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Presentation Facts is an on-going series of posts exploring what is known for sure about presentations and presentation visuals. The series is moderated by Robert Befus.
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One of the websites I poke around in is Dave Paradi’s “Think Outside The Slide.”
In addition to many excellent articles he has a very cool personalized assessment for PowerPoint based presenters. Take the assessment here.
……………TD
Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 2:48 PM .
Slideshare is like Flickr or YouTube for your slide presentations. Upload them, link to them, enter them in contests and see what others are doing.
Posted by Robert Befus at 9:02 AM .
I recently published an article on CIO.COM on presentations strategy and planning. Some of you may find it of interest.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 6:26 PM .
If you’ve never come across this before you should add it to your favorites or bookmarks. Steve Rindsburg of RDP Slides and the PowerPoint MVP folks have loaded the answers and solutions to almost everything PowerPoint related. Many of the responses in the PowerPoint Discussion Group refer to this site: www.pptfaq.com
RDP Slides is also the home of the very useful PPTools - PowerTools for PowerPoint
…………..TD
Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 3:18 PM .
For those interested in presentation best practices the issue always arises what is the most effective way to avoid stale bullets and sameness in slides. Inevitably the issue of creativity and resourcefulness leads to the concept of metaphors and analogies - using images or diagrams. The problem for non-artists or designers like me is where to get the nuts and bolts building blocks of these types of tools.
Recently a colleague, Gene Zelazny, the author of Say It With Charts! put me together with an entrepreneur who has launched an interesting site in this space. PowerFrameworks is an online gallery of conceptual metaphors in the form of PowerPoint shapes, professionally designed and ready to download into your presentation. The site also features concrete examples of how the metaphors can be implemented, and even a best practices section mirroring many of Zelazny’s own principles.
Kathy Villela, the site’s founder, actually worked at the consulting firm where Zelazny has worked for decades before beginning this site. Her concept, and what I like about the site, is that it is more than a gallery of shapes or clip art; it is also well constructed and searchable and mentally stimulating.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 2:49 PM .
Serious Magic, creators of Ovation, the popular PowerPoint enhancement software, has been acquired by Adobe. Adobe seems to be primarily interested in their video-related products. In the press release, Ovation isn’t even mentioned until the boilerplate verbiage at the end. They also say they will continue to sell the Serious Magic product line. However, as we’ve all seen in the past with acquisitions of this sort, there’s a big difference between selling and supporting/developing.
Posted by Lee Potts at 8:11 AM .
My new business book about PowerPoint is now available to read online. “Solving the PowerPoint Predicament: Using Digital Media for Effective Communication” is not a book specifically about PowerPoint, but the use of the program with third party tools to convey a message for business, academia or religious content. You can also buy the book on Amazon.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:00 PM .
Here’s the official link to the official site with official information:
……….TD
Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 8:34 PM .
Cool Presenters University article by TechSmith’s Betsy Weber.
Screencasting Tips for Beginners
Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 11:31 PM .
From “Top Ten Truths About the Digital Ecosystem“, a recent post on the Dealing with Darwin blog:
“10. Images are king. Verbal content, by virtue of its sheer volume, is increasingly perceived as noise. We are entering a new era of collage, where the mind of the viewer is the assembling artist. Verbalization happens post facto, the residue of headline skimming and subconscious synthesis. The esthetics of digitally enhanced images will become increasingly powerful as a vehicle for cutting through the clutter. Manipulating semantics or semiotics via images will become increasingly sophisticated, both in the private and public sectors. High-definition displays and portable form factors will be popular mass markets. Indexing and searching images, on the other hand, while technologically interesting, will be of peripheral impact.”
Posted by Lee Potts at 8:00 AM .
Sociable Media’s Cliff Atkinson is featured in an LA Times most emailed story featuring his work on the Vioxx litigation.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 12:00 PM .
What good are ingenious ideas or a grand vision if you can’t convey their fabulousness to your audience? Take some pointers from these leaders. The following individuals were profiled in the book 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators, by Carmine Gallo.
