April 18, 2007
Common PowerPoint Mistakes
Are you creating another PowerPoint presentation? Stop. Do not pass go, do not collect $200...until you watch
Life After Death by PowerPoint.
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[Spotted on Law Librarian Blog]
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)September 26, 2005
PowerPoint Alternatives - From Browsers to Blogs, Part II
In Part I of PowerPoint Alternatives, I talked about presenters who use HTML to display the visual portion of their presentation. Now that blogs are popular, some speakers are using blogs as presentation tools, including Steven Cohen of Library Stuff fame. Here’s a presentation he created in a blog last February and his post on the
topic. Note that he used Blogger, a tool that is free and can get you up and running with a blog in just a few minutes.
Downsides of using a blog instead of PowerPoint include a busier screen that you would find on most PowerPoint presentations. Also, a blog entry is not going to fill the screen the way a PowerPoint slide will, so it could be more difficult for the audience to read. From the presenter's standpoint, getting the slides in the proper order is cumbersome; you need to tweak the dates and times so as to get the blogs to display in the proper order, then remove the date from the blog template, since in this context, it’s irrelevant.
As with HTML, the advantages of using a blog are greatest when you be presenting using a live Internet connection. You can include the links you want to visit in the blog/web page, and easily link out to web sites. The blog also makes a great "take-away." The audience doesn't have to worry about writing down URLs; they can simply revisit the blog at a later time. If you enable commenting, the blog also can serve as a discussion forum for the audience to use to ask questions, or further discuss the topic.
A blog is a natural tool to turn to when the topic is blogging because it helps illustrate the basic features of blogs. I experimented with using a blog for a presentation I recently gave to the Greater Los Angeles Legal Administrator's Association called Blogging 101.
You'll see that I couldn't shake myself of the habit of writing entries in paragraphs rather than bullet points, force of habit, I guess. And in fact, I ended up using the blog as a handout/web page for attendees, just as I used to use a web page for that purpose. So though I liked using the blog as a add-on, I did, in fact, still use PowerPoint for the visual part of the presentation. All those screenshots needed a home since I didn't have a live connection. Even if I'd HAD a live connection, I still would have wanted the screenshots as backup.
But I did learn something. The organization of a blog forced me to think, not in bullet points, but in speaking points. I've been skeptical at claims that PowerPoint dictates a certain undesirable structure upon it's users, but after working with a blog, I'm starting to think there may be something to that idea. But the bottomline is, the organization of a presentation is something that should take place BEFORE you ever put virtual pen to paper. I always regret it when I fail to organize my presentation in advance, without taking the critical step of brainstorming and outlining using Marie Wallaces' Power of Post-its. (http://www.llrx.com/columns/guide10.htm)
You may never use a blog as a presentation tool. Nonetheless, there are things that speakers can learn from bloggers, according to Cliff Atkinson. In the end, it's all about communication.
January 10, 2005
Annotating Powerpoint on the Fly
I recently gave a Powerpoint presentation that included annotated screen shots of an intranet application. Someone in the audience thought I was highlighting the screenshots live, as I was giving the presentation, and asked how I'd done it. That got me to thinking....shouldn't there be a tool out there that WOULD let you highlight, circle or otherwise annotate anything that appears on the screen, whether it's Powerpoint or the Intranet? I looked around a bit, and learned that yes, in fact, there is a utility that will do this called WinPointer.
It's a nice little easy-to-use utility and could be very handy for live presentations. You can also easily create annotated screenshots that can then be inserted into a Powerpoint presentation. I'm glad someone thought of it!
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)September 06, 2004
Creating Tutorials and Animated Presentations
One of the questions I had after my Adobe Acrobat presentation had nothing to do with Adobe Acrobat at all. Instead, an audience member wondered how I managed to include animated segments in my PowerPoint that made it look as though I was working live with the software.
The answer? Camtasia from TechSmith, the same people who brought you Snagit, a handy little utility that grabs screenshots. I've mentioned Camtasia before, as a good way to record training sessions. You can also create short animated gifs, which is the format I used to paste into PowerPoint.
There's another product out there for creating animated Flash tutorials called Wink. I've never used it, but it also records screen sessions, and it's free. It's a bit more complicated to integrate a Flash animation into a PowerPoint, but it's definitely do-able. If you've tried it, let us know how you like it!
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 04:00 PM | Comments (1)September 01, 2004
Powerpoint 2003 - Presenter View
PowerPoint has been getting a lot of abuse lately; it has been blamed for the boredom of millions, and has even been accused of contributing to the shuttle Columbia disaster. Presentations magazine has asked "Does PowerPoint Make You Stupid?" as has CNN. Edward Tuft, a professor of information design at Yale and a dedicated hater of PowerPoint, "believes PowerPoint's emphasis on format over content commercializes and trivializes subjects." He details his reasons for despising PowerPoint in his Wired article, PowerPoint is Evil.
Much of the hostility is directed at bullet points. Luckily for presenters and audiences everywhere, PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 includes a feature that I think may help solve the problem of bullet point overkill.
As a presenter, I've struggled to compile PowerPoint presentations without offering too much text on the slides. But if you put much of what you want to say on your notes pages instead of the slides, you are stuck trying to coordinate your slides and your paper print-out at the same time. Trust me, when you're in front of an audience it's very difficult to page through PowerPoint slides while also keeping track of where you are in your notes. The answer for many presenters is to include bullet points on the slides to keep them on track, and avoid the notes pages altogether. Hence, an over-abundance of bullet points and text, and presenters who tend to read their slides.
To the rescue is a feature I've always longed for, presenter view. Presenter view allows you to see your notes and slides on your laptop, while displaying the slides only on the overhead projector. For more detailed information on how to set up presenter view, see Presenter view: tools for running a PowerPoint presentation, from Microsoft.
I'm looking forward to trying this out. Once I no longer need bullet points to remember what I want to say, I think I'll be on my way to using PowerPoint in a socially responsible manner.
If that's not enough to help wean you from an excess of bullet points, try Beyond Bullets, a web site dedicated to effective use of PowerPoint.
Now maybe we can stop blaming PowerPoint for all the ills of the world. Just remember, PowerPoint doesn't bore people, people bore people.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)
