January, 2008

Convenient with Inconvenience: Impress The World With Visible Keynote

You must haven’t forgotten Al Gore after his setback in election because of An Inconvenient Truth, which made him Oscar and Nobel winning last year. Al Gore arrived with mountains of research and a compelling, vital message. He left with a Keynote presentation fit for the silver screen. Those inconvenient truths in his slides really impact the world, don’t they?

I deeply appreciate his presidential presentation style and the compact slides design. It’s really good model for every presenter to know making inconvenient animations other than flat description. Every audience loves visual impact while narration is going on. Whether for business or non-profit, a good presenter must have visible keynote in his presentation.

By the way, Nancy Duarte, the CEO and founder of Duarte Design a presentation focused design firm that counts some of the biggest technology companies as clients, works on Al Gore’s project a lot. And you’ll like to watch and learn the designer’s slides clip from the award-winning keynote at http://www.duarte.com/#1.0.0

Certainly not everyone is a born designer to make dazzling slides for the world, but some convenient, intuitive, and simple animations in the presentation also can impress your business world.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Learn Keynote Presentations From Our Geek Gods

As I started Internet in high school, and studied Information Technology in college, Mr. Bill Gates and Mr. Steve Jobs are always the shinning stars across my IT voyage. Their speeches in recent years are definitely impressive: Windows 98 to Windows Live, iMac to iPhone, CES to MacWorld, etc. The technology has changed dramatically, but they keynoted as usual years by years. Early this month, Bill announced his final resignation from Microsoft in CES, and Steve announced his new gadget MacBook Air from Apple in MacWorld. I believe that most people have watched the shows. And with the memories of these geek titans’ last presentations, we can compare the visuals as well as help us improve our own visuals.

I am not attempting to be glib or sarcastic anyway, but actually you’ll be easy to find Bill is not such a good presenter more than a uncle neighborhood with fortune, while Steve often makes artful and effective presentations as he wants in contrasts. I generally agree with Carmine Gallo’s idea “Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs” (read it at http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2008/sb20080125_269732.htm), which indicates 10 elements to enhance your presentations:

1. Set the theme;
2. Demonstrate enthusiasm;
3. Provide an outline;
4. Make numbers meaningful;
5. Try for an unforgettable moment;
6. Create visual slides;
7. Give ‘em a show;
8. Don’t sweat the small stuff;
9. Sell the benefit;
10. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse

Everyone can try these techniques and they could be really helpful if you need to make a business presentation successfully. Besides, you cannot forget a key tenet of a presentation other than just dazzling the audience all the time: simplicity. Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means, and every presentation has its own rhythm with presenter for distinct occasions.

More Bill’s presentations on Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx

More Steve’s presentations on Apple:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/appleevents/

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

The Presentation Outlook: Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Review with Recommendations - Part 3

Continued from previous post

Not Just Smart: Make Other Ways Like A Professional

I don’t want to talk too much about the new feature SmartArt graphics, because it’s really content design component to preset professional styles, although it helps visually communicate information somehow. Just read more about the visual representation of your information and ideas by yourself: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100395371033.aspx.

To be really smart and professional to do with PowerPoint 2007, you’re supposed to know some must have equipments. With these recommendations, you and your PowerPoint 2007 are really armed to the tooth in any presentation world.

The first one you definitely need to install is the general support for PDF file. Microsoft has an Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en to make your PowerPoint presentations and export as the most acceptable document type PDF files. Despite this Microsoft add-in doesn’t have better abilities compared with Adobe Acrobat’s add-in (more about Adobe Acrobat at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/), its ease to export really makes sense for most users.

If you still fancy classic menus in previous versions not the ribbon in PowerPoint 2007, the producer of high performance add-ins and tools for Microsoft Office offers Classic Menu for PowerPoint to show classic menus and toolbars on ribbon of Microsoft PowerPoint 2007. See details at http://www.addintools.com/english/menupowerpoint/default.htm. It retains all PowerPoint 2007 features and recalls the classic drop-down menu. You may love this hybrid way to quickly get into PowerPoint.

