What's worse than reading off slides?

It is bad enough that some people tend to read from slides. Even worse is, when people put conversational words on the slides and then read it. What I mean is words like "Now let's go to the next slide" highlighted with an arrow. This is what you would say. It is completely useless for your audience and clutters your slides with distractions from the real content.
Put these transition words or phrases for dramatic effect ("here we go.......") on your notecard or just remember what you want to say. Your audience will thank you a million and you can take the next step towards more professional slides.

When to hand out your handout

Well almost as any debated issue: it depends ;-)

Think about what you want to achieve with the handout.

If you want the audience to fill in blanks or make notes to the slide, obviously you need to hand it out first. I don't really like that approach. If you give your audience a handout with your slides and space for notes, they are likely to browse through the slides and make up their mind before you have introduced yourself.
If you have matrixes or graphics, charts and graphs, I recommend you to print them out separately and give them out beforehand. If you have additional information on a handout, give it after your talk.

Don't forget: The audience came to your presentation to watch you present. Not to read your slides.

I have written more detailed on handouts here.

What you can do with a table on a slide

My first suggestion would be to take it off...
if your table has more than 4 columns and rows and more than 15 words, I would really suggest this.
Split up the table. There are probably multiple ideas comprised in there. Give each idea its own slide and explain or visualize it. You can then use a simplified table to sum up your findings with one or two words per columns.
And then use a powerful feature build into most software packages: Building.
Build columns or rows one by one. Maybe even cell by cell.
The audience won't be overwhelmed with information and it should be easier to grasp.

The annoying thing about web-presentations

Over the last couple of month I watched a couple of presentations delivered purely on the web as well as a couple of webinars.
So the "presenter" sits behind its computer and talks into a microphone while the slides are passing through.
I saw similarities to many presentations. Less visual and more wordy.

But there was one thing I could not stand.

The presenter put literally every word on the slide he said. Full sentences, and even words & phrases like "I'm not kidding" or "let's see where this takes us". Words and phrases you say in a conversation or presentation but not on a slide.
It was sort of a caption for each slide, but if this was the caption, there was nothing on the slide!

I mean I could still hear the person talk. It was a video. If you think it is important that everybody knows what you are saying, then put in small captions in grey on the bottom of the video but don't make it the content of the slide!

The same rules apply for web-presentations as for normal presentations.
Make slides visual and try to visualize concepts and points you want to get across. Provide a handout or even a transcript if necessary.

Did you experience similar situations in webinars or web-presentations. What where your thoughts?

Best wishes for the upcoming week!

Trade-offs

The most common trade off people seem to make in university presentations is visuals for text. Less visuals, but more text.
Why is that?
I hear the argument: "Well you can review your slides better for recap." so often. I think this is harmful for a presentation. In university, the content should be presented in a visual way, so that concepts are understood more easily and academic literature becomes more engaging. For recap, there should be a handout with text, which can be reviewed easily.
How about that for a counterargument?
Let me know what you think.
Have a good week.

The Big Picture

In her book "Resonate", Nancy Duarte puts a presentation into the perspective. If you take a report as one extreme and a story as the other, a presentation should fall in between these two extremes.

She describes reports as exhaustive, informational and factual. The structure is usually hierarchical. They are delivered in a plain, direct, and precise manner. I think about an academic thesis or business report. Mostly text paragraphs, few graphs and tables, and some bulleted lists.

On the other hand there are stories. Novels & movies. Emotional and dramatic.

Now as reports need all your focus and attention in order for you to grasp the underlying message, a movie tries to touch your other senses and emotions to get the message across.

Now presentations should fall somewhere in the middle.
Where they are placed depend on the presenter and the environment.

In a university setting I see presentations put right next to reports. Paragraphs put into bullets, if at all, and then onto slides. Maybe decorated with some pictures and then presented.

I think presentations need to be pushed more towards the middle. A presentations purpose is to explain the detailed data from the report as visually as possible. If you take the format from the report and put it onto slides, it's still a report. In oder to become a presentation, there need to be some elements from a story incorporated.

Prevent a disaster in a group presentation

Among so many things that have to be considered when delivering a group presentation, the worst case scenario is someone not showing up. Your presentation is rehearsed perfectly, you agreed on meeting an hour early to prepare, but there are some instances where someone could not make it somehow.

Now you need a plan B for this kind of scenario.

For once, all presenters should be familiar with the topic of each one. But it might be to complex for everybody to know every part. Here is what you could do:
- partner with one of your team members and exchange notes on the presentation at least one day before
- at least read through the notes of your partner a couple of times and ask any questions that are unclear

This won't take much time and nobody will expect you to know the others part perfectly, but you can impress anybody by stepping in and delivering the part.

So take a couple of minutes to exchange each others notes and familiarize yourself with each others part. If it should happen that someone can't make it, your presentation won't be at stake.

Have a good week!

Rules of Simplicity 5

Rule No. 5

Less bullet points and more visuals.

I mentioned it more than once already, I suppose. Bullet points are great for outlining topics. They belong into a word processing tool or notepad but not a presentation. You can provide your audience with a handout comprising your bullet points. Use meaningful visuals portraying your bullet points instead. I talk about this in my post about visuals. 

I hope this week provided you with a simple framework to make your next presentation great. These rules are not to be confused with a universal truth but rather guidelines you can utilize. There are still many other factors to consider.

Rules of Simplicity 4

Rule No. 3

Create a simple structure.

A complicated plot is for a mystery thriller. Presentations need to be easy to grasp, regardless how sophisticated your audience might be. Reveal the structure at the beginning or make it obvious by referring to a key concept throughout the presentation.

Rule No. 4

One point or argument per slide.

Anything elso wouldn’t make senso, honestly. If you talk about one thing and then about another and the visual representation is the same is just confusing.

I encountered some feedback from one of my presentations by one of my lecturers who said, it was a very good presentation, but there was kind of two many slides.

