Rethinking Power Point

Rethinking PowerPoint:
Improving Presentations With Techniques at Engage e Mind
by Allyssa Ritch Ron Galloway

2011 Method Content LLC ISBN 9781928885009 rethinkingpowerpoint.com
Rethinking PowerPoint
Introduction 5 People interviewed for this project 9 e Trouble With PowerPoint 14 Planning Your Presentation 23 Storytelling 30 Slide Layout 41 Michael Alley's Assertion-Evidence Method 44 How Many Slides Should You Have? 64 How To Get Audio & Visuals Working Together 70 Text Vs. Graphics 74 Regarding Bullet Points 86 Grouping Items On A Slide 90 e Content Of Slide Visuals 94 Presenting With Simple Pictures 101 Extraneous Information and E ects 106 oughts On Charts 111 Animation 121
Lines 127 Background 129 On Fonts 136 Handouts 141 Knowing Your Audience 147 Dealing With Presentation Nervousness 156 Stage Preparation 166 Inspire, Entertain & Educate 170 Don't Put Up Barriers 176 Don't Read Your Slides 179 Presentation Styles 182 e Value Of Closing e Blank Screen 190
e Presentation 197
How to Handle the Q & A Period 202 Who Are Todays Great Presenters? 205 Peter Norvigs Gettysburg Address PowerPoint 211 e Future Of Presentations 214
10 Tips From Ron Galloway 216 How PowerPoint Got Its Name 218
Introduction More than 300 million people use PowerPoint, from CEOs to 2nd graders, from pastors to lawyers. It has been said that PowerPoint presentations (which includes Keynote, SlideRocket, etc.) are the most used form of business communication in the world today. If this is so, a lot of information is being lost in the noise of poor slide design and presentation. Four years ago I made a documentary about WalMart, which had the end result of my appearing on lots of network news shows. Speaking agents started calling me because of this, and all of a sudden I had a second career as a public speaker, presenting mostly to business audiences on topics that mostly involved WalMart.
When I started presenting, I didnt use slides at all. I just spoke. I quickly came to realize, however, that meeting planners and audiences expected a slide deck to go along with the speech. So I started working with PowerPoint, and in the beginning I used the templates o ered when you open the program, and the Type Text Here box. I defaulted to bullet point structure because that is what I had seen others do. My results were OK, but not great, as re ected by the scores on audience evaluations. I then watched Steve Jobs give his presentation of the iPhone, and was struck at how much information he conveyed in his presentations, using minimal graphics and text. Sometimes he would have just one word on the screen. I started to emulate his slide design and method of delivery, getting rid of bullet points, using meaningful pictures instead of clip art, and telling a story. Lo and behold, my audience evaluation scores went way up, and I started getting hired to speak a lot more. Plus, I enjoyed giving the speeches more. Rather than reading from a bullet-
ridden slide I simply used slides to augment what I was saying, matching the visuals with my remarks, and not using notes at all. I was so intrigued by the change in my audiences reception of me that I decided to try and gure out why some slide decks and methods of presentation were better at making information stick than others. Making the content stick, after all, is the goal of a presentation. My thinking was that if you cleared up all the noise of poor slide design and ine ective presentation, the bandwidth of the information being presented would be increased, and people would learn more. So I spent a year traveling the country, interviewing experts about slide design and presenting for the lm Rethinking PowerPoint. But a 90 minute lm can only present so much information. What follows is the full text of the interviews from the lm, and what is interesting to me are the common threads that run through the interviews as regards to the best way to design a great slide deck and then give the speech.
is is a book by a nerd for nerds, at least presentation nerds. It is roughly organized by subject, and what I decided to do was use the format Locus Magazine uses in their interviews, i.e., they let their subjects talk. I hope you learn a lot from them. I know I did. Ron Galloway Producer, Rethinking PowerPoint
People interviewed for this project Ric Bretschneider was a previous team leader for PowerPoint and Microsoft. Seth Godin is the author of 13 books including Linchpin. Dr. Karen ole is the Dept. Head of Mechanical and
Nuclear Engineering at Penn State. Richard Harrington is the CEO of RHED Pixel. He is author of Understanding Adobe Photoshop CS4 and How to Wow with PowerPoint. Melissa Marshall teaches in the Department of Communications at Penn State.
Michael Alley is a teacher at Penn State. He is the author of e Craft of Scienti c Presentations. Rick Altman is the author of Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck & How You Can Make He is also the host of e Presentation Summit. e Missing em Even Better.
Lesa Snider is the author of Photoshop CS5: Manual.
Dr. Andrew Abela is the associate professor of marketing at the Catholic University of America. He developed the Extreme Presentation method and has also authored e Presentation: A Creating Story About Communicating Successfully With Very Few Slides and Advanced Presentations by Design: Communication that Drives Action. Dr. Tom Litzinger is the head of the Leonhard Center at Penn State.
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Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google. He is coauthor of AI: A Modern Approach Programming. Dan Roam is the founder of Digital Roam, Inc. He is also the author of e Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and Unfolding the Napkin. Dr. Carmen Taran is one of the founders of Rexi Media. She also is the author of Better Beginnings. Julie Terberg is the CEO of Terberg Design and author of Perfect Medical Presentations. Carmine Gallo is a presentation, media training and communication skills coach for Gallo Communications. He is a columnist for Businessweek.com as well as the author of Front of Any Audience and Fire em Up! e Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great In and Paradigms of AI
Scott McCloud is author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics.

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Jennifer Van Sijll teaches screenwriting at the Art Institute in San Francisco. Storytelling. Greg Smith is a professor at Georgia State University. He is the author of Film Structure and the Emotion System. Joanna Garner is an assistant professor for the Dept. of Psychology at Penn State Berks. Sarah Zappe is the Director of Assessment & Instructional Support at the College of Engineering at Penn State. Jennifer Groh is the associate professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. Steven Kosslyn serves as the Dean of Social Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including Graph Design for the Eye and She is also the author of Cinematic
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Mind, Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, and Better Powerpoint. Nancy Duarte is the founder and CEO of Duarte Design. She is the author of slide:ology: e Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations and Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. She also designed the slides for Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth. Nigel Holmes is the author of Wordless Diagrams.
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e Trouble With PowerPoint It's A PowerPoint World SETH GODIN: I think that because its a monopoly, other than keynote on the Mac, it is the one software program that has changed the way people communicate. e rst new way of communicating since they invented word processing. KAREN THOLE: One of the things that I've found in
working with industry, and we work closely with industry in our research, is that industry is becoming a PowerPoint world. It really is. It used to be in the old days people would write reports to communicate their results, but things move too quickly now to write a full report. So they are relying on their PowerPoint slides to communicate the information quickly. at means the PowerPoint slides, because they serve as the document to communicate research, need to stand alone in some cases because
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you are not hearing the presentation. So its very important that people know how to create good slides. SETH GODIN: We should start by understanding the
history of PowerPoint. PowerPoint was invented to help engineers explain what they were doing to non-engineers. Its function from the very beginning was not to replace the memo or to replace the public speech or to replace the essay. Its function was to allow someone who wasn't necessarily very good at interpersonal communications to put up some basic points for someone who was good at it. RICHARD HARRINGTON: PowerPoint is just a
playback engine and when it becomes a way for you to deliver the content you want, then its a great tool. Just like when you look at the print publishing community, they don't say, Wow, look at what were doing with Quark or InDesign. Its just like Well, no, that's where we put all the photos together and the words together.
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We create something thats professional and easy for the audience to consume. It lets us get our product out there. PowerPoint is just that, its a delivery mechanism. MELISSA MARSHALL: I think the best way that a speaker can really use PowerPoint to their advantage is to think of your slides as doing something for you that you can not do with the verbal aspects of your presentation. By verbal, I mean the words that you're saying as a speaker. I think that your slides should be the extra medium that you have. doing things that words cannot. So think of your slides as To me that means visual
images, things that go along with what you're saying, things that either emphasize what you're saying in a visual way, or things that provide visual evidence for what you are saying in your talk. MICHAEL ALLEY: I think what PowerPoint can do is it can focus the audience's attention to something that is in the presentation. When you're presenting science and engineering you are often giving the audience a lot of details, and the audience is trying to sort out whats important and whats not important. What the visual aid can do is help that audience focus.
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RICK ALTMAN: We did a survey at the conference several years ago. We asked people, how much time they spent learning the software. ese are the people who are the most invested in the industry, they've spent a few thousand dollars and four days out of their life to come learn about presentation content and delivery. Most of them told us it that it took them less than an hour. Often, it was a half hour. A few of them said fteen minutes. ey spent fteen minutes learning PowerPoint and e
they declared themselves pro cient. e problem is not that the software is so di cult. problem is that it is too easy. My daughters both created slides when they were ten years old. It's not hard at all to start using PowerPoint. e problem is that people therefore think that, is is easy, I can create slides. I can go give a presentation. ey equate pro ciency with the software, whether they actually have it or not. ey equate that with the ability to craft a message, at's pretty tell a story, design a presentation, and then deliver it. good software that can do all that.
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LESA SNIDER:
ey just have no training in it.
ey have
no idea that its important to communicate through imagery. ey have no idea how to handle imagery because most of the business folks that are putting together presentations have never had any kind of training on graphics whatsoever. ey have no idea what pixel dimensions mean. no idea how to size their graphics for presentations. collages, that kind of thing. never had any kind of training. ey have ey just
don't know how to work with graphics, knock out graphics, make ey have no clue because they've ey just sit down at this job and
all of a sudden they need to create a presentation and they've always seen the dreaded march of the bullet points, so thats what they do. ANDREW ABELA: For some reason, within the
corporations I work with, PowerPoint is the default communication tool for internal communication, even at Microsoft. When I'm in workshops with them, I chastise them for using PowerPoint basically as a glori ed word processor. I remind them that they already have an e ective word processing
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tool called Word but they still persist in using PowerPoint for any form of communication internally. RICHARD HARRINGTON: I don't have a problem with PowerPoint, you just don't want to apply it to everything. My favorite phenomenon is people who use PowerPoint to make posters. Cant they just use a page layout program? A lot of people in the medical community use PowerPoint because its vector based. ey design posters in it and then they print it out for If you are only their conferences or for when they are doing their board style presentations because its a tool they know. comfortable using a screw driver and you have to get a nail in the wall, you can get a nail in the wall with a screw driver, its just not the most e ective way. People use what they know. We want to get information out there. We want to share. We want to express our ideas and PowerPoint is easy to use. at doesn't mean that people use it well. Its not an intimidating tool. You can open things up and with a few clicks you've got words on a slide and you're dropping in pictures. I think what happens is that a lot of people aren't comfortable with public speaking, so
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now they have a crutch.
ey are able to get their information
organized and they feel that if they have an organized presentation, theyll have a good presentation. TOM LITZINGER: What happens with traditional
PowerPoint is that I, and a lot of others, use it as a crutch. Everything you want to say is sort of bulleted out there. So its an outline for you, which in some ways is not what the audience needs to see. PETER NORVIG: I think its homogenizing. If you use PowerPoint as its intended then the very worst presentations will get better. e ones where the speaker can't remember their points, now at least they can, because they can read the bullet points. On the other hand, if you use them as intended then the best presentations would get worse. So its a way to get things up to the middle level, but if you want to get them beyond that, you will have to be a little more creative.
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PowerPoint bullets don't kill people, people kill people. You can use PowerPoint well or you can use it poorly. the presenters fault not PowerPoints fault. DAN ROAM: PowerPoint has the unfortunate position of ats really
really being the whipping boy of all thats wrong in presentations. Lets face it, PowerPoint is just a tool. PowerPoint is a hammer, PowerPoint is a bat, right? You would never blame the bat if is is the someone doesn't get a home run. You'd never blame the hammer if the house falls down that someone built with it. problem that PowerPoint has. We all wave our ngers at PowerPoint and say, Its making us stupid. Death by PowerPoint, all of this kind of thing. Again, it is just a tool. How you use that tool determines how e ective you are going to be in building your house or in giving your presentation. CARMEN TARAN: I struggle with that because I struggle with anything that's templatized. I think we are turning into a cliched generation of users. Click here to add title. at's a generation that is not doing justice to the piece of software. It's
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unfortunate because blaming those kinds of templates, and those invitations to click to add text, is almost like blaming bad poetry on the pencil.
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Planning Your Presentation RICK ALTMAN: Well, this all gets back to the whole
question of how you would actually start a project like this. I think you have to get away from the computer when you are going to start any sort of creative project. PowerPoint is the worst place to begin a project. It might be a really good place to end up, but the computer in general is really a very bad place to begin any sort of creative project. ere's just so much temptation to make it perfect with backspace, autocorrect, and type text here. way to try to be creative. here box. smart. at's just the wrong You'd be much better o with the at is
proverbial cocktail napkin than you would with the type text at's a place where you can scribble notes. no good, throw it away, and start over. ats where you become
at's really where the creative process begins, when you
can have bad ideas and throw them away and start over. Its very di cult to do that on the computer. People just want to make it perfect the rst time.
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JULIE TERBERG: Step away from PowerPoint and make sure you have a really good story to tell, a logical, compelling story. If you're reporting something make sure you have your en think about what visuals you can create to facts and gures.
help your audience understand and remember those main points. is is for your audience. It's not for you. Realize that you have access to speaker notes, you can print out your notes or you can use presenter view. You do not need to have every word up on the screen. If you put every word on the screen your audience is going to read it. If they are reading, they are not listening to you. You can not read and pay attention at the same time. If someone is coming to hear you as a So professional speaker, they are there to listen to you. Your visuals should support your message but not include every point. keep it simple on the screen, elaborate in your script and rehearse. CARMINE GALLO: e most important thing is to have a
story to tell before you open your PowerPoint le. Steve Jobs may have made his money in the digital world of bits and bites but he plans in the very old world of pen and paper, or in his case, he likes to whiteboard and sketch. I think that is the best way of
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creating the narrative, creating the story. Its not that e ective to open up PowerPoint and jump in there and start creating slides. Why? Because you are losing the big picture. You are losing the story. In fact, PowerPoint makes it easy to be mediocre, because what's the rst thing you see, a template for a headline and bullet points. ere are no bullet points in a Steve Jobs presentation. In order to visualize the narrative and to Its highly visual.
visualize the story; sketch, white board, and think about things. What are the elements that are going to be in your presentation? Are you going to have a demo? Are you going to shut o the PowerPoint for a minute and conduct a demonstration? Are you going to stage it like a theatrical event and bring on other characters? Steve Jobs always introduces employees or partners to share the stage with him. PowerPoint. Its much more than just the words on the If you begin a PowerPoint presentation by opening
up the software, thats not exactly the most e ective way of creating a narrative that ultimately inspires and excites people.
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PETER NORVIG:
I think one of the limitations of
PowerPoint is that it does not separate out the various phases of research, guring out what you are going to say, and practicing what you are going to say. ose are all tied together. en you actually have to present it. Sometimes when I'm preparing a
presentation I write down bullet points, kind of as notes, but then I almost always take them out. I nd that the more I take out the better. ese are things that I want to talk about, not things that I want to have written on the slide. RICHARD HARRINGTON: What I see a lot of times is that people start in PowerPoint instead of starting in a more traditional sense with a pad of paper and then moving into a word processor. ey just jump right in and start writing. I think that that really ties into the faster culture, the faster pace of business. ey think, I have to create. I have to get this out there. Why am I wasting all my time with all this pre-thought? Lets just start creating the presentation and get it ready, so I can get to market faster. Its an easy program and when used e ectively, its a great program. But a lot of people bypass some of the necessary steps.
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Like building a house, sure you could just go to the hardware store, buy all the ingredients, start pounding things into the ground, but what are you going to get when you're done building? Where were the blueprints? Where was the design stage? A lot of people skip that really to their detriment. PETER NORVIG: Another way to look at it is to compare it to software for playwriting or for movie writing. ey have tools at the beginning where you are asked to enter in the characters and who they are. You enter Jeeves as the butler and that he's tall and thin. But thats all in the tools you use as an author. It doesn't mean you present that information rst and just throw it up there on the screen. It means you hide it. You present it just at the right time in the movie. PowerPoint doesn't really separate out those di erent aspects of preparing your notes versus presenting them at just the right time. So I think thats one of the issues. RICHARD HARRINGTON: PowerPoint or tools like it are a way to visually organize your information. I sometimes use it as part of the speech writing process. When I'm putting my
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speeches or my presentations together I don't necessarily know the exact order of everything. You'll have chunks and segments. You are going to talk about this point and that point. Look at it as a representation of your overall speech. Use it to re-organize things, condense things down, or to decide that this information is too detailed. Lets simplify that or lets expand on this. So as a teacher or as a presenter, I sometimes use it as an organization tool to second guess or go through my thoughts. CARMEN TARAN: I think the moment I became detached from it is when I got closer to it. In other words, I forgot about what everybody was blaming the software for and looked at the invitations and the promises that it could make in terms of, for instance, visual thinking. If you were detached from click to add title here, then the possibilities are endless, you can do anything in that four by three area. MICHAEL ALLEY: Richard Feynman left Los Alamos after WWII and then started working as a professor at Cornell in the late 1940s and 1950s. He was amazed at how tired he was at night and unable to do research. What he ended up realizing is
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that the classes he was teaching during the day were taking up much more time than he expected they would. that he gave for those classes. In fact, in the early 1960s, when he did his famous Feynman lecture series on physics, which has essentially just been captured and placed into books and sold thousands and thousands of copies, he decided that he was going to do no research for those two years. He was going to devote his entire time to putting together those large lectures on freshman physics. And you can see it in those lectures. So much is thought about. If you think about those freshman lectures that he gave, he was speaking for one hour and fteen minutes, twice a week, and he gave a full week on preparation. We are talking about two hours, and this is a guy I would guess easily worked fty hours. So he was probably giving twenty- ve hours of preparation to every one hour of speaking. It wasn't just going in the class and teaching the class, but it was the preparation
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Storytelling RICHARD HARRINGTON: storyteller. It ties back to who we are. SCOTT MCCLOUD: When I started exploring the forms of comics, I found that there were a lot of antecedents to it that went way before what people usually think of as comics. Antecedents like pre-Columbian picture manuscripts and certain Egyptian wall paintings. Not regular hieroglyphics nor picture writing necessarily, but places where people were actually presenting a sequence of images that were meant to tell a story. So I think every new form that comes along usually has antecedents that people have to recognize after the fact. ey realize that we can learn a lot from other forms of visual storytelling that took place many years before this thing was even cooked up, but that have a lot of relationships to what we are doing now. at's what I've tried to do with comics and I think that thats what some people are trying to do now with
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I think that PowerPoint is
really an area where everyone has this inherent need to be a
PowerPoint.
ey nd that there are a lot of traditions of visual
storytelling that have a lot in common with that tool. ANDREW ABELA: So why is storytelling important? I think there's storytelling at two levels. ere are the individual anecdotes, the little stories that you tell that sort of punctuate your presentation, and then there is turning your whole presentation into a story itself. I think the answer is the same for both, why both of them are important. through stories. I think, and there's some philosophers who will argue, that human beings make sense of life We see our own lives as stories and we see e raw data of our existence at a most If you know that and you want to history as a story.
elemental level is a story.
communicate well, then you communicate in a story because that's the common language that people have in their heads and in their lives. How do you do this? Obviously, for the little anecdotes, ose stories can come from that's just a question of nding little stories that reinforce the point that you are trying to make. far and wide because the role of the little anecdote is metaphorical. Its serving as a metaphor and the research on metaphors says that
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there doesn't have to be any connection between the subject matter of your metaphor and the subject matter you are explaining. mathematics. story. JENNIFER VAN SIJLL: In terms of something like So you could be telling a story from the animal e content doesn't matter so much so long as the kingdom or from history or from science to make a point about central point that you're trying to reinforce is reinforced by the
PowerPoint, I think that a really good, successful PowerPoint, whether its for business or even a social thing, will have a story. And just like in movies, there are certain requirements to making a good lm or making a good story. ANDREW ABELA: whole thing into a story? e question is how do we turn the e answer there I think comes from a
beautiful book called Moving Mountains by Henry Botinger. It came out in the sixties, I think. He was an AT&T executive who was very, very good at giving speeches and wrote a book about how to do it. He put together what I now call the SCORE
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method.
SCORE stands for situation, complication,
resolution, example. e situation is the set up to the story, the beginning to your presentation, the once upon a time. some kind of tension, some kind of question. course the answer to that. luxuriate in the resolution. e complication is a e resolution is of thing that raises a tension in the minds of the audience. It creates en, the example brings it down to en, BAM, another complication,
earth by giving some speci cs and allowing people to relax and resolution, example and you keep cycling through. VAN SIJLL: If you are doing a presentation what you really don't want to do is have 40 slides and then expect the audience to somewhat gure out what these slides mean. What you want to do is chapter or chunk them yourself. For example: out of those 40 slides you might have a chunk of ten slides broken into a beginning slide, an ending slide and then the meat of the matter is in the middle slides. en you go to the next scene, the next chunk of slides, and start again. An introductory slide, the meat of the matter which is a highlight or
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key point underscored with some great visuals or sound, the end slide, and then go again. So that the overall structure isn't a beginning, a middle, and an end. In other words, you break down your material into episodes so that you have bite size material that has its own structure, its own rhythm. Each episode is more interesting than the one before and that kind of entices you to continue. ANDREW ABELA: and again and again. ere's only one situation at the e one thing that is common across all
beginning and then its complication, resolution, example, again stories is this tension and resolution. Create tension in the mind of the audience, resolve it. Create it, resolve it. You can see this in all great art, in paintings, and in architecture. JENNIFER VAN SIJLL: Well in most Hollywood movies, there's three acts. ere's 30 minutes in the rst, 30 on the is summer I went to France ey have one outside and then 60 in the middle.
with my eleven year old daughter and I dragged her to Chartres. Its one of the oldest medieval churches in France. wall remaining from the year eleven hundred when the church was
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burned down. On this wall were three multi-paned windows. glass of the story of Christ.
was just amazed to see that there was basically a bio pic in stained e relationship between the windows and the narrative storytelling was really quite amazing. And so, what you saw when you looked up, you saw these three windows. e third window had more or less fourteen e center window had frames, that would have been Act 3.
twenty-eight frames, double the size of the third one, and then the rst, I think it had seven or eight frames. What was interesting is that just like in a movie, you have the setup, in this case it was basically Christ's legacy. All the people who came before, all the prophets of Christ, etc. Act 2 was from nativity on, the birth of Christ and then the story, all his struggles, in twenty-eight panes, just like in a movie. en Act 3 started with the trans guration, It was the then the betrayal, the supper and the cruci xion.
climax. And so, here you had in these some fty odd frames, just like in a lm today, storytelling, a narrative story told in glass, no words etc., which was so analogous it was stunning. ANDREW ABELA: What they're doing is resolving some kind of a problem for you. Music is a great example. Melody
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creates and resolves tension. In my workshops, I have the whole room singing a song and then I pause them part way through the song at the climactic point in the melody and ask, How do you feel? Everybody's response is that its un nished, that they feel incomplete. You know they want to nish. at's what you want to try to do with a presentation. You are continually creating and resolving tension for your audience. It makes for a ow of presentation that is very di erent from the sort of more logical, structured, boring approach that we typically use. Instead the approach is to raise a problem that your audience has, resolve that problem, raise another one, resolve that, raise a reaction or a comeback, resolve that and just keep owing that way. GREG SMITH: Torben Grodal is a Danish lm scholar who works from a cognitive perspective. He thinks that what happens to our emotions during lm viewing is what he calls a ow model. Once we get started in a lm we are moving in a particular direction toward a goal, just like the character. get the ring or whatever object the character is after.
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character wants to nd out whodunnit or the character wants to e character
has a goal and we follow that character and ally our emotions with that character. Our emotions are owing forward. Films put obstacles in front of that character. When lms put obstacles in front of characters it also blocks the ow of our emotions. We can't get where those emotions would like for us to go. So, lms create tension by blocking the character with A lm can obstacles. Similarly, we get our emotions blocked. the emotional e ects for us are multiplied.
then draw that out by continuing to delay us from our goal and Films can create suspense and fear by blocking our emotions from going forward. CARMINE GALLO: I think Steve Jobs presentation of the iPad was classic Steve Jobs. Here's a guy who is the greatest corporate storyteller on the world stage and I don't think he disappointed on January 27th when he introduced the iPad. He comes out and he does a typical Steve Jobs trait. He comes out and he set the theme for the rest of the presentation by saying, We're going to kick o revolutionary product. at set the theme and set the groundwork for the rest of the presentation. en he added a little twist, a little suspense as he
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2010 by introducing a magical and
often does. He said, But before we get to that, let me bring you up to date on some other things. Some people started to laugh, but to me that really re ected something that goes back 20, 30 years in terms of his presentation style. He sets the theme up front. He gives you a big grand vision and creates the excitement. en he kind of pulls back a little bit and just lets the excitement build. Its almost like a great novel. He doesn't reveal the entire narrative on the front page. He doesn't give away the story right out of the gate. He teases you a little bit and then he backs up and sets it up. Its building to the climax, building to the ultimate resolution which is this fantastic new product. JENNIFER VAN SIJLL: story, is a dramatized argument. is idea that a great lm, a great Whether you like it or not, ere's a controlling idea.
there's a controlling idea even in Mulan, or any other Disney movie or western or whatever it is. ere's a moral. You investigate it and you show all di erent points of view. You look at all the options that the hero has, with each sidekick representing one of the possible viewpoints that the hero could move to.
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I think in a successful presentation this is done as well. You will have a more convincing, credible presentation if you don't just show your point of view, but you also present the views of the detractors and then dismantle your toughest, best opponent. CARMINE GALLO: e one very unique thing that Steve
Jobs does in every presentation is what I call introducing an antagonist. In other words, he sets up a villain, an enemy. He creates an enemy so that people can rally around the hero. So in the iPad announcement in January, he talked about 2 devices that people use. He said, We all use smartphones now and notebook computers. Well, is there room for a third category? If we did create a device for a third category it would have to do things better than a smartphone or a notebook. It would have to be a better browser and do better video and better photographs. Well, there are netbooks out there. Netbooks don't do anything better. en he said, ey're just cheap PCs.
In other words, he set up a problem. Once he sets up the problem then that opens the door for the solution, the hero. Enter the hero, and thats Apple.
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GREG SMITH: When I'm feeling down and I need to pep myself up I'll watch the rst half hour of Tootsie as being just the greatest example of very e cient and modern Hollywood storytelling. I think whats really terri c about the rst half hour of Tootsie is that there is no extraneous information whatsoever. Every little bit of the things that we see on screen tells us something about Michael Dorsey or his situation. Its so e cient. Its just beautiful storytelling because there's nothing that needs to be added to that. One of the things that I think that every storyteller needs to think about is being e cient. If you continue to give me information after I got it then I'm bored. If you don't give me enough information then I'm a bit lost. Its nding that sweet spot between too much information and too little information. ats the real art of storytelling and the rst half hour of Tootsie, right before the rst time Michael Dorsey puts on the dress, that is brilliant and e cient Hollywood storytelling.
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Slide Layout ANDREW ABELA: I think that slide layout has to be one of the most powerful but one of the most underutilized tools in presentation. When you design the slide so that the audience immediately gets what the point of the slide is from the moment they see it, then they can sit back and relax and listen to you. Whereas, if you present them with a long list of bullet points they start reading those bullet points to try to understand what it is in front of them. For example, if the slide visually shows two alternatives. It is obvious to the audience before you even say a word that you are going to be describing these two alternatives and perhaps talking about the choices that people face. If the slide shows a balance, or a weigh scale, in balance or out of balance, then the presenter will probably talk about this thing that is in or out of balance. So if you design it so they get immediately from the layout of the slide what you are trying to say, the persuasion and the communication is that much stronger.
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RICK ALTMAN: When you start in PowerPoint what do you get? e default: title, bullet, bullet, bullet. I don't know about you, but I don't know too many good ideas that can be represented by title, bullet, bullet, bullet; and yet about 175,000 people try every single day. A lot of this simply gets back to the whole notion that they learn PowerPoint in a half hour and that is all they know. So they know title, bullet, bullet, bullet. It comes up when they issue the new slide command. So, they try to stu their ideas into that little box. Its very, very di cult to do and they usually fail. Hence, death by PowerPoint. SETH GODIN: e problem is that Microsoft has driven
the users of PowerPoint to make worse and worse presentations. ey have colluded with our desire as human beings to t into boxes so that we won't get in trouble. So, if you use the templates that are built into PowerPoint you will by de nition make a lousy presentation. If you do presentations to defend yourself with lots of bullets and lots of cover your ass kind of material you will by de nition make a lousy presentation. So my argument is 1. You probably shouldn't use PowerPoint at all
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because you're going to do it poorly. 2. If you do use PowerPoint you need to use it in a way that it wasn't designed to be used.
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Michael Alley's Assertion-Evidence Method MICHAEL ALLEY: In the 1980s, after I had nished my MFA in ction writing, I went to work as a technical editor at Sandia National Labs. ere I became interested in this question about how engineers and scientists, and later, the bigger question about anyone, how we should communicate our work. At that time I was mainly working with reports and I wasn't necessarily interested that much in the many presentations given by engineers and scientists. However, there was this certain style of making slides that came out of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. What had happened is that they had gone to a conference in Washington and their presenters did so much better than the presenters at the other national labs that our national lab, Sandia, decided that they were going to do their slides the way that they do. After I left Sandia, I started noticing other presentations and I was thinking that they werent working. My gut instinct was that this other approach is better. I didn't necessarily have a name for it. I just called it the Lawrence Livermore Approach, but it
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was this approach that a fellow there by the name of Larry Gottlieb taught to so many di erent engineers and scientists. became the status quo. Afterwards, I talked with Larry and I found out that he had gotten it from a guy by the name of Robert Perry who taught at Hughes Aircraft. Gottlieb also talked about its roots being in lm, particularly the lms of Alfred Hitchcock. When Hitchcock would think about his lms he would storyboard these lms with a single sentence above a picture of each scene. I didn't necessarily think too much about the origin but I was continually still asking how we as scientists and engineers should communicate our work. Whats going to be the best way? I looked for di erent ways that might be e ective, but out of all the presentations that I was seeing, this Lawrence Livermore Approach seemed more e ective than others. KAREN THOLE: at the top of the slide. audience. e assertion-evidence slide structure is ere is one major point, a particular is critical mass of people at this laboratory were using it and it
thought, that the slide is intending to communicate to the en, its backed up in the body of the slide either with
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a graph, or data, or an analysis that illustrates that main topic or point. MICHAEL ALLEY: e assertion-evidence approach is en, you support
essentially this: you write in a succinct sentence at the top of the slide what your main point of the slide is. that assertion not with a bullet list but with visual evidence; photographs, drawings, diagrams, lms, graphs, something that that audience can visually take in as they listen to you. Although you are expending more words up at the top, maybe twelve to fourteen words in your sentence, your actual number of words on the slide is going to be quite fewer. When I say assertion, in reference to science presentations, it could be an insight into how something works, a feature of the experiment that distinguishes it from other peoples experiments or a result. ose features, those results and insights, they're not ey are sentences. In the context of single words or phrases.
someone trying to communicate in science or engineering to an audience, you want them walking out the door not with a word, but with a sentence, with some principle or insight. It seems as if this is the real distinguishing factor between this assertion46
evidence approach and what I call the common practice, the topic-subtopic approach that PowerPoints default leads people to create. JOANNA GARNER: I think from the point of view of the work that Michael and us are doing here at Penn State, the point is that we are so far removed from those defaults. We are not just advocating for opening PowerPoint up, using the defaults and then adding a few images here and there. We are really looking at a very di erent slide design. I think that what happens is, if you open up PowerPoint, it says type text here. So people begin to type. ey let the structure of the slide dictate the direction that their presentation is going to go which is the opposite from the knowledge transforming idea that I talked about earlier. What you want is to be able to impose on the instructional, or the presentation media, what you want to be conveyed. You do not want to have the media dictate to you how you have to relate to your audience. MICHAEL ALLEY: ey are presenting in a box. ey are
allowing PowerPoints defaults to constrain them.

