Tony's PowerPoint Weblog

A weblog about Microsoft PowerPoint, presentations, presentation design, and related topics. The first of many bloggers on this topic.

(Due to the fluid nature of the web, I can't guarantee these links will work past their original posting date. Get 'em while they're hot.)

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• 06-29-07: Many apologies to you. Three months without a post is bad. I have been traveling a lot, and am spending the summer far from home, working on another large proposal. It involves public safety, government, and the environment. The contract, if won, is worth many billions of dollars. Each proposal page communicates with text and graphics. My client says that rough math puts the value of each graphic at about $15 million, but, hey, no pressure. (1) During these months, I have been demonstrating Vista and Office 2007 to many people during the course of work. While a wait-and-see attitude prevails for some potential buyers, it is PowerPoint 2007 that convinces average users that an upgrade has immediate benefits. Lots of them drool at the prospect of having their own presentations "not look like everyone else's." (2) On the other hand, uniqueness comes from what you bring to the tool. Creativity is the differentiator. Look here for PPT XP goodness, and here for PPT 2007 achievement. Each will leave you asking: "THAT was done in PPT?" (3) These past months have also seen mainstream media take swings at its favorite software target; The Age, NY Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The Register are the latest at bat, but CIO will help put you ahead of the game. Graphpaper.com is also on your team. (4) Big tip of the hat to DTC-area 3M rep Jim McDonald, who hooked me up lickety-split with a special kind of double-sided tape and applicator that can turn a long office corridor into a giant, lightly adhesive surface in no time. If you have 400 presentation pages to view on a wall and you want that wall to act like a Post-It surface for a couple of weeks through several revision cycles, you want 3M 928 tape and an ATG tape gun. It beats dealing with hundreds of pushpins and thousands of holes.

• 03-29-07: "Does this sound familiar?" asks Michael Bierut in Speech, Speech. "Your client has a message to communicate: an argument, a sales pitch, a call to action. Your job is to give it form. You're an expert at this. You know how to take a complicated bunch of ideas and reduce them to their arresting, memorable, engaging essence. You come up with some big ideas that you're convinced will work and, detail by careful detail, you bring those ideas to life. But there's a problem: your work is second-guessed by a bunch of middle managers, some of whom are insecure, some of whom have their own agendas to inject, some of whom just like to say no. Despite all that, you refine and revise, hoping to keep the strength of your original idea intact. Finally, your work is approved, and it goes out into the world. If you're lucky, it really makes a difference: minds are changed, passions are fueled, your client looks great. And, somehow, hardly anyone out there knows you were involved at all. It sounds a lot like graphic design, doesn't it? But I'm talking about something else: speechwriting. To a surprising degree, the two professions are remarkably similar." Read the rest of this -- and many other excellent works -- over at Design Observer.

• 03-21-07: Let the good times roll. (1) Guy Kawasaki's name has made the rounds in the presentation community for a while, largely due to his 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint as well as his overall methodology and style. (2) The former Apple Computer evangelist is now chiefly a missionary for tech innovation. This week he is practicing what he preaches at the Microsoft Small Business Summit in Redmond. His presentation "The Art of Innovation" was webcast for free on Monday; can't tell whether recordings will be available. (3) His views on presentation matters will return to the fore as he sits in on a four-judge panel for The World's Best Presentation Contest, a online event organized by SlideShare. Also judging is Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame. So far, 37 entries are posted for your viewing and voting pleasure. There are some real stinkers here but also a handful of good ones. If you have a particularly polished piece, why not let it roll?

• 03-15-07: MVP Global Summit highlights: (1) Computerworld reports "Microsoft's 'MVPs' say they're often its sharpest critics." After spending a few days of both scolding and praising the PowerPoint leadership as well as a few of its coders and testers, I can attest to the headline's accuracy. (2) While MSFT doesn't always do what we ask or want, at least they do listen, especially to fair and constructive feedback. During roundtable sessions, we discussed the most frequent issues raised by users, what the company is doing about these, and what future plans might include. Sneak peeks at possible scenarios had us alternately cheering, shrugging, and drooling. (3) You and others seem to be lodging few complaints about new features like the Ribbon, the Office Button, and Contextual Tabs, but even if just one percent of users hates a feature, Ric Bretschnieder reminds us that, "One percent of PowerPoint users is enough to fill a football stadium." This week, Microsoft confirmed they have surpassed the half-billion mark in the total of all versions of Office currently installed. (4) Germany, India, Korea, Spain, and the US were represented by the PPT MVPs in attendance. Is one based in your region? Find out here.

