I attended a conference recently where the speaker had good content but presented it almost exclusively in a monologue.  Plus, she had handouts that didn't align to her slides and slides that didn't include some of the strongest points she made (off of paper notes).  This lack of congruent material made me, I confess...itch.

Others who attended were thrilled with the material (and there was some good stuff!), but I was completely distracted by the approach.  Sitting and listening for 30 minutes is one thing, but this was an all day workshop.  I kept thinking it would have been just as effective to simply read the material -- in fact, more effective because I could have gone off on tangents and allowed other ideas to blossom from the main points as I read.

And after a few hours, I found myself wondering, "Do I ever do this?  Do participants in my workshops feel this stifling weight of just watching and listening as the clock ticks by?  Do I lose the value of a concept because it's out of sync with the materials (handouts, slides, flip-charts) that are supposed to support the content?"  

I truly hope not, but I imagine the answer is probably "Yes, sometimes you do." 

Personally I believe the universe gives us a gift in annoying people and situations.  That is, if someone or something is annoying you, it's also likely demonstrating something you need to understand. To me, the lessons the universe was trying to show me in this workshop fall into two broad categories:

How many pages should there be in a book?  Of course that's a silly question, because books come in all shapes and sizes.  There are common sense rules that it should be too heavy to hold or have so many pages that the bind breaks. But even these can be broken, as those of us with dog-eared, rubber-band-bound copies of Michener's Hawaii can attest.  If you're writing a book, you don't worry about how many pages it will be; you worry about telling the story.

The same is true for creating sales artifacts: we must FIRST worry about telling the story. But we must tell the story within the appropriate parameters. We have to consider the right amount of content for our delivery, how much of it should be reinforced on our slides or handouts, and what pacing and level of interaction is appropriate for our audience. 

And yet, so many presenters think they can bend time and space.  They KNOW how long the audience is available, and they know how long their deck is, yet they seem surprised when things go amiss. They cram 80 slides into a 20 minute meeting.  They present slide after slide with block paragraphs of 8-point text.  They drop 14-column Excel spreadsheets into slides that are ugly to look at and impossible to read.

Have you falled into any of these artifact traps?  Here are two tips to get back on track:

Assess Your Presentation Rhythm
Some people can tell a compelling story in an hour using only 3 slides; others are equally effective with 100 slides in a hour. The number is not important; the outcome is.  If you regularly present from slides, jot down the number of slides and approximate presentation time of your next dozen presentation.   Until you assess your actual times, a good rule of thumb is 30-90 seconds per slide.  So a 20-minute presentation will usually be in the range of 13-40 slides.  When gauging your presentation, you might want to omit any section break slides from your count and give extra weight to slides that you know take longer. The point is not the exact formula you use but that you are aware that your content has to fit into the time allowed.

Nix the Eye Chart
Important corollary to the rule of thumb above: The way to get your presentation from 50 to 20 slides is NOT to simply reduce the font size!  Be honest: Has your audience every seemed startled by the amount of text you put on a slide?  Do they suddenly reach for glasses or squint at the screen at a certain place in your presentation? As a presenter, you never want to make your audience uncomfortable, distracted or annoyed.  Guess what?  Teeny-tiny fonts do all three!  

Remember that the reason we still call them "slides" is because they were originally designed to be projected.  Yes, PowerPoint (Keynote, etc) can be used to create other types of documents, but their primary purpose to support YOU in a group presentation setting.  Consider how you change your speaking volume when you are addressing a group of 20 versus talking to one or two people.  
Font size is the volume of your slide, so turn it up.  
The bigger the room, the larger the font.  Even in a more intimate boardroom setting, 16-points should be your absolute minimum font size.  If your content doesn't fit on the slide at that size, you are using too many words or trying to convey too many ideas on one slide.  

PowerPoint gets a bad rap.  Most slide presentations are only fair (and that's being generous) and many are truly poor.  Now I would argue that this fact is NOT the fault of PowerPoint.  As the saying goes: it's a poor workman who blames his tools.

Nevertheless, there's a growing number of presenters who have decided to "solve" the PowerPoint curse by not using PowerPoint (or other slide applications) at all.

