I’m wondering if Grow Rich, Stay Rich (GRSR - the get-rich quick seminar I went to last year) has went out of business with the real estate bust, since the number of queries I get for it has plummeted. Fortunately “unpopular baby names” has taken up the slack of non-Toastmasters queries that generates traffic.
I was thinking about GRSR guy recently and one thing I’d meant to blog at the time was his use of PowerPoint. He had some really awesome slides, animations, great pictures - the whole nine yards. But he did something much smarter, which was to not use slides for much of his talk. Even better, he turned his overhead projector off when he didn’t need the slides. This got us looking at him, not staring at the same slide on his deck for ten minutes.
There’s good news if you don’t have a fancy overhead projector/remote and all that setup. You can make PowerPoint do the same thing for you. With PowerPoint running, just hit the ‘b’ key and it will make the screen go blank. For once Microsoft has made life simple!
GRSR guy generally would have a few minutes of slides, then he’d turn off the projector and have a few minutes of direct appeals to us. That length of time - a few minutes slides, a few minutes without - seemed to work the best for me. The slides were only for facts and figures, the stories (with the exception of a picture of his really cute 9 year old daughter running her own business) were narrated and the projector was off.
One thing to watch out for is that your overhead projection equipment may end up auto-shutting itself off if the screen is left blank too long. So you need to practice any speech you care about the results for on the actual hardware you’ll be using.
While I’m on the subject of PowerPoint shortcuts, F5 is reasonably well known (at least inside Microsoft :)) as a key that will take you to the beginning of your presentation and blow it up in full screen. In order to make PowerPoint go full screen on the current slide you’re hovering over, it’s shift-F5. A lot of our presentations at Microsoft have demonstrations of software in the middle, which requires temporarily minimizing PowerPoint and then coming back to it. Whenever I see some poor schmuck fumbling around to get to the initial slide, I just scream out shift-F5.
in 6-7-2008 @ 16:00:31
Thanks for the post,
I think everyone in business has been in this situation: an important but overly boring presentation, which makes it hard to pay attention and absorb the information.
Death by powerpoint indeed
Here is my advice if power-point must be used:
1: Close Outlook
Close Outlook when you are showing PowerPoint slides. Otherwise, email alerts pop up.
2: Slideshow Mode
Always use the slideshow mode: it makes your slides easier to see.
3: Standing in projector beam
Always avoid standing in the projector beam, as it is distracting.
4: Bullets as hooks
Think of the bullets on your slides as hooks. By that I mean that the bullet should remind you of your talking points but also incite curiosity in your audience. Use questions, alliteration (repetition of consonants) or juxtaposition of ideas to intrigue the audience. For example:
· Why Automate Processes?
· License to Fail
· Magnet Markets
· Customers: Faithful or Fickle?
· Plan or Wing It?
· Tragedy or Triumph?
5: Use more images
Incorporate images and negative visual space. Break up all the linear text on your slides with stories, examples, images & metaphors. Otherwise, you are not engaging your audience’s right hemisphere, the brain’s center of imagination. That’s when our minds start to drift, in spite of the fact that the data may be important for us to learn and understand. Use more imagery coupled with metaphor. The image search engine that I use is image.google.com. You can save the image files you find to your hard drive and insert them into PowerPoint. Use files that are between 30 – 100K for good clarity without bloating your PowerPoint file.
6: Simplify text
Most PowerPoint slides are loaded with way too much text. Distill your slides down into simple bullet points with 4 or 6 words per bullet max. Instead, think of the bullets as hooks.