Working Smarter : Rick Altman

Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Our good friend and WSN partner Rick Altman has authored a Working Smarter eCourse for us entitled “Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation,” which you can sign up for by clicking here. This is the first lesson of his eCourse, entitled “Too Much Too Easy.”

First are the dues to pay. As a good friend and messaging guru Jim Endicott like to remind us, good storytelling is often about first identifying the pain. And as tennis great

Martina Navratilova once said to me personally, “No pain...no gain.”

She was talking about physical fitness, not creating slides, but I couldn’t pass up a chance to name drop...

The 30-Minute Syndrome

If only I could earn the proverbial nickel for every time I have heard the following:

“PowerPoint is easy. I learned it in less than half an hour.”

Let’s start by acknowledging that the statement is generally true: PowerPoint® is not difficult to pick up and begin using. Both of my daughters created slides for school projects before the age of 10, and indeed, a reasonably astute grownup can begin making slides within 30 minutes.

Microsoft® might have you believe that this is a virtue of the software. In fact, it is bad. It is very, very bad.

Creating a presentation can be an extraordinarily creative experience, but it rarely starts out that way. And that is because PowerPoint’s default settings are not very creative and because most PowerPoint users do not come to the software from a creative field. They start out elsewhere in the Office® suite. They are Excel® crunchers, Outlook® gurus, Access® junkies. When they encounter PowerPoint and discover that they can begin using the program with effect in less than an hour, they are like kids with new toys.

But again, this is not a good thing; it’s a bad thing. These people declare themselves proficient after their requisite 30 minutes. These same people who get really good at their 30-minute skill set call themselves advanced. And those who get really fast at these same skills call themselves gurus. Those who teach it to others are gods.

But they don’t get beyond those first 30 minutes of skills. And then they go forth and commit high crimes against innocent businesspeople everywhere. Yup...Death by PowerPoint.

With PowerPoint, you practice your craft in public, and this craft is forever linked with death and taxes as the three things humans fear most. This is much more than the converted Excel user bargained for. It’s possible, make that likely, that she had no experience at all speaking before a group; she simply taught herself how to make bullet slides.

And herein lies the biggest disconnect of all. The company that this innocent Excel-***-PowerPoint user works for might spend millions of dollars on its brand. Expensive design firms to create glossy brochures...P.R. firms with lots of names on their door, hired to spin messages...high-powered marketing firms to ensure maximum exposure.

And this same company then sends someone out with 30 minutes of proficiency to make what will likely be a company’s first impression: the presentation in a boardroom.

Companies have simply not made enough of an effort to identify, define, and cultivate the role of the presentation professional. Therefore, it usually is assigned in haphazard fashion to anyone willing to step up to the plate, including the person who is simply good with Microsoft Office.

The Cram-Everything-In Obsession

I recently watched an episode of The Apprentice, where a handsome, well-dressed twenty-something man pleaded his case to Donald Trump by reciting every business slogan he could possibly think of, as fast as he possibly could, interspersed with the robotic “I’ll be great for your organization, Mr. Trump” at every breath. And it worked: Trump fired the other guy.

This is a very real phenomenon in today’s culture—the sense that it’s better to say everything than risk forgetting to say the one thing that you really need to say. And nowhere is this more evident than in the typical slides that project onto the whiteboards and white screens of America today.

This plays out in a fairly predictable way by those who prepare their own slides for a presentation:

They sit down at their desk.
They open PowerPoint.
They start thinking of every point that they need to make.
Soon they start thinking of how they are going to make each point.

End result: they have written a speech.

This is not such a bad proposition for the uninitiated public speaker; as we all know, it’s a horrible proposition for her audience. The woman from Scottsdale Arizona probably thought she was on the right track when she perpetrated the slide below:

It said everything she wanted to say.

No question about it: one of today’s most acute pain points is when speakers use their slides as notes. In many cases, it is because they have no idea that the Notes view exists.

This leads to Universal Axioms No.1:

If a slide contains complete sentences, it is practically impossible for even the most accomplished presenters to avoid reading the entire slide word for word.

Watch for it the next time you attend a presentation: the more verbiage a slide contains, the more likely is the speaker to read all of it. Talk about your double-whammy, because Universal Axiom No. 1 leads directly into Universal Axiom No. 2:

When you read your slides word for word, you sound like an idiot.

The slide shown above is the result of a five-minute makeover. We did nothing more than parse out the main ideas and add a rule. If you take 10 seconds, you’ll get the gist of what this presentation is about, but you probably would not have invested even one second trying to sift through the original slide. More important, we might stand a chance of hearing the real person come out if she speaks to this slide, as opposed to the drone who would have read the first slide. Gone is the compulsion to recite the slide verbatim; now she’ll have to actually collect her thoughts and deliver them. Scary? Perhaps at first. But the five-minute slide makeover will also make her over into a better presenter.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, more pain in lesson 2...

