Presentations and other stuff to trip over

Completely off topic for this blog, but something you should do even if, like me, you are certain you will never bother with twittering on Twitter. Read this article on Twitter squatting and get your name (if available) some related twitter urls for yourself and your site. You never know when you might wish you had them. It’s brainstorming time!

Twitter squatting by Steinnon in NetworkWorld

Follow the instructions in the article. The GoogleMail tip is good as, if you register lots, you will soon run out of email addresses (passwords don’t need to be unique, by the way, just email addresses).

All I would add is that when you create an account, after the first screen, press the ’skip’ link top right on the second screen, and then log out at the third. Think up a new name and repeat.

Do you use Opazity just to tease your audiences with things to be revealed? That was my starting point for creating the blurred image effect. But, of course, for movie directors, soft-focus (dissolve) transitions from one scene to another, such as you can create with Opazity, have had other significances.

In the cinema, different types of transitions have long been associated with manipulating audiences’ attention and emotions. Here’s what author Matt Woolman says in his 2004 book ‘Motion design : moving graphics for television, music video, cinema, and digital interfaces’

“Transitions…are critical in establishing narrative sequences and emphasizing content. In early films, radial wipes implied that time had passed from one scene to the next; fades to black signaled the end of a particular moment; and dissolves from one scene to the next functioned as a comfortable formal device…applying a slow fade transition to a word suggests that it is to be contemplated.”

For a scene, a slow dissolve fade had a particular significance, depending on the context. For example, in the classic 1953 film ‘From Here to Eternity’ it wasn’t necessary to actually show Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making love in the waves at the edge of the beach – the fade communicated it all. The slower the fade, the stronger the passion, it seems!

So, the effect of the speed of your transitions are another dimension to think about – and possibly use to your advantage – when constructing a PowerPoint presentation. If you are constructing transitions with Opazity, like the example on the website home page, you may feel constrained even by the standard 5 second ‘very slow’ animation setting. But actually, you can change those settings to any length you wish:

1. Select the PowerPoint shape
2. In Custom Animation mode apply an exit fade animation
3. Select the animation listing in the panel
4. Right-click and choose ‘Timing’. (This opens the animation’s dialog box.)
5. Put your cursor in the Speed box and type in the number of seconds you want the effect to last (see screenshot below)
6. Click ‘OK’

Rick Altman, presentation designer and organiser of the annual PowerPoint Live conference has inspected a PowerPoint ‘deck’ produced by Hillary Clinton’s team and not just found it wanting but has gone as far as redesigning it.

Whatever your view of the lady herself, the result, set out in Rick’s blog, is an interesting lesson in design principles and approach. View ‘Hillary Clinton Commits Death by PowerPoint‘ here.

When I talk to people and mention Opazity, a common reaction is to assume that any day now Microsoft is going to come knocking on my door begging to drop me a couple of millions of their loose change to incorporate it into PowerPoint. Well, it’s not like that! Let me explain…

In 2004 I went to PowerPoint Live! Which has become a key annual user-conference, supported by many Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). Of all the interesting experiences I had there, one which stands out was to listen to Ric Bretschneider, Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint, and other members of his team, talking about how they work. He didn’t say it directly, but I understood how difficult it is for them to introduce even the most minor change in PowerPoint’s functions. The scale of the business case they have to make – how many millions of users the change may affect, and how likely they are to be disrupted by the change – and their negotiations for resources are, by my reckoning, horrendous.

Clearly, they took the opportunity of the large-scale Office 2007 changes to slip in a few improvements, but how do they respond to people and companies that, like I have, produce something that makes a leap in terms of change to the program? After all, it is not for nothing that MVP Geetesh Bajaj said in his review of Opazity:

“The new versions of PowerPoint seem to have everything apart from the kitchen sink – but yet, it’s amazing to see vendors create small add-ins that provide an impressive capability that PowerPoint lacks.”

