From the Presentation Council listserv:

“Julie Irvin, President of Keystone Resources, is presenting the upcoming InfoComm International Presentations Council webinar, “How to Effectively Communicate Data Charts & Graphs,” on Wednesday, December 7, 2005 beginning at 4:00pm EST. If you are able to join the webinar, please send a RSVP to Shana Rieger, srieger@infocomm.org. The meeting link and call-in instructions will be emailed to you December 2nd.

* Pie of Pie Charts
* Use of Small Multiples
* Using PowerPoint & Illustrator to enhance basic charts
* The importance of chart labeling, titles and colors
* Other Software & Tools that help you illustrate points”

Posted by Lee Potts at 9:09 PM .

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To: All News and Wire Services
For Immediate Release:

Professor PowerPoint™ Loses Tenure
By Tom Bunzel

As an active member of the Visual Being web log, the Presentations Council of InfoComm International and the presentations community at large, I need to inform you all of a change in my circumstances necessitated by my recent correspondence with Microsoft’s law firm, Katten Muchin Rosenman.

I was contacted by a member of that firm a short while ago and informed that my use of the phrase “Professor PowerPoint™” was an improper use of its trademark and among other matters, potentially created confusion as to my relationship with Microsoft.

As many of you know, I have spent a fair amount of time and effort writing articles and books, educating users and in many ways promoting the use of PowerPoint™ in creating and enhancing presentations. However, when I explained these circumstances in some detail, I was informed that while Microsoft certainly appreciated my endeavors, my continued use of the trademarked name PowerPoint™ in my business and web site was inappropriate.

After consulting Microsoft’s web site pertaining to the proper use of its trademarks, I realized that there was no way I could continue as Professor PowerPoint™ without violating the clearly set forth canon of: “Do Not Use Microsoft Names or Trademarks as Part of Your Name”. There was very little wiggle room in that sentence.

To my relief the attorney added that Microsoft was not taking an aggressive posture in this issue. Since I had no great interest in retaining a law firm with the names of three partners on its letterhead, I appreciate that position immensely and sincerely.

So it is with some regret that this week I am publicly and irrevocably renouncing my position as Professor PowerPoint™, and now also admit that I got most of my diplomas through self study. (My B.A. in English from Tufts University is, alas, legitimate).

Obviously I had hoped to complete my career as a fully tenured Professor PowerPoint™ basking in the glory of a position in an albeit virtual and wholly nonexistent campus, but that is not to be. As of today the ProfessorPowerPoint™ web site is no more, and I have assumed a new position…

Henceforth my web site will be www.professorppt.com, and I hope that those of you who have linked to me in the past or referenced me in your own work will make the necessary adjustment.

The title of this web site has now been changed to “The Presentation Professor” (even though I shall remain, in reality, a humble untenured teaching assistant).

Let me make it perfectly clear that this entirely new web site has no relationship with either Presenters University or Presentations Magazine (even though I am an intermittent Contributing Editor at Presentations). Let me state for the record that I am also in no way connected to the “Ask the Professor” professor at Presenters University, the Video Professor on national television, nor any other real or virtual institution of higher education in the presentations industry. If in fact there are any other professors, real or virtual, teaching in the presentations community, I simply ask, can we all just get along?

It is indeed with a sad and heavy heart that I leave this entirely nonexistent campus, and set forth in search of new vistas in the presentations (and not just PowerPoint™) universe. I hope you will not forsake me for my past transgressions and continue to count me as a valued colleague as I carve out what I hope will be a new area of specialization and expertise beyond PowerPoint™ and into the virtually infinite realm of communicating more effectively using technology. (Oops, not to be confused with David Paradi’s http://www.communicateusingtechnology.com).

I will post my new office hours shortly but drop in any time. With fondest memories of a great ride, I remain sincerely,

Tom Bunzel
The Presentation Professor

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 4:10 PM .

5 Comments »

After delivering a web conference for the Presentations Council a few weeks ago, I wrote up my experience with some tips on do’s and don’ts for my InformIT web site. For anyone contemplating following in my steps, this might be a useful read.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 3:18 PM .

