PowerPoint Ninja/Chapter 2

From KMWiki

Contents 1 What can PowerPoint do in print, why use it for print work? 2 PowerPoint can produce printed documents… 3 The 13 beliefs of ninjas 4 The limitations of PowerPoint for print work

What can PowerPoint do in print, why use it for print work?

Whilst never intended by Microsoft, PowerPoint can be a highly effective tool to produce printed presentation packs for distribution to meeting participants, and to produce analytic and strategic reports.

These printed packs are often used in facilitated discussions and presentations as an alternative to a traditional “PowerPoint presentation” using projected slides. A PowerPoint presentation slideshow is usually passively viewed by meeting attendees (rather than participants), as the speaker does the familiar speak and click through the limited dot points on each slide. Boring, and ineffective one way communication.

Consulting firms produce documents in PowerPoint!

PowerPoint is used as the major document production tool for most of the major business consultancies in the world, including McKinsey and Co, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Co, and the major accounting firms. These firms use PowerPoint to create and print their major documentary project deliverables, which are strategic reports that are presented in a meeting context and then are left behind at the client premises as the firm’s report and recommendations.

But, you say, isn’t PowerPoint something to create slides for presentations?

PowerPoint can produce printed documents…

When you think about it, PowerPoint can pretty much do everything that Word can do. It just happens to be primarily structured in its interface to create slides for presentations rather than word processing documents. Both Word and PowerPoint can deftly handle text, graphics and drawings. In fact, the way that Microsoft builds its Office Suite is by sharing many of the specialist components among Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For example, the engines for charts, spell checking, grammar checking, clip art, graphic handling and organizational charts are all shared components that are “called” by Word or PowerPoint as necessary.

In much the same way as you could use a screwdriver to hammer a nail, you could use PowerPoint to achieve pretty much anything that you can create using your word processor. Of course, you would have to have a white background for your slides, and you would use text font sizes like 10 and 12 point rather than the typical very large fonts used in screen presentations, but you could do it.

Now, just because you can use a screwdriver as a hammer doesn’t mean you should. The trick, known by the consulting firms, and PowerPoint print ninjas, is knowing what tool to use for what purpose. PowerPoint can and should be used for more purposes

Slide 1: This is an actual PowerPoint slide displaying the opening text from this chapter – created for print and not screen. Notice the difference between the typical bullet font size of 32 and the more readable 10 point text.

than simply creating slides to be projected onto a screen to accompany a speaker’s presentation. 

In fact, PowerPoint is far more valuable being used as a page layout tool than as a slideshow creation and projection tool. Importantly, PowerPoint is not a replacement for Word in all situations – even though you could if you wanted to. It would not be efficient nor effective to do so. It would take too long and be too prone to error to try to use PowerPoint for all text processing needs.

Word and PowerPoint are each optimized in their design and interfaces for certain needs. It just happens to be that there are some print document production needs that PowerPoint is actually a better, more effective, and more efficient tool than Word. PowerPoint is better than Word when…

Essentially, PowerPoint is an ideal tool for printed document production where:

• Your work, and your ideas, will build in a relatively short report (5-50 pages) through a series of propositions to a conclusion and often recommendations
• The structure of your document lends itself to a self-contained page metaphor – ie one page per big idea or topic.
• The structure of your document lends itself to common structural elements on each page, primarily locations for text that changes on each page, rather than static headers and footers. For example, a location for a page heading, topic headline, descriptive text, source identification etc. This is different to the header and footer mechanisms in word processors that are typically used for framing pages and not as containers to hold content text.
• You are reporting the results of an analysis and making recommendations
• You have a significant number of charts, frameworks or diagrams as a key part of your work, which taken together are a larger element than the textual material in your document.
• Your content is conceptual in nature, or uses a navigational or structural metaphor.
• The document will be printed and used in landscape rather than portrait orientation (which permits more design, graphical, and analytic elements and often promotes more creative thinking and discussion)
• Your text is generally self-contained on each page, or runs across pages only in a very limited number of cases.
• Short documents that are regular in structure (ie Agendas)

Conversely, you should use Word and not PowerPoint for the production of:

• Typical correspondence (including letters, memos etc)
• Short reports that are predominantly textual
• Long reports that contain a significant amount of text
• Documents that contain an intricate, hierarchical numbering system (typical of legal documents) where numbering is used at the paragraph level in addition to the chapter and page level.
• Documents where text often needs to run from page to page (ie from the bottom of one page to the top of the next) and is often subject to edits and change during the course of preparation of the document.

What this means is that you need to have the courage and confidence to select the right tool at the right time, and to make PowerPoint behave in a context in which it was never supposed to operate. You should also bear in mind that even where you select Word as the document production tool for your project, if the content calls for graphs or charts, you should consider creating those objects, together with explanatory text, within a slide in PowerPoint that is then cut and pasted as a rectangular object into the Word Document. Generally, this provides a much greater degree of control and quality than trying to create the analytic and drawing object in Word. What this means is that you need to be a PowerPoint print ninja even where you are using Word!

Now, because we are making PowerPoint do something for which it was not intended, we cannot expect it to be a perfect page layout tool, or behave in the same way a professional page layout tool like Quark, or Indesign would behave. We need to accept the tradeoff we are making of less sophistication in the software for ease of use and ability to access on our own computers. This means that when working with PowerPoint as a page layout tool you constantly need to be mindful of, and emotionally accept, the limitations and quirkiness that you will encounter in the process. Sadly, at this time, PowerPoint, for all its quirks, is the best, most available tool for the job. Should something of better quality arrive with the same accessibility, then we will all move to it.

