PowerPoint Ninja/Chapter 1

From KMWiki

Introduction

You need to prepare an important business presentation to a small group of people in your company. You have their attention for sixty minutes. What are you planning to produce? What physical form will your important presentation to this small and powerful group take? Will you produce anything to accompany your voice in the meeting, or boldly carry no papers or slides?

The reality is that most knowledge workers faced with this scenario will reach for their word processor to produce a document, or will reach for PowerPoint to produce a slideshow presentation.

If they pick the word processor, the document is often plainly designed, lacking a rigorous page structure to encapsulate ideas and control pace through the material.

If they reach for PowerPoint, too often they produce a slide presentation that may look good projected onto a huge screen to an assembled audience of 3,000, but when printed, huge 40 point headings and 20 point body copy is unreadable at best and unforgivable at worst. When projected, the paucity of information conveyed in 4 bullet points of four words each per slide so simplify and mangle the content as to torpedo the objective of the meeting.

So, what to do?

Some help to answer this question comes from the work habits and document production practices of the world’s leading business consulting practices that face this problem on a daily basis. Their engagement teams of highly intelligent MBA’s, lead by seasoned partners and senior staff, have labored hard to research and understand the client’s problem and are now in a position to make their recommendations. How do they choose to articulate the project, their findings and their recommendations for action to their stratospheric fee paying clients?

Strangely, their weapon of choice for document production needs is PowerPoint.

Yes, PowerPoint – for document production needs.

However, these leading professionals use it not to create slides for projection, but they use it for a purpose that was never intended by the Microsoft software development team – as a page layout tool to produce printed packs for reading and discussion in a meeting context.

As a page layout tool, PowerPoint has much to commend itself – and I am an unabashed fan. It has a clear page metaphor (the slides), which permits rigorous structure and framing of ideas. It has a range of flexible drawing tools. It allows great flexibility in arranging text and other items on each page without restrictions typical in word processing programs. It has built in functions to assist in creating consistent page layouts and frameworks, and has a range of functions, shapes, objects and features to make producing those layouts efficient.

When dealing with regular page structures, PowerPoint is a joy to work with by comparison to manually maintaining section breaks in a Word document, or trying to establish a series of different page standards and structures within a Word document. Copying a slide just like the page you want with a series of objects and text arranged visually on the page is so much easier than struggling in Word to achieve the same task. Dealing with graphics and placement of images is effortless by comparison. Simply stated, there is no better readily available tool to prepare paper-based presentations by knowledge workers than PowerPoint.

Better tools are around, but too hard to use…

Importantly, that is not to say that better outcomes would not be achieved using a proper page layout tool like Quark, Indesign or Page Maker. These rigorous publishing tools are the tools almost universally used to produce journals, magazines, and books and represent the height of the art in electronic page layout. These are outstanding tools, deserving their strong reputations among the print design and layout industry.

However, the reality is that the learning curve and cost of these packages means that they are not as available, or efficient, for most knowledge workers to use as the almost ubiquitous PowerPoint that comes bundled as a part of Microsoft’s Office suite. Very rarely does a line knowledge worker in this new century have any of the professional layout packages installed on their computer. And yet all of them have PowerPoint just a click of an icon away.

Even if an organization has access to dedicated desktop publishing personnel (who use Quark or one of these more advanced tools), knowledge workers often prefer to create their document themselves, using the medium they can use. They do this rather than strictly separate the on-paper authoring role from the electronic creation of the document role. In other words, these knowledge workers use a tool that they can work with on their computer, even though a better result, although often a slower result, would be achieved if they worked in conjunction with their in house desktop publishing and design resources. Now, using PowerPoint for screen or for print presentations is much the same as working a lump of clay upon the potter’s wheel.

A lump of clay in the hands of a master potter becomes a beautiful vase when thrown upon the wheel and treated with care. The same lump of clay in my hands quickly becomes wet sludge, morphing semi-instantly into an unbalanced mess that soon launches itself from the wheel to the floor below. Yet, both the master potter and I use the same tools. We have both read the same technical book on the features of the potter’s wheel, and how to use them.

Yet the results we each achieved are very different.

PowerPoint can make outstanding and lousy presentations…

We have all witnessed first hand the full range of outcomes produced in using PowerPoint for screen presentations, for the ever-familiar slideshow. Some slides are models – clear, simple, engaging, and assist the flow of the presentation being made by the speaker. Other slides are atrocious. They use every feature, transition, font, color and clipart available in PowerPoint in ways that the presenter thought was cute when driving the keyboard, but which distract enormously from the message, and from the professional credibility of the presenter.

Same tool, very different outcomes – just like the potter’s wheel. So what is going on?

