Tips

Know the Audience, No Other Rules on My Presentation

As the golden rule for preparing a presentation, “practice, practice, and practice” is an essential skill to everybody. And I agree that the more I practice, the better I get, because it’s never an easy job to demonstrate and explain something in front of different audience. Making a presentation involves public speaking, which can be seriously scary. Famously, speaking in public has been voted scarier than dying (which says something about its lack of popularity). So if we make enough practices before, the confidence and courage is fearless.

Since we know the importance of practice, we should know more about our audience. I usually ask myself some questions in hehearsing, such as what’s the instant reaction from audience to my words. It’s easy to do a piece of research of those potential audience. Once I know some information about them, like genders, ages, or interests, I may add the considerations into my practice.

Practice is an essential, not a rule on presentation skills. Knowing a little about audience is the tip of such a game in which audience and me are players. Then no scary anymore. Like what’s quoted in the book The Art of War on 6 century BC: “If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles“.

William Peterson

Let’s Talk about Presentation Skills from Our President Obama

President Obama’s “HOT” is the result of our economy’s “COLD”. For me, his charisma is more than those inspired stimulus plan. I watched Obama’s first presidential show on CNN days ago, and considered the inaugural speech an excellent public presentation model for everyone, who wants to be another president or not.

Dr. Rich Kirschner mentioned about Obama’s presentation skill was kind of “Powerful Use of Persuasive Speech for Positive Change“, and I agreed with that.

All in all, Obama uses persuasive speech to take a potentially damaging set of revelations, and turn it to his advantage. Such talk actually has the potential to play an important role in bringing about positive change in this fundamental area of our civic discourse.

Such skills could be useful in most business negotiations, although many techies don’t like this way as I know. Actually not everyone can create its own presentation style like Steve Jobs, and sometimes it’s better to do business with old technologies.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

We Must Read More for Making Good Design

I realize that sort of information browsing online is not enough to learn any subjects throughoutly. So I move to reading more professional books like returning the college. Everyone likes better design in its presentation, so we must learn some elementary skills from books at first. And I was recommended to read Timothy Samara’s guidance to enhance my abilities of instructional design.

Here’re two recent books about tips and rules for design starter to make good to better design. Keep these ideas in mind when designing your next presentation or website, poster, and you’ll get excellent design achievement soon.

Timothy Samara is a graphic designer and educator based in New York City, where he divides his time between consulting, writing, and teaching at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, NYU, and Purchase College. He is the author of several books for Rockport Publishers, including Making and Breaking the Grid, Typography Workbook, Publication Design Workbook, Type Style Finder and Design Elements.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Ideas about Showing PowerPoint Presentations on iPhone

These days I was totally hooked with Apple iPhone from a friend. Certainly it’s not that fancy touch screen abuse, but those more and more interesting iPhone Applications from various innovative developers. Then I became wondering, how could I make my PowerPoint presentations displayed on iPhone, since it doesn’t like Windows Mobile to install such applications. After a little research, I got these ideas as below:

1. Export as a Series of Pictures to iPhoto on Mac
As Microsoft announced Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for Mac last year, getting presentations from Mac to iPhone is relatively easy. PowerPoint exports your presentation as a series of pictures directly to iPhoto, or saves those same slide images as pictures to your Pictures folder. From there, sync pictures to your iPhone through iTunes as usual, then use the built-in Photos or slide show program on your iPhone to show your presentation.

It’s really easy to go and try this way. However, the presentation on iPhone becomes kinda picture slideshow, not with all animations along.

2. Convert as Supported MPEG-4 Video Formats
Since iPhone support MPEG-4 video in .mp4, .m4v, .mov formats, some software vendor offers the idea of presentation to video conversion. You can just convert your PowerPoint presentations to MPEG-4 video first, then import or sync the video to iPhone with iTunes.

This method sounds reasonable, and all animations are here. But please see, video presentation is not slideshow anymore, because you can’t control them easily slide by slide. Right?

3. Remote Control PowerPoint from Computers
So some iPhone application developers find this way to connect PowerPoint with computer via Wi-Fi network. Then you can remote control your PowerPoint presentations wirelessly from your iPhone, with a realtime view of your slides. Show your slides on your PC and use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a clicker.

I haven’t tried this app yet, but the idea seems not bad. If everything goes fine in presentation, that’s the best way so far, if you have a reliable Wi-Fi connection on your iPhone.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Office’s Running Hour: Sketching Out Your PowerPoint Presentations in Ten Minutes

Well, every Friday I’ll attend some weekly meetings in the company. I think most office people get the same as me. Have you ever found yourself decompressing in true leisure one minute and scrambling to meet any deadline the next? So I teach people to survive with making conference presentations effortlessly.

VideoJug’s “How to Write A PowerPoint Presentation In 5 Minutes” is a great tutorial for most staffs. However, there’s kinda funny elements in it. And I think an real enough briefing-like PowerPoint presentation could be made perfectly in 10 minutes. Besides these tips in that video, I have something else to recommend:

1. To make excellent presentation with professional-looking slides, you need some good PowerPoint template resources on your pocket. See one of my previous post about this here.

2. Getting used to these intuitive features in PowerPoint 2007 will make your creation better and faster. Just learn something like SmartArt, shortcuts, etc. Quick Tips for PowerPoint 2007 on my previous post | PowerPoint 2007 - Get up to speed from Microsoft

3. Attach more. When you’re too busy to summary something in the slides, why not just attach and show the original files within your presentation? Check out some previous posts from me about “attaching documents or objects“, “recording narrations“, “Adding YouTube video clips“, or “embedding real-time Web pages“.