The 13 beliefs of ninjas

PowerPoint print ninjas that use PowerPoint as a document production tool all share a set of key beliefs about PowerPoint. You need to reflect on each of these beliefs and incorporate them into your belief system before proceeding to subsequent chapters of the book. These are the belief foundations which are critical to becoming a PowerPoint print ninja.

The 13 beliefs are:

1. Print can be done PowerPoint was written to create slides, but it can and should be ‘convinced’ to create printed page packs.
2. Defaults are awful Most of the defaults in PowerPoint, and the default charts and diagrams, are created to be effective for slideshows and are both hideously ugly and way too large for print work. It is always necessary to significantly rework default objects provided to create something more acceptable for print reading.
3. only handles text in text boxes, and cannot snake text from column to column, or across pages, as does Word. Even when handling text in the text boxes, the degree of control over text placement is not as complete as in Word. This is life and must be accepted.
4. PowerPoint, you are responsible for making sure text and other objects line up in the right places on the page. In Word, once you have the left margin then Word takes care of layout for you to make sure that text and paragraphs behave properly, and are spaced properly etc – not so in PowerPoint.
5. PowerPoint page is a canvass onto which the author places objects. As an author using PowerPoint, you are playing the role of content author, information designer, page layout editor and proofreader. Your skills in these roles are clearly seen on your canvass, and once you leave the PowerPoint Presentation religion behind there is less Phluff to hide behind.
6. It is devastatingly easy to produce bad documents using PowerPoint. It is challenging and rewarding to produce effective and actionable documents using PowerPoint.
7. fastest way to produce consistent, excellent documents is having standards, and a collection of prior examples to copy and paste rather than use the buttons in PowerPoint to create new pages, graphs, objects and documents from scratch using the ugly wizards. Wizards are ugly generators.
8. use of PowerPoint for print involves more pencil lead than silicon – masters often reach for pencil and paper to sketch structural design of the pack and individual pages before wasting the time of creating electronic versions. Ninjas own a set of color pencils.
9. There is a limit where you have to stop and handover to desktop publishing resources. If the document becomes more text centric than you thought at the beginning, or more important, or more complex in design, or more public in distribution, always, always have the courage to handover to more specialized resources.
10. content – physical or electronic – can be elegantly integrated into a PowerPoint for print document. This includes Microsoft Office content, scanned documents, pdf files, internet pages – anything.
11. document created by a PowerPoint ninja stands alone when read by someone who did not attend the meeting in which the document was discussed. The background, the analysis, the recommendations – everything – is in complete sentences and paragraphs in a way that can be read. Stacatto bullet lists that are unintelligible to all except those that attended the meeting are grossly unpalatable to the ninja. A ninja is not shackled to mediocrity caused by the limitations of the PowerPoint Presentation religion.
12. keyboard of the ninja is a piano to create understanding and action. View what you are undertaking as an art form, as design # flourish and enjoyment are important parts of the design process.
13. PowerPoint was designed as a slide creation and presentation tool. If a function or feature you are looking for makes sense in the context of a slideshow then it is likely present in the software. If the function or feature makes senses in a page layout tool, but not necessarily in a slide show creation and projection tool, then the feature is unlikely to be available.

Slide 2: Another actual PowerPoint slide. The more limited text handling ability of PowerPoint, particularly the lack of snaking text over pages, and between text boxes, means that for longer text documents you should always use a word processor.

There endeth the sermon.

The limitations of PowerPoint for print work

The last belief of the ninja related to the capabilities of PowerPoint to behave as a page layout tool, recognizing that there will be areas where it will not be able to do what a leading desktop publishing tool like Quark or Indesign will be able to do. So, what are the things that you need to be aware of as limitations?

The list is not long, but is important to know because it will save you later frustration and some difficult discussions with production resources where you explain what you want only to be told it is not possible at the last minute. Limitations to be aware of are:

1. No print to edge. Desktop publishing tools, and high end printers, are able to print to the actual edge of a piece of paper – called full bleed printing. PowerPoint can never, ever, print to the edge of a page. If you want a rectangle of color to the edge of a page, or a graphic to extend all the way to the top of the page you cannot achieve it in PowerPoint.
2. No exact color match. When you print your document you will never get the same colors as you see on your screen. Color management in the print industry is a big deal, with a lot of complexity with specifying PMS colors and the like. There is none of that complexity, or sophistication in PowerPoint. There is a degree of trial and error here – pay attention to what it looks like on the printer you will print your final document with and make adjustments from there. At the end of the day, your document is going to be viewed in print, so do not get too attached to what it looks like on screen.

Slide 3: Actual PowerPoint slide. Here a graph is used without the distraction of 3D views and large fonts, but makes its point. Source: CASE Action Learning MBA team.

1. No snaking text: As mentioned earlier, PowerPoint cannot run text from text box to text box, or across pages, like the most rudimentary word processor can. This is a big deal if the document contains a lot of text which will change a lot during the course of production of the document.

1. automatic table of contents: A very useful function in Word if you know what you are doing with text styles throughout your document (and if you do not know what styles are in Word make it your business to find out) is that it can automatically generate, and update, a table of contents using the text you have used for the various headings throughout your document. PowerPoint has no equivalent – which means leave the page numbers on your table of contents blank until the end of the authoring process rather than manually update them all the time.

1. section headers and footers: Word also has a neat function where headers and footers can be different in different sections of the document, which enable you to do things like have the chapter name on the top of every second page of each chapter, with the book name on the facing page. These functions are found in word processors – they are not found in slide creation software. You can still do it, but it is a more manual process by putting the text on each page separately.

Slide 4: Actual PowerPoint slide. When you do not slavishly follow the normal font size religion of PowerPoint presentations, you can present effective text, here addressed in two columns.