Relational Presentation Blog - Flexible PowerPoint

By Susan Guggenheim

When I bought Bob Lane’s book Relational Presentation in early April, I knew two things about PowerPoint—I didn’t like using it for presentations and everyone expects you to have a PowerPoint. Every meeting, demo, and training I have attended in the last 10 years featured content delivered via PowerPoint—all linear shows with bulleted slides. When the lights went down, so did our eyelids.

I started reading Bob’s book, tried out the exercises, and decided to build a relational presentation from scratch.

In my small business, www.susanguggenheim-is.com, I train lots of different groups in basic and advanced computing skills—from older adults, to teens, to the newly unemployed—and I needed a way of delivering diverse topics at any time, often spontaneously. I thought relational presentation fit my bill exactly.

I spent a couple of weeks putting together a main, branded switchboard, several resource switchboards (videos, online/offline training applications, and one just for seniors), and a core group of four basic training modules.

 

I used Bob’s templates, added my graphics, and went for a Nested presentation. After editing and testing, I felt ready to use the new training show.

Soon enough, an activities director for a senior residence called and we made an appointment for a 1-hour presentation. Upon arrival, I set up, kicked off my entry slide, and waited for folks to arrive in the activities room. First shock: the seniors were all over 85 and one was 92—not my usual 65-year-old crowd. And no one in the audience had ever used a computer! There went my presentation on basic desktop and mouse skills, two shows in my new relational deck. I had to punt, and this was a tough, hypercritical crowd. Who knew little old ladies could be so … well … unladylike!

I went for the resource slides, fired up Web page after Web page, and gave them “a tour of the Internet” presentation. They didn’t understand much of what I showed them, but they really liked my resource slides, saying they were “very nice”. They also loved my main, branded slide, “Look how pretty that is, with her name up there”, and said it was “magical” when I moved from slide-to-slide and back again.

The slides themselves were so visually appealing (and that’s all due to Bob because I did not create much of my own stuff), it helped lower their fear of computers, which allowed them to not worry about what they were supposed to learn. Best of all, it gave me confidence that I could get out of there alive. I can’t wait to take my interactive show before an audience it was developed for, but I’m also very excited to know that even with an unsuitable audience, I can still adjust to the circumstances and capture a group’s attention.

Filed under: Presenter Stories on June 18th, 2009 | No Comments »

By Robert Lane        www.aspirecommunications.com 

How Should I Lay Out Content on Slides? What are some effective ways of arranging content on slides to promote simple, visual, interactive expression? Here are six suggestions we recommend, available free by download here. This short PDF is an excerpt from the new Selling Visually with PowerPoint book by Robert Lane and Andre Vlcek.

Filed under: Design of Platforms, Design of Slides, Interactive, PowerPoint, Visual Language, Visual Selling on May 24th, 2009 | No Comments »

Those of us who include a lot of pictures in slide shows (hopefully everyone in the near future) need to think about the resolution of those pictures. Resolution, in a digital image context, is basically synonymous with quality. The higher your picture’s resolution, the higher its quality—in other words, the better it will look when printed or displayed. A high-resolution picture looks crisp and clear. A very low-resolution picture might look fuzzy or blurred.

Resolution is measured by the number of dots that can be counted within one linear inch across a photo’s surface, a term known as dots-per-inch (DPI) or pixels-per-inch (PPI—the same thing).

If we zoom in on the sunflower picture below by 1600%, the individual pixels (dots) that make up the scene become clearly visible.

This particular picture has a resolution of 300 dpi, which means we literally can count approximately 40 dots within a 1/8th inch space.

Why is this important to you as a PowerPoint presenter? Because high resolution pictures tend to have a very high file size, even when compressed. They greatly increase the size of your slide shows. What’s more, high-resolution pictures are completely unnecessary in PowerPoint. PowerPoint displays pictures at 96 dpi, regardless of their actual resolution in your shows. Said another way, if you insert 200, 300, or higher dpi pictures, all you are doing is greatly increasing the show’s file size for no reason. A high resolution picture doesn’t display any better than the same image at 96 dpi.

If you don’t know how to change the resolution of pictures before inserting them into PowerPoint (a process that requires a bit of graphic design skill), you can shortcut the process by using PowerPoint’s image compression feature. Double click any picture on a slide to select it and open the Picture Tools Format tab. Then click the Compress Pictures button on the Ribbon’s left side.

Here you have the option of lowering the resolution of all images in your show to 96 dpi. Generally, that’s a good idea.

However, note these two exceptions:

1) If you plan to print your slide show as a handout (a hideously evil thing to do, but that’s another subject), the printouts will look better if the pictures have a higher resolution and you leave them that way (not compressed by PowerPoint).

2) If your pictures occupy a relatively small space on the slide to make room for bullet points (another gross injustice to the human race, and another book entirely), you may want to leave them at higher resolution. Someday Nirvana will strike and you’ll decide to dump the bullet points and expand the pictures to fill the entire slide. Then, you’ll need that extra quality to prevent the larger displays from appearing fuzzy when projected.

Filed under: Pictures on March 24th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

By Robert Lane        www.aspirecommunications.com 

To be an effective visually interactive presenter, it’s important to be …well … as visual as possible with messages. In other words, get rid of the bullet points and replace them with forms of rich visual expression. “Yeah, but, I’m not a graphic artist,” you say. “I’m not a professional photographer, ether, and I don’t even know much about colors or design. How does someone like me develop visual communication skills?”One of the easiest and best ways to dramatically increase the visual impact of messages is to use good old-fashioned pictures in strategic ways—pictures that you either find or take with any digital camera. Such images don’t even have to be super professional. They just need to be used in the right ways during performances.

Pictures play at least 20 separate roles in visually interactive-style presentation. You should know and take advantage of all these roles. To help in that effort, we’ve assembled a new guide that showcases the twenty roles in detail. It’s free and you can download it here: http://www.aspirecommunications.com/Free Guides.html

Filed under: Pictures on March 7th, 2009 | No Comments »