This great variety in outcomes produced using PowerPoint, and the strong weighting of the outcomes towards the very poor quality end of the spectrum, results principally from the design of the wizards in the software and the established (and relatively undisputed) learnings of the “PowerPoint Presentation Religion” that have grown in the training and education industry that surrounds PowerPoint.

PowerPoint Presentation Religion is deadly…

You have heard the mantra – no more than four bullet points per page, the fewer words the better, do anything to keep the audience’s attention, do something to wake up your audience, clip art is good, fancy is good etc. The overwhelmingly poor quality of the presentations produced by PowerPoint users, and the low rate of information and knowledge transfer in the delivered presentations, has resulted in PowerPoint as a piece of software attracting some quite strong criticisms in recent years.

Now, we need to draw a distinction between “PowerPoint” and “PowerPoint presentation”.

PowerPoint = drawing software

PowerPoint Presentation = bullet pointed slideshow for projection

As a piece of software, PowerPoint is akin to a white canvass, a set of drawing tools, and a set of horrible templates and wizards.

As a noun, a PowerPoint Presentation has come to represent an on screen (or projected) presentation, using limited text in controlled bullet lists, where even the most facile or erroneous content can be presented with as much visual panache and authority as accurate content.

It is this latter meaning of PowerPoint Presentation, as a noun, as a term of art, in which the criticisms are, in my view, rightly justified. However, that does not mean that PowerPoint as a piece of software must logically bear all of the same criticisms as the noun PowerPoint Presentation, and that we should not use PowerPoint for a purpose that was never intended – namely print layout.

PowerPoint is a fantastic print layout tool if only we ignore the tenets of the PowerPoint Presentation religion. The fact is that PowerPoint as a piece of software can produce a range of outcomes depending on the mind and hands of the author.

If the author uses PowerPoint consistently with the religion of PowerPoint Presentations, then, more often than not, the resulting slideshow presentation will suffer the hallmarks of the justified criticism.

However, if PowerPoint as a piece of software is used by the author other than slavishly according to the PowerPoint Presentation religion of screen projection, large fonts, and small bullet point lists, then very different organizational and educational outcomes can be achieved.

Intelligent knowledge workers can more easily produce superior analytic and presentation outcomes in printed packs for reading using PowerPoint than any other commonly available desktop tool.

There are some 300 million copies of PowerPoint installed around the world. With these 300 million copies of the software, some 4 million PowerPoint presentations are presented daily, in conferences, in trade shows, in corporate presentations, in sales visits, in universities and in internal presentations. More than a trillion presentations every year!

Now, the vast majority of these slideshow presentations suffer from the “PowerPoint Presentation” as noun religion and belief system, and produce sub standard outcomes, obscure complexity, and contribute to numbing participants, reducing engagement and learning, and generate poor decision making.

PowerPoint = drawing software = canvass

However, once we recognize that PowerPoint is drawing software, and we distance ourselves from the cult of PowerPoint Presentation religion – then we are liberated. Of course, it is then incumbent on us as knowledge workers, creators, and authors, to determine what to do with this amazing drawing tool to advance our ideas, and to advance our teams and companies.

There are few things more daunting for the artistically challenged than facing a white canvass and a palette loaded with paint waiting for the first bold strokes of our brush. Where to start? What to do?

When we think about PowerPoint as a white canvass we have the same nervousness and difficulty. Very few knowledge workers have any training, and even less natural talent, to draw and to create, or to simplify their ideas using information design.

Yet we have this tool that can draw, shade and color.

PowerPoint as a piece of drawing software is a stretch medium for those of us that do not have any grounding or skills in the visual arts. In the same way as a white canvass is a stretch medium for us (ever tried to actually draw?), so too is drawing software. Every time I try to learn graphics packages like Photoshop and Illustrator I very quickly bump up against my lack of artistic skill.

Most knowledge workers are very familiar with the world of memos and reports, of sentences, paragraphs, headings and the like. Place a paint brush in our hand and we are likely to produce outcomes indistinguishable from the artistic efforts of our children (or in my case, worse).

Now, the ‘genius’ of PowerPoint is that it was designed to be the reverse of a stretch medium – it was designed to let the artistically challenged produce visual presentations with ease and with flair. It was intended to let the great unwashed amongst us, those with no design or layout skills, no information architecture skills, to produce presentations that looked professional, However, in providing templates and automatic wizards – the saviors from the complexity of the white canvass – PowerPoint actually does us a disservice. The reverse stretch medium approach (ie, make something hard easy) lulls the author into a false sense of security about the quality of the resulting presentation. This skews the balance of importance between presentation and content, leading the unsuspecting to believe that it is important to use all of the transitions and animations that are ‘features’ of the software. The result of this is that the author’s attention drifted from content to presentation, diminishing the time spent on the most important aspect, and therefore lowering the quality of the ensuing presentation. So there we have it, installed on 300 millions computers around the world. Intelligently crafted. Easy to use. Flawed in its simplicity and automation.