The lack of slides does remove some of the symptoms of a bad presentation:

• Too much text on a crowded slide
• The hypnotic compulsion to read slides to the audience
• Seemingly random content or disjointed flow
  
  

But of course, addressing symptoms provides some relief, but doesn't cure the underlying disease.  In this case that disease is a lack of story.  If you don't know the story you want to tell, if you haven't thought though how to bring your audience along with you, if you haven't planned the flow of content, you will not be effective, slides or no slides.

Presenting "naked" required more preparation, not less.  You, or more precisely your thought process, is alone and exposed.  This is not the time to wing it!   

One way to be very effective without slides is to actually start with SLIDES -- because often you are convey information that DOES need some visual support.  But every utterance does NOT need a corresponding bullet point.  Start with a full presentation, then delete any that are not completely vital to effective communication.  Left with only a handful of slides, you can decide if you want to insert slides into your talk only at key points or use handout, flip chart, or other method to aid audience understanding.  

This hybrid approach will allow YOU to hold center stage for most of your presentation.  Try it before your let all your slides slide. 

More than a decade ago, I had a boss named Don who like to use "the squint test" on any advertisement or collateral we created.  He would ask you to hold it up and he would squint at it from ten to twenty feet away.  

At the time, I thought he was a little nuts.  But over the years I have come to understand the wisdom of this approach to a first level of creative review, and I have shared it with many other people.  (So a tip-of-the-hat to all the boss wisdom we don't appreciate at the time.  Perhaps it's like the wisdom of our moms and dads, which we don't fully recognize it until we are out on our own.)

Now, Don was old school and the desktop revolution had not yet invaded his office.  In other words, he had no computer.  So the squint test was conducted with literal printouts and a big office.  Today you can get the same result by zooming out on your sales asset on-screen.

Physical or electronic, the squint test tells you a number of things very quickly:

1. Is piece visually pleasing? Is there a good balance of copy and negative space? Are the margins sufficient?  Does the piece feel crowded or unfinished?

2. Are the colors balanced?  Does one color shout while the others whisper? Is there harmony in the palette  Are the saturation levels too similar so that the colors appear muddy?

3. Where does your eye land first? Is that the most important point?  Are there two seemingly equal areas of interest? Is that desirable for this piece? 

4. If the piece is for a projected presentation, how will it look from the very back of a large room? If the piece is for a billboard, what shapes will drivers see before content clicks into focus? 

If you are deciding among several layout options, print out tiny "squint" version (where you can grasp the layout but not read the words) and as a few coworkers to comment on them.  The strongest layout will become apparent.

After you're happy with the squint test, of course you'll need get into the nitty-gritty of the copy and design.  But Don's point, and now my point, is that if the squint test fails, it doesn't matter how tight the copy is or how creative the graphics.  If your don't make it  past the squint, neither will your audience. 

Thanks Don.

Airplane travel disorients me.  The sameness of the clouds or the ocean or tiny towns, roads, and rivers shifting beneath the plane makes time stretch and bend.  Hours some times fly by in the blink of an eye, and on other flights, each minute seems to last forever.

Some planes are outfitted with video screens that show you a flight path and a tiny plane icon moving along - just like the ones in old movies or Indiana Jones!  This addition made long flights much more palatable to me.  There is magic in knowing "you are here."


Strong presenters know that the audience craves that sense of an overall plan and current position.  

Right off the bat, let me acknowledge there is a HUGE exception to this rule: master storytellers frequently employ an element of surprise or suspense and a few unexpected turns to hold their audience in the palm of their hands.  Think Steven Jobs.  He had the charisma and control to hold an audiences' attention as well as content that had us all literally reaching for our wallets before he finished speaking.  If you are in that rarefied class, congratulations!

The rest of us need to help our audience be a good audience, and one effective way to do that is to provide presentation GPS: that is, a map of our destination, our current location, and our route.

Some presenters choose to rely on their voice-over to guide the audience through the presentation, but here's the Catch22: if you know your presentation inside-out (and you really should!) it's hard to identify points of potential confusion. The flow makes perfect sense to you, but the first-time viewer may not follow your logic or, perhaps more likely,  they may make assumptions that muddle your stellar approach.   

