Craigstrachan.com - Keep talking! » PowerPoint

Selling with a slide deck – a great example

Craig Strachan — Sun, 30 May 2010 20:23:01 +0000

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.

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PowerPoint wishlist – “mini master slides”

Craig Strachan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:22:06 +0000

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

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Create great docs from PowerPoint – review of George! for PowerPoint

Craig Strachan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:14:09 +0000

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

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PowerPoint Karaoke slides

Craig Strachan — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:43:55 +0000

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:

Draw for random speaking order
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
Each speaker got 3 minutes to speak. Timing lights at 2, 2.5 and 3 minutes
I used the Toastmasters Table topics contest form as a “judging form”
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.

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!

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PowerPoint Karaoke Invite

Craig Strachan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:24:53 +0000

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!

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PowerPoint Karaoke?

Craig Strachan — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:49:32 +0000

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.

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PowerPoint wishlist for 2009 – Update

Craig Strachan — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:57:49 +0000

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/

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PowerPoint Presentations – a wishlist for 2009

Craig Strachan — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:06:26 +0000

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!

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Finding How-to’s for PowerPoint

Craig Strachan — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 11:46:46 +0000

When I present my PowerPoint training, I am often asked where people can find additional tips and help for creating their PowerPoint presentations. Here is a website to add to your resource list.

Dave Paradi has created a great list of PowerPoint resources, including videos, FAQ’s, technical help experts and support.

Enjoy!

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