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For the past few years I have been using a tool for creating music tracks unlike any other I have found.
SmartSound’s SonicFire Pro has some unique technology for making custom music tracks for all types of applications.

From movie scores to 10 second bumps, this is the tool I have found no equal to. Most canned music comes in preset times: 10, 15, 30, 45….. With SonicFire Pro you can easily set any length needed and produce a track with an ending.

The music library comes from many of the industry standard houses like Westar Music, Killer Tracks, The Music Bakery, and Narrator Tracks. Their library is constantly growing with thousands of great royalty-free tracks and the music is top quality. The focus is on visual media creators so if you’re in the business I recommend checking it out. I’m looking forward to future versions of this amazing tool.

Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 11:04 AM .

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Those of you who missed the webinar can get a summary of many of the points I made about why video doesn’t play at my InformIT column. There is also more info on the PFCMedia tool for avoiding problems with codecs.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 12:48 PM .

1 Comment »

During my webinar yesterday I covered the MediaPlayer object as a way of using DVD in PowerPoint, but it has limitations. About an hour after I finished, it occurred to me that there is a much better way to do it–put an empty button on the Slide Master and give it an Action Setting with a Hyperlink to your default DVD Player: Intervideo WinDVD or even Media Player. With your DVD player launched during the presentation, and a DVD disc in your drive, you can move from Title to Title whenever you want to play your content, and then close the player and continue whenever you want. This beats the MediaPlayer object which does not have the navigational capability to go through a DVD.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 12:19 PM .

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While I did not post LIVE as Rob Lindstrom did, I managed to write up my experiences and insights at the recent PowerPoint LIVE conference for InformIT.com. Here’s the link.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 2:09 PM .

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This week I was working with my young design team, ages 7 to 14, as they made preparations to present to a group of community leaders. The topic of the presentation involved a piece of public art to be installed at a playground in a fairly rough part of town.

We were well prepared: PowerPoint slides, architectural rendering, mindmaps, scale models, interviews with residents, drawings and photographs.

In preparing the group of young designers, I went over the basics of presentation skills and style: speak slowly and clearly; be enthusiastic; make purposeful gestures with your arms; hold your head high; make eye contact; and, smile!

They did great. And, there was a very noticeable shift in the room when the entire group, both presenters and audience, made the switch from “presentation” to “dialog”. I really almost started crying as these young children began to defend their decisions, explain the construction methods they intended to use, and, one-by-one address every question and concern of the community.

This is a subtle and crucial moment in the life of a public speaker. The questions takes the conversation off-script and off-road into the weeds of ideas and the thickets of complexity that can’t be easily hacked out of using tidy bullet point lists and fancy slide transitions! IN fact, the audience is well-adapted to sensing fear in a presenter, and–even more deadly–inauthenticity.

The only software that I’ve seen that can vaguely accommodate this freestyling and authentic type of dialog between subject matter expert and audience is the non-linear, java-based application, The Brain.

In allowing the user to migrate swiftly from “thoughts” to tertiary “daughter thoughts”, the presentation can mirror in visual space the same fluidity of conversational space.

Another emerging technology that holds promise is the rise of the semantic web and other applications that work with non-linear taxonomies or folkonomies, which is the practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. Basically, any type of file–a JPEG or excel spreadsheet–can be “tagged” with keywords and descriptive phrases that make searching for topics much easier and more intelligent.

The most prominent examples for visual assets include the wildly popular photo service Flickr and the lesser know app, Montage-a-Google.

The network involved with Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons have created flexible tools for gradiating copyright and usage of copyrighted material to replace the older, recalcitrant institutions of ASCAP and the US Copyright Office. As a creator of content, the user can designate levels of usage, for example whether (1) to allow commercial uses of your work; (2) to allow modifications of your work; (3) to designate a country-specific copyright, etc.

Creative Commons has made is easier to access quality music, video, graphics and photos that have been designated as “common domain”.

As these tools develop along with the ubiquity of free wireless service, the ability to access data and images in real time to aid storytelling and illumination will accelerate. Now we just have to get presenters over the age of 14 up to speed!

Posted by Peter Durand at 1:17 PM .