I reviewed other presentation, with about as many bullet points total as I had slides. Now it takes me about the same time to talk through the points with one point per slide as with ten points per slide. I argue that so many people can follow along more easily when they see one visual representing one point.

Rules of Simplicity 3

Rule No. 2

Craft a message for your target audience.

This comprises two things mainly. First you need to define your audience. Jot down all aspects you can think of. Ask others to brainstorm with you. Once you know your target and aim. I mean craft a message that will appeal to your specific audience. This could be your thesis for example. Now all you have to do is to support this message throughout the presentation. You can see at this stage it becomes difficult if you have more than one message. If that is the case you might want to thinks more broadly and outside the box. The topics you want to cover should’t be that far apart logically.

Rules of Simplicity 2

Rule No. 1

Define the purpose of the presentation for the presenter and the audience.

There is a reason why you make a presentation. Don’t take it as a mandatory assignment (it may be) but as a chance to communicate something important that will give you and others value and purpose themselves.

Now what to you want to achieve? Write it down.

What’s in it for them? Why should they listen? This is your ultimate goal, and you need to check afterwards if you succeeded to attain that goal. If you have trouble defining a goal, try the SMART approach. Goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. What exactly should your audience take home from your presentation? How could you measure it. I admit this is not always possible and easy, but try. Do you have a chance to attain that goal. Don’t be a dreamer but an inspirer rather. And lastly is your goal achievable in a certain timeframe.

Rules of Simplicity

During my research about presentations I came across a lot of great minds that supported my initial perceptions and paradigms of presentation creation. While drawing up some rules I follow and I want to share I was certainly influenced by people like Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds just to name a few.

So here go my five rules.

Rule No. 1

Define the purpose of the presentation for the presenter and the audience.

Rule No. 2

Craft a message for a targeted audience.

Rule No. 3

Create a simple structure.

Rule No. 4

One point or argument per slide.

Rule No. 5

Less bullet points and more visuals.

During this week, I will explore each rule a little more in detail. Come back tomorrow to find about creating a purpose and goals.

Make Visuals Meaningful

Visuals must be meaningful towards the point you want to make. Easily pictures can be confusing or distracting your audience.

I see that a lot. Images and photos are a kind or decoration for your slide. Something to make your slides more attractive.

I argue that visuals play an important part in your presentation and that images and pictures do not serve the purpose to make your slide more attractive.

They purpose is to get your point across and to convey your message more meaningful.

Now with that being said, it is the challenge to find the appropriate images for your presentation.

My rule is one visual per slide and one slide per point. Now, a visual doesn’t mean that there can’t be more than one image on the slide.

Here are some suggestions:

If you want to use an metaphor or other stylistic device to portrait your point, there might be one photo or image that brings exactly this across. Blow that image up fullscreen to capture your audience in the feeling.

If you want to show any kind of process or organizational chart, use multiple graphics and build the as you talk about them. Too many boxes and arrows at the same time can be very confusing and the audience might get lost.

If you used to have 3 bullet points on your slide supporting an argument you were making, you can use a visual for each point and give it a short and meaningful caption.

There are many more examples and I will mention it when they come up in future posts.

Are you the master of your presentation?

Imagine the following scenario set in a classroom. (Please be aware: the following lines are somewhat fictional...)

Students are awaiting the lecturer. Entrance: the lecturer. She bows to the computer, praying it will boot up quickly. 5 minutes into booting casual conversations among students arise and the first phones on the table feature flying birds crashing into green monsters without arms and legs. The printout of slides are handed down and by the time the PowerPoint presentation is loaded some students already have read through the set of slides and go back to sleep.
There we go, the presentation is loaded, with text and students end their discussion on how loaded they were at the weekend. The lecturer bows down before the screen, calling "all hail to powerpoint" and starts a monologue and the a dialogue with the screen. There is almost no eye-contact or any kind of rapport with the students. The lecturer keeps on talking and apologizes to the screen that he or she forgot about a slide that was thought to be deleted the last time on the computer.
The lecture is over, students go home with mixed feelings and the lecturer kisses the computer good night.

Back to reality... or did we never leave it? I don't want to be the judge of that. My point is that many people tend to be the servant of technology, not the masters of technology. Why is that. As a presenter you are an expert of the field you present, anything else would be outrageous to me, especially in a university context.
I don't know when PowerPoint was established as a part of almost every presentation. Presentation = PowerPoint. Everyone accepted this apparently. I compare PowerPoint to a dragon, because if it is handled right, it can be your most powerful companion, but without knowledge of how to master it, the dragon will torch you in flames. So what do you do, if you don't know how to handle a dragon? You stay away from it!! Why not get a dog? What I am trying to say is, that many people seem to be forced into PowerPoint without ever been instructed how to use it.
Apparently PowerPoint was developed to help the Marketing Department communicate with other departments. So I assume, before PowerPoint they used memos, reports, flip-charts and blackboards to get their points across. It has the great capability to show visuals, animate graphs and everything you need to visualize a 1000 page long report. It is not about copying parts of the report onto the slides.
So where did this message get lost?? I still wonder?

Presenters, especially lecturers, need to break out of the imprisonment by technology. I am not necessarily saying that they should find other ways to present, but rather educate themselves in how to use this piece of technology. It must be clear, what PowerPoint is for and what it is not for. Then there are just a few functions to master and you will be the master of PowerPoint. This should eradicate scenarios like the one I described above.

What are other reasons, you can think of, why so many people tend to cling onto their PowerPoint slides and don't break free and use it as their humble servant?

Have a good week.

"What I want to talk about today" - the Agenda

Without having conducted a survey about it, I am confident enough to state, that most PowerPoint presentations begin with a title slide and what follows is an agenda, table of contents or whatever you want to call it.

These usually look like table of contents from a textbook. Outline style, two to three indentations, getting you excited to read the book. Well, maybe.