• 03-11-07: (1) Greetings from Seattle. I am here again for the Microsoft MVP Global Summit. Sean O'Driscoll, our fearless leader, has a great blog post on this upcoming week. Just under 1900 MVPs from 88 countries will choose among 533 sessions to attend. Thanks for the numbers, Sean. They tell a great story. (2) The way Microsoft tells its own story, however, needs improvement. Might a blue cartoon monster help? "For too long, Microsoft has allowed other people -- the media, the competition and their detractors, especially -- tell their story on their behalf, instead of doing a better job of it themselves. We firmly believe that Microsoft must start articulating their story better -- what they do, why they do it, and why it matters -- if they're to remain happy and prosperous long-term." (Via TAJ at Awesome Backgrounds) For what it's worth, cartoonist Hugh McCleod also takes a light jab at PPT. (3) Provocative hand-drawn images are always are feature at Communication Nation. Visit their Visual Thinking School pool at Flickr too. Many of these would make compelling slides on their own. (4) Remember, just because you have a wealth of drawing tools in PowerPoint does not mean you should necessarily start and end there. "Drawing is so visceral," writes Russell Beattie. "... you get to just take an idea, quickly jot it down with arrows and boxes, and it's captured. And it still communicates the concept just as well as a full-on graphic or 10 bullet point slide. Probably better." While I don't entirely agree with that last statement, I recommend that you make drawings at the start. It's a better use of your time by helping you focus on telling a great story rather than wrestling with the technology. Paper first, PowerPoint second.

• 03-07-07: PowerPoint 2007 -- what it looks like, why you should get it, how to use it -- is the theme of a small but growing number of online videos right now. Microsoft offers seven basic PPT 2007 training videos at Office Online, plus limited-time free eLearning courses at their Learning Portal, and, of course, the obligatory sales demo. Meanwhile, Lynda.com lets you view 11 of their 74 video segments of "PowerPoint 2007 Essential Training with David Rivers" for free. Missing Manuals has a few free videos, too. Still, a greater number of computer-based training vendors have offerings in the pre-release stage only.

• 03-05-07: (1) "Take another look at your presentation and its content," writes Jeff Thull of Prime Resource Group in "Breaking the Rules of Sales" for Inc.com. "How many slides portray your company and your solution, and how many are about your customer and their business? On a recent consulting project, we looked at a PowerPoint being used for an introductory 60-minute meeting. Forty slides were involved. Unfortunately, one slide was about the customer, 39 were about the seller. Contrast this with the company's top salesperson, who also uses PowerPoint. She prepares for her initial meetings with Web research and phone interviews with various people in the prospect's organization. Her calls are very straight forward: 'I'm preparing for a meeting I will be having in two weeks with your senior management and would like to verify a couple of assumptions I am making about your business.' As a result, her slide deck had 18 slides, three were about her company, and none were about her solution. Her slide decks facilitate conversations and a high percentage of her first meetings lead to lucrative orders." (thanks, Steve Hards at Perspector) (2) Al Gore and Nancy Duarte make better use of Keynote than does George W. Bush with PowerPoint. (3) Cool tool: A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods from Visual-Literacy.org. (4) Need to print a single slide in a big format but you have few resources? Try the Rasterbator. (Haven't given it a whack yet; I need to find a suitable image.)

• 02-20-07: Hope all has been well with you during this long absence. I am the busiest I have ever been. Good for me, but bad for blog. (1) Sub-rock dwellers, take note: Vista and Office 2007 launched. I'm running both on a new laptop. Lots to like, a few things to dislike. If you are considering Vista, you'd do well to check out the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, and free and small application that could save you a lot of time and money and pain. Will be switching between old and new PCs for a while, so I'll write about the new stuff when warranted. Hardest part thus far has been retraining my fingers away from old keyboard shortcuts. (2) Got a Zune for the holidays. Lots to like, a few things to dislike. The biggest plus was unexpected. My brown Zune, sitting in its cradle while charging and playing, offers up the full-color album cover of the song playing, along with a time progress bar, song info, etc. This screen is large. And hour after hour as I work, it's presenting me a steady stream of images to which I have had often powerful, emotional ties for many years. The Zune software finds most of the images automatically. And if you want to assign a song an image from the album you cradled rather than the middling greatest hits compilation or lame soundtrack it also appeared on, you have the freedom to choose. The big screen's aspect ratio is perfect for PowerPoint slides, so you can pocket your presentations as well. One downside: no one I know owns a Zune yet, so I have yet to try its wireless transfer capability. Oh well. Welcome to the asocial.

• 12-23-06: It's the holiday season, and PPT users everywhere are churning out the usual greeting cards, family newsletters, slideshows, calendars, scrapbooks and iron-on designs for families and friends. And we accept this. (Heck, even Microsoft shows you how to create a multimedia greeting card in PPT.) Remember this, though: if a design looks "powerpointish" to your own eyes, it will be in the eyes of others too. Instead, learn from the pros. Start with an ideal of your finished product in mind. Your ideal might be inspired by a card you saw at retail, or a newsletter format you really like. Then start working. A focus on a goal saves you from agonizing over colors, fonts, shapes, and art. Like Covey says, "Begin with the end in mind."

• 12-09-06: Let's lift a logo! (1) You need a company's logo for a presentation. Eight out of ten of you will go to that company's website, right-click on an image, copy it to your clipboard, and paste it onto your slide. Ninety percent of those logos will come with a background, which you can't fully eliminate using PPT's "Set Transparent Color" tool. And ninety-nine-point-forty-four percent of you will not care, because the effort to find a logo in the proper format, color, and resolution (and with the proper permissions) is not worth it. The good news is that companies are starting to realize that it's better to freely share good and useful versions their logos and to educate those users in the process. Case in point: the Media Resources page of BEA. You get EPS, TIFF and JPEG files with no registration required. You get color and black and white. You get exact color values. You get usage guidelines. Even if you're not part of "the media" and thus never venture onto a company's media or press pages, do so anyway. You might be pleasantly surprised. (2) OK. You've looked through the company's press page, but all they offer are PDF files of annual reports or presentations. Try this tip. Open or download the PDF, find the logo or image you wish to use. Zoom in tight on it so that it fills the screen. Use your Print-Screen key to capture that image. Paste that onto your slide and crop unwanted areas or bring it into an image-editing program. You now have a better, higher resolution logo to work with rather than some tiny, grainy GIF image from a home page. (3) Impatient? Comfortable with EPS files? Just go here: Brands of the World.