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JOANNA GARNER: I think one of the main drawbacks is the very fact that PowerPoint is so accessible. Its so easy to open it up and start designing your presentation, your talk or lesson plan, by using the default settings of PowerPoint. Whats easy to do is to create a nice lesson plan, a nice stream of ideas for yourself as the presenter, but that doesn't necessarily match the research about how audience members learn the best. You have to overcome those defaults by quite a signi cant margin before you start to map onto those principles about how people learn the best. So from a cognitive psych point of view, PowerPoint slides as they are typically structured don't follow the multimedia principles of learning. ese are principles that have been discovered and elaborated on by psychologists, notably Professor Richard Mayer who is at University of California Santa Barbara and his colleagues. ese principles derive from work on how people learn from multimedia presentations, presentations where children or adults are looking at a screen and there is some content, a system or a principle to be learned.
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He's found that typically there are 3 principles which are really important. of learning. e rst principle is the multimedia principle Of course we've all seen typical is states that people learn better when there is text
and images on the screen. image. learning.
PowerPoint slides where the slide is just full of text and there is no Right away that violates the multimedia principle of e second principle is the principle of coherence. is
principle states that individuals, especially novices do a lot better when extraneous details, anything which isn't completely central to the point that the presenter is trying to make or the concept that the presenter is trying to describe, are taken out of the slide or presentation. If they don't, if they include any kinds of extraneous details, then novices in particular have a hard time determining what is most important. For example, you see a typical topic and sub-topic structure where you have a phrase headline and you have some bulleted lists. Its very tempting if you're a presenter and you're creating those slides to include things on a bullet list. relevant.
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You just keep
typing, you think of this, and you think of that, and this is
Unfortunately, what can happen is that it might be relevant and important to you as the presenter, in part because it reminds you of what you wanted to say, but its not necessarily what is most meaningful for the audience. So the principle of coherence states only the most important, that the most central ideas should be on the slide. Anything else can be elaborated on during the dialogue that goes along with that slide or it should be taken out altogether. e third principle is the principle of signaling. is principle states that you have to signal the connections between the ideas in order to help a learner, or an audience member, understand the content. Once again, if you have a low amount of prior knowledge or background knowledge in a topic, you need to know how do these components t together? If you have a process or a sequence for example, its very helpful if its signaled well. A leads to B which leads to C which leads to D, or A and B are components of C. Technical information generally has some kind of structure like that. We know that in a semi technical presentation, novices in particular, children in school who are viewing PowerPoint presentations or even just your average audience member, can very quickly follow
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the details but are really not able to create that mental model, that dynamic integrated understanding of how the information together. So we know that PowerPoint slides as they are typically used tend to omit images completely or use just descriptive or decorative images. ey don't tend to help the student or the audience member see the connections among topics. MICHAEL ALLEY: If you look at the mastered default of PowerPoint what you see is this large text block at the top and then beneath that is this bullet list. An interesting question is if these defaults actually in uence people? e large size of the text block at the top, with such a large type, 44 pts, centered, appears to encourage most people to create either a very short sentence or more likely a phrase. One thing that we found in looking at statistics of hundreds and hundreds of slides of engineers and scientists, some in professional business meetings, some at conferences, some in classrooms, is that 85% of the time, when they teach, people have placed a phrase up at the top. Why? What's the basis for starting with a phrase? What we've also found is that when you look at
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ts
the body of the slide, 60% of the time, people have placed a bullet list. Why a bullet list? What's the rationale for using a bullet list? Gordon Shaw from 3M argues bullet lists do not show hierarchy and they do not show connections. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, railed on bullet lists. He thought that they were a serious mistake for people to use when they are trying to communicate science, because of this very point they don't show connections. JOANNA GARNER: Lets say you want to give a
presentation about electronic medical records. You sit down to create your PowerPoint presentation and you do it with a common practice, the default settings. You're going to be creating phrase headlines for each slide and then you are going to basically be creating an outline, almost like a textbook would have an outline format for the di erent chapters. You want to talk about this and that and this is important. Whereas, if you use the assertion-evidence structure, your default is a sentence. Whats the rst assertion I want to make about electronic medical records? Is it that they have bene ts over
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traditional medical records? Is it that they are more e cient? Is it that they reduce medical errors? You could almost see a presentation in the assertion-evidence format that has each of those things as being the assertions. It really changes the way, right from the beginning, that you think about the information that you want to present. MICHAEL ALLEY: I think a hidden bene t of the
assertion-evidence structure is that the presenter ends up with a much more focused presentation. If you look at this slide here by Scott Fishbone, an undergraduate, he was asked by his company to look at these two di erent kinds of headlights, halogen headlights which is what is standardly used, and then a Xenon headlight. He rst came up with the assertion of what he wanted to communicate to his managers. It was that the Xenon headlights illuminate signs better than halogen headlights do. Once he had that, then all he needed was just a couple of things for visual evidence. He found an experiment where they had done a study at the same place and at the same time of night. ey had shined the halogen headlights and then from that same position shined the Xenon headlight.
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He put those two
photographs side by side with just a simple call out. Hes then got a great slide that he could talk about in 2 minutes and communicate an important principle. Now, if he had started with PowerPoints default, he would have come up with some heading such as typically done results or sign light results or some such crazy thing. en there probably would have been some bullet list that talked about information that would have been better placed in his talk. Because he started with just that topic, the presentation is not nearly as focused. MELISSA MARSHALL: I think the power of the assertionevidence design lies in two areas. First of all, it really does help the presenter in the sense that it forces you as you think about the assertions to really identify what the key points and the key pieces of your argument are. It really forces you to identify those links in the structure that you are trying to make with your talk. You have to ask yourself with each slide, What is it that I want my audience to take away as a result of this slide? How does this assertion that I am going to make with this particular slide, how does that contribute to my overall argument that I am trying to make throughout the whole presentation?
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Ultimately, that process of going through and thinking about what's the purpose of this slide, what it does, is it makes your talk much more focused. wrestle with each slide. very tight and very precise. I also think that its very e ective once you get into the presentation situation. e assertion-evidence structure relies on little text, just one sentence that's concise, no more than two lines, and then it backs that assertion up with visual evidence. It helps you to make sure as a speaker, particularly if you are nervous or dont have that much speaking experience, that your key points, because you've already done that work with creating the assertions, are going to be communicated to your audience by that slide. en you'll be reminded to discuss and develop them in But because the body of the slide is devoted to visual evidence, it helps the audience to relate to that information in a way that is di erent from them just hearing it. I think the end result is a presentation that is much more memorable and also
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ere are no extra pieces that end up on I think its very helpful from that
each slide, or at least that's the goal because you're forced to standpoint of helping the presenter to create an argument that's
your presentation itself.
much more persuasive.
e audience is able to clearly see the
structure and elements of your argument and then you back them up with visual evidence and the information that you are providing as a speaker. SARAH ZAPPE: I'm completely convinced that when you are preparing slides in the assertion-evidence format that it completely changes the way that you develop a presentation, speaking personally as well as from the experience of collecting data from students, and informally from faculty who have created these slides. You have to really think about what the message is that you have for this slide. Whereas with traditional PowerPoint we often think of this as an outline format and just throw the text on the slide. It never really crosses your mind what the message that youre trying to get across in your presentation is. Whereas if you are limited by what you can actually have in a visual aid, one statement at the top and some form of evidence, a graphic or a photo, your assertion will be to the point. You will then be focused more on what you are actually saying verbally.
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TOM LITZINGER: I think there are de nite bene ts. In any form of communication, the clearer you are about the point you want to make, the more likely it is that you will make those points to your audience. e approach of using these assertion slides requires you to think very carefully about the point of the slide and to only put graphics on there that support that point. You have to be well-prepared because the material is not there on the slide in front of you. You can't count on the traditional PowerPoint format of having the bulleted points to help move you along. I think there is real power in that, although it takes longer to prepare and to nd the right graphics to tell your story, it does force you to think very carefully about the point that you want to make. MICHAEL ALLEY: When we talk about science and
engineering we give the audience so many details. Its hard for the audience to know what's important, what's not important, where should they be, how should they see these details in the context of the research, or the context of the story that theyre telling. What PowerPoint is deft at is that PowerPoint can focus attention. It can say, Listen audience, perhaps with a sentence at the top,
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here's the main thing that you should be thinking about. sentence.
en
you have all these di erent ways that you can then support that Does a sentence necessarily have to be up there if you are a great speaker, if you can nail the headline? Perhaps not, but its important that that speaker knows, Ok, that's really what I am trying to get across here with this visual aid. And then all the things you can then do with the body of the slide. Why the heck would you put in a bullet list when you can put in perhaps a photograph, or a series of photographs, or a drawing? JOANNA GARNER: ere's a theory called cognitive load
theory. It states that when people interact with information that they have to learn, depending on how the information is structured, whether its complex or technical, and also how its presented, increase or decrease what is called cognitive load. Cognitive load is basically the amount of work that your limited capacity processor (your brain) has to do in order to understand that information. Some cognitive load comes from the fact that the information is very technical and other cognitive load, extraneous cognitive load, comes from the fact that the
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information might be presented in a way that makes you work harder than you actually need to to understand that information. One of the bene ts of using a PowerPoint slide that has an assertion-evidence structure is we think it reduces the amount of extraneous or extrinsic cognitive load and helps people to just grapple with the content and the structure of the information itself. Using a topic-subtopic type of slide can increase the amount of extra work or additional mental resources that you need to engage in order to understand that information. at is because you are having to go the extra mile to gure out what is the most important idea here, which is the coherence principle, and what is the connection here between this concept and that concept, which comes back to the signaling principle. If you're presenting very technical information, you already know that your audience might be struggling to understand the information, so thats when you want to be extremely cognizant of these multimedia principles and probably use an assertionevidence structure along with your presentation. MICHAEL ALLEY: One disadvantage or apparent
disadvantage of the assertion-evidence structure is that you are

