Today is Blog Action Day, where thousands of bloggers around the world unite to discuss a single issue. The purpose is to change the conversation on the web and focus global audiences on that issue. This year’s topic is poverty.

We encourage you to see what difference you could make. Presentations are a great medium for getting your ideas across. Create simple, powerful presentations and help spread awareness. We’ve spotlighted presentations on poverty on the SlideShare homepage. Please tag your presentations with “blogactionday” or “bad08″ so we can find and feature them.

You could also join the Blog Action Day Event on SlideShare and contribute to the discussion. Cheers to our users Nancy Poh and Oliver Ding for doing a great job initiating discussions and collecting presentations.

Blog Action Day 2008

Here are some presentations to inform and inspire you: Continue reading »

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Everyday, by some estimates, people deliver roughly 30 million PowerPoint presentations.

And 95 percent of them suck. Then people blame PowerPoint, as if the car caused the accident.

It’s a shame, really, because PowerPoint can be a great visual aid for a presentation. But it’s not the presentation itself. You are.

Below are five tips on how you can use PowerPoint effectively. As audience members we all know in the first few seconds of a speech if the speaker has done his or her homework or if we are merely the latest victims of the dreaded “Death by PowerPoint” syndrome (sometimes also called “Show up and throw up”).

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The success of ‘Meet Charlie, What is Enterprise 2.0‘ has been purely accidental. It started with a need to communicate the ideas and practices behind Enterprise 2.0 to the British Computer Society in April 2007.

I wouldn’t say there were any expectations to produce anything other than a standard PowerPoint presentation with me standing at the front delivering the bulk of the content verbally. However, I wanted to produce something which was different, would make people sit up and pay attention, to challenge tradition and most importantly something that would stand up on it’s own without a narrator.

My discovery of SlideShare a few weeks prior to the creation of Meet Charlie had inspired me to abandon everything I thought I knew about PowerPoint. The diverse and rich repository of slide decks helped me to re-evaluate my use of PowerPoint as a communication tool. I’d never seen PowerPoint being used so creatively and effectively. I also hadn’t seen much use of PowerPoint outside of boring meetings accompanied by boring presenters!

I settled on the theme of using a fictional character to illustrate how one might use a collection of web based tools to achieve their goals and structure their work. This worked really well, it brought the subject alive and provided the audience with a character they could instant connect with and compare themselves against. However the most effective attribute of the presentation was the simple, uniform and visually interesting slides. I forced myself to put the minimum amount of words possible on each slide, but enough to inform and guide the audience. It was also important that I kept a natural flow from slide to slide. It’s so distracting when slide decks jump in and out of topics/themes without a natural transition, so I made sure each slide had a natural lead into the next slide.

THE REACTION

I posted the slide deck (with mistakes in the content!) to SlideShare for the sole purpose of allowing the participants of the meeting to view it at their leisure. I was not expecting what happened next. Within hours it was featured on the front page and was clocking up thousands of hits and comments. It took me completely by surprise, after all, Enterprise 2.0 at the time was a very niche topic, yet it was inspiring and entertaining thousands of people around the world. That’s the power of SlideShare right there! One year on and we are well past 100,000 views with many embeds and comments.

THE FRANCHISE

Soon people started to contact me asking if they can translate the slides into their own language. Of course I encouraged it and now we have versions of Meet Charlie in Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Italian. I also started to hear from people who wanted to use the slides in their own presentations or at their work. I gladly agreed and began to keep a record of where Charlie was appearing, but it soon became impossible to keep up.

In my own circles at the time, Meet Charlie was being used in the pharmaceutical industry to promote the use of Web 2.0 tools behind the firewall. Another version was soon created, Meet Charlotte, a fictional scientist working in the style of Charlie to enhance her productivity at work. Charlotte and Charlie went on became the official mascot for any Web 2.0 related efforts at the company.

Here’s a list of where I know Charlie and his ‘friends’ have appeared:

• Presented to the board of a handful of fortune 500 companies
• Shown at scientific to technical conferences around the world
• Adapted for use at many companies to promote Enterprise 2.0 related efforts
• Conferences such as Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0
• In excess of 50 presentations in the style of Meet Charlie posted to SlideShare
• Promotion of company products/services

It’s amazing to think that Charlie has penetrated so many industries and events!
I think it’s great people are taking inspiration from Meet Charlie and I hope it carries on and evolves. I continue to find inspiration and ideas on SlideShare and of course Meet Charlie was inspired by the brilliant Meet Henry.