BusinessWeek’s on-line slide show features contemporary business execs considered among the top speakers in Corporate America. These men and women have leveraged their powerful communications skills to build such companies as General Electric, Starbucks, and Apple.
Posted by Peter Durand at 12:50 PM .
Occasionally, when you are designing a presentation or a web site, you need to get some ideas for likely visuals that could work with your color scheme. You could trawl through the photo libraries, looking for that particular combination of subject matter and hue, or you could use a neat little utility like Jim Bumgardner’s Colr Pickr.
Colr Pickr lets you select a color from a generated color wheel, adjust its brightness if you wish, and then goes off and selects photographic images of subjects that match the selected hue. It finds those photographs from a variety of Flickr group pools such as Color Fields, Macro, Flowers, etc, and returns a selection of them around the color wheel. Clicking the same colour again returns a new set, until it runs out of possible candidates.
This is a fun little tool to play with, but remember that just because it lets you find photographs it does not automatically mean that you can use them freely. All photos on Flickr are subject to copyright restrictions placed upon them by their owners. Sometimes these may be Creative Commons licences that allow you to use them in some ways, sometimes they are quite restrictive - always check before use.
Posted by Roy Hammans at 2:06 PM .
One in an occasional series of posts about presentation pros who are up to something.
I first met and interviewed Eric and Liz Glaser in the mid ‘90s when I was editor of Multimedia Producer magazine and they were pioneering the use of interactive CD-ROMs for sales and marketing applications. In 1998, they created a nifty CD-ROM that allowed the owners of Domino’s Pizza stores to mix and match food products to create menu specials and related profit analysis. I was struck by how easy and functional the program was and recall actually having fun building my own pizza menus. I got to wondering what Eric and Liz have been up to lately. I recently reconnected with them at their company, Compass Creative in Roswell, GA.
Both Eric and Liz come from ad agency backgrounds and, even though they’ve been in the presentation space for more than a decade, their agency roots still show in their approach to creating presentations for marketing and sales departments in large corporations. Their presentation work is artistically sound, to be sure, but the key to their business approach is hardcore sales functionality. In other words, they unambiguously help clients make money.
By 2000, the ubiquity of PowerPoint was eroding the demand for high-end CD-ROM presentations. The writing was on the digital wall, recalls Eric. “We knew we had to move away from just presentation. The days of the $80,000 contract to create a brochure on a CD were gone.” Eric and Liz sat down with their clients and asked them what they needed to improve their sales processes. “We wanted to find out where it hurt? What was the need?” says Eric.
They realized that all of their clients were standardized on Microsoft Office and by this time those companies were building their own reports, presentations, sell sheets, mini-catalogs and other sales products. But Office, bless its monopolistic heart, is not smart enough to know a user’s unique needs or how to automate and customize task-specific processes. Eric and Liz realized that Office is a multipurpose vehicle in a world that demands custom transport.
Monster Garage Meets Presentations
When their customers began clamoring for an easier ride on the sometimes bumpy and slow road between raw sales materials and customer-ready visuals, Eric and Liz stuck their heads under the hood of Office and rigged the PowerPoint engine to generate on-the-fly, customized sales reports, presentations and catalogs. The result is a series of modified, street-legal apps that scream like a nitrous-injected Honda CRX running a strait LS/VTEC block and a Turbonetics T-66 with .81 AR @26psi. Sweet!
Glaser’s new spin-off company, DXT Systems, now specializes in performance-enhancing middleware solutions for companies that want their salespeople and managers to be able to trick out their own sales sheets, screen presentations and print catalogs at dragstrip speeds and without a Class 3 license. Eric calls the system DXT to signify it as a dynamic extension of Office functionality…and to make it sound cool.
Current DXT clients include a DXT.Presentation Builder for Eastman Kodak, a similar system for a worldwide soft drink manufacturer that doesn’t like its name used by its vendors, a do-it-yourself DXT.Catalog/Sell Sheet Builder for MeadWestvaco and a DXT.Sales Report Builder for Solutia, a spinoff of Monsanto.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 5:29 PM .