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giving away the surprise right there at the top of the slide. I think you have to look at the situation in which you are presenting. Lets look at just a couple of di erent situations. Lets say that you're a scientist or engineer and you are presenting a result thats controversial. What may be better is that when that slide comes up, instead of showing the assertion up at the top, have nothing. Just have the visual evidence and walk that audience through the visual evidence. Lets say its a graph, walk them through, What's the x axis, whats the y axis, what does this data show? have that assertion come in. Lets take another situation. Lets say you're a teacher. You don't want to just give the students information and let them be passive listeners. Maybe up at the top of that slide you could start with a question or perhaps you don't start with anything. You know what question you are going to ask. en you show them You let them the evidence and you let them wrestle with it. assertion in. en, lets just say, its a di erent kind of presentation, one that is not just purely informative.
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en
make your case for the assertion and then when that shoe drops,
discover the assertion and then at that point, you could bring that
ere are some other elements
and there's a bene t to the surprise in this kind of talk. wouldn't start with the assertion, that would not be appropriate.
Hans Rosling has this wonderful surprise in one of his TED.com talks. He nds, by studying this United Nations data, that people in third world countries are actually living longer and having fewer number of children per woman than they were decades ago. e misconception then, that if you live in a third world country you're not going to live as long or you're going to have large families, that doesn't necessarily exist. But, rather than starting with that assertion, Rosling shows the data and then this wonderful surprise occurs in which he gives that assertion at the end. I could de nitely see that. at's just part of giving a great presentation. But the thing is, you as the presenter, you got to know what the assertion is before you can give that great surprise. e words that you then say, they've got to then lead and focus to that assertion. TOM LITZINGER: I think for me, there's a broader issue. PowerPoint is part of it. Whenever I go to professional conferences, or we have a seminar series where we bring in
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renowned experts and allow our graduate students to watch and hear their presentations, I am often disappointed at the quality of the examples that our students see. It is not the fact that these folks aren't expert, but its in their inability to craft a presentation that is appropriate for the audience, that has e ective visuals and slides that are not overpacked with information. In the academic world, unfortunately, I think in many cases we often think that more is better. We want to dazzle with detail and that doesn't work unless you're sitting in front of an audience of experts. I think that there is a lot of room for improvement in what we do in communicating. PowerPoint has become, to a large extent, the default tool for that communication. One of my favorite sort of joking shots at PowerPoint is the Gettysburg address given in PowerPoint. When you try to bulletize the world, its not the way to go. Obviously you want to tell a story. I think part of the power of this assertion-evidence is that you focus on the story and if you have a good story, you can build that into a good set of slides. en you are much more likely to have your audience walk out of there thinking about the things that you want to think about. I
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think there is great potential there, not only in the medium, but in just the whole idea of giving e ective presentations.
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How Many Slides Should You Have? CARMEN TARAN: I just did a sixty minute presentation and I had 142. But I think that its almost like saying how many props do you need for a thirty second commercial. Its not an accurate question because it always depends. I can click, click, click, click, click, so that in sixty minutes I can squeeze in a lot of slides. I met somebody yesterday who said he had 500+ slides for a sixty minute presentation. Talk to that guy. SCOTT MCCLOUD: In a one hour presentation I can ey go by pretty fast.
have as many as 700 slides or so.
My daughters slides per minute ratio is actually even faster. We went on tour and we saw all fty states in 2006 and 2007. I did a lot of these PowerPoint presentations all over the place at universities and companies, and my daughter came with me and also presented. I remember I gave her a little instruction on how to use Keynote, Apple's Keynote program. I just said, You know, here's how you create a new slide, and thats the only instruction I ever gave her.
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By the end of the tour her synchronized remarks, where she would be just like batting away using her screen as a prompter, so she could see what everybody else was seeing, looking at the audience and just talking, talking, talking, talking. She was going faster than I was and the images were ying by. Her presentation was only seven minutes but I think she had about two or three hundred images in her presentation. changing faster than mine. RICHARD HARRINGTON: In a thirty minute e images were actually
presentation I'll give anywhere from 45-80 but I'm using very short ones and just putting up the pertinent information. JULIE TERBERG: I had a 100 today. I think it depends on the speaker and their style. I prefer to punch through some of them quickly if I'm giving examples. Others I may sit on for a minute or two, but I like a fast pace. I think it depends on the style of the presenter. ere is none. is no rule.
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If you present via the Lawrence Lessig ere
method you may be presenting one slide every few seconds.
RICK ALTMAN: You know there are ways to quantify this. e quanti cation that I hear mostly is that you shouldn't have more than three or four bullet points on a slide. You shouldn't have more than ve or six words per bullet point. ese are all valid and these are all good. I don't know if you can really go beyond that to talk about slides. I've seen presentations where in the course of twenty seconds somebody has transitioned through thirty slides, rich visuals that are happening bang, bang, bang behind them in some beautiful collage. I've also seen somebody stu so much crap onto one slide that it takes them fteen minutes just to get through all that. I just don't know if there are any rules of thumb that really make sense as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather approach this much more organically. What message do you want to give? How do you want to tell the story? How can you best be front and center so your audience can feel the weight of your message? What visuals, what simple phrases can best complement that message? If you approach it that way and you answer those questions correctly, I don't think it matters how many slides. I don't think it matters how much stu you have on the slide because just
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addressing those questions are going to put you down a much better path than Ok, we need 6 slides here because its ve... I just don't think it matters as much. SCOTT MCCLOUD: One of the things that I've become interested in is this notion of density. I think that there is a tradition in PowerPoint to take advantage of space, to really use the space e ciently, and to pack a lot of information onto every slide. People like Edward Tufte talk about how important it is to do this in print and what tremendous power print has for the concentration of information, for micro and macro readings, for putting a huge amount of well organized information onto a page. We have this option to a degree in presentation tools like PowerPoint and Keynote. Its a lower resolution so we don't necessarily take advantage of it, but there's another reason that we may not want to take advantage of it, and thats the simple fact that there is no premium on space. One of the things that we have inherited from print is the sense of limited resources, this idea that we want to maximize every square inch. But there's no point in doing that if in fact
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there's no practical barrier to going from 10 to 100 to even 1000 slides. We can now, and if thats the case, why should we be bombarding people with information that either we haven't yet gotten around to or we've already dispensed with? If its still on the screen but we are not talking about it anymore, why? Well, there may be a visual interrelationship of all those di erent points. ere may be some reason that we want to keep it on the screen in order for us to understand this great map of information. But if all it is is a list, if all it is is just throwing a bunch of stu up on the screen and working through it one at a time, I say that's useless. You should be looking at what matters now, what we are talking about now, what's important to the audience now. shouldn't be there. GREG SMITH: No, I don't think there's a maximum Lots of people try to pack too If its not important, if its not relevant, it
number of slides but I do think there's a maximum amount of information that you can get. much information onto a PowerPoint slide and its easy to do. ats one of the most problematic things about PowerPoint is
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just how easy it is to pack a ton of information onto a slide. ats usually a horrible PowerPoint slide. Every presenter needs to control the information that they are giving. pace. ey need to control how much and they need to ey need to control the A good storyteller withhold certain pieces of information.
at's what a good storyteller does.
controls information, gives it to you when you need it, makes you want more, and withholds a little bit until you are ready for that. One of the great problems of PowerPoint is it makes it so blasted easy to dump information. I don't think there's a maximum number of slides, but I think every PowerPoint presenter has to think about limiting the amount of information thats in front of the audience at any given time because there are limits to what we can handle at any moment.
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How To Get Audio & Visuals Working Together JENNIFER GROH: In a PowerPoint presentation, what If you have any e
happens is the audience is watching the person speak, watching the slides, and listening to the person speak. videos presented in your slides they'll be listening to that as well. at's a lot of di erent stimuli going on at the same time. challenge is to capture people's attention and have the focus on the information that you want them to be getting from your presentation. You need to have the visual and the auditory component of your presentation work together, work synergistically and provide complementary information rather than competing information. You don't, for example, want your slides to say something di erent from what you are saying. You don't want them to say more than what you are saying. You want them to hit the bullet points of what you are talking about. You want your slides to provide images that illustrate what you are talking about rather than illustrating something di erent.
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STEVE KOSSLYN: Regarding the Stroop e ect. If I were to show you words that name colors; red, blue, green, and if I printed them in ink that was a di erent color, for example, the word red were printed in blue ink and the word green were printed in red ink. If then I asked you to tell me what color the ink is, its going to take you a lot longer and you'll make a lot more errors in telling me what color the ink is than if I have the word red printed in red ink and the word green in green ink, and so forth. When the surface properties, whats actually on the screen in front of you di er from the meaning, you get interference, you get a con ict. What you want is to make what they're seeing compatible with the concept. ats why you use a line graph where you've got a varying line to convey changes over time. Time is changing continuously and the line is changing continuously. Conceptually they line up. JENNIFER VAN SIJLL: at's what you want.
I think that audiences engage
when the story is personal, when it hits them when you tell a story, but also when more parts of their brain are being used then just text. For example, in movies, there are some movies that are
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wall to wall dialogue. I nd them somewhat limiting because I feel that I'm going to a lecture of some sort and someone's talking down at me. If instead, the movie gives me choices of engagement and presents questions to me that I have to gure out, I think those lms are much more engaging. Lets say in a mystery lm where they are given clues along the way or, if I'm asked to decipher pictures in the text where the answers aren't clear, where I have to decode the pictures and gure them out for myself. e successful rst eight or ten minutes of E.T., one of the most lms ever, contains no dialogue. What I found
fascinating about that is that it was one of the most successful lms internationally. Kids around the world were looking at all those images and were able to gure out who the good guy is, who the bad guy is, how the story works, when to be afraid, when to laugh. So absolutely no dialogue, a montage of sorts, images that told a story, a set up, a character, brought us to a new world. did it entirely with pictures. ey e little kid whose 8 years old, he or
she is put into that world, has to gure out whats dangerous, who to love. How does the rabbit react to E.T.? Well the rabbit likes
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E.T.
erefore, maybe we should like E.T. So, there's all this If you can get in a PowerPoint, or if you can get in a lm,
kind of engagement going on. more than one layer of engagement, not just text, not just dialogue. If you can do picture and sound and all these things and ask for the audience's participation, then I think what you have is ownership. at little kid watching that movie feels that he or she ey are guring it out, processing made the movie and its their decision whether E.T. is a good guy or not. Its their judgment. the images, images which are very directed not chaotic, intentionally chosen to make leaps.
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Text Vs. Graphics SETH GODIN: What we know is that people engage with knowledge in two di erent ways: we process words and we process images. Words are what you're doing when you are speaking. You can give a talk without any images at all, but what PowerPoint lets you do is cheat by putting images up behind you. What I do, and I think I was one of the pioneers of doing this years ago, is my presentations consist of me speaking and hundreds of images. No words whatsoever. Put up an image, tell a story about it. Put up an image, talk to it. Put up an image and explain why that image is up there. What happens is this, the image goes to one part of the brain. at part of the brain gets it, the joke is told, the connection is made and then you move on. When the speech is over you've now put two hooks into peoples' heads. e hook about the image, the picture of that homeless person on the street, the picture of that graph going up and to the right, the picture of that un nished piece of code, and the stories and the words that go with it.
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So my argument is, if you have a PowerPoint with more than six words on a slide, you have failed. If you want someone to have more than six words to take home with them, print it out and give it to them when you are done. PowerPoint is not good at delivering dense bits of text. CARMINE GALLO: e iPad presentation re ected the
same visual tone that all of his presentations have taken. Now obviously Steve Jobs uses Keynote instead of PowerPoint, but its the same theme. Its the same principle. People who use Its not so PowerPoint or any other presentation software can still create those beautiful visual images that Steve Jobs does. much the software as it is how he uses the software. Everything that Steve Jobs does in his presentation is reachable and attainable by anybody using PowerPoint. What he does is focusing on what psychologists call picture superiority. Psychologists have learned that in order to process information and retain information, its more e ective when that information is delivered as pictures and words and not just words or text alone. You'll rarely see bullet points on a Steve Jobs presentation. In fact, there were no bullet points on the iPad
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announcement.
ere were many beautiful images of the new
tablet, but there were no bullet points per say. SCOTT MCCLOUD: One of the interesting balances
between words and pictures is the fact that written words tend to require a degree of perception and decoding. When you see a block of text shown up on a screen, you don't immediately decode it. You actually have to run through it and decode it but a picture goes right past those barriers. It just breaks through the barricades and is instantly recognized. Now, one of the interesting things about speaking while you have just images on the screen is that you are decoding while you hear, but you are not bothering with all the text on either side of what is being said. ear are hitting and being decoded very quickly. extraneous information. sort of a cognitive bandwidth thats very, very fast. JENNIFER GROH: We've been interested in how the brain combines what we see and what we hear, and how early in the brain this process occurs. One of the interesting questions to
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You are
concentrating in the now, and those words that are hitting your ere's almost no ere's this instantaneous feeling. Its
think about is, why does it happen so e ortlessly? ears are coming together and interacting.
We've been
studying where in the brain information from the eyes and the What we've been nding is that its happening earlier in the brains sensory processing pathways than we previously thought. Sensory information comes into the brain through the eyes and through the ears and it goes from there to several stages; early stages include the retina, a location in the brain called the thalamous, and from there to the cortex. e auditory pathway information comes in and goes to the cochlear nucleus and to several other structures after that before reaching the cortex. We've been nding evidence that interactions between visual and auditory processing occur before signals reach the cortex. ese are areas of the brain that are thought of as being dumb, automatic. ese areas do basic processing and aren't Yet involved in thinking about stimuli, or thinking about what decisions you are going to make, or remembering things. these areas of the brain seem to be involved in processing both what you see and what you hear and putting those signals together. So this is providing an explanation for why we feel that the interactions between visual and auditory stimuli, sights, and
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sounds are so automatic and e ortless. It seems as if the brain is integrating this information early, before we've gotten a chance to think of it essentially. JOANNA GARNER: One of the tenets or the principles behind this multimedia idea, the idea that people learn better from images with words, comes from Paivio's research on dual coding. He showed that your memory for information is greatly enhanced if you engage in a dual coding process. We have a working memory, or a short term memory space, that we can use to encode information that is going to be then later recalled. Its going to be stored somehow in long-term memory. We also have two di erent kinds of memory. We have memory for verbal information and memory for visual, spatial information. Paivio's work has really shown that the best type of learning happens when you don't just focus on the visual or the verbal but you actually form connections between the two. Not just simple associative connections but connections that really help you to verbally describe, for example, a complex image, or to show pictorally a system that is di cult to understand if you only
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use words.
ose connections are called referential connections.
at's the theory of dual coding.
NIGEL HOLMES: My preference (text vs graphics) is just the graphics (on a slide) because a PowerPoint presentation in my mind always has a person giving it. Otherwise it is not a presentation. Its a lm or something, in which case then you need an audio track, but the audio track in a presentation is the person. So the presentation is both things together and this is where I have a problem with the current use of PowerPoint. I'll go and make a lecture somewhere and people will ask, Well, can I have your PowerPoint presentation? pictures? LESA SNIDER: If I had my druthers it would be 100% graphics. ats a little outrageous, but 90% maybe. You can overlay a little bit of text but think about it, any time you have text on your screen they are reading the screen and are not listening to the presenter. If you can choose images that convey
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And I'll say, Yes, but it
hasn't got any of the words on it, so do you just want the
the point or concept that you are trying to get across then the audience is going to be focused on you instead of the screen. I always try to get my students to try to nd an image that conveys that point or that concept and then put a little bit of text over top of it in a non busy part of the image. SCOTT MCCLOUD: e only real rule I have is that if
there isn't a need for words on the screen I'm probably just going to do it with pictures. After all, I'm standing right there and I'm saying a lot. ere is no reason I need to have it aped on screen. So you'll often see just images appearing one after another, usually pretty fast, as I'm speaking. I think its important to be able to break down points into these images. Not just to satisfy an ADD culture but simply because whatever you are talking about right now, right this instant, there's probably the perfect image for that point and those points change pretty quick. I nd myself very restless as an audience member if an image stays on the screen, for say ve minutes, when we have already rocketed through half a dozen topics. It doesn't feel natural. It doesn't feel like its matching or o ering any kind of counterpoint to what is being said.
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RICHARD HARRINGTON:
My pet peeve with
PowerPoint is an overuse of text which really goes hand and hand with a lack of visuals. I think that when you're designing for an audience, you need a fairly even split, maybe 60% text, 40% visuals. People really react to photos. It really helps them see what you are talking about. Routinely, I encounter folks who just overdue it. ey put so much text on a slide that unless you are sitting six inches away from the computer screen, you can't read it. My personal sort of tag on that is I call it open captions for the thinking impaired. You don't need to have that much stu on the screen. RICK ALTMAN: is is literally, at the moment, the
biggest annoyance that audiences have and I mean that literally. ere is a survey that is done annually where people are asked what annoys you the most about presentations and right now, in the number one spot, is too much text on a slide. everything in approach. e cram
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STEVE KOSSLYN: users fault.
It's not PowerPoints fault.
Its the
You have to understand when you are putting Human beings have certain
together a PowerPoint presentation that you are making a presentation for human beings. cognitive strengths and certain cognitive weaknesses and you have to recognize that in order to be e ective. When you put together a PowerPoint presentation, you should be careful not to have the font letters so small they can't be seen and not to overwhelm the audience. is is one of the most common errors and I've documented this by the way. Virtually one hundred percent of the PowerPoint presentations that we downloaded from the web, randomly sampling, have at least one slide where there is just too much information. RICK ALTMAN: screen?) I'm not sure I've ever tried to quantify it. Is it ok if I just say as few as possible. ere are many reasons why well intended Most presenters commit this error, this sin of commission, of too much. Most problems are sins of commission, not omission. (How many words should be on the
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people do too much instead of not enough, and there are many reasons for it. e rst is simply because they are using PowerPoint as their teleprompter, as their notes. ey come from a background where they write in Word or in email and they just type it all out. For the people that just learned PowerPoint, you copy and paste from Word into PowerPoint, suddenly it appears on a screen, how cool is that? ey have no idea they are committing death by PowerPoint with that one simple act of pasting their entire speech onto PowerPoint. So some of it is simply, again, the person who learned PowerPoint in fteen minutes, thought they knew it, and go from there. ere are plenty of other reasons why. One of the leading causes is the person who is trying to have it both ways. e person who is trying to create a slide deck that will work for projected material when they are presenting and that they will then print out and leave as handouts. SARAH ZAPPE: I go to so many conferences and I get really jaded because I see these presentations that are just horrible. I sit there and think that these people have good things to say but
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all they have is so much text on the screen. even trying to get their message across.
ey are often trying
to just explain what they have on the screen without necessarily I've seen examples where people have a slide with numbers all over it, fty numbers in a twelve point font, the results of their statistical analysis. ey know that you can't possibly see all these numbers but theyll just give you the main point. I think, Why don't you just say the main point on the slide and then refer back to the paper. Use the presentation as a teaser to have the people read the paper and get more information later on rather than just throwing up so much text on the screen. TOM LITZINGER: out a worst ever. e worst...I can't say that I can pick e presenter
ere are lots of ways presentations can go bad.
I have seen a few where they were just overpacked.
was just powering through slides packed full of information that nobody could read, probably not even the person giving the presentation. Its those kind of presentations that I think are hopeless. You eventually tune them out because you can't hear the person, can't understand them, and you can't read all those words. You just kind of give up.
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JEFF BRENMAN: your slides.
One of the things that I teach, that
often I get the best feedback on, is the concept of just breaking up e biggest problem that most of the presentations ere's just too that we work with face is too much information.
much content on every slide. A lot of times we try to simplify that content and get rid of it. It doesn't need to be on the slides because it can be spoken about in person. In the event that the content does need to be there, the easiest x is to just take that content and split it up onto multiple slides. If you have ve or six bullet points turn that into ve or six individual slides. e slide count doesn't matter because the slide e nice thing about count is irrelevant. Each of those slides will be on the screen for still the same amount of time as that idea. splitting up your content is that it gives your content room to breathe. It makes it easier for you to see if there's a great visual that you can apply to that idea, and it makes it easier to see if you need to have that idea on the slide or not, whether it makes sense in the order with everything else that you're saying.
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Regarding Bullet Points LESA SNIDER: Bullet points are evil. Well, they're boring. ey're boring and typically the presenter just stands up there and reads them o , as if he hasn't practiced his presentation at all. at's what the note feature was for. So many presenters put their whole presentation in bullet points, and inevitably, if they use bullet points they'll put too much text on there. terrible. RIC BREITSCHNEIDER: Well bullet points kind of fall out of outlining and outlining is a great way to get your thoughts organized. We do support the scenario of people putting down their thoughts and organizing, and reorganizing them in a list form. But its easy in PowerPoint to take that thought and then turn it into graphics. So, maybe it is a set of bullet points, but those should be short, those should be bullet points, bullets are small and deadly. A paragraph of text that you read to the audience is deadly in an entirely di erent way. You are going to
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e text becomes Its really
twelve or fourteen point type and you can't read it.
put the audience to sleep and they're not going to get your message. In the last version of PowerPoint we added a feature called Smart Art. Smart Art lets you select that row of bullets and convert it instantly into a graphic. You can then purpose that graphic in any number of ways to enliven your message and produce it in a way thats going to go beyond simply a lot of text on a slide. CARMEN TARAN: Bullets kill in real life. So bullet points on a slide may not always work. Of course, they can nd their way in, in terms of organizing information, if you can tame them. Unfortunately, too many people organize information in such hierarchical fashion where the meaning gets destroyed. Have you heard of that famous slide from the NASA deck? In 2003, when the Columbia Shuttle took o , a piece of foam hit the left wing and that's what caused the shuttle to explode upon reentry. Very sad event for the entire world. But what a lot of people don't know is that as the shuttle was still up in the air, the teams on the ground were trying to gure out what happened. e NASA managers held a presentation for their managers and
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they put those ndings in a PowerPoint deck, the type that has lots and lots of hierarchical lines. Only on this one slide, down at the bottom, was the fact that the shuttle had been hit with about 640 times or more the amount than it had been calibrated with. So the danger was imminent, and yet it was obscured by this one tiny bullet entry at the bottom of a slide. ANDREW ABELA: Here's an important distinction. Why do people hate bullets? Because they are used to seeing bullets on a slide with nothing else, right? at competes with your voice and so its destructive. But its not the bullets themselves that are harmful, its the lack of any visual kind of animating principle on the slide itself. If you downgrade the bullets and the main thing that the audience sees is some kind of a design, and then the bullets nd their place in various parts of the page, there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, there is research that shows that bullets are more comprehensible than complete sentences if you are trying to present while talking. Makes sense, they are little encapsulated phrases.
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RICHARD HARRINGTON: Its really simple. You've got a bullet, a bullet is ve to seven words. You could have 3-5 bullets per page. You're just supposed to be giving something a memory jogger, something that helps reinforce what you're saying. My theory on slides, speaker support, is that its just that, speaker support. It should be reinforcing what the speaker says not be an open playback system of everything the speaker is saying. JENNIFER GROH: I think bullets have been helpful to people to try to capture, what is the nugget of information that they want to convey. I think people have trouble distilling what they want to say down into something really short and concise. So I think bullet points are helpful but I wouldn't necessarily use one of the templates that comes with PowerPoint and feel that just because the format defaults to four bullet points, that's how many I need to have.
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Grouping Items On A Slide JENNIFER GROH: ere's a saying in psychology, e