I argue that a table of contents should not appear on slides in a presentation. I am not saying, however, that one should skip the part of introducing an overview of what the presentation is about. Here is a discussion:

A agenda or toc helps you to understand the main structure of your presentation.

That's why it is on the  first or second slide, duh.

But it is only visible for the first 30 seconds maybe and still just text, not visuals.

The agenda should help your audience to follow along your presentation.

That's why there is a little table of content on the side or the bottom of the slide.

This distracts your audience from the  point you are trying to make with the slide. It should therefore appear on your handout, so anybody can refer to it, whenever he or she wants. Thus people only get distracted from your argument on the slide while they look up the agenda on the handout. Not the whole time.

So I just leave the "overview part" out of the presentation? This cannot be right?

True. Why don't you use compelling visuals, pictures or a short provocative thesis on your slides and go over your agenda this way. If your audience demands a written agenda, they can look on their handout and you can tease them with a photo.


What do you think? If you are not convinced, please drop me another counterargument making the case for an onscreen written agenda.


I am trying to get away from presentations that just cover topics. I think a presentation needs to have a message that is written like a thesis, which you are going to justify by covering your content. People will not only grab a hold of the theory but also why it is relevant and how it might be applied.

I suggest the first slide should have a compelling title. A provocative statement. A thesis. I discourage you to use questions. If you do, make sure you have a definite and strong answer. A definite statement at the beginning can be a powerful enabler to get the attention of your audience. And this is what you seek. The attention of your audience. Only if you have their attention you can build up a rapport with them and engage them. Introduce your overview over your top three or four topics you want to cover with powerful images or photos. You can also use an easy to grasp graphic or statistic.
In the end this will help you to get your message across more easily and your audience will be able to retain the information more easily.

Tell me what you think about this method of wiping the table of contents of the slide. Comment and share this with people, you think can connect to this.


Have a good week.

All about handouts

Do you prepare handouts for your presentation?

Handouts, these additional pieces of paper you hand out to your audience. Before or afterwards? Hmm...

I would like to make a case for more effective handouts that accompany your presentation and actually help your audience understand you better.

First of all, I want to clear up some terminology: I distinguish - in contrary to many people I know - between "handouts" and "printouts".
A printout of your slides is not a handout in my opinion. A handout should add value to your talk and help your audience to follow along.

I have never gotten a handout that accompanied any of my lectures. I got printouts. Some feature 6 slides per page, some three with additional lines for note-taking. Of course in black and white so you can rarely identify a graph with many colored lines on it. In my opinion this is a waste of paper. Sometimes I think: "Oh gosh, this poor tree, if it would only know what it had become." Seriously though, I have a simple rule, which, when applied, can make presentations so much better, especially lectures. 

Put all the text that is on your slides into a word processing document and accompany your talk with visuals in a PowerPoint, if desired.

So many times I look at lecture slides and think to myself, this is a paragraph of a textbook divided into bullet points. Text is for textbooks and journals. A presentation - especially a lecture - should appeal not to verbal learners only, but to visual and auditorial learners as well. Afterwards you can mention books to read, but usually I read a dumbed down version of a textbook on the big lecture theatre screen. I will come back to this issue in later posts.

Back to handouts. They can release your actual presentation from so much distracting clutter, but so many people don't do it. "Here are your slides to follow along". I find this confusing to be honest. I tested several methods in a couple of lectures recently:
In the first lecture, I read through the whole set of slides and unfortunately encountered that the lecturer didn't give any additional information what so ever. So why doesn't he or she just send us the slides to read and just skips the lecture?? This is not the case in every lecture I will gladly add.
Oh well, another time, I put the printout aside and just concentrated on the lecturer. I listened to him without looking at the slides and tool notes on my notepad. It was hard, but I found this the most effective way, unfortunately. This made the slides redundant, on screen as well as on paper.
Then I tried the approach that is apparently the way to do it... Take the printout, highlight the headings of the slides, take notes, listen to the lecturer and pay attention to the awesome slides on the screen. It doesn't work out for me, personally. I'm not saying that this method is ineffective in some ways and some might get along well, but I find the following approach much better:

• Create a script of what you want to say in your presentation.
• Create a handout which has the following contents
• a coversheet with title, date, and the agenda for the day
• one or two sheets for notes
• a summary of facts, definitions, tables, graphs, additional reading and the lot in the order, in which you are presenting them
• Create a PowerPoint (or similar) with VISUALS that explain, highlight and reinforce the content on your handout in a meaningful way.

So, now you have a script for yourself, that hopefully helps you not to read off the screen. But you can't read off the screen anyway, because there are almost no words on it anymore - hopefully. You hand the agenda or table of contents out to your audience, so they can follow along your presentation and can, if they like, check at any time, where your are in your presentation. This eliminates the need for an on screen agenda. You might show them visuals that relate to the points in the agenda.
Now, if your text, that was previously on your slides, is now on the handout, nothing horrible has happened, right? Your audience can still read the text on their handout in a much nicer format. Remember it was previously on the printed slides! Text can be very easily word processed, but anyone will struggle to put it onto slides effectively.
So I argue that your text is still there for your audience to read, in a better format and that there is now a big opportunity on the screen to reinforce this text. Show examples on the slides, visualize a definition or concept. If you think, it is better in text form, remember it is still on the handout for everybody to read and refer to at anytime, not only during the while the slide is on the screen. This makes slide printouts redundant and you can still upload your presentation to the web for your audience to see. Because a presentation should be experienced, not read!

What do you think about that? I think this approach would make presentations much more effective. It will take more time to create, but I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages here. Text will become more readable, concepts more visual and you will become the master of your presentation. Not the other way round. More on that later.

Please share this posts with those you think will benefit the most from it. From my experience I would say, that this will be true for students and educators, but anyone will essentially benefit. All that it takes, is to understand the true role of a handout.