Microsoft’s limitations

Interestingly, Microsoft is not neutral on the subject of other people’s developments. I guess that people in the organisation recognise its limitations and are happy for other companies to produce extras that will appeal to, and enhance the experience of, a small proportion of their user-base. In fact Microsoft positively encourages them by providing a venue for the promotion of add-ins, etc. relating to their programs.

That venue is called the Office Marketplace, and it is worth visiting from time to time. There are separate Office Marketplace sites for many countries, which you can find by using the ‘change’ link at the top right of the page once you are on one of them. It then takes a bit of navigating to the right place from the portal page you are taken to, but look out for something like ‘Third Party Downloads’ at the bottom and then head for ‘Presentation Tools’.

When you arrive at the Marketplace (links below) you will find all sorts of interesting things with links to the vendors and an opportunity to rate their listing – the product, in effect – including Opazity. So do go and have a look now; rate Opazity if you wish, but don’t expect to see me stuffing Microsoft’s millions under my bed any day soon!

US Office Marketplace site, and the other sites in English: UK, Australia, Canada. (Canada has a French site too.)

Many thanks to Geetesh Bajaj, PowerPoint MVP, for his review of Opazity in his Indezine blog. He starts it with the sentence:

The new versions of PowerPoint seem to have everything apart from the kitchen sink – but yet, it’s amazing to see vendors create small add-ins that provide an impressive capability that PowerPoint lacks.

I must confess I really like that! Read the rest of the Opazity review, and explore the rest of Geetesh’s Indezine site.

Opazity is a great help in getting audiences involved in your presentation, and therefore more likely to remember you.

Here are some other audience involvement tips and, by ‘involve’ I mean getting them to take a physical action, not just mental one. A hierarchy of actions could be, for example, to ask them to:

• close their eyes and imagine something
• write down an answer
• raise a hand in response to a question (better for larger audiences)
• call out answers to a question
• handle some physical objects that you pass around. (It is best to do this at the beginning, as doing so during the body of the presentation will mean that at any one time there will be people who will be distracted.)
• handle a physical object and to comment on it

If you have other suggestions, do leave a comment.

I’m sure you have seen presenters between presentations fumbling around in Explorer or within PowerPoint itself to find their presentation after the last speaker. Don’t let it happen to you! Apart from looking unprofessional it adds to the pressure of the moment which, of course, makes it much more likely that you will open the wrong one.

Moreover, have you ever seen the look on the faces of an audience when the presenter opens PowerPoint in slide preview mode to reveal just how many slides they will have to sit through?

The solution

The answer is simply to save your presentation as a slide show (.pps or .ppsx) so that the audience never sees it in any work mode, and to save it to the most obvious place you can, which is probably on your desktop. Of course, you may have to think about whether desktop background (wallpaper) image is appropriate!

It’s a bit extreme, but on occasions I have even gone as far as replacing my desktop background with a screenshot of the title slide of my presentation. If you are not sure how to do that, search the internet for ‘XP [or Vista, etc.] change desktop background’.

I then dragged the presentation file icon to the Quick Launch toolbar and hid all the other icons littering my desktop by right-clicking in the desktop area and selecting ‘ Arrange Icons By’ (XP or ‘View’ in Vista) and unchecking ‘Show Desktop Items’, like this:

(Getting your desktop items back is the reverse of hiding them.)

This produces a desktop that looks like your first slide and, clicking on the shortcut launches your presentation for real. At the end of your presentation, closing it returns you to the desktop. This helps keep your stress level down, is a much better experience for your audience, and might even impress them with your professionalism.

If you are in the position of organizing a conference or seminar, you can adapt this method so that each speaker’s presentation is launched from a desktop with your branding. You can also add a countdown timer presentation to the desktop to run in the break. You will find a selection of those here: Microsoft timer presentations

For conference organisers an alternative to the above strategy is to have a presentation set up with a single slide with text hyperlinks to the speakers’ presentations. The point is to have a way of switching smoothly and easily between them. A more sophisticated approach would be to have thumbnail screenshots of their opening slides with the hyperlinks.