• 11-27-06: Blogged here on 10-05 upon its launch, SlideShare aims to be "the YouTube of PowerPoint." So far, I've noticed this can be good (its user interface is now shamelessly similar) and this can be bad (the chaff here far outweighs the wheat). Its volume of content is climbing, just like its visibility. As you might expect, it now hosts some slideshows about slideshows, such as Tony Osime's "How to Get Your Slides Noticed." Others, such as the strikingly visual "Making Money Blogging" by Matthew Haughey, clearly demonstrate an understanding of the Beyond Bullet Points methodology.

• 11-21-06: My current project involves bringing graphics from PPT (and elsewhere) into Word. It also involves mentoring a relative newcomer to document production. After searching and reading many articles about graphics formats, I found this one to be the best to pass along to both my protégé and to you: "Choosing Graphics Formats" by John McGhie appears at the Word MVPs site.

• 11-17-06: Going live. (1) Participants at the 2006 installment of the PowerPoint Live conference have started posting their recaps. Ellen Finkelstein's review is at Presenter's University. Tom Bunzel wrote his for InformIT. And your host, Rick Altman, shares his epiphanies at his own website. (2) Speaking of Ellen, she's among the frontrunners with readying a book about PowerPoint 2007: How To Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. Like many of the others, it will be released early in the new year.

• 11-12-06: Audiences love maps. They can be rich with data. They are typically easy to understand. They are not lists of bullet points, so even poor presenters are less likely to reiterate what is onscreen and instead say something relevant. Everyone wins. (1) Found via Lifehacker, a great resource for making vector-based maps is here: Planiglobe, courtesy of kk+w digitale kartografie. If you use Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, you will relish the fact that you can download ai or ps files of your own specifications for free. Simply amazing. I am currently creating graphics for a DOE proposal that involves many countries. Planiglobe is the answer to my prayers. (2) Previous prayers did not go unanswered. For years, the University of Texas has hosted the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, arguably the best collection of maps online. Worth a bookmark. (3) Just need a simple outline or decorative version of a state, country or continent? Office Online's Clip Art page (formerly Design Gallery Live) remains a quick, easy, and free place to turn.

• 11-05-06: Big businesses take note: Office 2007 and Windows Vista can begin shipping to you on November 30. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Microsoft made the announcement late last week without the usual fanfare, signaling that development of the retail release in January is on track. Retail customers, and especially holiday PC shoppers, can look forward to using their "Express Upgrade" to Vista for PCs purchased between Oct 26 and March 15. Also, eWeek reports today that the code for Office 2007 went gold, i.e., has been released to manufacturing. eWeek says this event marks the end of the largest Office beta test to date. More than 3.5 million people downloaded the second beta. (Jensen thanks those of you who did.)

• 10-25-06: Our friend Tom Bunzel, long known by many in his "Professor PowerPoint" persona, just wrote another book: Solving the PowerPoint Predicament from Que Publishing. Visit his site for links to a sample chapter and a coupon (valid until Nov 11) for a 35% discount plus free shipping.

• 10-18-06: (1) If you are a power user of PowerPoint, you've probably customized your menus, toolbars and shortcuts to fit your style. You might even use or create add-ins. While customization was a hallmark of PPT 2003, get ready for a big change after you install Office 2007. "Compared to Office 2003, Office 2007 has a serious customization deficiency," writes Patrick Schmidt in the excellent post Putting You & I back into Office 2007’s UI. "The new Ribbon UI is mainly static and only a limited number of elements are customizable, most notably the [Quick Access Toolbar]. I personally think that this level of customization is sufficient for most users, and hence Microsoft has met its goal in this regard." But what about the power users? "Microsoft raised the bar to customization with Office 2007 significantly, and I would not be surprised if this won’t stop some users and companies from adopting Office 2007," writes Schmidt. "I hope though that via my blog and my add-in, I can lower the bar somewhat and put full UI customization back into the reach of most users." Way to go, Patrick. We'll be watching. (2) You have until October 25th to download Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 and the later Beta 2 Technical Refresh. Three million people have already done so. Details over at ActiveWin.

• 10-12-06: (1) Welcome to those coming here via Crain's Cleveland Business. The Microsoft MVP Award mentioned in the October 9, 2006 "Going Places" column was granted to me in July. The designation lasts for one year. The award annually recognizes people for their contributions, technical and otherwise, to the community of users of Microsoft products and technologies. Among the nearly half billion users of PPT worldwide, there are 27 MVPs for PowerPoint. I am honored to be among this group. Click on the MVP logo at left for more information about the MVP program. (2) Austin Myers, another PowerPoint MVP (and a far more seasoned one at that) recently demonstrated the value of MVP technical contributions. Author of the PFCPro, PFCMedia, and PFCExpress add-ins, Austin recently solved the widespread and long-standing issue of how to place text on top of media objects (e.g., video) within a PPT slide. The tutorial and code is available here for free.