To wrap up, here are the main features of a handout:

• it's not a printout of your slides
• it comprises text, graphics, tables and other useful information, you would have put onto slides
• it adds value to your presentation by giving additional information and releasing the slides from clutter and non-visual item (namely text)
• it makes a printout of your slides redundant
• it will help your audience to review the presentation, if they chose to look at it another time online, for example

That's it for this week. I hope you found this useful and interesting. Maybe I could open some eyes. Please tell me if you disagree, but make your case.

Have a good week.

Evaluating your presentation

"Thank you for your attention."
"No more questions, thank you."

Applause

It is over now...no its not!

This wasn't probably your last presentation and here is why you should care about a thorough evaluation:

There is always room for improvement!

Here are some suggestions for what you can do after a presentation:

• collect immediate feedback from your audience after your presentation
• just ask them and don't be content with the answer "Yeah, it was good, I guess."
• try to find out what they liked and did not
• don't just ask your mom, if you know what I mean
• in a team - do a feedback session
• students may get an evaluation from their teacher
• ask for clarification and more feedback
• collect all your notes and files you created during the presentation creation process and put them in a folder or portfolio that you can review at anytime
• write a reflection on everything you did, observed and experienced
• what was good?
• what didn't work out at all
• share your presentation
• send your presentation to a mailing list and ask for comments
• share it on platforms such as slideshare.net/ or sliderocket.com
• did you by any chance tape or film your presentation?
• analyze your performance and write down good and bad things you did

Maybe you can think of other ways, to gather feedback. Please comment if you do.

So the bottom line for improvement is, that you have to be cruel in feedback and evaluation. I asked a teacher of mine for feedback once and she asked me if I wanted the kind or the cruel version. I went for cruel. She ripped my work apart. I felt awful. No, the important thing is not to sulk but to sit down and make the necessary changes suggested. After I redid my work, I felt great. I turned my previous work, about which I felt pretty good, into an awesome piece and I am still thankful for that cruel feedback.

Look at previous presentations you created. I like to look back to my high school years where I first encountered PowerPoint. It's mind-boggling. So, you learn with every presentation you make and you should apply your gained knowledge and skills to make your next presentation more effective and engaging.

It's a continuous process, really. Do you remember the first steps you should do when creating a presentation? Yes? Great! No? Go back to my previous posts on Groundrules, Preparation, Research, Design and Delivery to recap the most important principals to consider.

This posts completes my own presentation creation process. The steps are just guidelines for orientation. Every aspect of each step is worth comprising a single step in the process, but that would not make it easy to remember, I guess.

I hope, you liked this little series on this process and found some useful tips you can apply to your next presentation. In the next weeks I will go back to these posts and talk about single topics mentioned in more detail. Please share your opinion about this blog with me by commenting. Feel free to suggest any topic or finding you would like me to talk about.

Have a good week!

Delivering a presentation

The moment of truth. The day of your presentation.
Here is a little checklist that should be completed beforehand:

1. Your presentation is designed and ready to be shown to your audience.
2. You rehearsed
3. For the sake of stressing the importance of point 2: You rehearsed again!
4. You checked the venue and made up your mind if the room needs any rearrangements
5. All technical equipment works fine and everything will be ready at the day of delivery
6. You have handouts printed 
7. You are rested and prepared
8. You are excited, not nervous to present the next day

Alright all necessary steps are taken, but there are still some issues that distinguish a good presentation from a great and engaging presentation.

I will go into detail with the following points in future posts. Here are some things to think about:

1. Did you use your available resources to your and its full potential?
• write down things that didn't work out quite as well as you planned for future presentations
2. Are you aware of your body-language?
• do you manage to connect with the audience?
• videorecord yourself and analyze your performance without tone
3. Does your voice tremble or gets too high? Do you lose your voice?
• record yourself
• there are great techniques to master your voice!
4. Are you nervous or do you have stage-fright?
• there are exercises to get over stage-fright and nervousness
• I realized that with increasing knowledge and rehearsal of the subject, my nervousness decreases
5. What prompts do you use? Notecards, a script, nothing at all?
• do they help or confuse you?
6. Do you use a presenter, pointer, stick or any other presentation tool?
• or do you press the arrow keys on the keyboard to get to the next slide?

These are all issues to consider when delivering a presentation and I will dedicate much detailed attention to these in future posts.

Have a good week!

Designing a presentation

So, your research turned out to be a huge success and you are now looking for a perfect delivery. I want to let you know upfront that this post is not about PowerPoint slide design, maybe a little, but I will probably dedicate multiple posts to slide design in the future.

The design stage of my presentation creation process talks about utilizing different mediums to later present your findings. I will be trying to give an overview over a couple of media, tools and techniques to help you deliver your presentation.

Maybe you decided up front what kind of presentation you want to do. Maybe you changed your mind a couple of times as your research progressed. That's all very good and now you should decide what you are definitely going to use and start designing to it.

With "designing" I am not saying to fire up PowerPoint and start punching in bullet points. Again, as with the very first stage of the process, don't do anything stupid, and with "stupid" I mean using PowerPoint without any thoughts and planning.