If you liked what you’ve read thus far, then click here sign up for Rick Altman’s eCourse “Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation.”

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SmartDraw.com to Announce SmartDraw 2009’s Improved PowerPoint® Integration at PowerPoint® Live 2008

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:53:00 GMT

On September 21^st, 2008, SmartDraw.com will formally announce and demonstrate its improved PowerPoint® integration at Rick Altman’s PowerPoint® Live 2008 conference, which is being held here in our home town of San Diego, California. Rick Altman has authored a number of well-received guest articles for Working Smarter in the past and is recognized as one of the leading authorities on good presentation design worldwide. He’s also the author of Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck.

“SmartDraw is very good at creating charts, graphs, forms and diagrams, and even better at integrating [those graphics] into a presentation. I am flattered that SmartDraw has chosen our conference to announce the software’s newest presentation features” – Rick Altman.

At some point next week, we are going to try to put up some video of the proceedings at the conference. But for those of you who are interested in what we’re going to be showcasing, here’s a quick list of the specific features that we will be demonstrating:

Animation of Charts and Graphs
Unique PowerPoint® Integration
Charts & Graphs with 3D Effects
Live Maps with Regional Data
3D Perspective Effects (also known as the “flying carpet” layout)

Throughout the week we are going to continue posting additional presentation-related content. Feel free to subscribe to Working Smarter if you want to stay tuned!

Thriving with Animation

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:55:00 GMT

This is a guest post contributed by Rick Altman, a world-renowned presentation consultant, PowerPoint expert, author, and the organizer of PowerPoint Live.

Animation might be single-handedly responsible for more PowerPoint annoyance than all the other annoyances combined. Between Edward Tufte and Dilbert creator Scott Adams, PowerPoint animation is publicly flogged more often than our politicians are.

And at the same time, when done correctly, animation isn’t noticed at all. It’s not unlike being a major league baseball umpire, who gets no respect for doing a good job.

Indeed, good PowerPoint animation is so seamless that you are unaware of it. It reaches its zenith when it allows audience members to become lost in the story you are telling.

I approach this posting with the same fear and trepidation that I do our seminars on the topic at PowerPoint Live. I know that your appetite for the subject is insatiable, and that your zeal could send you across the bounds of good taste a few times. And when that happens, it’s my fault. I’m helping you commit Death by PowerPoint. So please repeat after me:

I will use custom animation wisely and appropriately.
I vow not to offend the sensibilities of my audience.
I promise not to use an animation technique simply because I just discovered it.
I swear never to make stuff move on screen just because I like to watch my audience members’ heads bob and weave like zombies.

Wisely and Appropriately

Good animation promotes increased understanding and appreciation of a topic. It calls attention to the topic, not the tool. I sometimes wish that the function were called not animation, but “sequencing,” as that is more descriptive of the higher purpose of animation.

Figure 1 (above) shows a chart that can greatly benefit from well-conceived use of animation. This chart looks at the time requirements of an email campaign and the relative merits of doing it yourself or using an outside service to assist you.

There are two things that are noteworthy about this data: 1) If you use an outside service, the time required is the same, irrespective of whether you send out a handful or an ocean full of emails; and 2) the time required to send out 10,000 emails by yourself is literally off the charts—we created that bar outside of the graph to illustrate that.

Proper animation of this chart can make a world of difference to your audience’s appreciation of the point you are trying to make. Most content creators recognize that something should be done to charts like this, but they don’t think it through—so instead, they give the entire chart some weird animation, like a box in, or diamond out, or those Venetian blind thingies.

Calling attention to the chart is not necessary; it’s the only thing on the slide. What is needed here is to direct attention, and that requires more thought. If using an outside service requires 10 minutes irrespective of quantity, that becomes the baseline for the point to be made. Show all of those at once, instead of showing the data in pairs across the five quantities.

Once that point has been driven home, then you can turn the audience’s attention to the task of sending out the emails without outside assistance. Each of those five bars in the graph can be introduced on a click, the last one set on a long slow wipe from bottom to top for drama and comic relief.

Several good things happen when you use animation this way:

Your audience really gets it: I’m a big believer in separating form and content to promote understanding. Offering up the empty chart is a great way to prepare your audience for what they are about to see.

You control the pace: Charts are usually displayed too quickly, leaving audience members with the feeling that they’re drinking from a fire hose. If you suspect that members of your audience are not clear on what it is you’re about to show them, you can wait until they understand before continuing.