I doubt very much we would have seen this amount of success without SlideShare.

Oliver Ding, one of our users, has created a FriendFeed room for SlideShare. The FriendFeed room lets SlideShare users share presentations and exchange comments.

Join the SlideShare FriendFeed room!

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Your presentations are important, especially if you are representing your organization to potential clients, the press, or the public. For a high-stakes presentation, a professional designer is usually worth the money. If you pay a professional to design your Web site and printed materials, why not do the same for a PowerPoint presentation?

However, many presentations are less critical. You may not have the money. Or you may need to get the presentation out tonight. For whatever the reason, you may find yourself designing your own presentation. Yet you want it to look good and communicate effectively. How does a non-designer accomplish this task?

I’ve been studying this topic for a while, because I’m not a designer. So I’ve looked, listened, and read a lot. I’ve come up with 5 steps that you can take to create a presentation that will work, even if you’re not a designer. Of course, you can’t reduce design to 5 steps, but if you use them, you’ll see a vast difference in your presentations. Why not try them yourself?

Before you start, keep in mind two overriding principles:

• Keep it simple. The simpler your slides, the better they’ll look.
• Design for your audience. Just as you craft your message for your audience, you should design for them. Think how different a presentation for 4th graders would be from a presentation for college students, accountants, or artists.

1. Create a custom color scheme

Start each presentation by doing something most people have never done - setting a color scheme. Why create a color scheme?

• The default colors look old and tired. PowerPoint 2007 is a little better, but not much.
• Your colors should support your other materials, such as your Web site and printed brochures.
• Your colors should be consistent throughout your presentation and without a color scheme, you’ll often find yourself changing colors of individual objects on slide after slide after slide. That’s a waste of time.

Rather than tell you step-by-step how to create a color scheme (or theme colors in PowerPoint 2007), which you can look up in Help, I’ll explain some ways to find the colors you need. That’s the hard part for non-designers. You’ll need to decide on a main fill color and up to three accent colors.

The first place to go is to your Web site. It’s more likely to be professionally designed. One secret for us non-artistic types is to piggyback on the work of artists.

The second place is your print materials. You may have to ask your graphic designer. If that doesn’t work, you can scan the material, open the resulting file, and use the free Colourificator, one of several programs that lets you point to a color on your screen (with an “eyedropper”) and discover its RGB stats.

You can download detailed instructions for finding the colors on your Web site and print materials, and converting them to the red-green-blue (RGB) format that PowerPoint uses from my Web site, at www.ellenfinkelstein.com/events/colors.html.

Finally, if you’re starting from scratch, use an online tool that generates color schemes. One of those is Color Toy 2.0. Do some research on the psychology of color, that is, how certain colors evoke emotions. You can find a great deal by doing a Web search.

Professional designers often create a sampler slide that contains AutoShapes filled with the custom color scheme, special treatments, design elements (such as images or special curves and shapes), and so on. This is a great way to try out various colors and fills and see what you like and which colors go well together. An extra advantage is that you can simply copy objects from the sampler slide to your other slides. At the end of the authoring process, you can hide the sample slide so that it doesn’t display to your audience. Here’s a simple sample sampler. (Try saying that 5 times fast!)

2. Format the slide master

You use the slide master to format a background (if any), choose fonts, specify text placement, and add images or design elements that will appear on all slides. This step can make or break your presentation’s look.

Let’s start with text. Have you ever noticed how slide titles in some presentations jump from slide to slide, giving you a slight eye strain or headache? This can happen for 3 reasons – avoid them all:

• Moving the title placeholder manually on individual slides. To fix this, display the slide and choose Format> Slide Layout. In the Slide Layout task pane, find the selected layout. Hover the cursor over it, click the down arrow, and choose Reapply Layout. (In PowerPoint 2007, right-click an empty area of the slide and choose Reset Slide.) This tip could save you hours spent adjusting individual placeholders!

  

• By default, titles are usually centered on a slide; and because the titles are different lengths, their left edge constantly changes. Instead, left-justify the titles and they’ll stay in the same place.
• Some titles are 1 line and others are 2 lines. You’ll see the titles jump down when you display a 2-line title after a 1-line title. Instead, specify a bottom vertical justification and that bottom-left corner will stay steady. On the Text box tab of the Format Placeholder dialog box, set the Text Anchor Point to Bottom. (In 2007, use the Text Box category of the Format Shape dialog box and set the Vertical alignment to Bottom.)

Choose a very readable font. Research has shown that sans-serif fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Tahoma are easier to read on-screen, so they’re good options. When you pick a font, stick to it throughout the presentation. Use black or dark blue text against light backgrounds and yellow or white text against dark backgrounds.

Please don’t put your company’s logo on every slide, which is what happens when you put it on the slide master. This will either be annoying, or the audience will soon tune out and ignore it. You wouldn’t put a logo on every page of a printed report, but only on the title page; similarly, leave the logo for the title slide and maybe the last slide.

3. Choose a background

To background or not to background? That is the question. Top designers today are creating slides with plain white (or black) backgrounds rather than the colorful, full-fashioned ones we’re used to. White can be both business-like and artsy; black is definitely artsy.

White is definitely the new blue in presentation backgrounds, for several reasons:

• Brighter LCD projectors mean that you don’t have to turn off the lights in most rooms. With the lights on, white isn’t as glaring as it used to be.
• Web sites usually use a white background and presentation design has followed this trend.
• A plain background enhances the effect of images, which may be overwhelmed by a fancy background.

Don’t use one of those old backgrounds that come with PowerPoint that everyone has seen a million times. And don’t try to create an elaborate background from scratch; we non-artists aren’t very successful with that. Instead, if you feel that you need a background, try a subtle background gradient (Slide 1), simple top and bottom rectangles (Slide 2), or a full-slide photo.

Full-slide photos may not play nicely with text. Remember that your text needs to be very clear against the photo. What to do?

• Reduce the contrast and brightness of the photo, to create a washout (Slide 3)
• Colorize the photo so that it becomes shades of one color. Change the photo to grayscale and cover it with a semi-transparent rectangle of the color you want. (Slide 4)
• Make the text placeholders semi-transparent (Slide 5)
• Use the full photo only on the title slide and then crop it to a sidebar on the left for the rest of the presentation (Slides 6 and 7)

Feel free to override your background whenever you need to use a full-slide photo.

Experiment with plain white and black backgrounds. Once you try these out, you’ll feel liberated from backgrounds! (Slides 8 and 9.)

4. Tell ‘n’ show

Tell ‘n’ show is my term for a concept of slide design in which you use text to clearly tell the audience the point you’re making on the slide, and then use a graphic to show what you’re saying. Cliff Atkinson uses this concept in his well-known book Beyond Bullet Points. Michael Alley does the same for the academic world. (See his article, "Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides.") Whenever you’re trying to get across a point and help your audience both understand and remember what you’re saying, tell ‘n’ show will help.

To makeover a boring slide into a tell ‘n’ show slide, do the following:

• Rewrite the title so that it actually says something. For example, change "HR Salaries by Division" to "HR salaries up 26-34%."
• Add a graphic that shows what you’re saying. In this example, it would probably be a graph/chart (Slides 10 and 11)

Examples of graphics are photographs, tables, charts, and diagrams. If necessary, divide a slide with several bullets into several individual slides. Take a presentation that is mostly bulleted text, do a tell ‘n’ show makeover, and you’ll be amazed at the difference.

With rare exception, you should use photos, not clip art (line art). Clip art usually appears humorous, and rarely adds to a slide. A nice technique is to find a photo with a solid (usually white) background and make the background transparent. Use the Set Transparent Color button on the Picture toolbar and click the background. (In PowerPoint 2007, choose the Picture Tools Format tab> Adjust group> Recolor drop-down list> Set Transparent Color.) (Slides 12, 13, and 14)

5. Use simple layouts

Non-designers have a great deal of trouble laying out a slide in an appealing manner. Designers use a grid to help them. However, if you don’t want to work with a grid, I have some other suggestions:

• Look at magazine ads, billboards, and brochures for layout ideas, find a couple that you like, and use them.
• Again, keep it simple. An easy layout is a half-slide vertical photo. Crop the photo as necessary and vertically center the text next to it. It always looks good. (Slide 15)

Do a Makeover

All of these techniques are feasible for non-artists. Take your text-heavy, bullet-heavy slides and do a makeover using the principles in this article. You’ll see a definite improvement!