Here are some suggestions you can adopt in designing a presentation:

1. Outline your presentation. You may already have a rough outline from your preparation and refined it during your research. Now you decide on the structure or outline your presentation will have. You can either go with pen and paper or finally turn on your computer and start a word processing program like MS Word or a simple text editor. All these programs have basic outlining tools and you should use them.
2. Decide on the medium of your presentation. PowerPoint is perfectly fine, but there are also other options. You might even split the presentation into parts and use different tools for your presentation. Here are some suggestions:
1. Presentation software like MS PowerPoint, Keynote from Apple, Prezi or others.
2. A demo can be very effective, if you want to show your audience a feature. This could either be a planned navigation through the internet, or a specific website; a demonstration of a software program or a video that you created can also be very effective. You can also show off a tangible good if it is appropriate.
3. A whiteboard, flip-chart and similar can be very helpful, if your presentation requires quick improvisations or interaction with an audience
3. Storyboard your presentation. Jot down what you like to display, it can be a lot of work, but it will help you to design your presentation later on. Especially when it comes to Presentation Software, it is easier to implement something that is already drawn up, than to create it in PowerPoint.
4. Script your presentation. Write down what you want to say like a speech. It will help you rehearse and create prompts like notecards. The script will be the place where your bullet points appear, not your PowerPoint.
5. Design your presentation. A presentation is about you and what you have to say. You can and should use tools to help you visualize your ideas for the audience. This is where I could go on for hours and I thought about it. I will exploit this in further posts about slide design in particular. The bottom line I try to tell everybody is: Text is not visual. Pictures definitely are and graphs can be visual if they are created the right way. Just consider this for now: If you want to talk about an elephant sitting in a tree - for some strange reason - how would you do it? Would you put the sentence: "The grey elephant with a big green spot on his head was sitting in an elm tree" on a slide? Try this just for fun. Then read the sentence and record your time. Once when reading it out loud and once reading it for yourself. Next, imagine you could draw an elephant with a green spot on a tree. Now put this picture on a slide. You want the audience to realize that there is an elephant with a green spot sitting in a tree. What is more effective and retentive? The text on the slide, while reading it out loud to the audience? Or just the picture and you reading the text off your script or notecards, if you need the prompts? I hope you see my point. We can all read faster than we speak and once I see text on a slide, I read it and when the presenter gets to the last word on the slide, I am already asleep. Visuals should be used carefully and accordingly, so your audience will have a real visual aid to your presentation.

There is so much to add to designing a presentation, and I will cover it in future posts. Until then, think about some new ideas you may have gained and try to apply them. I promise it won't hurt and if you do it right, as always, you will save time in the long run.

Comment, if you like to add thoughts and share if you value the information. Until next week, have a good one.

Research - Sound Foundation for a great Presentation

Now, that the presentation is carefully prepared, we can go over to the research phase. If you are doing a presentation about a topic you like or just want to present your findings from a survey you conducted, this phase will be fairly easy, although for students like myself, this is the least favorable phase of the process.

Yet, good and thorough research is the basis for any presentation. If you have nothing to say but empty phrases and you can't back them up, then there is no point making a presentation in the first place. In the end, questions from or discussions with the audience after the presentation will reveal how good your research was and what you know about it.
So I don't need to stress that research is important and I won't go any further with this. Keep in check with your goals and schedules you set yourself in the preparation stage and point your research in the right direction. Everything should flow nice and easy.

Well, research can be conducted in so many different ways, and I won't and actually can't prescribe you a perfect method to do it. I like to share some tips though, on how you might organize your research a little more efficient.

Kicking it Old School:

In 2006/2007 I spent one year at a American High School as an exchange student. I liked my English teacher a lot, although she was very strict. I learned a lot from her in retrospect. We had to write a research paper in her class and she forced us to do it her way. She showed us how to use flashcards to do research and we had to go to the local library and use them to do research. She collected and graded them weekly and the flashcards were actually part of the assignment. I didn't like them a lot, but I could not actually think of a better way, and found it in the end very convenient, when consolidating my work at the end.
So here is how it works: You have one set of flashcards, which you will be using for your bibliography. When you find a book, the first thing will be to write down the reference to that book in whatever style you will have to do it in. If you do not have any rules regarding referencing choose the one you find the easiest. Harvard APA and MLA are just two of a variety of referencing styles. Now you find a passage that is perfect for your project. You write down a synopsis on a new flashcard and put down the author and date of the book as well as the page numbers. On the back goes the whole passage as a quote or keywords from that paragraph.
You might have gotten bored half way through this last paragraph and I can't blame you. Flashcards can be an effective method but they are not really efficient and far from being suiting to modern technology.

After flashcards I tried a couple of different approaches, like putting all the data into a word processing document or just a handy notebook, which all worked somehow, but weren't great.


Going Paperless:

In 2009 I found a great piece of software which suited all my researching needs and has been improving ever since. It is a free cross platform service available for the web, your computer and almost any smartphone. It is called Evernote and it is basically a big digital notebook that you can access basically anywhere anytime. If you are not familiar with Evernote be sure to give it a try. It is absolutely free. There is a premium version, but the free version will suffice for many research needs. I am planning to do a video about Evernote, to show how I use it to organize my research and work. I won't go much more into detail here, but be sure to check it out at www.evernote.com. There are a bunch of videos already out there covering different features, just check YouTube. I will let you know via this blog or twitter (@visupres), when the video is ready. I might dedicate even a whole post to Evernote after I covered the five step process of presentation creation, so stay tuned.


I can't wait to talk about design next week. There are so many influential people out there talking about effective slide design or presentation design; so I will try to gather it all here and put each approach into perspective.
Please comment, if you are also a fan of Evernote, or share your methods of research that fit your style the best. Follow me on twitter and tweet about your experiences or things you want me to cover or put my thoughts out about.

Have a good week!

Preparation is essential for a great presentation

When I talked about the steps to a great presentation, I defined the "preparation stage" as the first phase one has to go through. We could also call it planning or organization, but I went with preparation, because you prepare your presentation to be something lasting. Planning and organizing are just parts of it.
Anyway, it doesn't matter in which context you decided to do a presentation, preparation is essential. I propose the following aspects are worth thinking about. The outcome of the presentation will largely rely on your preparation.
While you go through the stages of creating your presentation, everything will essentially go back to this preparation stage and you will safe a lot of time later, if you commit to putting more time - as usual maybe - into the preparation phase.


The following points are only outlines of important things to consider and I will probably feature them in future blog posts in more detail.