You become more confident: You have control of your audience in the palm of your hand (perhaps literally, if you use a wireless remote). Without being too crass about it, this position of advantage will likely manifest itself in a positive way.

You create trust: This is a great way for you to bond with them, by assuring them that you are not going to hurry them through data-heavy content. PowerPoint audiences are so often on guard in case a presenter does something ridiculous with animation or obnoxious with content, it’s amazing that they remember anything. Give them a soft landing with a heavy slide and they’ll remember it. They’ll relax and be more receptive to your ideas.

With that example under your belt, think about how you might animate the infographic in Figure 2 (above,) a progression of prices based on level of service. If you throw it all out there at once, you jeopardize potential impact, understanding, and appreciation. Furthermore, you will have to play catch-up and will likely find yourself explaining the slide more than sharing your ideas.

Instead, show your audience the continuum of pricing first, without offering any specifics. They’ll get it right away: it’s going to be a comparison of services, based on price. Now bring in each price point, one by one, speaking to it as you go.

Must you?

With any project like this, your use of animation must pass a litmus test of necessity. Is it needed, is it helpful, will there be benefit? If you can’t answer yes to these, the animation fails the litmus test and shouldn’t be used. Even if it passes this litmus test, continue to scrutinize its use, asking yourself repeatedly what would be the best sequence, the best pace, and the best animation choice to create a blended and seamless presentation of an otherwise complicated topic.

You do that and you use animation in the best way. And if you do that, you distinguish your presentation visuals from just about all others out there today.

Too Much Text!

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:45:00 GMT

This is a guest post contributed by Rick Altman, a world-renowned presentation consultant, PowerPoint expert, author, and the organizer of PowerPoint Live.

It is rare in modern-day business presentations to see a problem or difficulty that isn’t in some way caused by an overabundance of projected text. Just off the top of my head...

Speaker reading the slides
Audience tuning out and/or developing eye fatigue
Lack of emotion or energy in room
No real connection created between speaker and audience

All of these pitfalls usually boil down to slides that try too hard, that compete for attention, and that become distractions. Here are the four typical reasons why you as the presenter might make this mistake and how you can best avoid it in the future:

1. You Do Not Know Any Better

In the first installment of this series, we spoke of the multitude of PowerPoint users whose bridge to the software was their proficiency with other Office applications. If you come from Word and you are new to PowerPoint, you don’t know that writing out an entire document in PowerPoint is the wrong thing to do. It might seem like a perfectly logical way to prepare: write down what you want to say and then say it. And hey, there’s this software program that will show you everything that you’ve written down, so your audience can see it, too.

Of the four problem areas we define here, this one is the easiest to address: You learn the fundamentals of good presentation design. You have no bad habits yet and few preconceived notions. You’re just green. You just need to buy a good book...

2. You Are Addicted

This problem is not so easy to solve and in our line of work, we see it all the time: the presenters who feels as if they cannot function unless fully-formed thoughts are on each slide. While this usually finds its roots in the 47-minute syndrome discussed in the first installment (this is how they learned to use PowerPoint and they never questioned it or tried anything different), if you suffer from this, it has grown into a crutch without which you believe you cannot stand.

No question about it, one of today’s most acute pain points is when speakers use their slides as notes. It leads to the first three universal axioms that we will put forth across this series:

If a slide contains complete sentences, it is practically impossible for even the most accomplished presenters to avoid reading the entire slide word for word.

Watch for it the next time you attend a presentation: the more verbiage a slide contains, the more likely is the speaker to read all of it. This axiom leads directly into a second one:

When you read your slides word for word, you sound like an idiot.

This addiction needs to be kicked cold turkey: You need to force yourself to parse your bullets to the absolute bare minimum and then try speaking to them. At first, you might feel naked out there without your comfortable safety net, but in our experience, by the second time, you will begin to feel comfortable without the security blanket of all that text, and by the third time, you will thrive.

So many good things happen when you weed-whack your text, but above all, now there is the likelihood that the real person inside of you might come out, as opposed to the drone who was reading those slides before. Now your audience might really have an opportunity to engage with your ideas and feel the weight of your message. Once you get out from under your slides, you take the first step toward truly connecting with your audience on a level other than the intellectual. As presenters, that is our promised land.

3. You Are Trying to Create Leave-Behinds

How many times have you been to a presentation in which the speaker printed out his or her slides and delivered them as notes? How many times have you done this? In my opinion, this fails every time. In 15 years as a presentation consultant, I have never once seen a single slide deck function successfully as printed material and projected content. Not once!