magic number is seven, plus or minus two. Seven is about the number of things that you can hold in mind. If you are going to the grocery store and you need to buy more than about seven things you should have made a list because you are probably going to forget. Our phone numbers, except for the area code, are seven digits because thats about how many numbers you can remember when you look in the phone book, look up the name, look at the numbers and turn to the phone and punch it in. If its more than that many people will have trouble. So there is a de nite limit, somewhere between four and seven is probably a good number for a presentation like that. STEVE KOSSLYN: e number of words you want up
there is really going to depend on the number of concepts and even that depends on how di cult it is for that audience. If you have a di cult concept, one word on a slide might be as much
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as you want to have. If its concepts that are really familiar you can do a lot more. But in general, you don't want to have more than four units. ey can be clusters of things. groups at once. at's about it. ey can be words or phrases. We organize them as units. Human beings can take in about four e human visual system groups things according to principles such as proximity, things that are near each other get grouped, or continuity, if they line up on a single smooth curve they get grouped, or similarity, things that are all the same color, they'll tend to be grouped together. For example, when you are going down a highway and you see re ectors, you see them as a line down the street, not individually. ese principles that are useful in the real world as we move around, the same principles apply to presentations. Its the same visual system but its just being used in a di erent context. Use the principles of human perception to form groups that people will take in in a single visual gulp without having to work very hard. It makes it easier on the audience to understand and it will be more likely that they will remember it.
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JENNIFER GROH:
You can't have your slides exactly
match what you say because you are going to say a lot more. At least that's the ideal, to have just a few things written on your slide, and have them written more concisely than what you are going to say. What you say should elaborate on this and repeat it a few times. People's brains work more slowly than you might think and people need time to think over what it is you are saying. If you say it really crisply and brie y and then go immediately on to the next point, they may be falling behind you. ey may be thinking about what it was that you just said and it might take them a moment to think it over. Meanwhile you've gone on to the next couple of points and you've lost them. STEVE KOSSLYN: I think the critical thing for me ey have
because I'm a psychologist, is that you have to realize you're talking to human beings and they've got interests. cognitive limitations and they have cognitive strengths. You as a presenter, if you are going to be e ective, need to respect all of those, all of those characteristics and capacities and interests and so forth.
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e Content Of Slide Visuals LESA SNIDER: e most important thing when you're e last
dealing with graphics is to choose high quality graphics.
thing any presenter wants is for half their audience to be asleep. Hands down the best way to capture attention is to use a striking graphic. at used to be really hard because graphics were honking expensive. Stock photography was just outrageous, but with the advent of companies like iStockphoto and so on, graphics are a ordable for the rst time. using clip art or anything like that. CARMEN TARAN: Cliched stock photography must ere's really no excuse for
disappear. People standing behind each other on stairs and then you see a piece of text that says winning strategies or teams really work. A blank computer screen, ve people gathered around, crowded over it, getting excited about something. When was the last time you were at work and you got four people together and said, Lets get so excited about this blank screen right now?
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How do you compensate for that? You shift your thinking a little bit in terms of search habits. Lets say you have a presentation that you have to do on interviewing skills. You go to that online data base and you type in interviewing skills. You get the cliched images of people shaking hands, people talking to each other. People don't think of search keywords in terms of emotions. What do I want the audience to feel when they look at that graphic? Can I type in that search engine something else? Can I type in sweat because thats what really happens at an interview? Can I type in fear? Can I type in disgust? Can I type in why am I doing this? Any of those richer key words will get you more real graphics than the stock photography that is so cliche. I saw this slide once that talked about cold weather approaching. It had, of course, the bulleted text and all sorts of details. I always compare that with this picture that I saw that showed everything frozen, from the lake to the cars to the trees, just everything a block of ice. thinking. at is the power of visual
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CARMINE GALLO: In 2008, when Steve Jobs introduced the Mac Book Air, it was a really thin, lightweight notebook computer. ere were a lot of features to it. How do you visual something like that? I think most people would have created a PowerPoint with a lot of words and a lot of text. What he did was he had an image of a manila envelope and he said, around the o ce. envelope. is computer is so thin, it ts inside one of those envelopes that you see oating e only image you saw was this manila Its thinking di erently ats thinking creatively.
about how to visualize the story behind your product. CARMEN TARAN: What I'm most excited about and what I think that a lot of PowerPoint users don't do very well is visualizing abstracts. ey just very easily copy and paste ere is your data and there is information from Microsoft Excel.
your information. We all need some more training in visualizing abstracts. How do you bring to life something that you can not touch or put your nger on concretely? For instance, how do you visualize being an alien in a country? How do you visualize feeling alienated? How about a barbed wire. How would you visualize revenge? We used a picture this morning of this Porshe that had a
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license plate which said WAS HIS. revenge.
at is how you can visualize
e minute that you put a little extra e ort into
visualizing abstracts, now you open up new possibilities in your users minds. JOANNA GARNER: We've classi ed images that would be included on a slide as being decorative or descriptive versus explanatory. Decorative images are images that are not terribly helpful for helping the audience member understand that key component process or that key step by step process. that the assertion requires. Sound would kind of go the same way. You can have decorative sounds such as the whooshing sound when a bullet point ies in or the slide changes. A sound like that is probably not going to be very helpful and again, it is going to detract attention and cognitive resources away from processing that particular component of information. But if you have got a sound that is really an integral part of understanding that concept, then that would be bene cial. It should help the audience member build this mental model that allows them to understand how the
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explanatory image is really going to help to provide the evidence
components t together. For example, your presentation is about lightning. You include sound clips of how a thunder and lightning storm changes according to the distance that you are away or according to the processes that are going on within that storm. What we've noticed about the images that are used on PowerPoint slides, in the traditional topic-subtopic type of structure, is that if an image is used it tends to be an image which might be classed as decorative. It doesn't really add any information to the content of the slide. Or it could be descriptive. It basically describes and could be redundant with the text thats on the slide. You might have a sentence or a phrase that talks about a car and then you have a picture of a car just to show a visual representation. On the assertion-evidence slides we are really looking at images that explain. ey have to go beyond just describing a is An component of the main idea, they actually have to explain it. relates very well to the multimedia principle of signaling.
image that explains shows how components t together, whether its the formation of a thunderstorm or an engineering process of some kind. We know that when you signal those relationships
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between concepts and you do it in a visual way, you are building those referential connections. You are going above and beyond just using a descriptive image and main idea of the slide. JULIE TERBERG: Your audience is most important. It's not you the speaker. It's what they are going to take away from your presentation. If you are going to evoke emotion, use Use your photographs to convey those images. If you are talking about your products, have somebody shoot your products. own photography. ere's no need to go grab some stupid image If you are talking about a there's no room really for decorative images that would detract attention away from the
o of a website that your company put out. Grab a camera and set up some photographs yourself. images these days. location, get out a digital camera. It's so easy to take your own ere's no reason why you can't establish a good library of images to support your presentation. CARMEN TARAN: Make your own graphics any chance you get because that adds a more personal touch, but do it only if you have some photography skills, some composition.
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ey say
that the balance of a really catchy graphic, that will generate that emotion that I'm all for, is tension and timing. If you can have that tension buildup like I was showing you this morning, a graphic of a shadow of a hand almost grabbing the knob of a door. Its just the shadow of a hand. So as a viewer I'm thinking, Oh, I'm curious, what happens next, what happens next? beautifully done shot. It's the timing and of course, it's the composition of the shot. It was a Can you have the tension, the composition, and the timing done just right? If you can, if you can trust that, then yes, go shoot your own photography and people will enjoy that even more than stock photography.
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Presenting With Simple Pictures DAN ROAM: My whole idea is that we can solve problems by drawing simple pictures. It is the neurobiological process, the cognitive process, not an artistic process. Its the idea of saying we're not trying to create pictures that are beautiful, like Rembrandt would have done, because they are a really e ective representation of what we see out there. e pictures that I'm talking about drawing are exceedingly simple because what we are trying to represent is what we see in here. With some circles, some arrows, some boxes, lets face it, the essential of communication is trying to get whats in my head into your head in the fastest and most e cient and most believable way possible. I have found through my own research in neurobiology, cognitive sciences, communication, all of that, there is absolutely no more of powerful way to communicate the idea that is in my head into your head, then by talking about it and drawing a simple picture of exactly what I am talking about at the same time. If I was just talking, certain processing centers in your brain are active, others are not. If I'm talking and I'm drawing, all of a
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sudden its as if we are hitting on all cylinders, we've got the entire engine red up. I realize that in my work, I'm trying through these simple pictures to boil down any problem that is presented, whether its from the chief of naval operations or the head of project management at Boeing. Can we get to the absolute root essence of what the problem is by forcing ourselves to come up with the simplest possible visual explanation of it, and then building o of that? I mentioned the term simple. ere is an enormous trend today, as we all face this extraordinary level of information overload, thanks to PowerPoint more than anything else, that everybody is jumping on this bandwagon that everything needs to be simple. Simple is good, what we want is simple. Let's not really say that. Simple is not what we are after, what we are after is clear. A simple idea can be just as bad as a really complex idea. ere are a lot of reasons why simple pictures work. Lets just assume that this little circle represents our brain. Ok, this is your brain, now I want to focus on the neurons in our brain that process sensory information. So that is to say, all of the neurons in our entire nervous system in our brain that are responsible for
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us understanding the world around us, based on what we perceive of the world around us, all of our sensory neurons, 3/4 of them are focused on vision leaving this amount to cover everything that we hear, taste, feel, sense of balance, everything else. ree quarters of the neurons in our brain that process the information coming in from the world around us tell us what it is thats around us are visual. I have a quote in Unfolding the Napkin and I say, and I believe this to be absolutely true, e person who is best able to describe a problem is the person who is most likely to be able to solve that problem. What I mean by that is, nobody would listen if Chicken Little were to come running in, saying, Oh my, the sky is falling! e sky is falling! Item number one is we have the However, if Chicken Little came in and said, Ok, let me show you whats happening. earth. Item number two is we have our atmosphere around it. en we have the sun out here. What seems to be happening is the amount of activity from the sun thats coming through our atmospheric shield seems to be increasing and... e point I'm trying to make is if I can describe what seems to be the problem with global climate change, or with the
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greenhouse e ect, I'm no longer panicking about it. addressing them?
If I
understand the root elements of the problem, how can I go about e subtext, the kind of the mercenary subtext here, is that whoever draws the best picture is the person that is going to get the funding. is is the message that I am always conveying to people in business because they want to know how they are going to get their project funded? Draw the picture that contains the simplest possible explanation of what are the elements. SCOTT MCCLOUD: but its a whole way of seeing. down to its essence. Cartooning is something that we e idea is that you're somehow is is really powerful in visual
use in comics also, of course. Its not just a tradition of drawing amplifying an image through simpli cation, that you're boiling it communication. It can be very powerful as well in presentations in the way that we can just take a few lines and really concentrate the mind on what matters and just push aside all those extraneous details that sometimes distract us. Its just a fundamental fact of human communication that your audience is going to do a tremendous amount of work in bringing a few lines to life.
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Sometimes you just have to tap them, just the tiniest little hint of something is enough to really call up a whole world of experiences. Its a kind of compression that takes place, basically. You're compressing an image down through these little cartoons, through these simpli ed drawings and then they are being uncompressed in the mind of the listener, the audience.
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Extraneous Information and E ects STEVE KOSSLYN: What you don't want to do, in my
view, is give your audience extraneous information. Even worse than that is to give them distractions, decorations, and things that'll engage their attention and distract from what they should really be paying attention to, which is the information that is conveying the message. So I don't use extraneous materials even though they might be attractive. JOANNA GARNER: Assertion-evidence PowerPoint slides conform to the multimedia principle of learning. It helps children build referential connections and helps them build their information literacy. e second thing that I think is bene cial in creating the PowerPoint slide with the assertion-evidence structure is that teachers, or any presenter, really have to ask, what is their main goal in creating this slide? Instead of the presenter using that knowledge telling strategy, now the presenter is using a knowledge transforming strategy. What is it that I really want to get across? Can I write that as an assertion? Can I state it as a
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sentence and put that on the slide? assertion.
en can I create some visual
image or visual depiction of the evidence that then supports that It stops the presenter from including extraneous information, which violates the multimedia principle of coherence. If you're assuming that the children are novices, you don't want to include that extraneous information, even if its interesting. Even if its what we would call in psychology, a seductive detail, a detail that is very interesting but not central to understanding the key point. It detracts your attention and takes your attention away, but more than that, it takes your cognitive resources away. Now you are thinking about that really interesting little nugget of information that actually is not central to your overall understanding of the main point. When a teacher is creating a slide, the teacher should be eliminating that extraneous information and that would bene t the students learning. It helps the students to identify what is the important information that I should be learning here. JENNIFER GROH: Some stimuli will just naturally grab your attention. If something is di erent from something else it
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just grabs your attention and forces you to look at and think about it for a moment. at too in a PowerPoint presentation. You want your key points to be the ones that pop out and leap at you, that grab your attention and capture your focus. JOANNA GARNER: It is very tempting to include
decorative images to try to make the content seem fun, but depending on the kind of learning you have, if you have a learner that has attention de cit disorder or has that low background knowledge, then adding those images in can be quite problematic. e research on attention de cit disorder, ADHD, suggests that children and adults that have ADHD do better when there are visual distractions outside of the immediate task rather than as an integral part. You can have a child that has ADD or ADHD who actually could learn quite well in a busy classroom. In fact, what they tend to do is look away from the task and then look back at the task with a renewed sense of sustained attention. But when you start to add extraneous information or the decorative images to what they are looking at, thats when they might have more trouble paying attention. ats another reason why if you're creating PowerPoint presentations you're not necessarily
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aiming to add the whistles and bells or the decorative images to capture the attention of those students. You actually want to pare it down to just the immediately relevant information. DAN ROAM: Many of us think, Gosh, PowerPoint is
boring. So, I'm going to kind of sex up my slide by adding a 3-D e ect or a drop shadow or a new shiny typeface or something like that, e ectively putting in some eye candy in the desperate hope that that will make more people look at my slide. at works up to a second, but eye candy is a really good analogy for it because it is just candy, it's just sugar, and that only gives us a buzz for a very short time. All of a sudden our 3-D e ects, and all of this stu that again the good folks at Microsoft have added in, we don't need, because what our brain nds actually the sexiest of all is when we When we get it, which is always understand something.
represented in a cartoon by the light bulb going on over someone's head, that light bulb is a very nice cartoony representation of all of a sudden an in ux of dopamine into the brain. e amygdala, which is sort of the processing center of our emotional reactions to things, releases various chemicals into our
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brain when its pleased. It becomes extraordinarily pleased and therefore makes us very happy, when all of sudden we have that I get it moment.
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oughts On Charts RICK ALTMAN: I hate charts in general. Part of it is
because the charting engine is so bad. Its just so di cult to work with and the defaults give you so much stu that you don't need. How often in charts do you really need a background or the lines across it? In many cases you don't even need the axis. In charts, most of the time you are sharing proportional data, how this thing relates to that thing. You could do that with two rectangles, one of them being longer than another one. Oftentimes you don't need to know what the actual values are. You don't need to know what the progression across time is. You don't need all the tick marks. You don't need the background and yes, you don't need an extra dimension. I think the general statement I would make is that charts are usually overdone and dimensionality is one of the things that people overdue it with. I think that in many cases you would be just ne creating some rectangles, having them look nice and clean, sequence them, here's this one, here's this one, you see this
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one is bigger than that one. Your audience is going to get it just from that, in many cases. STEVE KOSSLYN: In my opinion almost nothing should ever be in 3-D. Unless all you care about is a very, very general impression. It really depends on your goals. So whenever you make a recommendation, the rst thing you have to ask is what's the point you are trying to convey. If all you care about is this thing is bigger than that and you don't care by how much or what the ratio is or anything like that. Fine, but if you expect any kind of precision, 3-D e ects in a drawing are really hard to interpret in terms of exactly how long a bar is or whatever. STEVE KOSSLYN: (on pie graphs) It turns out that our visual systems are not very good at estimating area. To the extent that area is being used to convey a speci c quantity, its a problem. But pie graphs are just ne if you are talking about visually obvious proportions like 25%. We are quite good at seeing 50% or 25% and various other kinds of ratios like that. Its when you get in between them that we are not particularly good at it.
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NIGEL HOLMES: Pies can be useful but you should not use more than about six slices of a pie and you should never tilt them. Never. If you tilt them you get perspective involved. Something that's 25% down here will look enormous if its right close towards you and you can't judge anything from that. Everything has to be at. I simply don't understand any of the 3D things that you can do these days, none of them. A shadow underneath it, why? Why do you want something to jump o the page? I want it to be on the page, not to jump o it. is is statistics and this is a mix up that people make, and I have made. People want to look at pictures but the statistics must come out fairly. If this is a pie chart and it is about how much beer people drink and you put it down like this, and draw a beer mug, underneath it, you've let the picture get in the way of the statistic. Picasso drew tables which were not in perspective, they were this way, straight up. of dangle down. Perception has long been answered. You can draw something that is not in perspective and still understand what it is. You can have your picture of the beer thing, but its at like this, and then
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e bottles don't fall o
it.
picture plane is straight up like this for you and the legs just kind
you can make kind of a glass underneath it and people will get the idea. Ok, this is about something we're drinking. You put a little foam on it and then its beer, or whatever it is. But you have not tilted the thing to try to make the whole picture like a real picture. STEVE KOSSLYN: Exploding a piece of the pie chart can be good if you have, say, one wedge that comes out because you've broken the perceptual organization. You've broken the proximity, that is the closeness, by pulling it out. Also the similarity of the continuation all around is now going to be di erent cause its out over here. Your attention will be immediately drawn to that one wedge that is pulled out. If you have too many wedges pulled out, you are not going to have anything di erent because you won't have the base, this single form thats been disrupted. If you have a bunch of wedges all you are going to see is a bunch of wedges. It just gets confusing and distracting. It doesnt accomplish anything except to make it di cult. STEVE KOSSLYN: information to take in. (On tables of data) Its too much e eye has trouble tracing something
thats far away in terms of the rows and columns, and if you give
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them the rows and columns by giving them lines it gets very busy and very complicated. A talk is not the same thing as an article. You should not be presenting archival data or something to them in a presentation. You should be trying to convince them of a What's the story? conclusion or convey certain general points. When you show a table youre showing a ton of numbers. What's the narrative? You're leaving too much information up there for them to look at instead of listening to you. Its not clear necessarily what the inferences are that they are supposed to draw. If you show a table, the only reason to do it is if there is one number that really stands out. You make it red and focus just on that one number. e rest of it becomes a background. Or perhaps there are some numbers that you want them to look at that are marginals, at the far end of the rows and columns. Its almost never the case that a table in a presentation is going to be better than a graph. A table just has too much information, far more than the four typically. Its also the case that in order to understand di erences or trends in a table you make them work harder.
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ey have to
mentally put it together. Why not just show it to them? Show them a graph that actually depicts the di erences you want them to be able to pay attention to instead of forcing them to try to gure them out on their own. STEVE KOSSLYN: (on line and bar graphs) What's almost always appropriate for line graphs is where the things you've measured are continuous. Time is a classic example. What you want is you want compatibility between what you're seeing, which is a continuous variation of a line, typically, with the concept being conveyed. If it's time that is varying continuously, then it makes sense to have a line going over it. Whereas with a bar graph typically you are talking about discreet points. Sometimes however even when you've got things that aren't varying continuously, like sex or men verses women, its still a good idea to use a line graph. It's unlikely people are going to confuse the two things that clearly disagree with the variable that's continuously changing. We get familiar with patterns. If you see a line that's going up you automatically know, if you're familiar with graphs, that one thing is larger than another.
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If you see two lines that are
crossing, people who are graphically literate know that that's an interaction, that is the e ects of one variable, say it was sex, depend on the e ects of another variable, age. For example, if we measured height at a relatively young age girls may be taller than boys, but at an older age it goes the other way. We're used to seeing lines that cross or diverge in various ways, at least people in science are, so even when the variables on the bottom don't change continuously it still makes sense to use a line graph. ese are guidelines. ere are no hard and fast rules. You have to do what's sensible. In general, if what's on the bottom is changing continuously, it makes sense to use a line graph. If it isn't, it makes sense to use bars. (How do you feel about horizontal bars?) ey make good sense if your labels are really long. If you have really, really long labels and you use a vertical bar graph you have to have either the labels going down, which is hard to read or use some abbreviation, which requires the audience members to memorize. Memorization is work and people don't like doing work. In those cases, it may make good sense. It makes a lot of sense if the thing you are measuring actually goes from left to
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right, like speed, for example. If you are talking about how far cars can go, or how fast they go, or something like that. On Otto Neurath NIGEL HOLMES: Otto Neurath was a social scientist, not a designer. In Vienna, in the 1920s he had a museum to explain to the people of Vienna what their town was all about in terms of its building, expansion, and so on. He made beautiful, in terms of scale, very large charts that were put up in this museum and the people of Vienna could come and learn about where they lived. Now, what was key about him was that, as I said, he's not a designer. He had a team of people. Marie Reidemeister. e team included a brilliant artist called Gerd Arntz, Otto Neurath and a third person called Otto Neurath was the idea, the social scientist, and the data collector. Marie Neurath, she eventually married him, was what was called the transformer. She took the information and selected what best represented Otto's original idea. Gerd Arntz, the third person, drew the icons. What Otto Neurath wanted to do was to make charts acceptable to museum going people.
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erefore he did not want
abstract bar charts or line graphs. He wanted things with pictures in them but he wanted it to be statistically accountable. So what he did was to set up a system which was called the Vienna method originally. If you wanted to represent a number and then a number that was twice the size, you did not draw a little person this size and then draw one twice the size. e reason being, if you looked at these two people, one would actually be much fatter as well. So in fact, that would be probably more like four times the size of this. Instead, he said, we will always represent 1 by one character and two by two characters and three by three, or if it was a lot of numbers, one equals 10,000, 2 equals 20,000 etc. So that his charts were stacks of little icons, whether they were people or sheep or bales of hay or iron or whatever. at system is incredibly elegant and I think now still looks, 80 or 90 years later, almost modern in its simplicity. He was restricted by the presses and the costs at the time in terms of his color so he tended to use black and maybe one other color. Even that looks modern to me now in our gloriously full color world. To have a graphic that is stark and black and white looks elegant. You can count it. Its statistically accountable. Its got pictures in
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it so people are attracted to it.
Its not a boring chart.
Its a
winner. I mean, I rip him o all the time, its just fantastic.
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Animation CARMINE GALLO: Be careful with animations. Just
because PowerPoint includes animations doesn't mean that you necessarily need to use animation. I tend to only use maybe a fade. Fade some words up on the slide. Too many animations distract from the story. CARMEN TARAN: For a professional presentation I would stick with fade and wipe, two subtle e ects. If you use a really wise graphic artist they can get by with a lot more because they will do it so subtlety, you don't even realize that there is a motion happening. Like we saw in the presentation yesterday where the person was doing this movie technique called denial and reword. You are only showing one small piece of a graphic to the audience and then youre showing another piece and then everything gets built up together. animation. ose are wise ways to use motion and
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RICK ALTMAN: You know animations have such a bad rap and to a large degree its deserved. How many years have we been seeing boomerangs applied to text and stu completely absurd. like that. Its For good reason people have a knee jerk
