We would like to invite all of our readers to visit Speaker Ready – a virtual meeting space (chat room) for presentation professionals.

When Ray and I began Visual Being, we were aiming to create a community of presentation professionals built around the sharing of experience and knowledge. It’s in the nature of our profession that many of us work in isolation, lacking regular communication with a shared community of practice. Some of us are freelancers working in sole practitioner environments. Some of us work in the corporate world where no one else in the company does what we do. The bottom line is that almost everyone can benefit from more contact with his or her professional peers and Visual Being hopes to make getting that contact a little easier.

Speaker Ready takes the next step towards reaching that goal by making the opportunities for interaction more immediate and, well, interactive. Think of it as an online water cooler. We hope you will stop by and check it out the next time you are taking a break or at the end of a long day of overpowering PowerPoint. As of right now, we can’t guarantee that there will always be something going on in there. However, if all goes according to plan, that’s how it will be in the near future. In the meantime, we are in the process of setting up a schedule of regular (weekly?) sessions, so feel free to let us know what times and topics will work for you.

Posted by Lee Potts at 7:59 PM .

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Live from PowerPoint Live, Sept. 28, 2005

Korie Pelka, corporate communications manager for EFI in Foster City, California, is unofficially the hands-down winner of the PowerPoint Live Award for the longest conference session title: “A Day in the Life of a Corporate Presentation Creator: Crafting Meaningful Presentations in Today’s Corporate Environment.”

Pelka, who is responsible for executive presentations and employee newsletters, began by offering her list of the seven most pressing challenges facing presentation specialists in the corporate environment:

1. Lack of time alloted to the presentation process by corporate clients
2. Lack of focus by corporate clients on the process and importance of presentations
3. Changing corporate strategies, which make messaging a moving target
4. Multiple cooks in the kitchen, all with different tastes and favorite recipes
5. Rapid market changes, which cause abrupt shifts in direction
6. Changing corporate structures, which keep everyone walking on eggshells
7. Lack of resources, because management always understimates the value of presentation

In her presentation, Korie stressed the importance of developing a method for creating presentations that streamlines the process as much as possible AND is flexible and adaptable enough to work effectively with all of various personalities and styles of in-house clients.

Some of the tips she offered to her peers:

• Have a clear process for gathering content
• Create storyboards to guide the presentation development
• Establish a strong story that supports your presenter as well as the presentation
• Encourage evangelists in the corporation through training
• Follow up on presentation results and initiate improvements
• Develop hooks between the presentation and the real-world
• Maintain your own sanity while getting the job done
• Enhance your own value proposition
• When all else fails, “Just breathe.”

Hey, Korie, maybe that last one would have been a better name for the session.

Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 12:49 PM .

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Live from PowerPoint Live, Sept 27, 2005

QUESTION: What happens during a typical PowerPoint presentation if you take away the forward and reverse buttons on the presenter’s remote?
ANSWER: You have a one-slide slideshow.

Except if you are Bob Lane. In that case, you deftly navigate your presentation from one screen by hitting hidden hyperlinks and menus that allow you to jump to more than 1,000 slides and presentations in your master file.

Making him a candidate for the most innovative use of PowerPoint at the PPT Live conference. Bob’s standing-room-only presentation on Tuesday was a demonstration of “Relational Presentation,” the name he has given to his evolving concepts for a new approach to file organization and nonlinear navigation using PowerPoint. In his design concepts, which represent more than six years of research and development, slides–or entire presentations–are organized into a hierarchical tree structure by categories. A navigation screen with hidden links, icons and lists allows him to drill down through the layers of information and return at any time to his starting point. Using a Gyromouse (www.gyration.com) to run his cursor around the screen, Bob demonstrated that it is possible for PowerPoint to break free of the bonds of linearity.

Linear presentation (following a pre-set series of slides and ideas) limits the ability of a presenter to respond interactivity to the audience using graphical elements. Even though still in a rough state, Bob’s approach is an creative and well-reasoned example of efforts to move beyond the linear format of presentation without abandoning PowerPoint as the central presentation tool. Judging by audience reaction, the interest in such a capability is running high.

Ironically, during the presentation, Bob revealed the potential and the pitfalls of nonlinear PowerPoint presentation. Although the audience was clearly impressed by his ground-breaking concepts and his freeform, interactive presentation style, his presentation ultimately suffered from information fragmentation. His presentation did not have a predetermined destination, and that is exactly where it arrived. Many of the attendees voiced the opinion that the session lacked a clear takeaway. When you present nonlinearily, “it is hard to keep in mind what you want to convey to the audience while letting the audience drive the presentation where they would like to see it go,” commented author and consultant Kathy Jacobs.

PowerPoint-based, nonlinear information design and presentation may well be the wave of the future, but it does not come without hidden riptides and undertow.

Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 11:23 AM .

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