Craigstrachan.com – Keep talking!

Last week I spoke at WordCamp, Cape Town (the WordPress conference), and I watched many of the other sessions as well. Here are a few lessons I learned from my and the other sessions:

1. Keep the sessions short and sharp. If forces the speakers to be concise in their message, and the delegates can focus on a short message. This is something that TED do very well (max 30 minutes sessions)
2. Keep words on the slides large; you simply cannot shot a screenshot of 50 lines of source code (in a technical session) and expect the delegates to be able to read or understand the code. If you need to show source code, only show the important couple of lines. Or course pictures and diagrams are much better, there were some great slide decks (and some bad ones as well).
3. Arrive early. I got stuck in a downpour which stopped traffic. Thankfully I still arrived on time.
4. Get the AV sorted out before you start. It is disruptive to have to stop halfway through your presentation to sort out your microphone
5. Practise, I cannot over-emphasise this too much
6. Get your bio in ahead of time. My bio was read exactly as written, which was great. It was easier for the MC, and for me
7. Hang around afterwards. Some of the most interesting questions came during the tea break after my speech.

Hi all

Just a quick note to let you know that I recently contributed to an article for Destiny Man Magazine.The article is about common mistakes we make when speaking in public, and on how to avoid them. You can read the article online here.

Craig

Here is a great slide deck illustrating how to use visuals to portray a story. It is an advert of John Maxwell’s new book  “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect“. I will be reviewing the book shortly, so watch this space. In the mean time, enjoy the slides.

It shows that you can easily tell a story with lots of pictures, and few words.

Master slides in PowerPoint provide a very effective mechanism for all of your slides to have a similar look and feel. Now imaging if you could extend the concept to have several different master slides in your presentation?

No, I am not suggesting that you change the look and feel or branding every few slides or so. I am suggesting that you use a “mini” master slide to allow for several slides to have the same basic content, which can then be tweaked per slide.

So for example, imaging that you your presentation has 10 slides containing a map of South Africa, each of which highlights a FIFA 2010 world cup football venue.

South Africa FIFA Map 2010

Now, the traditional approach would be to have everything on a single slide and to use a lot of fancy animation to make each venue highlight in turn, or to create a single slide and make 9 more copies. Both approaches have problems.

The first is messy and complex, the second requires duplication of work, especially if you wish to change the background image.

So, how about creating mini master slide with the image on it, then you just need to the the customisation on the other slides. Make sense? I think it will be pretty cool.

I will add it to my wishlist.

Image from http://wikitravel.org/upload/shared/e/ee/Map-South_Africa-fifa-2010.png

PowerPoint is a great tool for creating presentations, but it has never been particularly good at creating documentation or handouts. However, it is a huge amount of work to maintain two completely separate sets of documents.

Enter George! for PowerPoint by Leaders Guide Pro. They kindly gave me a free license to play with the product.

This simple little addin fills the gap very nicely by providing a simple yet powerful documentation creating capability for PowerPoint.

Some of the features are:

• Create table of contents for your handouts
• A variety of elegant document templates, with titles, page numbers, headers and footers
• Can create speaker notes or delegate handouts
• Custom logos can be added to your documents
• It is very easy to use

Here is what a typical PowerPoint handout looks like. Nothing wrong with it, but kind of boring.

But put it through George!…

Notice the header at the top, and copyright details at the bottom.

You can finally add a table of contents to your handouts.

A variety of templates to choose from.

George! uses a simple process called “tagging” to create the table of contents.

Would I buy it – yes! Would I recommend it? Yes if you find yourself creating handouts on a regular basis from your presentations. If you are just using it for Speaker Notes, then the default printing capability of PowerPoint will probably be ok.

George! uses Microsoft Word to create the actual documents (I suspect the Office scripting engine), and as a result the actual document generation process is a little slow (especially for large documents). So, best to create your documents and grab a coffee or something while you wait. However the results are worth it.

You can buy George! for about $40 from Leaders Guide Pro.

A final comment: I had a few problems getting my free license to work. Nancy from Leaders Guide Pro was absolutely superb with assisting me, providing support and follow-up. Full marks for their customer support.

• Sample presentation (an extract of one of my presentations)
• Speaker Notes – generated by George
• Session Handouts – generated by George
• Handouts generated directly from PowerPoint

On Monday evening, I ran a PowerPoint Karaoke contest at the Cape Communicators Toastmaster Club. This is the first one that I have ran, and it was a fantastic evening!

We had about 10 people who were each given a random deck of PowerPoint slides, and they were given about three minutes to present a presentation using their slides. It was all in good fun, and we had some very interesting takes on the topics.

It is a great way to both practise your impromptu speaking skills, and to have some practise with PowerPoint.

