Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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I spent the ride back to Los Angeles from San Diego trying to figure out just exactly why I think this trade show is so special.

While many of you work for large companies, a fair number are probably solo practitioners like me, and that can make you feel pretty lonely in the technology universe.

(Violins please.)

Then again, even if you're in a big company, your skills may not be totally appreciated. The view from your cubicle may sometimes make you feel like Dilbert.

Now, the word "community" is way-overused in our industry. But PowerPoint LIVE is such an intimate and friendly event that its sense of community is palpable. It has to be mainly the work of its host, Rick Altman, who also runs a Corel event. He extends a warm and sincere personal welcome to all who attend, present, or sponsor the show. It doesn't hurt that Rick's mom, her friend, and loyal crew of other staff members have followed the event as staff since its inception.

More to the point, the event is faithfully attended and staffed by two very significant sub-"Communities." One is probably the biggest gathering of MS Office MVPs outside of a Redmond conference. If you've been to the PowerPoint newsgroup you will recognize the names of some of the most prolific helpers with the program on the list of PowerPoint LIVE Help Center pros.

They include (and I will leave some out) Steve Rindsberg, the VBA guru, Geetesh Bajaj of Indezine, Kathy Jacobs, Echo Swinburg, Troy Collar, and a veritable "Who's Who" of mavens with the program, from programmers to graphic design experts.

Another community that attends and catalyzes interactivity of the more human kind is the Presentations Council of ICIA (International Communications Industry Association), to which I proudly belong and which shares the expertise of the A/V and presentations industry among its members and beyond.

The council also contributes heavily to Visual Being, a Webblog dedicated to presentations craft, where you can find excellent insight into PowerPoint LIVE by my colleague Rob Lindstrom.

To give you an idea, there are over 200 PowerPoint fanatics in town for a few days, and on any given night between 75 to over 100 of them went to the same restaurant for dinner to keep talking PowerPoint, drink, and interact. Margarita consumption reached unworldly proportions.

Before I forget, they/we were also joined by Ric Bretschneider, Microsoft's Product Manager for PowerPoint, and Rebecca Levine, Microsoft's PowerPoint Program Manager for the Graphics Products Unit. Needless to say, we got an in-depth look at PowerPoint 12 (which I wrote about in my update from the Professional Developers Conference).

The Immediate Close

So what else sets this conference apart, besides the warm and fuzzy stuff? Well for one, it's incredibly useful. Here's why:

Besides the obvious aspect of being able to learn from experts and dig deep into the features of the world's most popular presentation program, many of the sessions at PowerPoint LIVE, now in its third year, and the keynotes deal with a generally unappreciated aspect of computing: WHY DO YOU USE THE PROGRAM?

This is the essence of Death by PowerPoint. I've written before about the outstanding insights of Jim Endicott, a presentation consultant who specializes in thinking about this vital aspect of the craft. He says that too many presenters focus on themselves instead of what the audience wants. For a sales presentation, he talks about finding the pain that your product or service cures to hook the audience into caring about your presentation. He provides a 7-part persuasion building model that proceeds from the hook, opening through the stages he recommends for eventually closing. This year, he provided another fabulous insight: the concept of the immediate close.

Have you ever been in a presentation where the speaker has run out of time, and starts to rush through the remaining slides at warp speed? This destroys any hope of closing the deal in a sales presentation. Jim suggests that the speaker know the slide number of one or more slides that he can get to instantly by entering the slide number (and hit ENTER) to get right to the close if time draws short. You can also do this with a hyperlink and a Custom Show.

But the key is that, in a sales situation, you can go seamlessly to your strength and summary, close and ask for the order, and elegantly look like you've planned for the time allotted or the quick exit.

This technique dovetails well with an interesting presentation paradigm put forth by Bob Lane, an academic presenter from Arizona. He showed a veritable Collective Unconscious-like hyperlinked super-presentation where the presenter is totally flexible by a using Web-modeled slideshow that can go anywhere, any time, in a few mouse clicks. This model stimulated lots of discussion about potential applications and directions for the ordinary PowerPoint slide show.

Finding A Presenter's Strengths & Weaknesses

Perhaps most successful among the presenters was Korie Pelka whose in the trenches insight of her work with EFI (Electronics for Imagining) resonated with most attendees who are basically working for presenters and whose ideas are welcomes with varying degrees of enthusiasm, while they understand the medium of PowerPoint best.

Korie's slides, which will be available at the PowerPoint LIVE site for attendees, provided a really insightful view of the types of presenters strengths and weaknesses and how to best craft a story or message to make an impact for a variety of situations, including sales, technology, training, and corporate communications.

This stimulated two sessions of discussions of the psychology of dealing with audiences and with presenters themselves, from CEOs to engineers who know too much and sometimes get off on details that are better left alone.

Going beyond the bytes into thinking about the real world scenarios in which presentations are given (and revised on airplanes) gave attendees concrete ideas on how to organize and craft their message and reach desired objectives.

On a more entertaining but very useful note, we were also lucky enough to visit with Albert Einstein (aka Arden Berkowitz) who both regaled and inspired the audience with some very nuts and bolts techniques for creative thinking. Hint: don't answer the phone on the first ring; take a breath; "bookmark" where you were in your thoughts when it rang; then pick up and deal with the call.

Oh Yeah. Products, Too.

Lest we overlook the technical aspects, there was an expo filled with innovative PowerPoint products, many of which have been dealt with in previous updates. These included Camtasia Studio 3, Infommersion Xcelsius and Instant Effects' Office FX along with various Flash converters and VOX Proxy's animated characters.

For the cool factor the show featured at least four maestros of PowerPoint design and animation, including Nancy Duarte on corporate branding and identity creation, and Troy Chollar, Julie Terberg and Glen Millar, veritable Gods of PowerPoint Animation.

To see examples of the absolute crème de la crème of PowerPoint, you must look at their work. We got to see the inner workings of the Custom Animation Task Pane for some of their projects, and there were literally hundreds of effects on one slide that worked seamlessly.

I would say that Julie and Troy can do more with corporate charts and logos that you've ever imagined, and Glen is an artist with PowerPoint on a level you can't imagine if you haven't seen this Aussie's awesome work.

For those of you who use PowerPoint I have three suggestions:

Put an image on the Slide Background. Use AutoShapes to obscure and reveal the image by filling them with the Background Image.
Use the "With Previous Animation" setting to combine effects in a myriad of fascinating ways.
Activate the Advanced Timeline to fine tune your animations.

I will explore these techniques in more detail in a future update (after I've grokked them myself).

Before the show even began, there were seminars, including one by Julie Marie Irvin and Todd Dunn which provided a comprehensive resource guide to the universe of products that enhance, support, and project PowerPoint presentations. In two hours, they covered conferencing, organization, and Flash import and export tools. Julie has supervised some of the most successful presentations for military funding and pharmaceutical promotion, while her colleague and friend Todd is perhaps the guru of audio visual mastery, having worked at Disney World and with the U.S. Air Force. Their handout was worth the price of admission.

If you get the sense I'm excited about this show and about my relationships with my PowerPoint colleagues, you're correct. I am not sure whether Rick will let non-attendees have any of the content, but if you're a serious PowerPoint user, I suggest you beg, borrow, or pilfer the program CD or try to access the Web site for the content.

Only 364 days til the next one.

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