There is just no free lunch here: If you prepare your slide deck properly, with engaging visuals and minimal text, it would be inadequate as supplemental documentation to your presentation. If you create fully-fleshed-out documentation that would be well-suited for printouts and you project them as your slide content...instant Death by PowerPoint.

This is a tough one, because I know that the unavoidable conclusion here is extra work for you. You must create two documents to do it right. With slide deck deadlines that are routinely “yesterday,” this is a tough pill to swallow and I have no illusions to the contrary. I refer you to our current Article of the Month for tangible and specific solutions to this dilemma.

4. You Are Required to

I see this more and more in my travels as a consultant: the presenter who feels compelled or is literally required to display and say out loud a lengthy passage of text. An annual shareholders meeting...a proposal at a city council meeting...safety guidelines for visitors at a public gathering...these often carry legal or fiduciary requirements.

But we have already established the high fire danger of displaying lengthy content and then reciting it off the screen. So what do you do?

The recipe for success here is the order in which you do things:

Offer up the most minimal bullet points for the required passage.
Recite the entirety of your required message.
Then display the entirety of your required message.

Doing it this way resonates at a profoundly different frequency; now you’re not a drone, you’re omniscient! Say it first...display it second—that makes all the difference in the world when you are faced with this type of requirement in a public presentation.

Please take from this article one simple conclusion: Less text on your slides!

Make sure you read Rick Altman's next article "Thriving with Animation!"

The Real Problem with PowerPoint®

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:00:00 GMT

This is a guest post contributed by Rick Altman, a world-renowned presentation consultant, PowerPoint expert, author, and the organizer of PowerPoint Live.

Anyone in today’s workplace knows what’s wrong with business presentations and the software of choice for 99% of those giving them. Just about everyone has experienced Death by PowerPoint, and based on statistics, you have probably committed it on more than one occasion.

Everyone can cite the biggest offenses:

too much text on slides,
lack of forethought,
little regard for message,
unimaginative design,
and those awful animations.

Indeed, Googling “i hate powerpoint” returns hundreds of thousands of hits. And the edgy title of my current book, Why Most PowerPoint Presentations SUCK… And how you can make them better, has struck a respondent chord among potential readers.

But these are the symptoms of the problems facing the business presentation community, they are not the reasons. Why are these things happening? What is the real problem?

You might think that it’s because the software is too hard to learn, but you’d be wrong. In fact, you would be as wrong as you could possibly be.

The problem is that PowerPoint is too easy.

We conducted a survey at the 2006 PowerPoint Live User Conference in which we asked a simple question:

How much time did you spend learning the software?

We asked this question of the 217 attendees, each of whom spent over $800 and took several days out of their work schedule in order to attend. In other words, we asked the most committed, vested, devoted users of the software that you’ll ever find.

The average time spent learning PowerPoint was 47 minutes. Most said they spent less than one hour learning PowerPoint and a handful put the number at 15 minutes. This is the tool to which they owe their livelihoods and prior to coming to PowerPoint Live, they had invested mere minutes in training time.

And that’s because the software is really quite easy to begin using. Both of my daughters created slides at eight years old. You don’t need much training to get around and do stuff.

And that’s a big, big problem.

I come to the presentation community from the publishing and graphics industry, where the software really is hard. If you want to learn Adobe Photoshop, you know you need help. We used to get 400 and 500 people to attend our seminars on CorelDraw and Ventura Publisher, and I wrote edition after edition of books on those subjects.

But the PowerPoint user is typically someone who either showed proficiency with the other Office products or was found to not be shy in public gatherings. He or she was asked to learn PowerPoint and was able to do it in short order, like 47 minutes, and has gone on to spend the next five years using only the tools and the maneuvers learned during those first 47 minutes...

If you stink at Excel, you do so in the privacy of your own cubicle. But if your PowerPoint skills are bad, entire roomfuls of people see it.

So no wonder!

The good news is that we see a change in this trend. Attendance is up at learning events, many more books are published discussing advanced concepts, and most of us active as presentation consultants are seeing upticks in businesses.

More important, companies are finally starting to get it. Historically, most organizations have invested far more on their printed brand than on their in-person one. They would spend millions of dollars on logo design and advertising, yet for what is usually the first impression – the sales call or proposal in the boardroom – they would send someone out with a 47-minute skill-set.

Now these same companies are beginning to realize the importance of presentation skills development, and this is welcome news.

What are the important skills needed by content creators, slide designers, PowerPoint jockeys, and presenters who have had their consciousness raised? That will be the subject of our next posting…

Make sure you read Rick Altman's next article on the root cause of many bad PowerPoint presentations, Too Much Text!