon the lists; throw out the dry stuff.

If you want to connect with me, to change me, to have an effect, to make me remember, show me something.

Don’t tell me the Namib desert is dry – show me a picture of the sands.
Don’t tell me the cash-flow forcast is bad – show me a graph
Don’t tell me various ways you got funding – show me a pie chart
Don’t tell me how fast the new computer is – show me a comparison (live if you can!)

By all means have the necessary data available to back up your claims (in a written document to leave behind, perhaps) but please, please please, don’t force me to listen to it verbatim (or worse yet, read it from slides as you read it to me!).

May I give you a personal example?

My younger daughter is off to Namibia for three weeks in the summer and one of the ways she’s raising funding is by giving talks to groups like Round Table and Rotary Clubs. One of the things she wanted to explain was where Namibia is. It’s on the south-west coast of Africa, adjacent to South African. Big deal. However, a satallite image of the continent, slowly re-orientating and zooming in to show the location of the country is more exciting, more interesting and provides not only a strong feel for the location but also it’s world-wide context.

Another example… she wants to talk about the roles in the team while they’re there

In most circles, that would be a bullet-point list. For my daughter it’s a series of carefully edited images, building into a clever montage showing a fork, sergeant stripes, a compass, a pile of coins and a walking boot. (I’m not showing the result here because it won’t work without the subtle build animation for the slide, sorry!)

Imagine the difference!

Perhaps these aren’t the bet example in the world to use (but they’re important in our household right now, so tough! ) but remember the advice of authors: don’t tell, show!

Normally I like to create something new in these posts – after all, any fool can cut, paste and hack at other people’s work.

This time, however, I’m going to break my own ‘rule’. Take a look at this talk from TED on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y. It’s a guy called Daniel Pink talking about motivation.

Notice how natural he is – how he resists the temptation to glance at the screen behind him. Notice how he uses the screens on the floor in front of him to show him what the audience sees but also what’s coming up next. Towards the end, check how for just half a second his eyes skit sideways to look at the person coming to the edge of the stage to follow him on – that’s attention to detail. This man is very much in charge of what he’s doing. Notice also the simple message – he doesn’t try and do too much…. “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business is doing”. Check out the clean, simple slides and…..

….. stop! If I go on any more it’s going to sound like a proposal of marriage! Thank heaven’s he’s an expert – if everyone was this good we’d be out of jobs.

I’m a fan of doing things by hand – pen/pencil on paper – before you start to use your computer. The very second you fire up your computer you start to think in the way the software things… or rather how it forces you to think. I can’t prove it but it seems to me that the designer(s) had a specific way of thinking in mind when they write software and that this puts implicit assumptions into the software: the designers and therefore the software itself assumes that you’ll be doing things in a particular way… their way.

If you happen to think the same way the software does, you’ll find the software easy to use and if you don’t, you won’t.

Of course, if you do think the ‘right’ way for the software, you’ll have the advantage of finding things easy/intuitive, but you’ll also have the downside of being much less likely to produce something original (or even interesting!) as millions of other people will have done things just like it before you.

If you think differently you might find it easier to produce something original/interesting/effective but only at the cost of it being harder to produce anything at all in the first place. For me, there are some software packages that, when I use, I feel like I’m pushing an elephant up a hill.

That’s why I suggest to my clients that they don’t use electronic toys until well, well after they know what they want to say and how they want to say it – pencil and paper are about as easy to master as it gets; the advantage is that you can concentrate on what you want to capture, not on remembering how to capture it.

Let me give you an example, picking on Microsoft’s Word. Suppose I want to change the layout of the page from portrait to landscape. Where are the tools for doing this? They’re under the Files Menu as page setup. If you’ve been brought up on Word that probably makes sense to you out of sheer habit. But under the OpenOffice package you’d change the layout of a page under the Format Menu – in the same way as you’d change the format of a paragraph or a line, you’d just reformat a page. To me that’s more instinctively sensible.

No doubt there are other people who won’t think like me, of course!

I have the same preference for Apple’s Keynote software over Microsoft’s Powerpoint; it’s just more intuitive. Things are where I expect them to be and I don’t have to think about where a command might be; I just go where I’d put it if I was writing the software and there it is…

What are the advantages of this?