Assuming you’ve got the 10-minute-presentation talent, you got enough breathing space in office, aren’t you?

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Kick Off the Keynote: Brief Launch, Rich Presentation

Okay that a lot of my friends ever complained that their audience were so unprofessional when they addressed something logical and theoretical. The fact is, your presentation is so good, without the best approach to audience’s logic.

Like Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” If we’re not the presentation expert, or need presentations to keep walking, we might ignore the true feelings from potential audience when planning the keynote. long or short is not the important elements in the planning. When the part with complicated theory comes, just enrich the experiences, such as playing relaxing background music, or throwing out the key sentences like thundering.

Your presentation can be as long as it should be, but it can not be poorly developed without brief launching and rich contents. The starting part couldn’t be tedious, as well as the main contents couldn’t be too simple without your professional insight. There’s no requirement to make everyone a presentation expert, so that’s why I usually recommend such improvements on PowerPoint 2007 to level up our efficiency at work.

We don’t blame the logic of audience, because everyone can master presentations like a pro.

My Past Posts about PowerPoint 2007:
Quick Tips to Enhance Your Presentation in PowerPoint 2007
The Presentation Outlook: Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Review with Recommendations

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Not Bad to Live, Easy to Show Your Web Pages Real-Time in PowerPoint Presentations

Yes, I think we’ll prefer this way of living Web pages real-time in PowerPoint presentations, not pause the slide show and open the Web pages in Internet Explorer. I’ve introduced the step-by-step guide to use ActiveX control to do the live Web page in PowerPoint slides (refer to my previous post Make Your Live Homepage in PowerPoint Slides. Now I just find the right PowerPoint add-in to simplify that complicated PowerPoint macro way from one of these nice PowerPoint MVPs (what’s MVP? refer to the post Know Those PowerPoint MVPs to Help Yourself). And the VBA tool is totally free for everyone, and compatible with PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 97-2003. That’s maybe why a 5 stars editor’s rating in PC Magazine (refer to LiveWeb review by PC Magazine).

LiveWeb - insert and view web pages real-time. - by Shyam Pillai

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Your Office at Work: Fresh Resource Center inside Microsoft Office

Not only you, I’m engaged to Microsoft’s Office at Work, which is far more than some hints and tips for those office applications. Because the contents there are really helpful in our daily office life. We can not miss those great ideas to stuff:

• A popular article from Office Hours on ninja tricks you can perform
• An introduction to readability stats
• A review of phishing and other email warnings
• Updated Excel tips (the most popular program folks are looking for hints on this page)
• Most e-mailed templates (based on email this link data)
• A link to our own comic, Office OFFline
• Plus keeping last month’s most popular article, PowerPoint without bullets

The best part here is, you’ll find the resources you want to see on different prospects, such as Office at Home, Office at School, Office at a Small Business.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

New Presentation Technology in Review: Thank MVP Geetesh on FlashPPT

In early twenty-first century, I devoted myself into the presentation innovations, shaking up a business practice were settled to the future. Quite a few of my thoughts may come out as I also like to dig more on Microsoft PowerPoint. Yet Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) in PowerPoint have their own opinions on the experienced presentation skills. I really appreciate their works in practice. Here I recommend MVP Geetesh’s latest professional reviewing and ranking for the Flash/PowerPoint mixed tools on his FlashPPT site. You’ll find the technical details about the PowerPoint to Flash presentation (http://www.flashppt.com/blog/).

Also, you may like the presentation guru Geetesh Bajaj’s another presentation site Indezine (http://www.indezine.com/) and his PowerPoint Blog (http://www.indezine.com/blog/), which contain more nice PowerPoint templates and a lot of presentation resources for everyone.

One thing I need to claim, I’m not Microsoft MVPs only the IT presentation concerned businessman. So I just think that improving presentation skills is important for modern guys with new presentation technologies to make the business world easier. We don’t need to be the PowerPoint MVP, but we appreciate all efforts of the MVPs to help us become the MVP in our own field with better presentation skills. Thank all MVPs.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Saving Yourself from Desktop Publishing: Keep Your PDF Documents Online

No doubt that one of the great contributions by Adobe is the standard of Portable Document Format (PDF) from 15 years ago. As Adobe referred, PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system. Post Script, Distiller Server, Acrobat Connect, so many deeply developed technologies around it. But who cares these or those technical aspects? All the reasons we favor it so much could be: cross-platform compatibility, compact size, easy creation, nice security, print and browser friendly, etc.

This morning, one friend of mine told me that she would store all her documents in PDF other than Word documents in the future. Maybe it was a good idea to do so, but I persuaded her not do that, because Word documents are Word documents, while PDF documents are PDF documents in your own business. Word documents could be the best-ever desktop sharing, as PDF might be the best-ever desktop publishing. However, that wasn’t enough for the good arrangement of one’s business. The advanced suggestion from my mind is: backup all Word documents, convert them to PDF documents, and store all PDF online. Why online? Definitely there’re millions of answers to this question in the Internet times. After all, we’ve already entered the upper class of traditional desktop publishing, with the online documents.

Adobe’s Create PDF Online
http://searchpdf.adobe.com/

PDFCreator on SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Google Docs with “Save as PDF”
http://docs.google.com/

On the honor of the great help from Adobe’s PDF for our businesses these years, let’s move our PDF documents to the Internet, and leave the business with PDF in a better vision.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran