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Preparing Great PowerPoint Presentations (workshop)
April 19, 2010
Many people dread being forced to endure PowerPoint presentations, because they are often painfully boring and poorly prepared. But they don’t have to be. I will be revealing some secrets to preparing engaging presentations with outstanding visual slides this week at a few locations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
On Wednesday, I will be presenting at L.E.B. Toastmasters, located at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The meeting runs from 7:15 pm – 9 pm. Guests are welcome.
On Thursday, I will be at the HP/Hilltop Speakers (Toastmasters), located on the Hewlett Packard Campus, Building 20, 3000 Hanover Street, Palo Alto. The meeting runs from noon to 1 pm. Guests are welcome.
On May 6, I will be customizing the workshop for lawyers who attend the Legally Speaking Toastmasters in Palo Alto. They meet at the Keller Williams Realty office, 505 Hamilton Ave., Suite 100.
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Advanced Toastmasters, Protoasties, Moves to Burlingame
April 4, 2010
Protoasties, an Advanced Toastmasters for Professionals Who Speak, has settled on a stable new home at Trapeze Restaurant in Burlingame, Calif. Meetings resumed in February, following a rocky 2009, stemming partly from the closure of the Portofino Grill, the club’s former longtime meeting location in Foster City.
Many of the 2009 regulars have returned and a rejuvenated leadership team is in place, including myself as president, Robert Tang as treasurer, Jeffrey Bruno (vice president of education) and Kimi Ziemski (vice president of public relations).
The club meets on the same day and time as before: the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month, from 6:30 pm – 9 pm.
Professionals join Protoasties because they are driven to make their presentations and speaking engagements stand out. They know that this is the fast-track to increasing their sales, raising venture capital money, motivating their employees, and getting an edge on their competition.
Members of Protoasties are professional speakers, presentation skills trainers or people who present in a professional capacity. They serve as CEO’s, corporate board members, entrepreneurs, published authors, sales/marketing executives, among other disciplines.
Protoasties was launched in 1998 as a platform for members of the Northern California chapter of the National Speakers Association to sharpen their speeches and presentations through peer feedback before hitting the road. Protoasties was founded by NSA Hall of Fame speaker Patricia Fripp and Craig Harrison, founding board president of Pro-Trac, NSA/NC’s speaker college.
As an advanced Toastmasters club, most Protoasties members have earned at least CC status (completed the Competent Communicator manual), through another Toastmasters club, or have already mastered certain public speaking fundamentals. Although you may not yet qualify for membership, if you are aspiring to join some day, you are welcome to come as a guest.
Meeting Format: Unlike the traditional Toastmasters club, which splits time evenly between prepared speeches and table topics, Protoasties allows its members to rehearse longer than the typical 6-8 minute speech. In addition, a roundtable of members may verbally critique the speech, rather than a single evaluator, which is the norm at most Toastmasters chapters. This often reduces the amount of time available for table topics, a two-minute impromptu speaking exercise, designed to sharpen skills in communicating under pressure.
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Using Videos in Your Presentation
March 16, 2010
Incorporating video to your presentation has many powerful benefits to keep your audience engaged. It’s a great way to illustrate a point, or even show visually rather than only tell how something has occurred.
In fact, it’s a great way for “businesspeople… to show new stores or products in action or to show interviews with customers,” notes design guru Garr Reynolds in his new book, Presentation Zen Design, which is sort of sequel to his 2008 best-selling book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery.
Reynolds says adding video to a long presentation is especially useful to break up the pace, since research shows audiences’ attention tend to drift after about ten minutes, unless some aspects of the presentation are altered.
If you are a Mac user, embedding video (from your movie folder) onto a slide in Keynote 2009 is a simple drag and drop process (see video tutorial).
PowerPoint 2010, which is expected to be released in June as part of Office 2010, promises to include the ability to embed videos. A beta version is already available from the Microsoft site.
Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations includes other great tips on designing effective presentations that contain text, graphs, color and images.
Reynolds first book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, provided the framework for planning, putting together and delivering presentations.
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No Distractions: Using Fonts with PowerPoint
December 14, 2009
A friend of mine spilled coffee down his white polo shirt moments before taking the stage for a presentation. Quick on his feet, he opened his speech explaining his dining mishap. Then went into his material.
This was a great technique: to allow the audience to notice the stain, and then forget it. If he had ignored the stain, the audience wouldn’t have. They’d be thinking: Does he know about it? How’d it happen? Has he been wearing that shirt all day?
Rarely fonts can make a presentation, but if misused, they certainly can ruin a presentation, just like a distracting stained shirt.
Choosing the appropriate font for your slides is important, because the right font will make your text easy to read. But even more importantly, it can keep your audience focused on your message. That’s because a bad font or misuse of fonts are often distracting.
Here are some basic font rules to follow:
- Keep it simple: Don’t mix font styles. If you find the need to use more than one font, make sure they are complimentary fonts (e.g. – Arial and Arial Bold)
- Serif vs. Sans-Serif: Serif fonts have tails on the edge of the letters. By contrast, sans-serifs don’t (sans means “without”). Serif fonts (e.g. – Time New Roman) are commonly used in magazines, because they are easier to read when there is a lot of text. However, on a PowerPoint or Keynote slide, it’s best to use a sans-serif font. Some of the most common are: Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma and Verdana.