• 10-05-06: (1) "Presenting, even to your coworkers and colleagues, is an entertainment experience," writes Chris Brogan in My Best Presentation Tricks. "If not, why are you standing there with a room full of people looking at you? You could just send an email, mail out a brochure. The presumption is that there’s something inherent in your presence that people can’t get from just browsing the brochure. Most people incorrectly assume that they ship a human along with the presentation merely for the Q&A session that follows. Wrong. This is your opportunity to breathe life into material that might not stand so well on its own. It’s a chance to give a face and a voice to something that might not be easily humanized." (2) On the other hand, presenterless presentations continue their march. New this week: a mashup of PowerPoint and YouTube named SlideShare. (Their logo sports the ubiquitous "beta" slug; their blog gives details about the software.) TechCrunch has a review.

• 09-18-06: (1) PowerPoint Live 2006 takes place this week in San Diego, CA. Rick Altman is hosting. Geetesh Bajaj will be blogging (as will others). Through a combination a poor planning and crazy clients, I won't be there this year. For everyone's benefit, however, I'll gladly link to anyone who is. (2) Toastmasters is trying hard to reach a younger crowd, reports the Washington Post. I suspect there are many who, having long relied on electronic presentation tools in crutch-like fashion, missed out on some of the timeless lessons about rhetoric, stage presence, and storytelling that groups like Toastmasters can teach. The best presenters I know are equally adept at the technical and the theatrical.

• 09-15-06: "Rule: if you must use a laser pointer, when you point at something, hold the pointer steady," writes Jonathan Shewchuk, an associate prof of computer science, in Giving an Academic Talk. "Most people try to circle an object instead of pointing at it. Guess what? Nobody has a clue what you're pointing at! I have sat in conferences and watched one speaker after another after another do this, all oblivious to the fact that their audience has no idea what they're indicating. If you just saw the screen and not the speakers, you'd think it was a breakdancing workshop."

• 09-13-06: (1) A succinct sentence headline supported by visual evidence meets your audience's need to understand technical concepts, writes Michael Alley for AllBusiness.com. "This alternative design makes communication more efficient, memorable, and persuasive, and is much better suited to the presentation of technical material than is the traditional bullet list format." See Rethinking the design of presentation slides: a case for sentence headlines and visual evidence. (Free registration required for full article.) (2) In a much shorter article, Alley's assertion above is number four among his Five ways to improve your presentations now. (3) Another great list of tips comes from MSFT UK's Darren Strange. In Office Rocker!, read Death by PowerPoint - Giving better presentations. A sample: "Make friends with the stage. If you can, come to the room you will present in when it is quiet and empty. Walk about on it and get familiar with the environment. Understand any buttons, lights or gizmos. I call it 'making friends with the stage'. I've found that knowing the space, the stage, the options for walking about beforehand gives me confidence later. When faced with a room of strangers, if I'm friends with the stage I feel at home." (4) One final list of tips comes from Russell Davies, an account planner. His thoughtful and practical five things about powerpoint is a 9-minute video. (Watch for the Storyboard Moleskine he flashes briefly at one third through.) (5) Fark asks its Photoshop-enabled miscreants to Give this guy a better slide in his PowerPoint presentation (NSFW). (6) It's my birthday. I turn this age today. If you're in a kind and generous sort of mood, click here.

• 09-04-06: It's Labor Day here in the US, a time to honor the sacrifices of working men and women while mourning their job benefits and security. (If Marx were alive today, he'd probably say "Workers of the world: I told you so." Mao, on the other hand, salutes Wal-Mart.) But gone are Gompers and Gramsci -- today, the bulwark between management and labor is HR. (1) Managers of Human Resources are frequently the only presenters that laborers in a given organization may ever see. With responsibilities like training, internal communications, and promulgation of the corporate culture, HR folks know about presentations and presenting. Via Steve Clayton comes KnowHR Blog's list of the Top Ten Best Presentations Ever. (2) HR gets little respect. "The human-resources trade long ago proved itself, at best, a necessary evil -- and at worst, a dark bureaucratic force that blindly enforces nonsensical rules, resists creativity, and impedes constructive change," writes Keith Hammonds. "HR is the corporate function with the greatest potential -- the key driver, in theory, of business performance -- and also the one that most consistently underdelivers." Hammonds goes to an HR convention for Fast Company to find out Why We Hate HR. (3) Some HR presentations may be a source of that hatred. Amid the market of ready-to-go presentations for sale, HR slides and templates are plentiful. See here and here and here. Are you in HR? Do you author, purchase, or get handed the material you need to present? Once presented, does it divide your workers or does it unite?

• 08-31-06: (1) A few days from now will mark the fifth anniversary that Microsoft employee Mike Fried has been working on PowerPoint. Luckily for all of us, he recently started a blog, which looks very promising. If you're working your way through the beta of PPT 2007, look to Mike (and other MSDN bloggers) for tips and info. (2) As some prepare for Office 2007, some others prepare for its demise. Wired reports that Google Announces Office Suite, Takes Aim at Microsoft, while Red Herring lists 17 MS Office Killers, but John Dvorak scoffs, "For decades, I've been hearing that Office is doomed." (3) Paul Gibler of ConnectingDots, an e-marketing consultancy, also writes a weblog named PPT - Powerful Presentation Techniques. Good stuff here.

• 08-22-06: One full month without a post? Bad, blogger! BAD! Ow, I just whacked myself with a rolled-up newspaper. Yes, this summer has been bereft of regular postings, but that ends today. (1) Weblogs (e.g., Sooper, Presentation Zen, and others) are noting the references to PowerPoint use within the military in the recent book Fiasco - The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks. (2) Perhaps lawyers have a keener grasp of clear and persuasive communication using technology than do soldiers. (3) SnagIt 8.1 is out. Trust Betsy to know PPT users' needs. Sue Chastain loves the software, as do I. (4) MVP Bill Ryan is venting spleen about the dreaded "PowerPoint Nazi." (5) Edward Tufte is shipping copies of this newest book, Beautiful Evidence. Because you love him so much, you can choose between buying one copy from his website or buying five and saving fifty bucks. As usual, count on NPR for news coverage and Slashdot for blather punctuated by insight. Stephen Few says "Tufte’s latest book is both brilliant and disappointing." (6) Some of the best pairings of images and text you will see this year: Fast Company Slideshows. As you browse through, notice the strong central image and minimal text on the slide. Then notice the notes, bullets or quotation below the image. Now imagine your own slides – and your speaker's notes – appearing the same way. (Your handout, if necessary, will be a printout of the speaker's notes view.) (7) A designer shares his design for a cover slide for an internal presentation at Microsoft. (Click on the image to enlarge.) Very much in line with their "people-ready business" imagery as of late.

• 07-22-06: (1) Like it or not, PowerPoint is the first, last, and only tool of choice for many of its users when it comes to creating images for persuasion or storytelling or explanation. To use it effectively in those endeavors, we'd probably do well to learn from the earliest and best persuaders and storytellers. "How Art Made the World" is a five-part series on PBS airing now. I've yet to catch any of the installments, but I hope to see especially Episodes 3 and 4 in rebroadcast: "The Art of Persuasion" and "Once Upon A Time." (Some episodes are available in BitTorrent, but not all.) (2) "How to Lose the 'ums' and 'ahs' from Your Speech," courtesy of Tim Warner's weblog on English communication, "Mother Tongue Annoyances." (3) Speaking of annoyances, sister MVP Echo Swinford wrote a book entitled "Fixing PowerPoint Annoyances – How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About Your Favorite Presentation Program." Published by O'Reilly, it came out earlier this year to pretty good reviews.

• 07-18-06: Still here, and just now surfacing from client work for a peek around. Here's what I see: (1) PowerPoint in the news: Microsoft to Plug PowerPoint Hole, according to cnet. New virus exploits vulnerability in PPT. Look for a fix on Aug. 8. (2) MS Office in the news: Microsoft Shifts ODF Stance, also from cnet. While you may not be able to "save as PDF" in Office 2007, you can look forward to MS-backed plug-ins that let you save to the Open Document Format. Large organizations such as government offices are taking note. (David Berlind of ZDNet says almost everyone got the initial news wrong.) (3) Popular blogger Anil Dash says "the Ribbon and new UI in Microsoft Office 2007 is the ballsiest new feature in the history of computer software. I've been using Office 12 for about six months, and not only has it made me more productive, I'm struck by the sheer ambition of the changes in this version." Why? Read on. (4) Andrew Ferguson of Bloomberg News recalls the time not so long ago when anti-PowerPoint screeds were all the rage, but then died down. He kicks up the dust again. (4) Every once in a while, I search for "PowerPoint" in Google Video. Suddenly, it seems, free video tutorials for PowerPoint have been appearing there. Looks like very good stuff for beginners. (In contrast, a YouTube search for "PowerPoint" yields less interesting results.)

• 06-30-06: "PowerPoint presentations are the lifeblood of many a corporate meeting," writes Woody Windischman, a Microsoft Sharepoint MVP, in The Sanity Point - Making Sense of the Sharepoint World. "...however, getting a consistent message across has been difficult due to the fact that a PowerPoint deck is one big file. Sometimes, it is one really big file. If you have certain key business information and you want to ensure everyone presenting 'gets it right', your choices have generally been limited to providing a 'standards' deck, containing all of your company’s boilerplate, and making everyone pull out the slides they need; or going through the tedious process of saving each slide or small block of slides individually, then having your users merge each file them into their working presentation. That can be very difficult, not only because you might have many such standard slides, but it means that the user needs to try to copy and paste them from the base presentation into their working copy, or merge many separate files. Finding just the right slide can be a task as well. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just have each slide in its own file, and easily pick and choose which ones you wanted in your presentation? Well, with PowerPoint 2007 and MOSS [Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007], you can! The slide library feature of MOSS allows you to create a repository of standard company slides, that is true, but because it is based on SharePoint, you can do so much more! Your library can include custom fields so you can make it easy to find just the slides you are looking for (e.g. sales figures, company policies, key executive bios), either by search, or by filter." Woody then goes on to illustrate some features of the slide library. My take: although third parties already offer slide management tools (1) (2) (3) (4), my hunch is that slide libraries will be deployed mainly in large organizations. I spent nine years at Accenture; I think I spent three of those years just searching for slides. Getting tens of thousands of coworkers in 42 countries to coordinate their use of slides was difficult. Knowing that you had the latest and greatest version of a slide in hand was nearly impossible.

• 06-27-06: Another reason not to crowd that sales slide with lots of text and images: "When asked, both consumers and advertisers agree that conspicuous white space [definition] around a word or image – epitomized by the design of Real Simple magazine – associate a product with refined taste and upscale qualities," says a release from the University of Chicago Press Journals. "However, in the first paper to trace the history of white space in advertising, researchers from University of Alberta and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana argue that the meaning of this design element comes not from its inherent features, but from relatively recent art history and cultural immersion." The researchers connect the meaning of white space to the minimalist movement in art and architecture and the corporate art movement in the late 1950's. However, they found that even without specific knowledge about its historical origins, both creative directors at major advertising agencies and typical consumers had a similar understanding of the meaning of white space. (Full article: John W. Pracejus, G. Douglas Olsen, Thomas C. O'Guinn. "How Nothing Became Something: White Space, Rhetoric, History and Meaning" Journal of Consumer Research, June 2006) Here's how to remove a photo's background using Photoshop. Here and here are how to do it in PowerPoint, using the "Set Transparent Color" tool, for backgrounds of a single color.

• 06-22-06: (somewhat off-topic) With Bill G's departure imminent, plenty of pundits are scurrying about, attempting to decipher what it all means, but David Pogue nails it. In "Reconsidering Bill Gates" (registration required), he writes: "Not everyone is prepared to reconsider Mr. Gates. If the comments online are any indication, some people remain cynical about the timing of Mr. Gates's exit; Microsoft is not exactly riding high these days. Its stock lately is the lowest it's been in years. The next version of its flagship product, Windows Vista, has been repeatedly delayed and scaled down. Its attempts to extend its reach to other platforms--palmtops, phones, watches, music players--have created, at best, niche markets. Some people won't be happy no matter what Mr. Gates does. They say he made the decision for P.R. value, or even as a plot to boost Microsoft's software sales. "Interesting theory: 'Buy Windows Vista. Do It for the Children,'" writes one critic online. "Ah, Bill, you are a shrewd weasel indeed.") But despite all this, and even despite Microsoft's history, I find it almost impossible to remain cynical about Bill Gates's intentions. I think he's changed. Maybe when you're in your 50's, you start to think about how you'll be remembered. It'd be one thing if he were retiring to enjoy his fortune, or if he were using it to buy football teams or political candidates. But he's not. He's channeling those billions to the places in the world where that money can do the most good. And not just throwing money at the problems, either-- he's also dedicating the second act of his life to making sure it's done right. In fact, when you step back far enough, Mr. Gates's entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale. I know this is going to earn me the vitriol of Microsoft-bashers, but I'll say it anyway: Bill Gates has the money, the brains and the connections to really, truly make the world a better place. I admire him for the attempt. And I believe that if anyone can succeed, he will."

• 06-20-06: (1) "Could Web-based PowerPoint-killers be the last straw for MS-Office?" Not likely, IMHO, at least in the short term. See readers' lively comments after story. (2) "Imagining a Day without Microsoft" I'd prefer not to. (3) "Microsoft Shows Off JPEG Rival" Thanks, but I like PNG over JPEG. (4) "Download direct from most video sites" The upside: Immensely popular video clips from all over the web will now be appearing in many PPT presentations. The downside: ditto.

• 06-18-06: I appreciate my father for many reasons, but two traits stand out for what they mean to me every day. I hope they come through in this blog. I also hope they come through in your presentations. (1) Be smart. Look at all angles. Understand the information, the perspectives, the biases. Everything is grist for the mill. Be well-read, because there are connections between things that we sometimes don't see. (2) Be kind. Some people might not want to embrace your ideas. Or can't. You can explain, you can persuade, and you can let people make up their own minds, but give people the respect, the time, and the space to do so. (Thank you for time and space to brag about a smart and kind man — my dad. Happy Father's day!)

• 06-13-06: (1) PowerPoint blog alert -- this time from the belly of the beast. The PowerPoint & OfficeArt Team Blog comes directly from "the team creating PowerPoint and Office 2007's cool new graphics engine." That team, by name, is Ric Bretschneider, Howard Cooperstein, Mark Jaremko and Shawn Villaron at Microsoft. Of course, the team includes several others whom we MVPs met during the summit last fall. My own recent dearth of posts (sorry!) pales in comparison to theirs (heh!). (2) As we travel down the beta road, there will be bumps. "Microsoft to boot Acrobat out of Office" reports MSNBC. Office 2007 will no longer include an automatic way to 'Save as PDF.' Bummer. (3) Stephen Few is also looking at the beta and shares some valid concerns. (4) Marcia Conner, writing for Fast Company, discusses the importance of balancing visual and verbal information for improved learning in See What I Mean: The Power of Visual Learning.

• 05-30-06: You knew that snarky movie reviews were inevitable for An Inconvenient Truth (blogged here 04-24, the film debuted this past weekend). See, for instance, "PowerPoint Politics," a review of message, messenger, and medium. "As meeting-attendees everywhere know, what works about PowerPoint is the seductive combination of high tech and high touch. That is, someone is in the room with you, as a reassuring stage presence, but he or she has a pretty good arsenal of slam-banging special effects, too. So you are lulled along by the voice, even as you are pulled along by the charts and graphics, in which all the risers and trendlines invariably move in the desired direction. It's hard to argue with a good PowerPoint -- how d'ya think the Pentagon convinced itself that it was going to win in Iraq with so few troops?" Read a fuller discussion over at Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen. More film reviews over at Metacritic.

• 05-26-06: (1) Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 is now available for public download and preview. Those of you in the US with an office computer that has the next three days free might want to start downloading the beta right before you skip out early today. (2) Jensen Harris, Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office "user experience" team, writes an outstanding blog about the user interface in Office.

• 05-24-06: Good storytelling involves good stories. (1) StoryCorps is a "nationwide project to instruct and inspire Americans to record one another's stories in sound." Also per their website, the project is modeled "in spirit and in scope" after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, through which oral-history interviews with everyday Americans across the country were recorded. Project partners include the Library of Congress and National Public Radio. Project leaders and participants were interviewed on the radio yesterday and offered ideas for prospective interviewers and interviewees alike. See, for example, some tools you can use to generate interview questions. If you are involved in gathering or presenting the stories of others, check this stuff out. (2) Let's say you've recorded a story electronically, be it audio or video, but digital nonetheless. You have some digital photos and/or video clips to assemble with the recording to make a PowerPoint presentation. You've had past problems integrating movie and sound files into PowerPoint, and more problems emailing the results. You use PFCMedia and PFCExpress to cure those ills. You are the next Ken Burns. (See 12-27-05 post about the "Ken Burns effect" in PPT.)

• 05-22-06: (1) News section: Have you ever wanted to create an image for your presentation which looks like a scan of a genuine newspaper article but contains a headline, date, and body of your choosing? Behold The Newspaper Clipping Generator, free from Fodey.com, which also supplies The Movie Clapper Board Generator and more. Browse through hundreds of image generators at The Generator Blog. (2) Comics section: Edward Tufte ain't such a toughie. Sure, he continues to be cited as a point of inspiration for Unsexy Graphics for Business Intelligence, but you probably didn't guess he has a comical side. (3) Weather, sports, and dining sections: Despite rain and high winds, a big gaggle of us runners completed the RiteAid Cleveland Marathon yesterday. At 4:23:09, it was neither my fastest nor slowest among the ten or so I've done in as many years. The best part was training with my friend Paul Freeman in recent months and accompanying him during the later miles of the race. The second best part was lunch and dinner: a steak at home, another steak at a pub, several side dishes, a few beers, and a pint of ice cream. Next time, I should just go ahead and invest in a cow.

• 05-19-06: (1) A shining example of the value of public dialog on the internet: Mitch Gallant of JavaScience Consulting is a fellow Microsoft MVP for security and describes in detail his experiences with employing a storyboard approach for DVD creation using PowerPoint and Photo Story 3. Other MVPs add to the conversation. With DVD authoring and distribution on the rise, this is timely, authoritative, and helpful stuff. Gotta love that PowerPoint newsgroup. (2) Another good example: from Lana Johnson, University of Nebraska Lincoln, comes Presentation Graphics Do's and Don'ts. It not only discusses basic design concepts and guidelines well, but also stands as a great demonstration of how to share your script as well as your slides to produce better context and understanding. I wish more presentations posted on the web were displayed this way. (3) Yet another good example: Alan Levine, instructional technologist, reports in his CogDogBlog about one presentation technique that I would love to try sometime soon. He writes, "Less a report than being a bit goofy, I arrange for my presentation to be interrupted by a cell phone call (has that ever happened to anyone else?) - where I am trying to handle a crashed server situation with someone at the other end – who turns out to have the name 'Mom'." Summary post "Presentation Interruptus" here, full post with transcript here. I have a hunch that Levine and I share fond memories of Bob Newhart's classic telephone comedy. (4) Final good example for today: the blog of Alan Hoffler, director of MillsWyck Communications. "Your message and other things you say" offers some terrific posts, including the thoughtful "But we WANT bullet points."

• 05-10-06: (1) "I've been planning on writing quite a treatise about Keynote," writes psychologist and blogger Les Posen, "but a few events told me I'd better throw some preliminary ideas together for a blog entry. The essence of this entry is the independent observations of several Keynote users, including myself, that the application has an ineffable quality about it that brings out the creativity in its users." Without a doubt, Les has consumed all the important posts about Keynote versus PowerPoint so that you and I don't have to. His digestive tract has thusly spurted: "Just what is it about Keynote that is changing the way people present? For the better!" When you've flushed through that article, swirl around the other corners of his log; many other posts related to presentations are either clinging around or have left their skid marks. (2) Happy belated birthday to Freud.

• 05-07-06: Do you own a Moleskine? Me neither, but many seem to adore their personal non-digital assistants. I can see the attractions: a rich and storied past, an aura of artsy bohemia, and instant-on functionality. One could say the same about a beret. But this option might sway me: the Story Board Notebook. "Each page consists of a sequence of storyboard frames for drawing mini-stories. The first half of the book has two frames per page - the last half has four frames per page along the left side, with room to write text to the right of each frame. A great productivity tool to help create graphic and narrative depictions." An alternative: make your own.

