Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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I thought of this topic too late for last month, to make it a true New Year’s Resolution, but it’s important enough to get into it any time.

As an IT professional you probably have a number of different targets with whom you need to communicate effectively:

Most important, you may need to communicate budget or planning recommendations for approval to management.

In many cases, you will need to document your processes and workflow for peers and associates.

Finally, many IT pros also provide help, and you may need to create tutorials or write help documentation for end users.

In all three cases it is safe to assume that your main core competency is not writing — so a few tips on how to communicate better may be in order.

Since we’re technology pros, we tend to think in terms of tools, and to avoid writing and be able to present ideas quickly, the most obvious program most of us turn to is PowerPoint.

Unfortunately, many PowerPoint users make a common mistake, and this would be particularly pertinent for IT pros who are well versed in the product. Even if you don’t need the level of design expertise, for example, that Nancy Duarte writes about in Slide:ology, you can take one quick tip from her and me.

Don’t begin with PowerPoint.

You will get bogged down in creating cool slides, and you will lose the flow of your message.

Use a piece of paper to sketch out some ideas if your need is visual, or if it’s a set of ideas, work in Outline view in Word or directly in PowerPoint (if you must) and map out your main concepts.

But that’s the key — knowing what you really need to say.

Especially if you’re presenting to management, you don’t want to waffle or get off on tangents. An outline can help you delineate specific goals that you want to put forth.

If you want to impress management, you may want to use Word instead of PowerPoint, and think about creating a white paper using one of Word’s templates for that purpose.

You can find a white paper template on MS Office Online by opening the Office button in Word 2007 and clicking New–Templates online.

Figure 1

You can also dress up your Word document by using the new Building Blocks feature to quickly import different looking pages, graphs and other previous content into a white paper or other document.

Here’s another idea: make sure you mark any important headings in your document with a Heading Style...

Figure 2

...so that you can generate a table of contents.

Figure 3

That sort of thing dresses up any communication to look professional. But again, make sure that you are presenting your ideas in a straightforward organized way.

Here’s an idea for a flow that always works:

We’re facing a (set of) problem(s)/challenge(s)
If we don’t meet them, here are the consequences
Historically we’ve dealt with these issues (how?) successfully/unsuccessfully
This time we need to do (what?)
Drill down — timeline/project — specific recommendations
Summary

For a similar outline for your peers or end users, you will generally also be addressing a problem, challenge or issue — why else would you be writing.

Now, what if you wanted to expand your white paper or Word document into a PowerPoint presentation.

In Office 2007 you can preserve Themes between file formats, either by using the same (named) theme in both a Word doc and a PowerPoint file.

Other items that you can repurpose fairly easily between Word (or Excel) and PowerPoint are tables, charts and most recently SmartArt diagrams.

More important, if you have set out a nice flow in a Word document, and generated a table of contents, how might you use that as the basis for a PowerPoint file?

You could try to copy and paste your outline directly into a new Word document, in Outline view, and see if you can promote or demote some sections to create a working outline (to generate PowerPoint slides) but you would probably find the formatting messing you up.

A solution is to copy and paste it first into Notepad, to strip out all of the formatting, and then into a Word or PowerPoint.

So what other tools could you use other than a Word doc or white paper or a PowerPoint presentation?

For a flowchart that effectively illustrates a process (and its various detours and options) you can’t do better than Visio or SmartDraw.

If you want to create a movie out of PowerPoint, either to distribute online directly or through YouTube, with audio narration, check out Camtasia.

While Microsoft Live Meeting is certainly an option, to meet remotely with members of your team, colleagues or clients, you might want to use Go-To-Meeting.

Too often we concentrate on technology and take other skills, like just communicating effectively for granted. As an IT pro, it’s important to be on top of both the content and thematic aspects of communications, and the tools of choice.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

AuthorSTREAM: PowerPoint with Narration Made Easier Online

Slide:ology: Nancy Duarte’s Design Secrets and Her New PowerPoint Book (Review)

Books and eBooks

Patterns for Effective Use Cases (Read in Safari Books Online)

Business Writing

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