reaction of hating animation, which is too bad, because the animation engine in PowerPoint can be responsible for an audience really understanding a presenters message. I wish that the thing were renamed. It should be called the sequencing at's all nonsense. engine. Animation brings up this whole notion of cartoons and motion, action and energy, all that stu . e animation engine reaches its highest form when it allows you to sequence dense, chunky, complicated information. I'm not talking about bullets here. Bullets don't ever need to be animated as far as I'm concerned. But if you put up a big old chart all at once, now you are making your audience drink from the re hose. You are going to have to go on defense which is what I like to call it when the presenter has so much information up there. He or she then has to back up and explain the slide rather than just sharing ideas. When you can bring a complicated piece of information out piece by piece, then you really give your audience the opportunity
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to appreciate the weight of your message. responsible for that.
Animation can be
Now how ironic, the same tool that
everybody hates is the one that can really make the di erence between an audience just hearing what you have to say and really absorbing and appreciating it. Cueing rough Animation And Builds
STEVE KOSSLYN: A key thing in giving a presentation is to have control over the audience members' attention. So you want to know in advance what they're going to be paying attention to, and you can vary that in a bunch of di erent ways. One is, you can present it rst so that the thing you want them to pay attention to is the only thing that's up there. ere's nothing else competing with it. Or sometimes its better to just brie y present the whole list of things you're going to talk about so they get a sense of where you are going. en grey out, that is have the things that you are not going to be talking about almost the same color and contrast as the background, so that you can barely see them. eir attention will be drawn to whats
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di erent and whats most striking, most discriminable. Talk about that and then get rid of it and work your way down the list. at doesn't always work e ectively though. ere are some cases where if the material is su ciently challenging, that having them all up at once might actually be better than showing them one at a time. is is counterintuitive. ere have been studies of this. When they are all up at once they can decide what to spend the most time on. When you present one at a time youre giving the most time. You have to know your audience. You have to know what's going to be di cult for them and you have to know what they already know. When you are presenting one at a time you may not want to give the same amount of time for each thing. You want to in fact calibrate, for that particular audience, how much time you present each piece. Otherwise you may be better o just showing them all at once. JENNIFER GROH: at's something that the presenter
should try to control. You want to cue your audience as to where on the slide you want them to be looking especially if you are going to violate Steve Kosslyns rule and have more than four
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things on the slide.
ats where some animations can help you.
Try just brie y ashing the text that you are talking about or using your laser pointer to point at the location on the slide that you are referring to. If you are giving a scienti c presentation and you are presenting a graph, everybody should always remember to point out the axis and whats plotted on each axis. element of any kind of scienti c presentation. RICK ALTMAN: something move. e ip side of your question is, how do at's simple. Make at's the other reason why at's an important
you get everybody to look at your screen? ey can't help it. animation is so powerful.
e audience has no choice but to
look at your screen when you animate it. I've poked fun at this and I've stood way o to the side, made something happen on screen, and everybody looks. I say, Hey, no, I'm over here guys. look. en they laugh. ey realize that its human instinct. If something catches your eye, you have to at's the other side of the coin, if you want all eyes on screen, just make something move, they can't help it.
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Lines DAN ROAM: A line, a circle, a triangle, put a couple of lines together, the evocative power of the simplest kind of symbols that we can draw is really remarkable. We don't need to draw well, all we need to be able to do is ask what are the essential shapes of the idea that I have. A line to me typically is a connector. I have a shape, square, circle, a line is a way to connect it. A line can denote also, as was pointed out with the light bulb; brightness, or clarity, or understanding. SCOTT MCCLOUD: Lines have more than informational content. ey also have emotional resonance, whether a line is e character of the drawing, straight up, or across or a diagonal.
is it rough? Is it smooth? All of these things can also trigger emotional feelings as well and this is something that we use a lot in illustrated ction and in visual storytelling, graphic novels, and comics. is is something I think people are only really just beginning to explore in presentation as well, where it tends to be very dry and have a strict informational quality to it.
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Background (White vs. Black/ Dark vs. Light) MICHAEL ALLEY: White background versus dark
background, I could see arguments going either way. If I'm doing a short presentation, lets say at a conference and I'm incorporating equations, or I'm incorporating graphs, a white background has some sweet advantages in that those graphs and equations come in seamlessly. If I'm doing a longer presentation, an hour, two hours, or even three hours, and an audience could become tired because a white background is brighter on the eyes, then I tend to use a cool dark color such as a dark blue. me is a great thing about PowerPoint. is to ey've got this gradiation
and its so easy to do. When I was at Sandia, I used to watch these artists spend an entire day doing these airbrushes to get that kind of depth e ect and here we can in milliseconds do that with PowerPoint. ats PowerPoint working well.
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MELISSA MARSHALL: So which do I prefer? I would say that it depends on the situation. I don't have a standard that I always use a dark background and light text or I always use a light background and dark text. For me there's two factors that go into the choice because I do give talks that utilize both, either a dark background with light text or vice versa. e rst factor that I consider is what type of visual evidence do I have? If I have a high concentration of a certain type of visual evidence, perhaps a graph or a chart, depending on what that is, then I might make a choice of which works best given the majority of the visual evidence. at's one consideration, but usually what factors in even more is the length of the talk that I'm going to be giving. If I'm giving a very short presentation, perhaps twenty minutes or less, then I am more likely to use a light background because that is something that is bright to people. I do think that a lot of images stand out nicely on a light colored background. NIGEL HOLMES: Both. A change of pace within a single presentation. e fact that if you have a black slide in your presentation, nothing comes up on the screen as opposed to white
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which is kind of shocking. If you have a black screen and then you want to introduce another part of your presentation, a little white one, or whatever the name of that chapter as it were in your presentation, in white on the black is a nice transition. I'm going to black so the audience knows thats the end of that bit. en a little word appears as though from nowhere on the black background. Its an aesthetic question, as you said. Sometimes I'll continue with a black background but a lot of the stu that I do doesn't have a background, its a picture. JULIE TERBERG: It depends on the lighting and the
environment. In the case of corporate templates, I always provide a dark version and a light version. You want to use a light version in an ambient lit room. Black text on a light eld can be easier to read when the lights are up. Darker backgrounds are traditionally saved for a large ballroom. Perhaps the lighting is dim and the speaker is at a podium. Its easier to read a light text on a darker eld because a white screen will glow. Steer away from white backgrounds if you know you are going to be in a formal environment.
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RICHARD HARRINGTON: I ip op but most of my presentations have some sort of branded look. background with light text is easier on the eyes. Using a dark Its not as
draining if you are watching a long presentation but light backgrounds with dark text prints better. I'll just ip op. Even within a presentation I'll ip op. I usually have title slides that identify the section we're going in and those typically have a dark background, more graphical elements, and light text. If I'm in something that's very bullet or text heavy, I switch to a lighter background because it tends to be more like the printed page and people have an easier time reading it. So, I take my background in broadcasting, where broadcast graphics are typically darker backgrounds with lighter text, which holds up better with the electronic medium, and I use those on my more stylized graphics. When I get into a text heavier graphic I switch back to the world of print which is typically a lighter page with a darker background. JULIE TERBERG: For projection forget highly saturated reds and bright yellows. Grays can be tough for backgrounds because they tend to really go towards one end of the spectrum
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and become really purple. contrast.
Make sure you're using the highest
LESA SNIDER: I like the dark background with light text but not stark white text because thats blinding, and certainly not red or yellow or anything awful like that. I'm using a background myself right now which is a black to light grey gradient. is at the top and the light is at the bottom. doesn't blind you. STEVE KOSSLYN: It depends on the lighting e dark en I like using
probably about a 20% grey text, not white but just light grey so it
circumstances. If you have control of the lighting it shouldn't make any di erence, but if for some reason its a dark room, you don't want a white screen. at is too much glare. You don't want white with dark on it. You want it the other way around. e key is contrast. You want to be sure that they can see it easily without being subjected to too much glare or having to strain too much. As long as you have enough contrast you are pretty much going to be ok.
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Generally speaking, if you have control of the lights, you should have the lights slightly dim, not dark. You want the audience to be able to see you as well, because the talk is just as much about you as it is about the material you're showing. RICK ALTMAN: I think contrast is the most important thing. You give me green on brown, I'll kill you. But black on white, white on black or simply dark on light, light on dark, I think they are ne. I'm comfortable with white backgrounds and black text because then, yes, if it does need to be printed there aren't any issues. You don't have to worry about getting everything just right in that dialogue box and clicking the buttons that say do this black and white or whatever, it'll just print ne. It's just lower maintenance. JULIE TERBERG: If you're using a light background, use black text. If you are using a medium to a dark background use white text. You don't need to use a colored text. Its not necessary and if you are using it for a highlight color, you may be ignoring the fact that some of your audience is color blind and might not see that color. ey might not see the di erence. You have
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to be aware of color blindness issues in a percentage of the population. Use another graphic convention, an underline, an italic, to highlight that word instead of colored text. JENNIFER GROH: Well, there are certain color
combinations that probably won't work very well for many people. About 7% of the population is red/green color blind. Now the remainder of the population nds red and green to have really maximal contrast with each other, so you tend to gravitate towards using red and green when you want to show two opposing colors. at doesn't work for 7% of your audience. So you want to use something other than a red/green combination. Some color schemes work better in rooms that can be made really dark and others are terrible under those circumstances. If I can put in something that I'd really like the developers of PowerPoint to o er, it would be a quick way to change the color scheme based on the lighting conditions.
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On Fonts ANDREW ABELA: My book is full of a lot of research in every chapter, kind of substantiating everything that I talk about. So, its not just my judgment, its the empirical evidence. fonts and it all contradicts itself. e font was the one headache because there is quite a bit of research on ey accuse each other of mistakes in the methodology and so on. So as far as I can tell, there is no de nitive conclusion about fonts, size, or type. e general conclusion that I've always heard for print is that fonts with serifs, like Times New Roman, are easier to read and I personally tend to agree with that, and I tend to use that. But I've had other people argue, and some research shows that there is really no di erence between serif and sans-serif. en TV screens or video screens changes everything because apparently that changes what type of font works as well, but again, unfortunately, there's no consistency in the conclusions. NIGEL HOLMES: Gill Sans. I like Gill Sans because Eric Gill, who drew it, was a very eccentric english sculptor.
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He
produced the most beautiful wood engravings. Talk about white or black backgrounds, he did white lined wood engravings. He was asked to make a font that had classical structure to it. So if you look at Gill Sans the g is a peculiar thing, which is a circle on the top with a little head, then a downstroke and then another circle at the bottom. ats based on a Roman set of letters. So his font, although its a sans-serif font, is very readable at all sorts of di erent sizes and thats very attractive to me. MICHAEL ALLEY: e font that I use now is Calibri. Its
a sans-serif font so its a very clean font but unlike Arial, its not as blocky. It just has a little bit more shape to it. Its also a very e cient font in that in two lines of text, and I recommend no more than two lines of text for a single text block, you can get in more words at twenty eight point than you can with Arial. I don't have to sweat tightening the sentences as much, though I do think its important that you go through each slide and cut any word that is not needed. Don't use breathability when you can use a much shorter word wicking.
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MELISSA MARSHALL: Calibri, which is a sans-serif font.
My go to font right now is ere's information available
about how people, when they are taking in information, what they are able to take in most e ectively. What I'm concerned about is what they are able to take in most e ectively in the presentation format. My understanding is that a serif font is the best choice when somebody is reading a written document but for something that is projected, a sans-serif font is a little bit cleaner looking since its lacking those extra strokes. KAREN THOLE: Sans-serif, the Arial font is really the way to go and that makes a huge di erence. If you are looking at a slide and its written in Times New Roman, a serif font, its very hard to read, much harder to read than if things are done in an Arial font. STEVE KOSSLYN: Lately it has been Arial, clean and
simple. It doesn't really matter that much whether you use serif or sans-serif as long as the letters are large enough to be seen from the back of the room and there's enough contrast. You don't want to have a really dark grey background with black letters on it, for
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example. seeing it.
ere won't be enough contrast.
ey'll have trouble
You don't want to use some of the Microsoft templates. For example, they used to have one, Celestial, where there were planets and stars. I once saw a talk where the guy had white letters on this, with all these white planets and rings and it was almost impossible to be able to discriminate the letters from the background. You don't want to do that kind of thing. As long as the letters are large enough and the contrast is great enough, it doesn't matter much in terms of readability, but the sense that you convey is going to be di erent. If you present a sans serif font it looks more modernistic, cleaner, whereas a font with serifs, which are the little hooks and little lines at the edges of letters that make them more readable under some circumstances, they're more traditional looking. So Times New Roman for example, or New York, those are classic examples of serif fonts. ose will look traditional. So you want the look and the feel to be compatible with the message. RICK ALTMAN: I prefer Tahoma to Arial, the new Calibri in version 2007 is nice although again, you can't be certain that
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everybody has it just yet. If you're creating texts where the word wraps might be signi cant, then you got to go with something that you know everybody has. JULIE TERBERG: Standard fonts because my clients use PowerPoint around the world and if you go outside of the standard fonts, you are going to run into problems with other users.
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Handouts RICK ALTMAN: In my fteen years as a presentations So yes, the simple
consultant, I have not once seen it done successfully, the single slide deck that will function both ways. you need to create 2 documents. solution, although my clients never like to hear me say this, is that e twain shall never meet, where a single slide deck will perform both of those functions. One way or the other I have to bring the pain to my clients and I have to tell them that they need to create two documents. When the thing was due yesterday they are not happy to hear this but that's the simple answer right there. NIGEL HOLMES: One reason why I think there are so many words on slides is not actually because people are using it as a teleprompter or that they're lazy or whatever. Its because they want to print this out for people who are not at the lecture or the presentation, but that doesn't work either. points doesn't give you the whole thing. Reading the bullet
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I think it would be better, and I've done this on a few occasions, if you make your presentation the way you want to, with some words on it but mostly pictures and you talking. en you write a piece that is di erent. Its a di erent medium. Its like the di erence between print and web. A lot of people will ask me, We're a magazine, will you do this graphic for us and well put it on the web? And I'll say, Really? You are going to put this double page spread thing, with six point type on the web. Who is going to see it? You're going to move around it or what. di erent medium. Reading a piece is di erent from seeing it performed, and I mean performed, in front of you, which is a combination of pictures up here and a few words behind me and me speaking. And sometimes there are no pictures, so you will listen to me. SCOTT MCCLOUD: I don't think the handouts should be the slides. I think that what was a virtue in print became a vice in presentations. One of the things that we have to recognize is the fact that these are such vastly di erent media. When we do handouts in connection with a presentation, I think its actually a
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What are you talking about, its a
mistake to have the handouts be the presentation. If all we are doing is printing those slides and printing whatever text we had alongside them, I think that that re-purposing is actually betraying the best strengths of both media. di erent. e handouts should be e handouts should take advantage of the way that
print can concentrate information in small spaces and the presentation should take advantage of the way that we can land on only those ideas that matter one at a time. MICHAEL ALLEY: People hurt themselves when they
make presentations because they try to have the slides that they project be the exact same slides that they give out as handouts. e problem is that you've got two di erent communication situations. When you are a presenter and you're projecting slides, you've got an audience whose listening to you at lets say 120 words per minute and then trying to read the slides. When you've got a handout, that audience member is going back to their o ce or study and they are just reading that slide at their own pace. A lot of people, and I see this quite a bit in business, are very concerned about having the entire story on the handout.
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ey put
themselves in a box because they think that if its on the handout slide, its got to be on the projected slide. My suggestion to them is create your handout slide, putting a lot of words in the body, but when it comes time to take that handout slide and project it, have just the assertion at the top and the words that are necessary in the body. A lot of that extra text, fold that into your speech and spend the time to really learn the story of your work. If you'll do that, you'll communicate so much more to the audience. If you project everything, their understanding is going to go way down. PETER NORVIG: So I mentioned these various phases of what I need to know when I'm preparing it, what the audience needs to know when I'm giving it, and then there's also what the audience needs to know to take away. You don't want people kind of rushing ahead and reading the words before you are presenting them or else the whole audience is fragmented and they are losing what you're saying. You also don't want them having to take notes, thinking, Gee, this is really interesting and I don't want to lose this. Having a handout is a good way to do that.
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Another possible way is to say these slide will be available online and you can get them later. Whether that should be in the same format as the slides or separately, probably most of the time it should be separate. It is di erent to look at notes versus to hear a presentation. If you have the time, the best thing to do is prepare the presentation one way and then prepare the notes separately and distribute them either on paper or online, whatever works best and whatever is expected. RICHARD HARRINGTON: Personally, I never hand out print outs at the start of a presentation. I'll put them on my website where people can go and nd them or occasionally they'll be published, but I don't like to give those out ahead of time for people to read ahead. SETH GODIN: Its another defensive mechanism. I keep talking about defense here because we are wired as human beings to not like public speaking. e reason is that public speaking is when the rest of the tribe is looking at you. You can get in a lot of trouble. We didn't evolve to want everyone to look at us while we
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spoke up. So we do all these things to protect ourselves when we give a public speech. One of the things that feels very protective is to hand out a handout. Why? Because now when you're speaking, everyone is ignoring you and they're reading the handout. Well if that's what you want to do, don't even show up, just send the memo. What I think you ought to do is use this precious moment that you have to make your point, and then say, Don't worry about writing a bunch of notes because here are all the notes. I'll give them to you when I'm done.
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Knowing Your Audience NIGEL HOLMES: I realized that I can't just write the
lecture on the plane and give it, that these people have paid to come to this thing. I should put as much e ort into this as I put into my real work, and thats the give away, I don't even call this my real work or I didn't then. Now I see it as a job. I'm not just saying I did this, now I did this, and I'm an illustrator so now I did this, and somebody asked me to do this, and I thought this came out pretty well. I've seen so many lectures like that. Its awful. You have to get out of that and say what is it that these people want to know? Part of the preparation is, who are these people? What age are they? What are they looking at? Why have they come to this conference? Why have you asked me to make a presentation? All of those are very pertinent questions in my eld. are going to make. e answers that you get will really help you to form the presentation that you
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STEVE KOSSLYN:
e goldilocks rule, not too much, not Second, on
too little, just the right amount, depends rst on knowing what you're trying to convey, what your message is. knowing your audience. You've got to know both what they
already know, because you don't want to bore people, you don't want to give them information that's extraneous, and you've got to know their level, so you can know where to start when you are conveying new information. You have got to know what their interests are because people have to be engaged or they're not going to get it. If you are not appealing to things they're interested in, why should they listen to you? You really have got to know your audience. RICHARD HARRINGTON: You are there for the
audience for a reason and you want to make sure that what you are presenting is going to be clear and understood. You can't just take the same presentation you've used every other time and regurgitate it. I think a lot of speakers forget that. I always try to understand who it is I'm presenting to, their level of education, their need for being in the room and then evaluate my decks of slides and throttle it up or throttle it down.
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JENNIFER GROH: I don't know that there's one single answer to how much time people need to absorb information. When I teach, for example, if its really new material that people don't know, I actually tend not to use PowerPoint for anything except for maybe displaying some images or some graphs. All the text and all the things that I'm going to say, I write on the board. e reason I write it on the board is that the pace of my writing better matches the pace with which people are able to listen to me and absorb it. Its kind of a way of slowing myself down. When I give a PowerPoint presentation to an audience that knows the background I can go much faster. use more examples to break up my ow. can use. You don't know how much background every member of your audience has, so one thing that you can do is say the same thing in a couple of di erent ways. at way, you will not lose the en, for the people who know the material already by boring them because you've actually said something slightly di erent. people who don't know that much about the point that you are
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But if its an
audience that's new to the material, I'll go much slower and Ill ats another trick you
trying to make, they have maybe 3 chances. If they get any one of those chances they'll be ne. So using redundancy but not exact repetition can help people along. STEVE KOSSLYN; e extent that people have to think
about something and relate it to information they already know, they're much more likely to remember it in long-term memory. One of the worst things that you can do is treat your audience as if they are a bunch of sponges. at they are just sort of hanging on to a rock and waiting for nutrients to pass by and they're going to suck it in when it comes by, fairly passive. You really want to get the audience actively involved. You want to use demonstrations. You want to set things up in a way that forces them to think because the more people think, the more they're likely to remember. amazing thing actually. It's sort of an accidental byproduct, just thinking things through will make it stick. It's an
SCOTT MCCLOUD: One of the most important things in comics that we take advantage of is the readers imagination and
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the fact that people create these whole in-between sequences in between panels. We take two disparate images and then we somehow stitch them together just the way that we stitch the whole world together from fragments. We never see the whole world of our experience at any one time and yet we still understand that it has a whole character to it. I think that in presentations we also have that stitching going on, when we go from one slide to another. eres a certain cognitive leap and I think a good presenter might take advantage of that leap and allow the audience to do a little bit more work than simply having everything spoon fed to them. Something can happen in between those images.
JENNIFER GROH:
When you have a PowerPoint
presentation accompanying your talk you are engaging two sensory systems in the brain. You are engaging the auditory and the visual system. ere are then two ways for the information to ere are ways for you to be getting into the higher areas where you are thinking about what the meaning is of this presentation.
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check yourself if you have maybe misunderstood what the person is saying. You've got the visual aids of the PowerPoint to alert you to that fact and prevent you from having a misunderstanding. e visual alone wouldn't tend to do it for you. People tend to get a little bit bored when its just something visual on the screen. Hearing someone describe it keeps us engaged, keeps us feeling like its a conversation. e more someone can challenge their audience to be thinking along with them, the more engaged they will be and the more active they will be at listening and watching and absorbing the content of the presentation. Engaging through Montage GREG SMITH: Montage is simply the French word for
editing and its used in a variety of ways in lms. What we often talk about as montage sequences are those sequences that summarize a whole bunch of time. When a couple starts dating, you'll get a montage sequence. ey'll go get an ice cream, go to the park, etc. It will summarize time.
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Montage is very useful for summarizing time that way, but montage has been used for a variety of things. Its been used by Sergei Eisenstein, probably the primary theorist of montage, as a way to think about how the viewer thinks and how the viewer puts together things in their mind when they are watching a movie. For Eisenstein, montage is something that allows the ats viewer to mentally participate in putting things together. the power of montage for Eisenstein. Its giving you the pieces of an idea and letting you put that idea together in your head. ats going to be a much more powerful way to think about things, to feel things than if I just told you what to think and what to feel. For Eisenstein, what he does is he says, I'm going to give you two ideas and I'm going to sharpen them as tightly as possible. I'm going to make them as vivid and as important as I can and then what I'm going to do is ask you to combine them in your head. He says thats whats going to make those ideas come to life, thats whats going to make those ideas yours. Sergei Eisensteins rst lm, Strike, was a very important lm for him in experimenting with his ideas. Eisenstein always thought of his lms as experiments. He would think about his
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theories and then he would try to put them into practice in his lms. Strike is one of those lms that is an experiment. What he's trying to do is to make you feel what it would feel like for these strikers to be mown down by the army, to be brutally murdered. Eisenstein thinks that we've just seen too much of that, we've seen too many people being mown down on lm by armies. We are used to that. Its almost familiar content. How do you actually make someone feel what its like to be massacred? He says, I've got to jump you out of that, I've got to jump you out of your comfort level. So what he does is he uses montage, a particular kind of montage, intellectual montage. He says in order to make you feel what its like to be massacred I'm going to show you people being massacred by soldiers. But, I'm going to intercut that with an actual bull being slaughtered. If I can take these two ideas, people running away from soldiers and a bull being slaughtered, if I can show you both of those ideas, you will put them together in ways that are horri c. And it is, a horri c, horri c piece that he puts together. When you are seeing that bull being slaughtered and then you see those people running away from the soldiers, the massacre occurs in your mind. the power of montage.