Schedule to the DEADLINE:
This is supposedly the most important aspect to the whole process. If you have the greatest presentation ever, but you are 2 days late, nobody will hear you. The usual deadline is a good and fair amount of days ahead of the day you received your assignment. For me personally, it becomes more scary the closer I approach it. The easy solution is to "dress this scary thing up in a funny costume, so we can approach it with confidence". Kidding aside, what I mean is that with preparation (the costume) your presentation will become better and successful most importantly.

Here are some things I suggest you can do:

• Schedule a meeting, if you are in a team, or take some time for yourself aside to sketch out the process
• Create an overview over the next couple of weeks and put either your free time you can allocate to creating the presentation into it, or note down any appointments and schedules that will prevent you from working on it. You will probably find, that the more people there are in a group, the harder it gets to find times where everybody has time to attend meetings. Don't forget, that the sunday after a big party might not quite be the best time to work on your presentation, so stay ahead ;-)
• Plan the further stages of the presentation process. I suggest you go backwards from the deadline of the presentation.
• I will explain in later posts what the "delivery stage" means for me, but keep things in mind like technology. Be sure to include a day in your schedule where you check out the venue of the presentation. Test all the equipment you will need and make sure you have the number of the tech guys and call them before the presentation, not during!
• Keep at least the day before the presentation for rehearsal. Better yet are two to three rehearsals during the week before the presentation, if you can manage to do so.
• Maybe you have to prepare an essay or an handout as well. These documents need some time as well. Make sure when to hand them in and allocate time to do it.
• Putting your presentation together should be one of the last steps before rehearsal, but make sure to estimate the time you will need. At this stage, if you are working in a group, you probably want every member present, so find a convenient time.
• Allocate time for sufficient research. All your presenting skills will only work if you have good content.
• Think about short meetings to track overall progress.
• Have one or two brainstorming sessions before your research and maybe after you dug a little bit into your topic. It is frustrating to find yourself working in the wrong direction after a couple of weeks.

Definitions:

Before you start gathering all kinds of great things and thoughts about your topic you need some clarification on a couple of things that are key to your success. 

• Purpose - Get the purpose for your presentation right. If you don't have a purpose, define one for yourself. It might also be crystal clear for you what you want to say and this will help you get along the other tasks very easily. In a university context, try to clearly understand the task you have been given. Ask for clarification, if the task is not specific enough. Maybe your creativity is encouraged. I talk about assignments in last weeks post. The bottom line for students is - unfortunately maybe - to get the assignment right and fullfil the requirements.
• Goals and objectives - Define your goals for the presentation. Do you want to score a good grade? Do you want to make an impact on peoples lives? Do you want to sell an idea. State clearly your personal objectives and have everybody working on the presentation commit to them.
• The Audience - Define your audience. Try this as detailed as possible. Are they your classmates you know. Are they total strangers. What do you know about them? Demographics and geographics can be very important. What is their prior knowledge of the field? Try to think about your audience with marketing goggles on: What are their needs? What are their wants? What are the trends? What are the uncertainties? Are there risks to disrespect a part of the audience? Remember: the audience is king and you will try everything to please them. Well maybe not everything ;-)
• Your message - Once you have defined your audience you want or need to reach, you need to tailor a message for them. This is the essence of your presentation. You want the audience to take something away from your presentation and you want to do it in the most memorable way. You might argue that academic presentations are only about delivering content slide after slide, point after point. I argue that this is not the case. A board meeting is not about presenting the sales figures of the last quarter, but about delivering a message - a new strategic direction perhaps - backed up with content. A presentation is not a written essay or a report. It is a visual way of delivering your findings. I will defend on this statement in future blog posts because I think, that this is the point where many opinions might differ.
• Brainstorming / Structure / Outline - If the basic structure is already clear to you, jot it down visually so that everybody in your team can visualize it. Maybe you need to work out the structure step by step and you need to do some brainstorming first. Make one or two brainstorming sessions to gather all your thoughts and ideas. Use different brainstorming techniques and try to visualize your ideas. This will ultimately help your audience as well to understand what you want to say, providing them with the visual aids. Create an outline of things you want and need to cover.
  The more detailed these steps are pursued, the easier it will be to research your topic and put the eventual presentation together. I will elaborate on these topics also in future posts.
• Medium - Lastly decide on the medium you will use to deliver your presentation. There's a crazy idea I want to float by you. Why not go PowerPoint free? Why not go technology free? It really depends on your topic, but you should at least think about it. Maybe you can create an engaging story that will stick in peoples minds longer than a set of slides. If you are not familiar with presentation software at all, either learn how to use it right, but never just use it because everybody else does it! If you are not a pro in slide design, a whiteboard, visualizer or a flip-chart will do just fine to help you get your point across. But remember, that presentation software has its merits and if you can use it in an effective way, then please do so. I am planning a whole section on software such as PowerPoint, so stay with me. Whatever you come up with though, know how to utilize in the best way possible.

Remember all these steps can be completed without using a computer and I suggest that pen and paper can do their magic. Please don't ever make the mistake to plan or outline your thoughts in PowerPoint. I know and I have done it, too. It is tempting, but this it not what it is for. There are plenty of planning, brainstorming and outlining tools for your computer and you should use them as they are intended. (I will cover some applications in future videos on my website.) PowerPoint or other presentation software, if any at all, should be the last application you open on your computer while you work on your presentation. Although, I encourage you to play around with it and familiarize yourself with it, if you are not an expert. I hope to feature some best practices and uses with presentation software on my website in a couple of months. Otherwise check YouTube for a ton of tutorial videos. But be careful, there are a lot of bad practices on YouTube, so I advise you to find channels from proven experts. Hopefully I can manage to gather some good links, when I am covering presentation software. So stay tuned!

One last thing. This might all sound reasonable, but why should we spend so much time preparing? Sufficient preparation will give you a clear vision of what lies ahead and it won't lead you in wrong and different directions. Try the NIKE approach: Just Do It! Take your next presentation project and try to apply thoughtful preparation and analyze afterwards if it helped you.