Here is how I did it:

1. Draw for random speaking order
2. Draw for random topic order – I didn’t want to be too nasty and give somebody a topic that they knew absolutely nothing about, so they could select topics beforehand. I also gave them 3 minutes to prepare – basically while the previous speaker was speaking. If you are feeling nasty, give them a topic just before they speak, and let them go – much as for a Toastmasters table topic session
3. Each speaker got 3 minutes to speak. Timing lights at 2, 2.5 and 3 minutes
4. I used the Toastmasters Table topics contest form as a “judging form”
5. You are basically pretty free to make up the rules, so the above is what I did; feel free to adapt and let me know what works for you.

Here are all the decks that I used:

Each deck was approximately 5 slides long. Note that they are not “real” slide decks, but made up to give the speaker something to play with. Some of the topics are a little off the wall.

• Overview
• Are you in the right job?
• Are computers scaring us?
• Where will you work next year?
• Exponential growth
• Modern Goal Setting
• Motivating Others
• Understanding your customers
• Teambuilding
• Marketing for beginners
• Social networking for idiots
• Tips for making email friends
• Finding a good mate

Many people have asked me for a copy of the slides so that they can present the Karaoke contests at their own clubs, so here they are. Please feel free to steal and disseminate. My only request is to let me know how it goes.

Please note that I have created these slide decks from a variety of publicly available material and slides that I have built up over the years. If I have inadvertently used copyright material, please let me know and I will remove it.

Finally, thanks so much to Imation for sponsoring the event. They gave us memory sticks and  tee shirts as prized. The sticks are 1 gig, and about 1cm square – really cute. They also gave me an amazing remote wireless projector adapter. This little device plugs into your USB port on one end, and the projector on the other, and voila, you have a wireless projector!

Leave a comment and let me know how your session goes!

You have heard of Karaoke

You have heard of PowerPoint

But, have you heard of PowerPoint Karaoke?

Cape Communicators Toastmasters Club

would like to invite you to a PowerPoint Karaoke Contest

You could even make the Finals,
and win a grand prize of up to $5000!

So, here is the deal:

• You will be given a set of about 10-15 PowerPoint slides
• You will have about 3 minutes to give a presentation using these slide
• We will videotape your presentation, and give you details on how to upload it to YouTube
• From then on, it is up the the USA sponsors to determine a winner from all uploaded videos

Detailed contest rules are here.

Come along and compete, or come along and watch; it promises to be loads of fun!

When: Monday 19 October, 7:00 for 7:30pm
Where: Cape Communicators Toastmasters Club, Huis Der Nederlanden, Central Square, Pinelands
Cost: R40 for non-members (cash bar, but no snacks)
RSVP: Lois Strachan Lstrachan@martech.co.za, 082 859 6567 (by 16 October please)

Think of it as Table Topics for PowerPoint!

Here is an interesting technique that will both improve your thinking skills, and provide an unusual form of entertainment: PowerPoint Karoake. Basically, you have to present an impromptu PowerPoint presentation. From how I understand it, you are given a deck of slides, and you need to present an unprepared presentation using the slides (also known as Battle Decks).

You have to deliver a PowerPoint presentation about an unfamiliar topic, with slides you’ve never seen, to an audience eager to heckle and laugh at you. If you’re in your underwear, you’re having a nightmare. If you’re clothed, it’s called PowerPoint Karaoke

This is serious business, there are loads of prizes, including a grand prize of $5000. Unfortunately, the contest is only available to USA and Canada residents, but I still think that it could be quite a fun event to host anyway.

If you look on YouTube, there are over 125 different PowerPoint karaoke video’s, here are a couple that I enjoyed.

See you on the stage.

Hi all

I recently blogged about my wishlist for how PowerPoint is used for presentations in 2009. Olivia Mitchell has created a great summary on her website of the viewpoints of the different public speaking bloggers.

You can read it here:

http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/design/powerpoint-does-design-matter/

I was recently asked by a fellow public speaking blogger, Olivia Mitchell from Speaking about Presenting what I would like to see in PowerPoint presentations this year. The answer to me is quite simple – LESS.

• Less Slides
• Less Text
• Less Complexity

Less Slides

The trend in 2008 has largely been to replace lines and lines of bullet points with pictures illustrating the points. This is great because pictures have a powerful ability to illustrate points that text never will have. Hence the large and vivid pictures commonly used on newspaper front pages.

However, pictures are only part of the solution to giving an effective presentation. I still feel that most presentation need to be simplified and to have fewer slides. Remember that if a slide does not add to your message, it probably detracts from it.

Less Complexity

If you push the capabilities of PowerPoint (esp version 2007), you can create some amazing effects and transitions. Here is a great example. However, the more effects and transitions you add to your presentations, the more complex they become, and greater the chance of you messing it up. So, unless you really know what you are doing, or you have some great designers and PowerPoint experts working with you, you might want to cut back on the complexity.

I have also seen very few transitions, effects and animations that add to a presentation.

Less Text

We still need to see less text. Far to many presentations are text heavy. Laura Bergells makes a great point about going picture crazy and replaceing every single line of text with graphics. We do need to find a balance, but I would still rather see a presentation with too many graphics than with too much text.

So, lets cut back on the slides,simplifiy the slides that we keep, and use less text. Here’s to some great PowerPoint presentations in 2009!