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ats
STEVE KOSSLYN: You should be trying to convince them of a conclusion or convey certain general points. eres a continuom in PowerPoint presentations. On one extreme you've got presentations that are designed to convince people. On the other extreme you've got presentations that are designed to convey information. Most presentations are somewhere in the middle, they're a mix of the two. But on the extreme convince part you want to present an argument where when they walk away, they believe something they didn't necessarily believe when they walked in. On the extreme convey part, you want to teach them something, so when they walk away they know something. Its not about belief now, its about knowing something they didn't know.
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Dealing With Presentation Nervousness CARMINE GALLO: Great speakers and great PowerPoint presenters are not born. You're not born knowing how to deliver a great PowerPoint presentation. It takes practice and rehearsal. DAN ROAM: up? I think for everybody who speaks there's
always a moment of what if this doesn't go well? What if I screw ere are two things that are the only answer to that. One of e example I'll always give, you them is a belief that you can do it because you've done it before. e other one is, you practice. mentioned George Clooney earlier, you know what makes an actor really good? We believe that they're being spontaneous. Are we fooling ourselves? Do we think that George Clooney is making up those lines on screen at that moment? We think so but he's said those things dozens of times. When Conan O'Brien or Jerry Seinfeld goes up and does a standup, are they making those jokes up at that time? We think they are. No! ey've rehearsed that stu , over and over and over,
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and because they are so comfortable with it, they can then be spontaneous. e fact is, there is only one thing we need to do to be better at speaking in public and that's practice. Know what we are going to say and say it to ourselves a few times before we go and say it in front of somebody else. at doesn't inhibit us, that doesn't stop us from being intelligent or spontaneous. It gives us the innate con dence to know that then we can then be spontaneous because we can always fall back on what we already know that we know how to say. CARMINE GALLO: ere was an executive who I once
worked with. He was an executive in a Fortune 500 company worth over a 100 million dollars. He was very successful and very, very nervous about public speaking and his presentations. He got really worked up ahead of presentations. People didn't even want to be in the same room with him. I knew it was because he was nervous. Even people at that level get very nervous. How did he eventually get past those nerves and calm those nerves? He practiced relentlessly. He would stand up for two hours at a
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time, maybe a week ahead of the presentation, and literally go through every slide. at way, he had con dence. He know what was on every slide. He knew how he was going to open every slide and how he was going to close it. He knew how he was going to start and how he was going to nish. at gave him more and more con dence. When he didn't practice, he was signi cantly more nervous. When he rehearsed and he knew everything about that presentation and he had it nailed, it gave him a sense of comfort. at's one of the best pieces of advice that I can give people who are nervous before presentations or public speaking, get up there and practice, it'll make you feel better. MELISSA MARSHALL: Well, I recently gave a talk at
Harvard medical school. I was very nervous for that talk, in the sense that I was very excited about the material that I had to communicate. e reason that I was nervous was the constraints that were on that situation. I had only a short period of time and I had this material that I felt passionately about. I was concerned about how I was going to be able to t that material into the amount of time that I was allotted to present. Also, I started to
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feel a little bit anxious because it was going to be a fairly large group that I would be presenting to. One of the things that I get asked a lot as someone who teaches public speaking, this is the question that happens on the plane, right? When you sit down with someone on a plane, if you strike up a conversation, well the rst thing they ask you is, What do you do? en when I say, I teach public speaking at Penn State, almost always the second question out of their mouth is, What can I do to be less nervous as a speaker? I really wish that I had a magic bullet, something that I could say that if you do this, then that's going to take that away. I think one of the biggest misconceptions or fallacies out there about the best presenters is the belief that they're just really comfortable. e belief that they're just a really good presenter or e belief that this is just something they've got great charisma.
that comes naturally to them. I would argue that I've found that to be pretty much untrue in most of the cases where I've had the opportunity to speak to really e ective, really con dent presenters. e thing that every good presenter that I've found has in common is that they practice and prepare a lot. I don't think that there's anything that takes the place of good practice and
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good preparation. I can say that for that talk that I gave recently at Harvard Medical School, that I was in my hotel room that night before practicing that talk probably thirty or forty times before I actually gave it. So I don't think that there is a magic bullet. Practice and preparation is the best way to get there. One thing I advise that my students do when given the opportunity to give a talk, which most people will shy away from that, is take that opportunity. First of all, its a way to di erentiate yourself. You get an opportunity and you never know who is going to be in that room. Its an opportunity for you to show what it is that youre working on but also, it is one of the crucial ways I see to becoming a better speaker, to get some experience. e nervousness does go away when you start to realize after being in front of audiences again and again, that you survive. at being said, I understand that its not that easy for a lot of people. Stage fright is a very real thing. Public speaking anxiety is a very real thing. Beyond practicing and preparing, one of the little tiny tricks that I mention to my students is scrunch your toes. I know that probably sounds silly, my students laugh at me every time I say it, but the reason all that dgety-ness happens is because you have this nervous energy.
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Nervous energy that
perhaps manifests itself in a shaky voice and those sorts of things. What scrunching your toes does is it sends that nervous energy to a place where the audience can't see it. It's a very small thing but I've found it to work. RICK ALTMAN: e rst thing I tell people is don't try to
not be nervous. You know the rst thing that a friend will tell somebody before they are going to do something important? Don't be nervous. Well, that's impossible and I don't think it's good advice. Nerves, what is it? at's energy. at's your body telling you that you are about to do something important. So, to try to not be nervous is pointless, super uous, and could be bad advice. In fact, I remember, and I quote Reggie Jackson, the great ball player in the 70s and 80s, all the time. He has more post season home runs than anybody in the game. Someone asked him the same question and he said, Well, I'm concerned if I'm not nervous because then I will wonder, am I not on my game? Does this not matter to me? I look forward to the butter ies in my stomach and I'm concerned if I don't have them.
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I really can relate to that. I'm nervous every single time I go on, irrespective of how many times I've done this. I look forward to the nerves. en the question is how do you channel the energy because that is what can get you in trouble. You've seen it I'm sure, the person who starts talking fast, talking high, starts moving fast. You start moving all your little muscles. You start all the dgets and the twittles. You don't know what to do. You put your hands behind your back, can't do that, in your pocket, can't do that. You don't even know what to do. So part of it is how you control your musculature. What you want are to use your big muscles, your gross motor skills. You want to make big gestures. You want to use your diaphragm. at's why laughing is good. Instead of making e big gestures let you use your big your audience laugh make yourself laugh. You want to have what I call air under the pits. speech pattern. muscles and when you do that, that tends to slow down your e two have a symbiotic relationship. When you slow down your speech pattern, you tend to not use your little muscles. You tend to use your big muscles. You tend to use your diaphragm more instead of your throat. So it all
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plays in, it can either snowball for the good or for the bad. When you can control your pace and when you can control your muscles, now you can control the energy you will inevitably have. Instead of saying Don't have the energy, don't be nervous, its much better to embrace it, count on it and try to channel it. GREG SMITH: One of the best pieces of advice, even e idea of don't
though it sounds stupid, about presenting to a large crowd, is to be aware that nervousness can be your enemy. be nervous is a bad piece of advice. Of course you're nervous, but you should be aware that if your nervousness communicates to an audience, you're in trouble. What every presenter has to do is become an actor. Every presenter needs to understand that even though I'm nervous, I'm going to act like I'm not nervous. I am nervous as all get out but I am breathing and acting as if I'm not nervous. at comes across You are a as being con dent even though I may not be. You could never not be nervous but you can act like you are not. performer. You are an actor in front of an audience. Nervousness that communicates is your enemy because it says I'm not in control. It says that I don't know what I'm talking
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about. Act con dent. Act as if you're not nervous even though you certainly are. ANDREW ABELA: Years ago I got some advice that I
found very, very helpful. I'm not sure if its helpful because it does anything or if it just gives you something that sort of has a placebo e ect, if you will. at is diaphragm breathing. Breathe with your stomach, kind of in and out, empty your lungs and ll them a few times before going on stage. I've found this has a calming e ect and if it doesn't, it actually just makes you think that it does. It gives you something to think about other than going up on stage. Focus on the breathing instead. More recently, what I've found much more useful is to just think about the audience. have to o er them. ink about the audience and what I If I'm thinking about them, not thinking
about me, then there's no reason for the nervousness to arise. Whos to be nervous if you are there to help people and serve people. ats how I like to think about my speeches, I'm there to give them something. ey're there cause they want to receive it. What's to be nervous about? Its not about me the presenter. Its
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about my message and about the people who are receiving my message most of all. CARMINE GALLO: Being nervous, stage fright, is a very di cult thing for most people to get past. I think it stems from the fact that we as human beings are just really self-absorbed and consumed with ourselves. How does my suit look? Is my tie straight? Its all about me instead of focusing on the message and how you're helping the people in your audience. Once you start refocusing and going from me to we, then I think it helps get past some of the nerves and the stage fright that go along with public presentations. But I know that's easier said then done.
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Stage Preparation SETH GODIN: I give twenty, thirty, forty speeches a year. My record is ninety in eleven countries. Here's what I've discovered over time. Every single time a producer or someone like that asks you a question, write down the question and the answer and just start collecting them in a document. Give that document to the people who are controlling the speech a month before you get there. Two weeks before you get there make sure they got the document. Assume that they will ignore everything in the document and assume that it won't go the way that you hope. ere are two ways that you can deal with this. One, you can make it so you don't use PowerPoint and you just speak. You can be pretty sure that they are going to have a microphone and therefore, you won't have to worry about anything. Or, realize that it is your responsibility, not theirs, to make sure that it is all going to work right. have to get there early enough to actually test it. My feeling is, they didn't ask you to come give a speech because they wanted to control what you were going to say. So I
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at means you
don't share my slides ahead of time.
ey don't mean anything,
they're just pictures. I have no handouts because that's not what I'm there to do. But what I do make sure I'm going to do is be available to them, sometimes at ve in the morning, to make sure that my laptop really did get hooked up, that it really is projecting on the screen. CARMINE GALLO: I think in order to give a really
e ective presentation and to have all of the energy necessary to connect with an audience you need to feel good. You need to feel good about where you are in that presentation and you have to have a sense of con dence about where its going. I always recommend getting there as early as possible. always get to a venue an hour ahead of time. everything. I ip through some of the slides. I I connect
I usually have
multimedia so I want to make sure its playing. I turn up the volume to make sure everybody in the audience can hear e ectively. I get up on stage. I look around a little bit and maybe I walk around. It gives me a sense of comfort because I know the environment and I'm comfortable with the environment. en I
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can start meeting people as they come in and I'm con dent that the technology is set up and its ready to go. Before a speech I'll avoid things like milk and co ee, things that will dry you out. Usually some warm tea and honey is the best thing to alleviate your voice and to make you sound better. DAN ROAM: ere's something in the potassium thats in a
banana thats actually kind of a natural mellower-outter, plus it also gives you a really good boost of energy thats going to last for about an hour or so. ats usually what I'll have. I don't want to be lled up on anything before I go and speak. So I don't drink anything. I've given up ca eine. Never drink co ee, never drink anything that has ca eine in it if you are going to be speaking a lot. e ca eine dries you out and obviously adds an edge of anxiety that nobody needs. It always puts you in this position where you are going to have a high and then a drop. So I have just worked ca eine out of my life. Drink warm, not cold water. What you want to do is go into the lobby outside the ballroom before you are going to go give your keynote. Go to the tea dispenser and just take the hot water out. Let it cool for a few minutes and drink that warm water.
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e warm water warms up your vocal cords.
It hydrates you
which is great and it warms up your vocal cords. Its a very subtle thing but if you are going to be talking for the next three hours keep drinking warm water.
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Inspire, Entertain & Educate NIGEL HOLMES: I think its all theater and since its en when you are
theater, you plan it, write it, and rehearse it. them. CARMINE GALLO:
up there, you are entertaining people as much as you are educating
A presentation is intended to do
three things: to inform, so you're giving them information that they need; its meant to educate, so maybe you're telling them about the state of the industry or a particular problem before o ering a solution; and its also meant to entertain. People don't go to presentations just to learn information, they also want to have fun when they are learning that information. You should be excited about the message and the information in that presentation. RICH HARRINGTON: I think that those are the best
presentations, when you are learning something but you are having fun. You believe in what they're talking about. You feel
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the passion for the subject matter and its contagious. I think that most folks su er from just wanting to educate people. ere's nothing wrong with educating, but if you educate without inspiring and educate without entertaining, then the retention goes through the oor. I think that thats what the best CEOs and some of the best speakers get, is that I need to inform you but I also need to entertain you and inspire you. CARMINE GALLO: I actually think, to be a great
presenter, its very important to be in great shape, to exercise, to eat well, to be healthy because again, that imparts energy. Subconsciously, people are making decisions and judgments about you when they see you before you even say a word. So how are you coming across? How do you look? Do you look t? Do you have some energy? I think its a little too late to start thinking about that right before you give a presentation. So, I like to be t. I like to eat well and I love to exercise. at way, when I do have to give a presentation, I'm at my best and I've got a lot of energy. KAREN THOLE: (Referencing Hans Roslings) His enthusiasm. He had great energy in giving that talk and that also
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makes a big di erence. Its the visuals most certainly, but its the delivery of the talk that is very important as well. So you need to show some enthusiasm, be excited about the work youre presenting. CARMINE GALLO: I was a television anchor for about fteen years. One of the things that I actually learned when I was in graduate school for broadcast journalism was that when that camera is on you've got to boost your energy. So think of energy on a scale from one, which is pretty much asleep, to ten, which is over the top, Tony Robbins type of energy. at is too much. Try to be somewhere at a six, seven, or eight, which is higher energy than normal, much higher energy than you would feel comfortable with speaking to somebody one on one for example, but thats about the right amount of energy for television. When I was still working as an active journalist, I covered the Schwarzenegger campaign for governor and then I covered Arnold's rst 100 days in o ce for a television station in Los Angeles. I only got to meet him a few times but I attended all of his speeches. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an extraordinary speaker but a couple of things, he works at it. He's worked at it for many,
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many years. He knew that the next level of his career would be an opportunity for him to reach a wider range of people through the way he presents himself and through his public speaking. I actually heard from his best friends that he studied public speaking and he gave as many speeches as he could so that he would be a more e ective speaker. He also gives a fantastic PowerPoint presentation. He practices PowerPoint and he's very good at PowerPoint. He has an energy level that most speakers can not match. I asked some of the people around him why Arnold has so much energy. ey said he's got more energy than the twentysomethings on his sta because he exercises more than everybody else. Even when he's governor, and you can imagine how much work that would entail, every single day, he still nds an hour and a half, six days a week for exercise because he knows how important it is as a speaker and as a leader, to be t, to look healthy, to be healthy and to have energy. LESA SNIDER: e quality I like most is passion from the
presenter and no bullet points but that never happens. Passion from the presenter, because if they're not passionate about the
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subject they're talking about then its going to be boring. not going to be animated.
ey're
ey are not going to walk around.
ey need to exude some level of passion about what they're speaking about or they probably ought not be up there. SCOTT MCCLOUD: Generally speaking, the most
important thing is to be relaxed and to believe in your subject. It could be one of the biggest problems with presentations, it isn't so much the style of presentation or the strategies of presentation, its the fact that many people who give PowerPoint presentations all over the country every day, couldn't care less about the subject. If you really care about what you are saying, you nd ways to make it smooth, to make it natural, to make it engaging, and to get it all across. NANCY DUARTE: I think PowerPoint is one of the things that is actually ruining our education system a bit. If you go back to before presentations existed and study the work of Richard Feinman, he was a physics professor at Cal Tech, he does a brilliant job of connecting to the audience, writing on the white board, going to the slides, checking his notes. But what he really
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did is, he explained the value of physics. He had that sense of wonderment in what he said. He not only talked about what they are physically doing but he talked about the grander context of why its important and why it has changed the world. He didn't just focus on the subject matter. In many ways PowerPoint in presentations has become a crutch with the outlines and everything there. You really want people to get red up about your subject matter. You are really turning your students into evangelists and your cause is your subject matter. So take the time to have two to ve or eight or so lectures per semester that are passionate, that convey the reason you fell in love with what you do. If that love and passion transfers to another student, you've done your job.
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Don't Put Up Barriers CARMINE GALLO: In terms of body language, there are three things that great speakers and great presenters do. One is eye contact. Great speakers make eye contact, 80, 90% of the time, which is why its important to create PowerPoint slides that are visual. If there are too many words on a slide you are going to read from that slide. So eye contact is very important. Great speakers also use hand gestures. In fact, some research shows that complex thinkers use complex gestures. It gives us con dence in the speaker. Its ok to use hand gestures, not contrived, phony hand gestures, but use your hands naturally. e third thing that great speakers do is maintain what is called an open posture. So you can snap photographs of someone like Steve Jobs, or another person who I like, John Chambers at Cisco Systems, and they don't have arms crossed in front of them. behind the lectern. audience. It's very open. ey are not ere's no barrier in between them and their
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RICK ALTMAN: My wireless remote is always in my hand, so perhaps that has sort of become my security blanket, or I should say, without it I feel something is wrong. I feel naked. But no, I don't have a security blanket. I don't use notes. Usually, I don't use notes. I nd that there's too much risk of creating barriers between you and your audience that I want to do as much as I can to eliminate those. I don't use a lectern either, because even though its just a hollow wooden box its potentially a barrier. I try to just be standing in front of my audience. CARMINE GALLO: ere's a pastor named Joel Osteen
who actually does a really good job of moving away from the lectern. He has a lectern there with some notes but he'll walk around the lectern, glance at his notes and then deliver it to the crowd beside or beyond the lectern. CARMINE GALLO: People like John Chambers will
actually take it one step further and break down that barrier between him and the audience by not only not using a lectern but by leaving the stage and roaming around the audience. He begins by introducing the topic on stage and then within a few minutes,
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he walks among the rows of people, looking at people in the eye. He gets right up close and personal to people. Its almost as if its a conversation rather than a monologue. Its a lot more receptive to the audience when you are actually closer to them and within the audience. Its a little o putting sometimes and it does take an amazing amount of con dence and practice, because you really have to have your message down cold in order to do that.
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Don't Read Your Slides MELISSA MARSHALL: e worst PowerPoint presentation that
I've ever seen - what comes to mind is a lot of di erent presentations that have the same characteristic. One place that I see a lot of PowerPoint presentations that I believe are challenging is at an academic conference. your In that scenario, there's this incredible opportunity where you have people who are likely in eld, who are very interested in your work but they are As I think of the worst ones that I have seen, its when the presenter gets up there and their entire talk is on their slides. are pretty much reading everything from their slides. ey e listening to many presentations throughout the day.
audience could get everything that they needed to know or everything that was communicated about that presentation from the slides. I think that that is a missed opportunity. If your audience is getting everything that you want to communicate directly from your slides then why do we have a presentation situation in that scenario? If they can get the same information then you may as well just hand them your slides. You
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may as well just hand them a paper. Whenever you are reading everything from the slides its a missed opportunity. It's a missed opportunity for you as a presenter to really connect that information in a live venue to your audience and to adapt that information to the needs of that particular audience. When you just read, as I see people do at academic conferences, you are not taking that opportunity to stand out and really do your work the honor that it deserves. Even more importantly, you are missing an opportunity to really establish the importance of that work with a group of colleagues that are genuinely interested. RICH HARRINGTON: When you put too many words on the slide, what happens is people turn their back to the audience and they just read. People didn't come to a presentation to see somebody standing at the front of a dimly lit room, staring at the screen reading. ey came to see the speaker.
JENNIFER VAN SIJLL: I don't ever read my PowerPoints if I'm doing a group talk, ever. I think that's the worst thing to do, put text up on the screen and then actually read the text to the audience, because the audience is reading a lot faster than you.
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ey can read faster than you speak and they're just bored out of their mind. So I learned that by being an audience member where somebody literally read everything that was in their PowerPoint and I thought I was going to rip my hair o . CARMEN TARAN: ere is nothing worse than a presenter
reading slides behind them with the exception of a presenter eating and reading text on the slide behind them.
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Presentation Styles SCOTT MCCLOUD: As far as my own presentations go there are a few things that I try to do. In my mind I make a distinction between what I think of as magic carpet talks and monkey bars talks. A magic carpet talk is where you've actually memorized the material enough that what you're saying just sort of ows along and as you are stepping through the material, images come up underneath you as you are walking, just sort of in mid air. Monkey bars talks are where an image comes up on the screen and it reminds you of what you wanted to say and then you improvise on that. CARMINE GALLO: Arnold Schwarzenegger always had a vision of himself in his own mind, even when he was a kid, of coming to America, becoming an actor and becoming a leader in some capacity. When he reached tremendous success as a body builder and as an actor, he began to think about the next step in his life. He realized that that role would probably entail having to
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persuade or in uence people on a leadership level, and so he realized he had to become a better public speaker. His best friends told me that he would take every opportunity to give a speech, to give a presentation. He's actually very e ective at delivering PowerPoint presentations but he worked at it. He worked at it for many, many years. A lot of people were speculating, Maybe he's giving speeches because he wants to be governor. He wants to run for o ce. At the time, he didn't know but he did realize he wanted to be a leader and a great leader needs to be an e ective speaker. So he worked at it and he saw a vision of himself as a great speaker. and giving presentations. e PowerPoints that I saw, he was campaigning on some particular initiative and so they were typical government issued PowerPoints, but the way he delivered the PowerPoints I thought was very e ective. He would glance at the PowerPoint slide, mention something and then turn to the audience and deliver the information. Where most people read from the slides, he knew better than that. He knew that it was important to communicate to everybody and have that eye contact.
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en he took every
opportunity to become a great speaker by practicing and speaking
SCOTT MCCLOUD: On the smooth side, its nice to have magic carpet talks. Sometimes its nice to have that really polished presentation. I also, though, do like monkey bars talks because its fun to improvise, and its from that improvisation that you gradually build something a little bit smoother, a little bit more prepared. I ip back and forth as far as that goes. NIGEL HOLMES: If you can, get away from the podium and act some things out. Get people up onto the stage so they can look at whats up there and they can kind of interact with it even. I get people to do exercises on stage but, the point is to show the diagrams of how you do exercises. You've involved the audience and they can see them up there, they can kind of follow along and then the audience can see. Its using the whole space. a computer. Its not just saying this is something that is like looking at the T.V. or any other media, like Its a three dimensional space we're in that has human voice. It has the potential for music. Depending on how big the space is, you've got enormous space to play with as well as your presentation. Understand that when you are making a
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presentation, for it to be successful, for people to remember it, that it is almost closer to theatre than it is to the classroom. CARMINE GALLO: Props are appropriate when you are introducing a new product or a service and you want to give people a feeling for the environment in which they would be using that product or the service. One of the most e ective ways I've seen of using props is at Cisco Systems. What they do is, they have two people on stage, the CEO, John Chambers and an actual guy whose title is chief demonstration o cer. His name is Jim Grubb. ey usually share the stage together but what Jim will do is actually create a faux environment. When they're talking about wireless networking at a baseball game for example, he actually had a little stadium setup with two or three levels of stadium chairs. He had some baseball posters behind him, just a very simple setup. He and John sat on the stadium chairs and were looking at the little mobile device and talking about wireless networking. with nothing to bring is alive. Imagine how boring that would be if you just presented that in terms of PowerPoint slides
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Often times, what they will do, is they will show some PowerPoint slides that give you basic visuals or information. en, they'll take you to another part of the stage where they talk about it in a faux environment so that you can get a sense of how the product actually ts into your life. RICHARD HARRINGTON: My biggest pet peeve is