Well this wraps up this weeks topic. There are so many things I just mentioned and I can assure you, that I will address them in the future. I hope you found this useful and worth spreading. Comment if you want to add anything or if you disagree.

Ground rules and guidelines for presentation creation

Before I want to take you through the five steps, which I outlined in my next to last post, I want to talk about the actual trigger that starts the whole process.

In Business, the Boss probably assigns his employee to prepare the numbers of the last quarter in a presentation. A speaker might be invited to a conference and she or he wants to prepare a presentation to guide the talk. A group of entrepreneurs might have to pitch their business idea to a board of venture capitalists. There are lots of reasons and incentives why we are making presentations, but I don't want to focus on this too much.
In University, a presentation - single or in a group - usually is an assigned task that might even be graded to a certain degree. I had a lot of assignments to do presentations. And there were many different approaches with different rules or limitations - which, by the way, apply to any kind of presentation.

Time:
There are a lot of opinions on how long a presentation should be. It has to be long enough to cover the required topics, but short enough that it fits into a given time slot. Guy Kawasaki - a venture capitalist - states that the time for a presentation must not exceed 20 minutes and TedTalks range around this time as well. Now you might not be an entrepreneur or Al Gore to give a presentation in either setting. In my opinion it should be relative to the content and sufficient to bring your message across.

Well this sounds very nice but how can it be applied?

A crucial thing is that the rules and guidelines set by the initiator have to be realistic and precise. A ten minute presentation about World War II or a forty minute presentation about the financial crisis seems unrealistic too me. Maybe for an overview but not for a detailed analysis. A twenty minute presentation about how a certain battle led to the end of the civil war in the US, with key factors and implications is better.
Make also sure, that there is enough time to prepare. This is however no excuse to procrastinate!

Format:
"Your task is to create a PowerPoint Presentation about ..." or even better: "with a maximum of 15 slides." Why does it always has to be PowerPoint? And in my opinion it should not matter how many slides you use, but I will come to that in later posts. PowerPoint seems to be THE tool for presentation creation. There are a lot of other ways to present content and messages. A car-salesman doesn't tie you down onto a chair and shows you a PowerPoint. For now I will leave it at that and encourage everybody to think outside the "PowerPoint-Box" and try to think about alternatives. I will point out a couple of methods in upcoming posts and also tackle the "slide-count" issue. My bottom line is "Freedom of Choice" as long as it is used effectively.

Topic:
My advice to students would be, to make sure what the task really is about. A presentation about the economy of greece would seem very broad and uninteresting. If it is stated as "Give a twenty minute presentation about the economy of greece", try to define your own topic and check with your teacher.
How about: "Present key factors, that lead to the current state of the greece economy as of 2012." The more a topic is defined, the easier it gets for the presenter to create an interesting and effective presentation. Maybe, even one key event is worth presenting about.
In my opinion, everybody is able to read a Wikipedia article about a broad topic such as the economy of greece. But the more detailed and defined the topic is, the easier it gets to target the research and to do an interesting presentation. In the end both the audience and the presenter will benefit.


In summary, when it comes to the ground rules:

1. Be sure to define the topic as good and precisely as possible.
2. Make sure that you have enough time to prepare
3. Relate content to given time
4. There is nothing wrong with PowerPoint* but try to think outside of the "PP-Box"


Comment about your experiences with great tasks and bad guidelines and rules. What are the trade-offs? What is the difficult part, when defining a topic for yourself?


*to be challenged at a later time - stay tuned ;-)

Why it is so important to teach "Presenting" in higher (business) education

From my experiences in business school, I can say that so many people - students and lecturers alike - don't know much about how to create and deliver effective and engaging presentations, that will make a difference and stay in students minds.
I think that the average retention rate from a lecture delivered with PowerPoint or other presentation software is too low. The only way retention is tested, is with a test or exam at the end of the course. But how much did the presentations of the topic contribute? How much did students take from the slides and print-outs they received? I think that too many information are lost just after the end of the presentation. I can only remember parts and messages of a few presentations and they were made by people who were able to tell compelling stories and did use examples and visuals instead of text-heavy slides.
I am not saying that self study and reading about a topic is not important, but in my opinion a lecture or presentation should at least add value to the learning experience and not be wasted time. By wasted time I mean that, students won't remember anything or too few information from a lecture presentation.

I state that it is essential that everybody should be taught how to present effectively.

Students look up to their lecturers and if they are confronted with bad and ineffective presentations and they don't even realize it, they are heading for big trouble down the road.
Especially business students will depend on good communication and presentation skills in their later profession. I suppose these skills are important for anybody pursuing a higher education degree. So many other students have a passion or finding they want and need to talk to a larger audience about. Why should anybody not to be able to be understood?
This is why presenting is so  important for anybody.

With Visu Presentations I want to provide this education. I am creating screencasts and video courses covering the presentation creation process I talked about last week. Furthermore I want to feature some presentation software tips and workflows. I will keep on blogging and tweeting my thoughts and tips I find through my research to help anybody to become a better presenter.

Reflection and outlook

Just before Christmas we had to perform a presentation in our English class about a pretty broad defined subject and had to apply it to a context where an international company was planning to do business in the UK. Basically it was a business briefing about the implications each topic had on the company entering the british market.
Although the overall task seemed a little bit confusing at first, it was a pretty straight forward one. Anyway the presentations where taped and I hope we will get the footage to analyse ourselves. As you might already know from my tweets, we had to write a reflection about the presentation process and I promised to feature some of mine with you today.


So here we go:

[...]