Regularly your PowerPoint documents will be used for online presentation in the Internet times, and I think most peopel won’t believe the feature of directly saving as Web pages in PowerPoint, which generates a bundle of files with unfriendly codes in pages, and no improvements in PowerPoint 2007. Multimedia software manufacturer Wondershare introduces the Flash conversion add-in to make online presentation properly with PowerPoint 2007. More information goes to http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash-pro.html. As SilverLight is under construction, Flash still takes up current Web content authoring. If you have multiple presentations on business or teaching, this one could be a great tool.

With one year evolution of PowerPoint 2007, the baby has been accepted by most of us. We like the Ribbon, hate the incompatibility, and want to be new professors on it. At the end of the common review, I just recommend the last thing: Don’t forget to install the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 1 (218.3 MB, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9EC51594-992C-4165-A997-25DA01F388F5&displaylang=en). There’re no more secrets from Microsoft, because you’ve known PowerPoint 2007.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

The Presentation Outlook: Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Review with Recommendations - Part 2

Continued from previous post

The X Files: New Documents Makes The World Differences

Such wise improvements for an application would be great spotlight, but Microsoft’s totally new Office format (OOXML) for PowerPoint 2007 is not that satisfied to ensure widest compatibility of files. Certainly, Microsoft provides PowerPoint Viewer 2007 (Get it directly at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=048dc840-14e1-467d-8dca-19d2a8fd7485&displaylang=en). But most users don’t just tend to watch and go. As they’re still using previous versions of PowerPoint, new X format make the documents become untouchable files. The unfriendliness will scare some new officers away.

Also, Microsoft makes an Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats” (Go to find it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en) to make up any inconveniences. But even so, the current situation is that, most PowerPoint 2007 users cannot edit the old non-X documents properly: wrong position, sprained objects and some loss.

The essential recommendation on this point is that you’d better transform the new PowerPoint 2007 files formats PPTX/PPSX to older vision files formats PPT/PPS before you take your presentation to anywhere else. Maybe you can always save your documents as non-X files to avoid some problems before PowerPoint 2007 is generally installed in most computers.

By the way, you can enable the Microsoft Office PowerPoint Compatibility Checker in PowerPoint 2007, and PowerPoint will prompt for those features in current presentation which are not supported by earlier versions of PowerPoint. Once continue to save, those unsupported contents will be removed or converted to static objects in older versions. This is the friendliest feature for compatibility as Microsoft has knew there’re always some troubles definitely.

However, as the new ribbon tab rearranges the group of commands and features, it puzzles most upgraded users from previous versions. On the other side, the pretty ribbon takes much more system memories and other resources and may slow down your computer somehow. Therefore most people think the starting time is delayed in PowerPoint 2007 from previous versions. About the ribbon, I generally favor the idea that introduces more intuitive icons to click on. If you’re really not filled with the tabs, just right click and “Minimize the Ribbon”.

To be continued….

The Presentation Outlook: Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Review with Recommendations - Part 1

This essay just provides personal perspective on using PowerPoint 2007 as presentation tool and share the proven methods and techniques I’ve developed after the throughout year of facilitating PowerPoint 2007 presentations.

Like any other baby, PowerPoint 2007 is really delighted with its 1st birthday and Christmas gift Service Pack 1 this winter. Also, the parent Microsoft is so happy to see the new baby’s greatly sales excellence last year. However, we still need to look carefully at what the newcomer executes and conduct a review of PowerPoint 2007 with recommendations that every user and consultant would consider.

While most of practice users are fond of PowerPoint 2007 focusing on their attention on the design process, we produce more functionally by leveraging meaningful business approach. We’ll experiment with three fundamental elements in PowerPoint 2007 and provide integrated recommendations for current and potential users.

Charming New Face: Does Everyone Like The Ribbon?

Most IT organizations tend to deploy new PowerPoint 2007 through its favored enterprise acquisition channel in the one year. All enthusiasm apart, actually many things stayed the same in PowerPoint 2007 from previous versions.

One of the great changes of PowerPoint 2007 is it lets users make presentations much faster and easier than ever before. Actually, just the new ribbon interface make PowerPoint 2007 look and feel dramatically fresh, even though most features are unchanged. Compared with long drop-down menu and task listing in earlier versions, the ribbon is simply more accessible and usable, and people really like the WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] thing. About Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, you can read more at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101679411033.aspx?pid=CL100605171033.

To be continued….