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We bring you an extra Slide Tips this week - an article by Rick Altman with some timely analysis of a presentation from Hillary Clinton.
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As part of her narrative on being the more electable candidate, the campaign for Senator Hillary Clinton distributed a PowerPoint slide deck to Democratic members of the House of Representatives on May 9, to be viewed, she hopes, by many uncommitted super delegates.

I wish the campaign had hired a presentations coach. If Hill & Bill Inc. had sought my advice, at a minimum, I would have pushed for an entirely different approach to the design and execution of this self-running presentation. But if I’m being completely honest, I would have advised them against sending out the slide deck at all.

Those of us who do not work in and around the capitol rotunda did not get to see the actual slides, we just saw low-resolution representations. But there were enough pixels for us to conclude that Senator Clinton did indeed succumb to Death by PowerPoint.

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The slides contained a weak attempt at branding, via a slide header that contained the campaign logo. Beyond that, however, the slides exhibited a near-total lack of cohesion and design. Let us count the ways…

• Headlines shout at you in all caps and all have underlines. I can only wonder how many congressional aides clicked on them, expecting to be taken somewhere.
• The headline isn’t even a headline – it’s more like a running header. The slides do not actually contain true headlines.
• Photo use is haphazard with one photo of the senator stuffed into the lower-left corner on two different slides and then a non-descript and incongruous photo of the capitol building dropped onto another slide.
• The table on Slide 4 is too much for any busy professional to deal with and the pac-man chart next to it does nothing to illuminate.
• We’re not sure where the bar graphs on Slides 6-7 came from, or the pie chart on Slide 8, but they are clearly pasted images. How do we know this? Because on all three slides, the images were pasted onto the slide on top of the text! It is particularly egregious and embarrassing on Slide 8.
• Slide 9 lacks any sort of punch befitting a concluding slide. It repeats the photo from Slide 2, repeats the running header, and offers a concluding sentence that appears to have been massacred by a committee on political correctness. Slide 9 also displays the line “Paid for by Hillary Clinton for President.” We hope they didn’t pay much for it.

As I said, we did not see the actual slide deck, so we cannot say for sure whether the Clinton team attempted to create builds to sequence some of the chunkier data, like the charts and graphs. If we give her content creators the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did create builds for the more dense slides, then they are guilty of creating no navigational assistance whatsoever for the viewers working through the slides. In other words, as they click through a build, they would have no way of knowing when that slide’s sequenced information was concluded.

The Makeover

There is nothing in the original slide deck to move someone to take action – there is only an appeal to the intellectual component of the argument, and as we all know, that is rarely enough to compel someone to action.
The irony in all of this is that this visually unappealing and unemotional slide deck was put together by the same campaign that created a killer website, replete with thousands of excellent photos. In about 90 minutes, I was able to produce an entire makeover of the slides, relying just on low-res screen grabs of website photos.

I did not concern myself too much with a slide master or a color scheme, as I knew the layout of each slide would be determined by the photo I chose for it. But I did set a standard for typeface (Verdana) and size (28 for titles, 20 for text). The other common element I employed is a favorite technique for helping blend text with a photo—the gradually changing transparent fill. Over areas that need less contrast and a darker background, I create a black rectangle and set its transparency to go from 0 (solid black) to 100% (completely transparent). I then set the text over the less transparent part.
You can see this effect in the first “We must fight for those seats” slide and the “Fighting for Seniors” slide.

The remake of the table slide was the most arduous, requiring first a photo with sufficient open space and then a trip into my image-editing software to blur out the background. As is my usual practice, once I create a table of data, I promptly ungroup it so I can better sequence it (PowerPoint’s animation for tables is pathetic).

Still Not Good Enough

While I think that the makeover is much better than the original effort (if you can call it “effort”), there is still a fundamental disconnect that is taking place here with this campaign to appeal to super-delegates.

In short, this message should not have been created as slideware; it should have been a PDF document. Without a live person advocating these positions, the bulleted content is insufficient for fleshing out the argument, in the original slide deck or the improved one.

Clinton’s arguments are too nuanced to be made by static bullet slides, especially poorly designed ones. They require deeper discussion and development, and if that is not going to be made by a live presenter, it needs to be made by printed words. This deliverable should have been a completely formatted document, created in InDesign or Xpress, or at a minimum, Publisher, with evocative photos, fully-formulated paragraphs, and integrated data charts. The whole thing should have been RIPed to a PDF file with relevant links to URLs for yet deeper analysis.