I was excited to prepare the presentation for this class at first. I had numerous thoughts going through my mind. Despite the enthusiasm, my group quickly encountered problems. “How to narrow down a broadly defined topic to fit into a twenty-minute presentations and applying it to a business context?” We started too quickly and found out great things about our topic, but could not relate it to a business venture at all. Another more systematic brainstorming session resolved this, and we could refocus and again do more targeted research. We constantly needed to ask ourselves: “Okay, this is really interesting, but is it relevant for a company doing business in Britain?” There was a lot of restructuring and “crossing-out”, but we made considerable progress as we came closer to the deadline. Another problem I personally encountered was, that our brainstorming appeared already in PowerPoint. I did research myself about effective presenting and presentation design, but was not able to convince my team without proving with viable sources. It left me very frustrated, but I will talk about the outcome at the end.

[...]

What I learned from other presenters is mostly the following: Know your topic and know your technology! I personally hate to rely on other people’s hardware and software and would rather bring everybody to my room with my equipment. Joking aside, PowerPoint can be a powerful tool, if it is understood correctly and used effectively. For example, importing a video is somewhat more advanced, but if you want to include it, you have to make sure it works correctly and does not interrupt a smooth flow of a presentation. I am influenced by many people about slide design, such as Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds. Presentations should be visual and text is not, although most  presentations were featured by bullet points and text. Most importantly though, it is to know your topic well. One has to be familiar and almost an expert in his field. Even if someone has trouble with public speaking, everyone can distinguish between someone who knows his part and is insecure and someone who doesn’t know what he is supposed to talk about.

[...]

The essence is this:

It depends on how you break it down but I think, there are five different stages to a presentation: Preparation -> Research -> Design -> Delivery -> Evaluation. In following blogposts, I will elaborate on each of those steps, defining them more clearly.
Even for myself I see a lot of room for improvement in all of those steps, but it is important to know what a successful presentation contains.

So with this blog and later some video-courses and other content, I want to examine these steps and stages. Make students (myself included) and others aware of these steps. But the most crucial thing to the whole concept is execution.
Everybody, especially every student, probably knows how to write a "killer-essay" or a great report. We know how to proofread and spell check, do effective research, but it all comes down to execution. To go through with it, not to procrastinate and deliver only a decent essay, because "we did not have the time after all".

So stay put, comment on my posts, as I am exploring the different steps during the next months. Suggest alternatives to the methods I propose. Criticize anything that does not suit you and share the parts you value and want others to know as well.

My goal is to overall raising the bar for presentations made in university and later in our day-to-day life.

Why I started Visu Presentations?

I am currently preparing for upcoming exams and was reviewing "printouts of lecture-slides" the last couple of days (some people call it "handout" or "script", but I will point out in later posts why I prefer the term "print-out" instead of "handout"). It came all back to me, why I started this endeavor I call Visu Presentations.
Someday I might look back and will thank my lecturers for the incentives they gave me to start blogging, tweeting and - soon! - creating content about a subject I like. Right now, I am not amused. It seems like they don't really care about delivering their favorite subject effectively to me and of course to my fellow students. I remembered why I stopped attending these lectures half way through term and started studying in my flat instead. Not because they were held at 6pm - an unfortunate time but still manageable. No, these lecturers, with all due respect to their field and expertise in it - did not seem to know how to deliver a engaging, effective, enlightening, engrossing and enthralling presentation or talk about their topic, their field. I certainly hope not, that they were not motivated enough. But, were they content with their own performance? I don't know.
Anyway, five times I strolled into the auditorium and was welcomed by two large screens, each displaying the first slide of yet another dull presentation - at first confusing for me, but I hoped that at least someone had put some thought into it and one screen wasn't enough.
So why were these presentations dull? Was I the only one, who though that way? Thankfully, no. We were presented with slides overloaded with text, bullet points and clip art. Worse still, sometimes the presenter was reading completely off the slides making the whole PowerPoint - at least for me - superfluous. During one lecture, I tried to only listen to the lecturer; another time, just focussing on the slides and essentially reading them like a book. Although, when one lecturer started to put multiple thoughts or points into one bullet point and separating them with semicolons and reading the whole presentation off the screen in a monotone voice, making it impossible to follow, I decided to go.
It struck me the same day, that I did not want to accept this and help anybody, who has problems with presentations. May it be the right use of the software, the final delivery, or the process as a whole. Teachers and lecturers are role models for students and in following presentations by us students that semester, I recognized certain attitudes: If they do it like this, it must be good enough for us to do it also. In team meetings preparing several presentations I realized how entangled we all were by the "black magic of PowerPoint".
Here were are at a point were I want to raise the attention of everyone, who thinks the ways of presenting I described above are sufficient and good. They are not and there are many people who agree with me on that (from what I found in my research about presentations creation and design).
Of course, there are lectures with great presentations and talks. I was fortunate enough to attend a couple. And to me, they prove to be more effective and retentive than the hails of bullet points some lectures expose their students to, everyday.
But what is different with these presentations? I will elaborate on the answers to that question in great detail and to an extent, where anybody will - hopefully - be able to present effectively to any audience.

Please keep coming back weekly reading this blog and exploring ways of effective presentation creation. I am positive that I will manage to keep posting weekly on Mondays throughout the upcoming exam period. So please keep reading, sharing and commenting. Maybe you have similar experiences or totally different ones in any way.
Have a great and fulfilling week.

Happy New Year and welcome to the visu-presentations blog

I am excited to start 2012 with a blog about a passion of mine.

Presentations.

Don't get me wrong, this blog is not intended to be another "Bad-PowerPoint Blog", but rather a holistic approach to presentations from the beginning steps of preparation to the final delivery. Using presentation-software effectively will be a part as well, but not the focus.

As I am a student at a Business School, I will focus on presentations in university and business contexts, but my methods , tips and research findings can be applied to all sorts of presentations. Students, lecturers and teachers, businesswomen and men, entrepreneurs and anybody who wants to talk about something important to a relevant audience.

Via this blog I want to share my knowledge, experience and research findings all around effective and engaging presentation creation.

I will try to write at least once per week, so stay tuned, keep reading and referring to this blog, if you like it. I welcome all comments, but please don't spam with unnecessary and irrelevant jibber-jabber.