people who basically completely ignore the audience. My favorite phenomena is people who over rely on the recorded timings feature. ey will open up their presentation and record their ey basically have all the timings set and so ey show and rehearse it.
they just sort of sit there and their presentation is auto-running. You feel like you're watching a trade show oor barker. or is this live? ere's no interaction. are just giving you the presentation. Its like, Wow, is this taped ere's no ability for people to ask questions. line. e presenter just seems like they've
dialed in and you can see that they are focusing on that end nish ey're not looking at the audience at all because everything is memorized, everything is scripted in their head and everything is timed out.
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Well, that's not what people came to see. Your slides are supporting you but you are there to speak to the audience and to try to engage the audience in a meaningful way. People have so many reasons to give presentations. I think what happens is people forget that you are there to communicate something, whether it be an ideal or a mission, whether it be education or fundraising. You are there because you are trying to get something accomplished and what you are trying to get accomplished is not giving a PowerPoint presentation. Its conveying information in a way that sticks. For a lot of people the medium becomes the message as opposed to what the message itself is supposed to be. RICK ALTMAN: e most important piece of advice I can
give to any of my clients or anybody that comes to our conference is to not make the slides more important than the presenter. I say this very directly. I'll look them in the eyes and say, You are the presentation not your slides. Nobody in the history of speech making, nobody has ever walked into a room, saying, Oh I can't wait to see his slides. at doesn't happen.
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So, rst you simply need to impress upon the person that they are the reason that somebody walks into a room. It's their expertise that is at central interest here. When the slides get in the way, that's when you start hearing, Well, that presentation sucked, that guy didn't know what he was talking about. CARMEN TARAN: If you are a powerful presenter, you en, the slides
have a lot of command over the room and you know whats happening. People are eating from your hands. really don't matter that much because really, whos the most important visual in a presentation? You are. You as a presenter are the most important visual. at authenticity that you bring to the stage, your body language, gestures, facial expressions, stance, and movement, overpowers everything that happens in the slides. I nd that if you use really powerful graphics in the en it takes even stronger background they can be distracting.
presentation skills to account for whats there so that the focus remains on the presenter. Sometimes people use a lot of text and graphics as a teleprompter. You know that when you see complete sentences on the slides. ose are not good. But in terms of
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balance I would say that you can get by with one powerful graphic that will add emotions. JOANNA GARNER: e best presentations that I've seen
are the ones where the speaker is who you are paying attention to. e audience members are really looking at and listening to the presenter and the presenter is not driven by the visual aids. e presenter uses the visual aids instead to clarify a point, include more information, or illustrate something that they can't obviously show in person.
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e Value Of MICHAEL ALLEY:
e Blank Screen
Before a presenter creates a slide, I
think its a great exercise for the presenter to sit down and think if slides are appropriate for this presentation and if for this presentation, for all parts of this presentation. moment to occur when the slide is blank. ere is nothing more wonderful in a presentation of PowerPoint slides than for a e presenter moves to a part of the room he or she has not stood in before, moves close to the audience, and really engages the audience in a personal way. You sense it when that occurs. Here at Penn State we try to teach our students to really be a critical thinker in terms of, are slides needed at all points? For instance, people have a slide with acknowledgements and they'll typically have these bullet lists. it is just boring and impersonal. When I'm doing even a technical talk, and I do acknowledgements, I like to blank the screen. I like to step forward. If somebody is in the room I like to just tip my hand to them and thank them. If its a sponsor such as National Science
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en, they'll go through them and
Foundation, I like to look people in the eye and tell them how much we appreciate their support. Make it personal. ere are times in presentations where you are telling a story. Now, that may not occur in a 12 minute conference talk where time is really tight but in a longer, one hour talk, such a personal account can be a nice touch. keyboard. PowerPoint. Hit the B button on your Its the most important thing to learn about at's how you blank the screen.
STEVE KOSSLYN: PowerPoint is a medium, like television or theatre or books and so forth, and just like other media its not good for everything. ere are some cases, some kinds of You can use the information, or some situations, where you really probably shouldn't use a PowerPoint presentation. program to prompt you as the speaker if you wanted to, but there are cases where if you want the audience to be thinking or you want them to be engaged with you as a speaker you may want to just have a blank screen up or not even use PowerPoint at all. So there's a famous parody of the Gettysburg address. I think it was eight slides, and it is a parody. It reduces it to the absurd. e Gettysburg address was extremely e ective and would have
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been less e ective with visible prompts of any sort because it was based on principles and abstractions and the kinds of things that aren't easily visualized. visual systems involved. ere's really no reason to get people's Similarly, in the course of a regular
presentation, there may be parts where you are better o getting them to re ect and think and not distracting them from that exercise by having something in front of them. MELISSA MARSHALL: One of the most powerful tools that a presenter has available to them is knowing when to blank the screen. A lot of times I'll get asked, when people gure out that I do a lot of work with PowerPoint, what's my number one tip for making an e ective PowerPoint presentation. If I'm feeling sort of snarky, my snarky response is, the most e ective thing you can do with PowerPoint is to blank the screen. I don't actually mean that as snarky as it sounds, but I do think there really is an element of truth to that. In many cases, you are better o as a presenter to blank the screen, like when you are trying to communicate something that perhaps is from your personal experience.
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A lot of times people will ask, particularly when I'm teaching the assertion-evidence design, they'll ask me, Well, I don't have any visual evidence for this portion of the presentation. What should I do? How do I enact this slide design when I don't have any visual evidence for this section of the presentation. What I say to them is, at's ok, that does not mean that there is some sort of a fault that is happening with your presentation. People feel that they need to have a slide for everything and I don't believe that to be true. If you can not think of visual evidence, that is ne. All that means is that the most powerful way that you will communicate that message is by blanking the slide and simply talking to the audience. at is the magic of the communication situation in a presentation format, speaker and audience. You as a speaker have direct access to that audience. You are able to read their nonverbal feedback and adapt your message based on that. Blanking the screen can be very powerful when you are trying to emphasize something that is either from your personal experience or if it is something that does not contain a visual element.
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Another thing that I would say could be considered is that its very e ective to blank the presentation when you are trying to bring emphasis to a particular point. If you are about to make a critical statement, something that you want to make sure everyone absorbs, blanking the screen has the e ect of sort of surprising the audience. presenter. at being said, I think it is also important that people are cautious with that. Whenever I teach my students that its a good idea to blank the screen to bring the focus onto you, or when you don't have visual evidence, I think its also important to be careful that you are not constantly blanking the screen. If its only going to be for a few seconds then its not worth it, but if there's a portion of your presentation that doesn't have visual evidence or that relies heavily on your personal experience, then blanking the screen is one of the most powerful things you can do with PowerPoint. GREG SMITH: full of content. ere's a tendency in PowerPoint It'll automatically focus them back onto you as a
presentations to just give us slide after slide after slide, jam packed You have to remember that its not just a
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PowerPoint presentation. Its also an oral presentation. One of the greatest ways to get the audience to focus on the words that are coming out of your mouth is just to throw a blank slide up. A blank slide also communicates information. It communicates a pause, a rest, and it also allows you to focus on me the presenter for a moment. Very frequently what I will do, if I'm doing a blank slide, is I will use that as a moment that's a personal anecdote for instance. When I want to put a personal touch on it, after all this information that I've been throwing at you on the PowerPoint slides, I will throw a blank slide up. back into the o cial presentation. I have just controlled the focus of my audience in a way that makes sense because I'm saying that here is a moment thats di erent from all the rest. Here is a moment that is a about me the person. Now I'll get back to the o cial slides, the o cial information. SARAH ZAPPE: I think people forget that the purpose of a visual aid is to back up your verbal message. So you don't necessarily always have to have something on the screen behind
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en
it will be a moment for me to be a person, before I then move
you. Sometimes you want the audience to pay attention to what you're saying rather than looking at the slide or reading bullets on a screen. So if you black out the screen it forces the audience to look back at you and start listening to you again. message will become that much more powerful. en your
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Closing
e Presentation
CARMINE GALLO: I like closing presentations by making it dramatic. One of the best closes I've ever seen in a presentation occurred in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned to Apple after an eleven year absence. He introduced some new practices and a new management team. It was a pretty standard presentation but at the very end of the presentation, he paused and he said, Look, I understand that Apple's had a lot of problems recently but I just want to remind everybody here in the audience about who our customers are. ey are people who think with their right brains. ey are the people who are using our ey are the ones who always think ey are the creative types. tools to change the world.
di erently about what they can do and their place in the world. It's those people who we need to make tools for. We always have and we always will. And he just paused and said, ank you, and everyone stood up. No one remembers the rest of that presentation but they remember that close. It was dramatic and wrapped it up, but more importantly, it gave you something to think about.
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It
inspired you and was uplifting. At the end of that presentation a lot of people thought to themselves, I want to be that person. I want to be that creative soul whos changing the world, maybe those tools are made for me. closing a presentation. STEVE KOSSLYN: I think the most e ective way to close is rst, to summarize what you've said so they can have the take home message. en have some very crisp signal that you're nished. Sometimes it can be a cartoon or with a joke of some sort. Sometimes it can be just returning back to the rst slide and making a comment about it that re-interprets it a slightly di erent way. Something that gives you a bookend. You really need to make it clear at the end that you've wrapped it up. One of the worst things you can do is say something like, or at's it for now, at's all I have to say, or something that dribbles out and It was a very powerful way of
leaves them wondering if there is in fact more. You need to really wrap it up. Have a crisp ending.
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JEFF BRENMAN: You usually want to end in a way that's going to be memorable, that is very con dent and determined. ey know its over when its over. e way you do not want to end a presentation is by putting up a slide that says conclusion or summary with eight or nine bullet points of everything that you said that day. most people think they have to end their presentation. de nitely not the most e ective way. A presentation is really a story that you are telling and so, its not a matter of how to close a presentation, but a matter of how to end a story. e most e ective way is to call back to the beginning, to the introduction. If you had a little anecdote or a way of introducing your presentation, a reference back to that and go full circle, as they say. Similarly, a concept that we have in improv comedy, and in pretty much any kind of entertainment writing, is the notion of the callback. e callback is just calling back to things that came up earlier in the show or in the episode. At the end of your presentation call back to topics and ideas that you brought up and synthesize them together in a way that provides new
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at's the way ey think
there is some rule that says they need to end that way, but that's
insight now that you have completed your story.
e audience
will absolutely love it because those sorts of connections are being made in their brain and they just feel like its a solid conclusion. NANCY DUARTE: Every presentation should be a journey and every journey has to come to an end. important. e ending is very e principle of recency says the ending is the part ey'll remember parts of the middle
that people will remember the most because that is the most recent thing they heard. ending. Powerful endings aren't going to happen just by accident, they have to be planned well. energy into it. You have to actually put some I believe an ending needs to have a call to and the beginning, just gists of it, but they'll remember your
action. Make it really, really clear what the audience can do to help you further and advance your idea, because all presentations are ultimately about persuading people to believe what you believe or do what you do. You've taken them on this great journey. You are telling them here's what is but here's what should be, here's what is, but here's what should be. You are leaning them towards your version
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of what should be. Once they are there, you should end with a call to action that says, Here's what you need to do to make this idea come to reality. Here's what you need to be to make this idea come to reality. Give them those tangible, tactical things they can do. you end. ats a very powerful thing to do but thats not where ats where a lot of presentations end. e powerful thing is to bring to the ending this wonderment, this sense of gloriousness about the way the world could be with your idea being adopted and what it could become because of this idea. Use personal stories about how your own life has been transformed and that that is why you believe in this idea, and how there lives can be transformed too. Create an ending that creates a desire in the audience to start on this new journey with your new idea with you, and thats a very powerful way to end a presentation.
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How to Handle the Q & A Period If you ask for questions and no one responds: CARMINE GALLO: During the Q & A period, if there are no questions, maybe people are thinking about lunch, it depends on when you're a speaker. I don't think its necessarily a re ection on the speaker per say. If there aren't that many questions, or no questions, just have one or two in your back pocket that you already know the answers to. at way you can raise a hypothetical or you can say something like, One of the questions that I often get is X, Y, Z and here's the way I would answer that. at way at least there's no awkward moment where nobody's asking a question and you have nothing to say. If an audience member disagrees with you: RICK ALTMAN: I don't know that I've had any hecklers but I've certainly had people disagree with me. You have to immediately turn o your defense mechanism. You can't respond defensively. Even if you think youre not, you probably come o as doing so. So youve got to give the person his or her due and
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you have to validate the opinion, at which point I think its ne to respectfully disagree or to even say, Well, we are going to have to agree to disagree on that one but I appreciate your point of view. Its a credible point of view, what do you all think about that? at's one way to do it, is to engage others. Many people will then come to your own defense which is better than you trying to do it yourself. But the customer is always right in this regard. You have to give the person his or her due. CARMINE GALLO: I don't see any member of the
audience as being a problem member per say, and if people say something out of line, or out of turn, or they yell something out, I think the most important thing is to always remember to have fun with your presentation. beautiful PowerPoints. presentation. People forget that. ey create these ey think about their messages and they
think about their stories but they forget to have fun in a ats one of those things that you have to do right before you go on. Put a smile on your face and realize that you're delivering some great information and you're going to have a lot of fun delivering that information. So, if people heckle you, or
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they make a joke, or they say something out of line, its not going to throw you.
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Who Are Todays Great Presenters? JULIE TERBERG: I think that an e ective speaker doesn't need any visuals. An e ective speaker speaks from their heart and they don't need anything on the screen. with the audience that way. e general population when giving presentations, they're reporting things and they're teaching things. where they are not looking at their slides. their audience and asking questions. some of the best presentations I've seen. CARMINE GALLO: Whether you like it or not, you are ey certainly need ey are looking at ose are visual support. So a presentation given e ectively that way is one ey are interacting with the ey are communicating something much more powerful, maybe emotional, connecting
audience and the visuals are supporting their message.
being compared to someone like Steve Jobs. Some people have turned presentations into an art form and Steve Jobs is one such example.
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PETER NORVIG: Steve Jobs had his thing yesterday and he's always good. One of the things I like about him is that he does minimize words and he never uses bullet points. He has one word on the slide or he has the picture of the new shiny thing. Its very visually oriented and then the focus of the words is on him. CARMINE GALLO: introduced the iPhone. of reasons for that. e greatest presentation I've ever I thought it was the most stunning
seen period was from Steve Jobs in January 2007 when he presentation I've seen from start to nish and there were a number He really built up the drama when he introduced the iPhone. Anybody could have come out and said, We've got a great new product today. It's a mobile phone that we think is going to really shake up the industry. of cool features about it. Let me introduce it to you. Instead, he created an experience out of it. He said, ere are three things we are introducing today, a new iPod, a phone. And that's where he got a lot of applause, because that was a new product. He said, We are going to introduce an iPod, a phone and an internet communications device. People were expecting three products. en he paused and said again, An iPod, a
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ere are a lot
phone, and an internet communicator. And he paused. repeated it again. iPhone.
en he
en nally he asked, Aren't you getting it?
ese aren't three devices. It's one device and we're calling it the at is the one memorable part of the presentation that analysts and investors and the media recalled the next day and that was the headline. Steve Jobs always takes one moment of a presentation and creates what I call the holy smokes moment. at one moment, that one memorable scene where if you're in the audience you say to yourself, I get it, thats cool, I want that product. LESA SNIDER: Steve Jobs, he's great at putting the He never uses a
minimal amount of information he needs to up on that slide. He very rarely if ever puts full sentences up there. bullet point and he uses graphics for the majority of everything. I consider graphics to be pie charts and bar graphs as well as images but he is the king of giving presentations in my opinion. I've seen very few people that can even come close to that, because everybody uses bullet points. We have to get that word out, NO more bullet points.
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STEVE KOSSLYN:
Steve Jobs is able to foreground the e visuals really strike
message and zero-in on what's important.
home and he's able to use his own personality to ll in between the visuals. He strikes just the right balance between focusing on what he's talking about, the product, and focusing on him, a highly credible, charismatic guy. Its a beautiful balancing act that he does. MELISSA MARSHALL: When I think of the best
presenter I will say that thats a really, really di cult choice. Best presenter that I've ever seen would be Brian Cox, a physicist. He works at the CERN facility in Switzerland on the Large Hadron Collider. University. He's also, I believe, a professor at Manchester And he is, to me, the best presenter of technical
information that is accessible to a wide audience. It doesn't get much more di cult than explaining to a broad audience particle physics. So I believe Brian Cox does a masterful job making that information meaningful. CARMINE GALLO: One of the best speakers I've ever seen was Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain. He was a
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magni cent speaker, but when I learned more about him I realized he had a theatre background. He used the podium as a theatrical event. He was very polished and he was very good with answering questions. He used hand gestures and was very animated. I thought he was a marvelous, marvelous speaker. He grabbed my attention even without a PowerPoint slide. good. RICK ALTMAN: Nancy Duarte is wonderful. She blends so many di erent skills and creates incredibly rich, vibrant visuals and imagery to help her tell her story. JENNIFER VAN SIJLL: seen has got to be Al Gore's e best presentation I've ever e Inconvenient Truth, when he had He was very, very
that ladder and he was going up on that ladder. I just thought that was brilliant. He almost looked like he went into the screen. He was interacting with the screen, with the PowerPoint. It was incredible, just the idea of bringing that ladder and climbing up. SETH GODIN: If you are looking for a template that I would go Google Elizabeth Gilbert @ TED.org. Elizabeth Gilbert
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gave a talk at TED 18 minutes, no slides, no cue cards, no script. She told me later that it took her six weeks of daily practice to do this impromptu speech. I'm afraid to send you to see it because you are never going to do a talk that well, neither am I. She's gifted. But I think if you want to see what its like to talk to a million people but act like you're talking to nine, Elizabeth can show you what that looks like.
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Peter Norvigs Gettysburg Address PowerPoint
PETER NORVIG: At the time, I was working at NASA as the senior computer scientist. In 1998 there were two missions to mars, both of which failed. So there was an investigation to try to understand what happened and to make sure it didn't happen again. I was put on there because some of the issues had to do with software. So, there were a series of long meetings to understand everything about the missions and the development process and how we might x it. In many of those meetings the information was presented in PowerPoint. ey were a little bit tense because these were joint missions between JPL, jet propulsion labs, and Lockheed, and both sides really wanted to understand what happened but both sides also, a little bit, wanted to push the blame o on the other guys. I felt like we could be doing this so much better if we just sat down and talked about it. PowerPoint wasn't really getting to the heart of the matter. Instead it was a way to kind of distance
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yourself from really getting into the issues and I thought that was boring. What really struck me is one day we were there and one of the long time engineers, Bob, disappeared after the rst break and didn't come back until the end of the day. And I asked, Bob, what happened? He said, Well, these presentations weren't going anywhere so I wandered down the hall. I found an old buddy of mine and I just said, lets sit down and talk about it. We talked about it and we found this problem here that might be a potential problem and worked through what we should do about it. I felt like he did so much more in those couple of hours, just by sitting down and talking than we did sitting in a room with a PowerPoint. So I got frustrated about it and I got back in my hotel room and was wondering, what is it about PowerPoint? We didn't need PowerPoint in the past. without any slides. I thought back to some of the great speeches of the past where information was communicated I thought of Martin Luther King and I thought of Churchill on the beaches, but those were all kind of long. Gettysburg was sort of the shortest speech I could think of that was famous and that was easy to parody.
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So I said, OK, lets take a look at that. I found a copy of the speech and opened up PowerPoint and used the auto content wizard to generate slides for me. It generated a slide for the agenda and conclusions and so on. I used all the slides that it suggested except I also put on, not on the agenda, to desecrate and so on because Lincoln had that little ourish. en, I wanted to make sure that I had a graph, because PowerPoint is so good at graphs, of the number of nations that were created four score and seven years ago. en the other thing was, besides sort of the rigid format, one of the other problems with PowerPoint is the presentation is often so poor compared to paper. e resolution is lower. e fonts and the colors often don't go well and that can sometimes be an issue. And I thought, Geez, I'm going to have to do a lot of research into color science to gure out bad combinations of colors and to try to nd a really bad font but fortunately, the auto content wizard solved that problem for me. It came up with a really garish, hard to read color combination and really bad fonts and so I didnt have to do any customization of that.
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e Future Of Presentations SCOTT MCCLOUD: I think a lot of people have notions about PowerPoint and related software that it naturally leads to certain types of content, usually a whole lot of bulleted lists and people droning on and what not. But, I think that its important to separate form and content. You know the form can play host to any kind of content and this is true of virtually any new form that comes along. e initial content, the initial things that people tend to do with it, people assume that thats all its capable of and of course, thats not true. Its been fun, I think, in recent years as people have played with the form, either very consciously, people like David Byrne or just how we've seen a gradual evolution of presentation. People realize it doesn't have to be just bulleted lists and droning on, it can actually be something a little bit more compelling. MICHAEL ALLEY: I think with any medium there's an
evolution that occurs. You know with blackboards, they rst came out in the 1800s and it was a big deal to have a blackboard.
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People would say presentation with blackboard or this is the only blackboard within a 50 mile radius. When they rst came out people didn't know how to use blackboards, but then people got to be a little bit more clever. It took some time but somebody found hey with a piece of string and chalk, man I can make a circle. Some people realize you can get di erent color chalk and then you can do all kinds of things. By 1900 there were these people, such as Ludwig Boltzmann, who were just acclaimed presenters at using the blackboard. ey mapped out their entire presentation in which they would think about where they would start on the blackboard at the beginning of the presentation and where they would end. I think we are on the same evolutionary path with PowerPoint. are way at the start and we need to move faster. could be so much better. e problem is we ere's just so
much more that we can do. Its so ine cient right now and it
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10 Tips From Ron Galloway 1) Prepare 25% more slides than you think you will need. It gives you con dence that you won't run out of material. 2) In case of equipment failure, carry multiple copies of your presentation in multiple formats. I have a copy in Keynote and PowerPoint format, and also PDF, because people forget PDFs can be projected. I keep a copy on my iPod Touch (the Nano will also work) in case the computer breaks down, because you can plug it into a projector with the right adapter and present straight from it. 3) Get to the room early to make sure the projector is there and works with your presentation. Dim the lights down near your screen. Set up your water. 4) Carry your own laser pointer. Get a strong one, preferably green. 5) Eat after your presentation, not before. Eating before will make you sleepy, and you don't want to take the chance something will upset your stomach. Stomach distress on stage, which I have had, is suboptimal.
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6) Presenting from the relaxes your audience a bit.
oor as opposed to the podium
7) It has been said in the book before, but never give out handouts before a presentation. Never. 8) Don't have anything on your computer desktop you dont want your audience to see. projector. 9) Use beta blockers if you are really nervous (and if your doctor says it's OK). I do every once in a while. 10) Smiling as you approach the podium will relax you. Remember to breathe. ey will see it as you set up the
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How PowerPoint Got Its Name RIC BRETSCHNEIDER: is story was told to me by the
lead PowerPoint sales person of the time, who had worked with Forefront, the people who had originally made PowerPoint before Microsoft acquired it. Forefront was having money problems and had to go out on a big sales promotion in which they ran to all their distributors. ey were selling o all their inventory just to make payroll and keep the company a oat. It was successful and he was feeling really good about himself. On the ight back, as the plane was taxiing out onto the tarmac, there's a point on the runway where the plane is supposed to put on its brakes and bring the power of the engine up to full. ey are at the point and he looked out the window, and on the tarmac there was written the word powerpoint. He just said, ats the name of the product that we are working on, and thats what Microsoft has been putting out for the last twenty years.
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Copyright 2011 Method Content LLC
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Rethinking Power Point