The data and the argument are potentially compelling, but I score this as a missed opportunity for the New York Senator…

This post by Kevin Sasser is the eighth in our Slide Tips series.
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(This post is a continuation from last week’s article….)

Famous last words of a sales person…
“…so I’m going to just blow through a few of these slides and then we’ll get right to the demo.”
…right before they dive into 30-45 minutes of slides.

In our first post, we discussed some fundamentals in building a sales presentation. To recap

Tip 1: Your Prospects Time and Your Slide’s Real Estate are Both Precious, Treat Accordingly

Tip 2: Follow Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule (Available on Slideshare)

Tip 3: Take advantage of innocent bystanders (practice with people not directly involved in your pitch)

Once you these basics mastered, the following two tips will put you on your way to creating and delivering effective sales presentations.

Tip 4: Clean is Good

If you haven’t watched a Steve Jobs presentation, please do so now, you can find some on SlideShare and on Apples’ website. I’ll wait.

In case you didn’t want to leave, here’s one slide from a recent presentation.

Do you know what he’s talking about? Most do.

Did you see precious real estate dedicated to extraneous logos or words? No.

The typical sales slide would look like this:

The image below is a screen shot of a presentation that contained a photo of Steve Job’s iPhone presentation, so an image capture, of an image capture, of a photo, of a presentation. Got that? Notice you can still clearly see the text, and you know what he is talking about. That’s the goal.

Steve Jobs is an uber-expert in design and has been the lead on one of the most successful corporate turnarounds in modern times, if anyone has earned the right to spew facts, figures, and other meaningful tidbits into a presentation it’s him.
However, Steve’s genius is reflected most in the simplicity, yet effectiveness, of his presentations. Think about that the next time you are almost overwhelmed with the urge to put a mission statement somewhere it doesn’t belong.

For your next presentation try this. Start with a blank template; change the background to a darker color.

Create your pitch using only a 32pt font and key words, no more than 3 bullet points per page, and no more than 3 words per bullet.

Run through the pitch and refine until you get the flow.

Now, at this point, to make any adjustments, you must ask yourself

“Will this help convince my audience to purchase my solution? If so, why?”

For example: “Will adding a photo image to this slide strengthen the point I’m making?”

If the answer is “yes”, crop the image down to it’s most relevant point, especially if it’s a screen shot of your solution or a website.

Tip 5: Credibility Rules

There are two measurements of credibility that apply to every sales presentation. The first is the accuracy and honesty of the content that is being presented. The second is the believability of the presenter.

You want to gain credibility and engage your client, start off with a very specific problem that when solved with your solution results in a tangible benefit.

For example:

“After implementing our Knowledge Management program, our clients in your vertical have lowered employee attrition rates on average of 18%, and some have experienced annual savings of over $60 million dollars, resulting in an ROI of 654%”

Remember a few years ago when several college football coaches were fired after it was discovered that some “creative licensing” was applied to their resume’s? One coach lost a multi-million dollar job with a major university; another was done in by a reporter who simply used a simple internet search to uncover the fraudulent details.

While the professional sales professional maintains his integrity at all costs, there are hidden dangers when making unsubstantiated claims.

Sales Rep: “Our customer service is superior”

Audience: “Really? How?”

Sales Rep: “Uhhhh….well…I know those guys and they are really good.”

Audience: “Thank you, please leave your name badges with the front desk”

If you are going to make a claim, be prepared to back it up. Remember, your audience will have web access and can double-check you at any point in your presentation.

This post by Kevin Sasser is the seventh in our Slide Tips series.
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I remember the day my father brought home our family’s first microwave oven. While we were far from the first on the block to own this modern culinary marvel, we still viewed this event as the catalyst that would catapult us deep into the heart of the middle class.

Dad unpacked the mammoth machine, as mom and I rushed to the store to purchase our first collection of prepackaged microwave dinners. On the drive home, I envisioned how my taste buds would react to the overwhelming, bountiful flavor that surely would erupt as soon as we introduced the cardboard boxes in our grocery bag to the powerful, yet controlled, radiation contained within our new oven.

As we prepared for the maiden meal, the atmosphere was careful and serious, like a crew preparing the space shuttle for launch. My father read the instructions to some feast-in-a-box emblazoned with the word “Gourmet” while I confirmed the verbal commandments and executed the dictated tactics.

“OK, cut a slit in the top of the box.”

“Cutting slit in box….check.”

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