A better solution it to incorporate presentation GPS elements into every presentation. There a many ways to do this, including:

• Agenda  - the simplest and most overlooked tool you can use to set expectations... and meet them
• Break Slides -  highlight upcoming topics and indicate the current section
  
• Headlines - combine primary and secondary to  tell them overtly "you are here"
  e.g., this is the Finance section and we're still discussing Seasonal Discounts
  
• Iconography - create icons that corresponds to each topic and repeat them on content pages to orient the audience to the larger outline and flow
  
• Color - select your background, border or headline color to subtlety communicate a change in sections
  

There's an old, yet accurate piece of presentation advice: Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Tell 'em.  Tell 'em what you told 'em.  I would add one more element: Tell 'em where they are.  

When you were a kid, did you ever make flip-book movies?  You draw a stick figure on the corner of each page, make the tiniest changes on each successive page, and then you flip the pages and - voila! - your own mini-cartoon.  Whether it's a flip book or an movie playing at your local theater, the static images seem to move because of how our brains interpret them. 

Sadly, this same phenomenon can be incredibly distracting in a presentation.  Have you seen it?  The company logo nestled safely in the lower corner for 20 slides suddenly does a little dance on slide 21.  The table that has been supporting a content build over several slides sudden shifts dramatically to the left.  The headlines have a disorienting tendency to drift toward the top of the slide.

You might be thinking, "Oh, who cares about such a minor thing."  But like so many small details in life - a dirty fork at a restaurant, a spot on your favorite shirt, a ding on your brand new car - once we notice them we don't forget them.  

The good new is: Most of these slide twitches can be eliminated if you use PowerPoint as it was meant to be used.  The basic slide layouts anchor your content consistently across your slides.  I will occasionally see a slide deck that has been built entirely from text boxes floating on blank layouts, and I am dumfounded by the extra effort that was wasted creating each slide from scratch.  It's like using a screwdriver to try to pound a nail -- yes, it might work, but why not grab a hammer!?! When you work with the basic layouts, your margins and headlines will not shift around from slide to slide. 

That's not to say you have to use the "of-the-shelf" layout for size, color, placement etc.  Edit the SLIDE MASTER and you can customize the look and feel, without sacrificing consistency.  Place a logo on the SLIDE MASTER and not only will it automatically appear in exactly the same place on every slide - it will no longer be editable on each slide.  That means you won't accidentally delete, stretch, or move it.  Think of the graphic elements on the SLIDE MASTER as existing under a pane of glass.  You can see them, but you can't touch them, unless you go back to the SLIDE MASTER.

If you have never explored to the SLIDE MASTER, it is very much worth your time.  Not only will you better understand why slides behave the way they do and have more control, you will also save significant time because you can edit once and have it impact 50 slides.  This is a skill worth pursuing.

After you've aligned the SLIDE MASTER to your will, you might still want to drop a graphic or other element onto several slides. A good example of this is a flowchart that you want to build in several stages, and you don't want to use animation on a single slide because you want the handouts to print individual steps on separate pages.

If you try to eyeball the placement of individual slide elements, you might get lucky.  But there is way to create the look of seamless animation over several slides. (And if you started using PowerPoint, as I did, in the early 90's, you will remember this is how we did it before there was an option for "animation").  

Create the FINAL slide in the series first.  In the example of the flowchart, capture every step in the process.  Be sure you're happy with it, before you move on to the next step.  If you need to get buy-off from others on your team, get their OK before you move on to the next step (trust me, you'll thank me).

Copy your FINAL slide and place it before the final slide in slide sorter view.  Edit the new copy to remove elements for the next-to-last slide. Then copy that slide, and strip off more elements.  Continue until you have the desired steps in your series.  Watch your series in SLIDESHOW and the slides appear to build.  

The secret is that you locked in the placement for the last slide FIRST.  Sometimes, you will realize you forgot something or need to make a modification that impacts all the slides in the series.  The risk of "twitchy" slides is highest when we think we can make exactly the same edit in multiple places.   If you need to adjust every slide in a series, I strongly urge you to modify the final slide and then repeat the copy-remove process.