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Rethinking Power Point

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Rethinking PowerPoint:

Improving Presentations With Techniques at Engage e Mind

by Allyssa Ritch Ron Galloway

Lesa Snider is the author of Photoshop CS5: Manual.

Scott McCloud is author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics.

ey just have no training in it.

now they have a crutch.

ey are able to get their information

at's really where the creative process begins, when you

I think one of the limitations of

I think that PowerPoint is

really an area where everyone has this inherent need to be a

ey nd that there are a lot of traditions of visual

elemental level is a story.

SCORE stands for situation, complication,

character wants to nd out whodunnit or the character wants to e character

2010 by introducing a magical and

allowing PowerPoints defaults to constrain them.

and images on the screen. image. learning.

You just keep

He put those two

your presentation itself.

much more persuasive.

e audience is able to clearly see the

disadvantage of the assertion-evidence structure is that you are

ere are some other elements

have as many as 700 slides or so.

If you present via the Lawrence Lessig ere

method you may be presenting one slide every few seconds.

at's what a good storyteller does.

I think that audiences engage

ere were many beautiful images of the new

ose connections are called referential connections.

at's the theory of dual coding.

And I'll say, Yes, but it

My pet peeve with

STEVE KOSSLYN: users fault.

It's not PowerPoints fault.

ey are often trying

ere are lots of ways presentations can go bad.

I have seen a few where they were just overpacked.

JEFF BRENMAN: your slides.

One of the things that I teach, that

e text becomes Its really

twelve or fourteen point type and you can't read it.

Grouping Items On A Slide JENNIFER GROH: ere's a saying in psychology, e

You can't have your slides exactly

dealing with graphics is to choose high quality graphics.

license plate which said WAS HIS. revenge.

at is how you can visualize

e minute that you put a little extra e ort into

explanatory image is really going to help to provide the evidence

greenhouse e ect, I'm no longer panicking about it. addressing them?

sentence and put that on the slide? assertion.

en can I create some visual

oughts On Charts RICK ALTMAN: I hate charts in general. Part of it is

e bottles don't fall o

If you see two lines that are

erefore he did not want

it so people are attracted to it.

Its not a boring chart.

Animation CARMINE GALLO: Be careful with animations. Just

to appreciate the weight of your message. responsible for that.