I recently had the pleasure of delivering a 3 hour seminar on presentation skills to a group of continuing education students at a local college.  They were studying web development and would be graduating in the following year.

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Watch Out When Using Excel Content!

I just read a blog post on Presentation Magazine where they asked several people for their best presentation tips.  There are 37 in total and number 25 is from Max McConnell, Division Director of Prompt Communications.   Max talks about embedding your excel spreadsheets into PowerPoint and the dangers of just cutting and pasting it.  Max suggests the following procedure.Edit->Paste Special and choose ‘Picture (Enhanced Metafile).  This places the excel data as a picture.  Failing to do this will transfer all the excel support files and you may be giving way too much information away.  It reminded me of a a true story. (more…)

Every story has three parts, a beginning, a middle and an end.  We can thank Aristotle for that concept.  As children we loved stories at bedtime and by the camp fire.  As adults, that love affair has not dwindled.  We love stories and it is an effective way of communication since humans have been using stories as a way of communicating for thousands of years.  Many people say that they can not tell good stories let alone write them.  This series of blogs on writing a script will be based on Cliff Atkinson’s “Beyond Bullet Points” book which I use with my work and think it is a very valuable tool for anyone who is serious about improving their presentation performance and effectiveness.  I strongly suggest you purchase the book and keep it close by as a reference tool. I will spend the next series of blog entries talking about the first part of the story telling process, the beginning.   The story script template can be found on Cliff’s blog.

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There is a relatively new presentation tool out there called Prezi.  It is a different way of organizing your thoughts for presentations and presenting them in an interactive format.  While Prezi is cool because it is different, it is not the solution for bad presentations as some have made it out to be.  I have read some blog posts saying it is impossible to be boring with Prezi.  My answer to that is never underestimate the human potential.

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You make several presentations to your department and to people in other departments of your company.  These type of presentations are difficult to prepare for because your meetings and presentations are often frequent, you do not have many resources for the preparation of your presentation and handouts and you don’t have a lot of time.  With time, money and assistance not available, how can you provide handouts of your presentation that will re-enforce your message?

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Many prophets of presentation design and skill speak about the horrors of adding text only to slides, word for word.  On top of that, there have been studies showing that reading the text off of a slide, word for word is not effective.  I tend to agree with this however every now and then someone comes along and breaks the rules with flair and brilliance.

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Just as I thought I had nailed down all the reasons why one should not hand out their PowerPoint slide deck to their audience, I find another good reason.  Dave Paradi, author of  “The Visual Slide Revolution” runs a blog on PowerPoint.  Dave operates out of Mississauga, Ontario in Canada.  His recent post talks about cropping pictures and how the cropped part of the image can be regenerated if the PPT compression feature is not performed on the picture.

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I have been doing a lot of reading lately. Catching up on what some people are blogging about regarding presentations in general and PowerPoint in particular. While I find there are some great blogs that will give you sound advice on presentation preparation, storytelling, visuals and delivery; there are equally as many that are missing the point.

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In presentations, nothing makes a statement louder than silence.  If you have a statement that you want to drive home, make a point to cloak the statement in brief moments of silence. 

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You are making your sales pitch and everything is flowing smoothly.  You are getting great response from your client and they seem to be buying into your viewpoint.  THEN YOUR CLIENT THROWS AN OBJECTION AT YOU.  You stumble, your falter, you panic (just a bit).  You address the objection but the wind is now out of your sails.  Your concluding slides fail to carry the punch that you had hoped for.

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