- Don’t capitalize full words: Because it’s like screaming at your audience. Instead, use bold or italics to emphasize a word or thought.
- Font Size: Try to avoid using a font smaller than 30 point. If you need to reduce the font to squeeze all the text on a slide, chances are you’re using too much text. As an alternative, replace most of the text with a visual that indicates the same message.
Following these steps should keep your audience focused where you want them to be: on your message, rather than on your coffee stain.
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Steve Jobs’ Presentation Secrets
November 3, 2009
Whenever you hear someone describe Apple CEO Steve Jobs, they often use words like “charismatic,” “showmanship” “electrifying presenter.” His presentations look so effortlessly that people often believe it’s innate.
But that’s hardly the case. Steve Jobs is no doubt one of the world’s best presenters, but that’s because he is relentless at rehearsing and refining his presentation until every aspect shines.
BusinessWeek columnist Carmine Gallo examines many aspects of Jobs’ presentation techniques as well as his tireless preparation in his new book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.
Gallo analyzed dozens, if not hundreds, of Steve Jobs’ keynotes and other presentations, which resulted in Gallo crafting a playbook, per se, on how you can learn similar techniques to electrify an audience.
Most speeches fall into four categories: informative, inspirational, persuasive or to entertain. Gallo notes that Jobs aims to cover at least three in every speech.
“Steve Jobs presentation is very much like a dramatic play – a finely crafted, well-rehearsed performance that informs, entertains and inspires,” Gallo writes.
Aside from delivery and preparation techniques, Gallo also covers how Jobs uses storytelling to grip his audiences as well as prepare outstanding visual slides to complement each story. No bullet points.
Related Article:
7 Tips to Sell Ideas The Steve Jobs Way
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Prioritizing Your To-Do List
October 19, 2009
If you struggle with time management, perhaps a presentation I recently developed for a variety of audiences will be useful to you. It focuses on Goal-Oriented Time Management, and the method can be used to make your busy life more manageable, to jumpstart a career move (change) or even to develop a talent.
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Reynolds: 15 Tips For Your Continuous Improvement
September 27, 2009
Presentation design expert Garr Reynolds posted a fascinating blog item today about the kaizen approach to improve, or ways to continuously strive to improve your presentation skills. (BTW – many of the 15 tips can be applied in other areas of your life or career beyond public speaking.)
In his lengthy blog item, he stresses the importance of daily, continuous steps toward a goal are far more valuable than most people think.
“Tiny improvements are o.k.,” he writes. “Over the long-term, these add up to great improvements.”
Reynolds is a former Apple Computer manager, author of Presentation Zen and a marketing professor at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan. As a result, his design methods are often heavily influenced by the Japanese culture.
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Why Some Presentations Really Connect With You
July 9, 2009
If you ever wondered why some presentations and keynote speakers really connect with you, it’s often because they use the power of storytelling and great images (rather than bulletpoints) that help their audiences to visualize their message.
In this fascinating Ted Talk recently posted online, information designer Tom Wujec discusses why animation, graphics and illustrations are powerful ways to create meaning for audiences emotionally.
One of the key points that drives home Tom’s message is in a slide shown half way through the talk about the fact that we make meaning by seeing. If you consider that for the next time you prepare a slide deck, remember Tom’s three points:
1. Use images to help clarify what we are trying to communicate.
2. Make the images interactive so we engage more fully
3. Augment your memory by creating a visual persistence
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Google to Release Communication Platform
June 28, 2009
Google said it plans this year to release a real-time communication platform that allows people to collaborate on a project using a format called waves.
In Google Wave, you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. People on your wave can insert a reply or edit the wave directly.
It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. The company claims Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
Google has yet to announce a release date of the platform. If you’d like to be notified when its launched to the public, you can sign up here.
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Top 5 iPhone Apps for Presenters
May 25, 2009
Tons of programs are being designed for the iPhone every day, and quite a few are making life easier for public speakers. In fact, the Top 10 most downloaded Business Apps (today, anyway, since this list may change tomorrow) includes four voice-recording programs.
Here are five iPhone apps you’ll probably find useful before your next public presentation:
Speakeasy Voice Recorder allows you to record and playback verbal notes and reminders from your iPhone’s built-in microphone. If you get a burst of inspiration for a future speech at an inconvenient time to write the speech, speak reminders into your phone.
This app sounds like the perfect program for anyone like Michael Keaton’s character in the 1982 comedy “Night Shift.” Keaton played a self-described “idea man,” who carried around a tape recorder so he could record his crackpot ideas, such as feeding mayonnaise to tuna-fish, or creating edible paper to eliminate garbage.
QuickVoice Recorder is another popular voice recorder for the iPhone, which includes a voice-to-text email feature.
Evernote allows you to capture information in a variety of environments using multiple devices or platforms (Mac, PC, etc.), and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from almost anywhere.
This program allows you to capture To-Do lists, notes and research, Web pages, twitter messages or snap photos of business cards/whiteboards/wine labels and more.
Remote Desktop, by MochaSoft, enables you to have secure access to your work computer through wifi or the phones network (EDGE). Using your iPhone, you can connect to your Windows work computer and see the files, programs, and resources exactly as you would if you were sitting at your desk… but of course, squinting on a far smaller screen.
Speech Timer: This program is designed with the Toastmaster Timer (or any longwinded public speaker) in mind. This timer app will make your iPhone vibrate or sound when the flag changes colors.
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