1 Comment »

Finally a compilation without going into Control Panel of the various codecs that will work with Windows XP and Media Player from MS Knowledge Base. Keep this handy if you’re doing video using an editor that doesn’t use snappy descriptions like “best quality on your machine”.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:02 PM .

1 Comment »

Dr. Douglas Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary offers another take on the importance of images and their affect on culture in a letter he sent to the editor of Time magazine:

Moreover, images, which dominate American and most western media, are very limited in what they can communicate concerning truth. They cannot directly convey propositions, but instead evoke emotions. Yes, some are telling and unforgettable, such as the photography of the young Vietnamese girl running naked in the streets after being napalmed. But for all their poignancy, images may mislead or overwhelm without informing or educating at a deep level. This image-saturation (if not image-mongering) has lead to the pandemic debasement of intellectual discourse in our country.

There’s a lot of very interesting material in the discussion that follows his post in its comment section. The theological focus of Dr. Groothuis’ post raises some interesting questions as well. For instance, how does one best deal with the moral dimensions implicit in a profession that has, as its focus, the enhancement of persuasive abilities?

Posted by Lee Potts at 12:05 AM .

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Thanks to PowerPoint MVP Kathy Jacobs for a link to the site of PFC Media. They make an inexpensive (free to try) add-on for PowerPoint that makes it easier to ensure that media files that are sent out can be played by recipients.

I will review the product in the near future, but this is a cool idea because the failure of the recipient to have a codec is one of the main reasons a movie or sound file will not play properly.

(The other one is broken links).

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 11:33 AM .

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For a first post this is slightly historical, but I wanted to share this clip of how our recent UK election results from May 5 were broadcast by the BBC. I was entertained and impressed by both the technology and the presentation.

For a little bit of background: Peter Snow, the presenter in the BBC video clip linked below, has been forecasting and broadcasting election results for as long as I can remember. He has always been known for his innovative presentation style, adopting visual aids that have since entered into the national consciousness. He will always be associated with the ‘Swingometer’, a device co-invented by David Butler and the Canadian broadcaster Professor Robert McKenzie and first used in the BBC television broadcast of the 1955 General Election in the UK. Then it was a piece of cardboard propped up on a desk against a semicircular scale and was manually adjusted to indicate the changing fortunes of each political party as results came in.

It was ideally suited to indicate trends in a two-party battle but was not so good once other political parties began to increase their share of the votes. Now the Swingometer has entered the virtual, multi-dimensional age. Spare a few moments to watch the video of the results linked below.

Unfortunately I can’t give a direct link due to the way that the BBC embeds their news player into their web site. Visit this BBC page, and select the button top right ‘Election News in Video’. In the window that pops up, select ‘Results explained: Peter Snow analyses the election outcome’ in the Special Coverage section, bottom left corner. Stay with it, as it gets more theatrical as it progresses and do view it full screen – but make haste, it may not be posted in this way for long.

Does all this visual technology make the results any easier to interpret? Well, the entertainment value is high and it compresses a lot of data into a short visual experience – ideally suited to those of us that sat up all night watching through a caffeine-supported stupor. In the past the Swingometer was wildly inaccurate in its predictions. In 2005 however it proved to be a pretty accurate measure of the final outcome.

There is also a Flash on-line version of the Swingometer (illustrated), complete with an introduction by the inimitable Peter Snow.

Posted by Roy Hammans at 8:21 AM .

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I might be late to the party with this one but my boss introduced me to The Wainhouse Research Bulletin the other day and it seemed worth sharing.

The goal of The Wainhouse Research Bulletin (WRB) is to help vendors, reseller channel partners, service providers, investors, and end-users alike follow the fast moving action in the world of rich media communications. Wainhouse Research analysts cover presence, instant messaging, audio conferencing, web conferencing, videoconferencing, distance education, streaming media, and unified communications products and services. Via the WRB, we both report and give our unique perspectives on product announcements, financial results, and corporate developments as well as technology and market trends. The WRB is published approximately weekly via email.

There’s also an RSS syndication feed available.

Posted by Lee Potts at 9:13 PM .

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