Yet, there it is, a piece of software, a drawing tool, a white canvass, standing ready and available to every knowledge worker on the planet.

Whilst never meant as a piece of software to prepare printed documents for reading, PowerPoint should be used to produce outstanding print documents by knowledge workers who are aware of its few limitations, who eschew the PowerPoint Presentation Religion, and who are prepared to increase their skill in design and information architecture. When it comes to PowerPoint for print, because using it as a page layout tool was never part of what it was supposed to do, no learning resource is readily available. Of course, there is a wide range of excellent technical references on how to operate all of the features and functions of PowerPoint. However, that is much like reading the owner’s manual for the potter’s wheel – it educates about features, but does not help you produce a great outcome.

Worse, all of these books suffer from the PowerPoint Presentation Religion syndrome.

The many, many, excellent books that are readily available on using PowerPoint will all tell you what is possible – but you do not want to know what you can do, you want the knowledge that teaches you what you should do to produce great outcomes, to produce outstanding print presentations using PowerPoint. As important as what to do is knowing what not to do! You want to be a PowerPoint ninja, not a PowerPoint academic.

This book is the ninja guide to help content authors and document preparers create outstanding paper presentations and reports using PowerPoint – presentations that will assist their organizations make decisions, and take action. The objective of this book is not to teach you how to be pretty, but how to be rigorous, it is not to teach you how to dumb things down, but how to simplify for understanding without eliminating the complexity of life. It is PowerPoint Ninja, not the Idiot’s Guide to PowerPoint, or the PowerPoint Master Technical Reference.

This book assumes that:

• you have used PowerPoint before and have a familiarity with its approach and with its features.
• you want to increase the quality and impact of the paper presentations that you produce using PowerPoint.

This book does not assume that you have already mastered every technical feature of PowerPoint, or read and digested any of the numerous technical books that are available. Of course, the more familiar you are with PowerPoint, the faster will be your rate of absorption and application of the material in this book. However, it is not necessary to have an advanced level of knowledge before commencing on your path to becoming a PowerPoint ninja.

How this book is structured

This book is quite different in its approach by recognizing the two distinct and often separated groups of people that interact with PowerPoint as a tool.

PowerPoint is not like email, where generally every user of email types and receives their own emails. With PowerPoint, there is often a degree of separation between content authors and document preparers – not necessarily total separation, but specific collaboration with specific and distinct roles and skills.

In preparing PowerPoint presentations, there is often a working relationship between those that have to create, prepare and deliver the presentation and those that assist produce the document, attending to the more software usage perspective. There is often a team of professional and secretarial resources that both have a role in the same electronic file, with different roles being performed by each.

For example, sometimes the content author draws the slides in ink on paper and hands it off to an assistant to create the presentation. Sometimes a content author starts the presentation in PowerPoint, and hands it off for cleaning up, structuring and presentation to a secretarial resource. Sometimes the content author has no support resources and must perform both roles, playing the author and document production role in the same way as they do when they author and type their own emails.

Given these relationships, there are two distinct needs that must be addressed – we need to help create content owner ninjas, and also presentation preparation ninjas. The most effective way to do this is to treat each of these audiences differently. The issues that are relevant for a content author are quite different to those that are relevant for the people that implement the vision using the electronic tools. Similarly, there are aspects to the relationship between the content author and the production resources that are different for both sides of the relationship.

In short:

• a busy, leading professional does not need to know how to press buttons and create things using PowerPoint, but needs to know what is possible, with what scale of effort, and know the best way to communicate with production resources to achieve that outcome. The content author also needs a range of analytic and information design skills in approaching how to communicate their messages and information in a way that is immediately accessible and actionable by readers and listeners.
• on the other hand, document production resources need the technical and functional information combined with an overlay of what is effective in business communication, and need to know how to communicate with authoring resources to achieve that outcome. To become a PowerPoint ninja, the document production resources need to be able to clearly understand what features of PowerPoint add value, and which are mere distractions, and how to drive the valuable features efficiently and consistently.

The objective of this book is not to turn every content author into a PowerPoint production ninja, able to drive the keyboard to produce outstanding presentations. The intention is to address each of these two groups differently – to equip each with the skills necessary to work together to generate outstanding, actionable presentations. Conscious of the value of the time of leading knowledge workers, the chapters that are addressed to content owners are kept deliberately short, totally approximately 50 pages, including many pictures of actual PowerPoint slides from printed packs.

The intention is that content owners really only need to master these 50 pages in order to substantially increase the quality of their presentations, and then ensure that their document production resources read the balance of the book. Of course, if the content owner has sufficient time and interest, reading the balance of the book is certain to add a valuable perspective to their learnings, but it is not strictly necessary.

[Read books about print layout design and information architecture]

[About communicating to take action – not a beauty parade]