Picking on PowerPoint for an example: to insert a picture I have to INSERT/PICTURE/FROM FILE and then navigate to where I keep my pictures. To do the same in Keynote is a simple click/drag. Not only is it quicker in its own right but crucially it doesn’t interrupt my thought processes. The result is higher productivity. In all seriousness, I bought my first Mac laptop on something of a whim, despite it costing about £200 more than the equivalent Windows-based machine. I did some hard number-crunching with a spreadsheet a bit later and even if I charged my time stupidly cheaply, I figured that I’d got my £200 back in terms of extra productivity in a matter of weeks. Now that I know the Mac OS, or course, it would take even less…

Incidentally, this article started off life as me wanting to right something nice about Xmind – it’s free, open source and effective – a great way to draw MindMaps and so on to develop the structure of your presentation. (There is a paid-for ‘pro’ version but I’ve not needed it yet.

We’ve just had a very nice new bathroom installed – and so for the first time in several years I’ve been able to enjoy the luxury of taking a bath (don’t worry, I’d been using the shower; I hadn’t started to smell!), That’s great for me, because I find time relaxing in a bath conducive to sorting out the overview and ideas for big presentations.

That lead me to wondering how other people design their presentations and to something we’ve been finding a lot recently – clients who design their presentations at the computer. Our advice is always the same – don’t.

As soon as you start using a computer, no matter how expertly you use it, two things inevitably happen. Firstly, you limit yourself to the ways the computer ‘thinks’ (by which, of course, I’m referring to the way the program you are using was written). Some presentations (and other questions of communicating with people) aren’t easily captured or recorded in a computer program and that limits your imagination.

Secondly, no matter how good you are at using a computer, part of your brain needs to be used in working the program, not in creating your presentation, and that limits your productivity.

Today’s tip? It couldn’t be more simple. Trust yourself to step away from your computer when you need to think about how to tell people things. And if your boss wants to know why you’re staring out of the window, tell him Simon Said…

…..are (almost) always horrible. The lack atmosphere and they often lack anything that might be described as subtle. Putting a presentation on the web so that all anyone sees is your slides is, as I’ve tweeted once, a bit like looking only at the balls and wondering why the juggling act is a bit rubbish….

Something which might help is http://www.synchpoint.co.uk/. They contacted Curved Vision this morning and being nosy, I poked around the website. I have to admit that I’ve never used them but if I needed to do what their stuff does, I’d be seriously tempted…. you get to watch a recording of the presentation and see the slides (synchronized). What’s more, there are a load of gadgets which allow you to skip forward, back and sideways (by searching).

What it can’t do, of course, is make your presentation any good in the first place!

I’m a fan of visual slides if you’re going to use PowerPoint (or Keynote or any of the other alternative slide-ware packages). There are times when bullet-points are the way to go, of course, but not many. And not as many as people seem to think!

The idea of avoiding the boring bullet-point-riddled slide seems to be catching on a bit, but there are a few mistakes that I’ve noticed people making in the presentations I’ve sat through recently. The most common mistake seems to be the idea that adding a gratuitous picture to the side of the bullet points somehow stops it being a bullet-point slide.

It doesn’t – it just makes it a bullet-point slide with a picture.

To add insult to injury, of course, you could make the picture nasty and common clip-art. That just makes it look even more like a token gesture. Or perhaps you find a semi-relevant picture, but the background is the wrong colour for the slide – just putting it onto the slide does nothing more than make the picture stand out like a sore thumb even more, showing up that you’ve not taken the five minutes you needed to take the background out or change your slide.

Please – you know who you are! If you’ve got a graphic on your slide, make it a graphic slide, not a bullet-point slide with a graphic.

Or I may just have to shoot you with one of your own bullet-points.

for the loss of this blog for a week. My ISP were all the help they could be without actually doing anything about it – such as replying to questions in less than three days at a time.

That said, I’m not a big fan of apologies in presentations. Consider this: when you say to an audience “I’m sorry this slide isn’t too clear – I hope you can read it at the back” what you mean is, no doubt, to be respectful of your audience and assure them that you’ve got their interests at heart. What they hear you say however is totally different.

What an audience hears you say at this point is: “I’m sorry the fact that I was too lazy or dis-organized to get this slide right for you instead of going out for a drink with my friends is actually showing“. You’re actually saying that something else (and I don’t care what – it could be anything!) is more important to you than your audience and getting your presentation’s slides sorted out.

There are few honorable excuses – such as when your wife unexpectedly goes into labour three weeks early – but by and large, if you’ve got to apologise for your presentation skills, you’re just plain rude!