{"id":293,"date":"2008-10-06T14:06:45","date_gmt":"2008-10-06T21:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=293"},"modified":"2008-10-07T08:47:59","modified_gmt":"2008-10-07T15:47:59","slug":"powerpoint-steps-in-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2008\/10\/06\/powerpoint-steps-in-context\/","title":{"rendered":"Powerpoint steps in context"},"content":{"rendered":"

I often wonder at advice that people give about travelling because the act can vary so widely; the way I travel — what and how I pack my clothes, even — depends on the situation.\u00a0 Travelling for work, for instance, is quite different than travelling for vacation.\u00a0 Travelling with kids is completely different than travelling alone.\u00a0 Vagabonding<\/a> is different than a quick weekend getaway.\u00a0 And so forth.<\/p>\n

The same is true with presentations.\u00a0 It’s hard, I think, to give good presentation advice without precisely specifying the context of your advice.\u00a0 So, for instance, Seth Godin has a new posting on “Nine steps to Powerpoint magic<\/a>,”<\/p>\n

The first of his steps (not rules) is to not use Powerpoint at all.\u00a0 But if you have to use Powerpoint, don’t use bullets.\u00a0 And if you have to use bullets, make them one or two word bullets, max.\u00a0 After all, Godin says, “Powerpoint is for ideas.”\u00a0 He recommends using a remote and a microphone, and keeping the overall presentation time down to ten minutes if possible.<\/p>\n

\n

This may be good advice — I trust Godin — but for what?\u00a0 I gather that he’s referring to public speaking events with dozens or hundreds of people in the audience, Steve Jobs product announcement style.\u00a0 But the problem is that the rest of us, those not making big product announcements, use Powerpoint for completely different purposes.\u00a0 Purposes for which these ‘steps’ are completely worthless.<\/p>\n

Many years ago, as a young pup consultant, I was trained in a rigorous style of presentation development very different than Godin’s.\u00a0 One of the cardinal rules was that the ‘deck’ should stand alone as a paper document.\u00a0 Anyone should be able to pick it up and understand the story without any prior knowledge.\u00a0 In fact, they should be able to read only the headlines <\/strong>and understand the story.\u00a0 The headlines were the most important part of each slide and the content in the slide should support the headline.\u00a0 The content of the slide could be data or charts or bullet points, depending on the requirements of the story.\u00a0 Good decks were written headline-first; in older versions of Powerpoint it was easier to do this than it is today, but the vestigal functionality of writing in outline form still exists in the application today.\u00a0 Ideally, you should start with a blank template, write out your whole deck in headlines, and then go back and fill in the detail on the page in support of the headlines.<\/p>\n

My office had complicated rules about punctuation and capitalization but generally you were expected to write in complete sentences and if you were going to make a bulleted list it definitely had to have more than one, and preferably more than two, bullets in the list.\u00a0 Single word<\/strong> bullet points weren’t even considered an option.\u00a0 All these details were strictly enforced as drafts, paper drafts, were handed around the office.\u00a0 It was common to get dozens of detailed line edits on a single version of a deck.\u00a0 Why are the bullets ordered in this sequence?\u00a0 What are the units on this graph?\u00a0 What is the point of this table?\u00a0 Why doesn’t it have a title?\u00a0 Can you call out the important fact here?<\/em> And so on.<\/p>\n

The assumpion behind this style of presentation was that the deck would be read, as a document, by a small group of clients and consultants around a table and then passed around at the client site as the documentation of our recommendations.\u00a0 No one ever thought to stand up with a microphone or a remote — these were black & white printed paper artifacts, to be reviewed in groups of a dozen or less.\u00a0 I remember the first time I had to make a color presentation for a client, and how gaudy and tacky it felt.<\/p>\n

Powerpoint, like any other tool, gets used for tasks for which it is distinctly ill-suited, and there are a lot of people using Powerpoint who do a terrible job with it.\u00a0 But helping them do a better job with their tool requires an understanding of the context; what works for Seth Godin on stage in front of hundreds of people will not work for a small team dealing with a complex, intricate problem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I often wonder at advice that people give about travelling because the act can vary so widely; the way I travel — what and how I pack my clothes, even — depends on the situation.\u00a0 Travelling for work, for instance, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[146,646],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-4J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}