• 05-03-06: Internet Explorer 7, just now in its Beta 2 release, will offer tabbed browsing, a feature long enjoyed by users of Mozilla Firefox. But have you ever tried tabbed presentation browsing? This is something I have enjoyed doing for years. Here's how: a) draw shapes like tabs (or boxes or ovals or whatever autoshape you desire) along any edge of your slide and label them with the titles of the various sections of your presentation, b) for each tab shape, choose Slide Show > Action Settings > Mouse Click > Hyperlink to > Slide ... > then select the first slide of that particular section, c) copy these tabs onto each slide you would like them to appear, d) test all your tabs in Slide Show view before calling it a day. This is a great way to make your delivery nonlinear, interactive, and customizable to the viewer's needs. By the way, Redmond would love your participation in the beta test of IE7.

• 04-24-06: "His Powerpoint presentation ... was superbly done--the best I have ever seen either on this or any topic." "He has some dazzling graphics, and uses Powerpoint as it ought to be used." (source) Also, "'this presentation is a life-changing experience' ... delivered with mesmerizing gusto, an onstage combination of the 'Nutty Professor' and an evangelical minister wielding a laser pointer and well-timed jokes." (source) Who is this presentation rock star? You can call him Al. The name of his presentation-turned-major motion picture is An Inconvenient Truth. The movie comes out in May. (The original presentation was authored in Keynote; Gore sits on Apple's board.) (Update: Kottke has a link to a Google video of the presentation.)

• 04-21-06: There were 235 slides in the deck, there was a $235 million award. Coincidence? Judge for yourself.

• 04-20-06: How do complex graphics for your organization come into being? Do you think you could use some help from the pros? There are pros? Yes. A small but growing world of professionals involved in helping others bring information and ideas to visual life are online. Start at VisualPractioner.org and learn what these folks do and how they do it. Also, search on phrases like "visual facilitation," "graphic facilitation," and "visual practitioner" throughout the web. (As you see their samples, you'll no doubt agree that some of these complex images have no business being projected onto a screen due to sheer density; whenever I create such graphics, I strongly urge my clients to supply these in print.) Considering doing these graphics yourself? Check out this book. Its author is Stephanie Krieger, who writes the wonderful blog Arouet.net.

• 04-18-06: (1) Found a terrific resource for free sound files: The Freesound Project aims to create "a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps," etc., all released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Freesound focuses only on sound, not songs, so a PowerPoint presentation specialist looking for, say, steady raindrops with an occasional rumble of distant thunder, will find exactly what he or she wants in short order. (2) Some are claiming that Office 2007 might be shipped in 2007 and not in late 2006 as previously announced. As recently as March, Microsoft said that is not true. As a beta tester of PPT 2007, I encourage Redmond to take all the time they need to make stuff as bug-free as possible. A ship date carries vastly different importance to a shipper versus a shippee. Lots of folks have liked previews of Office 2007 so far, but the real test happens when what's shipped hits the fans.

• 04-13-06: (1) New addition: Shawn Toh (also known as "Tohlz" in various online communities) joins the ranks of Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals for PowerPoint. PowerPoint Heaven is the website; The Art of PowerPoint-ing is the blog. Animations are his thing. Shawn, a student in Singapore, is our youngest PPT MVP and filled with that youthful vigor that some of us would like to see bottled and sold at retail. (2) New edition: Edward Tufte recently mailed me the second edition of his PPT essay. It now sports the amended title "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" and weighs in at 31 pages, up from 24. The essay will appear in Tufte tome number four, Beautiful Evidence, due in May. If you're wondering whether the toughie has softened, a glimpse at section titles like "PP Slide Formats for Paper Reports and Computer Screens Are Ridiculous and Lazy" should remove any doubt. When my copy of the earlier version winnows its way out of the reading pile it's hiding under, I will compare the two and report back. (3) Another new edition: Cliff Atkinson reports that a second edition of Beyond Bullet Points is in the planning stages. New material will incorporate feedback from the first edition, coincide with the forthcoming PPT 2007, and include other ideas. Have one? Tell Cliff.

• 04-11-06: (1) Office Live: Microsoft is offering MS Office Live Basics for free, both during and after its beta test. Two higher levels of subscription -- Live Collaboration and Live Essentials -- will cost $30/month after beta. The basic package includes domain registration, email address administration, web page creation, and other tools. The catch? Ads. The target? Small businesses. The vision? Extend the brand, lay the foundation for web services, etc. Should be interesting to watch this develop. (2) PowerPoint Live: Rick Altman is offering a free pass to PPT Live 2006. The pass, an $825 value, plus US/Canada roundtrip airfare, will be the reward for the winner of the PPT Template Design Contest for this year. (3) Bill and Melinda Live: today on Oprah. The catch? Ads. The target? Families and kids, and the schools they contend with. The vision? Standing up for change in the US educational system. Yes, this trio of billionaires includes the world's most famous dropout, but other tech titans are much less charitable to our nation's students.

• 04-05-06: I'm back from Paris, filled with a hearty joi de vivre. My hosts, my students, and the city itself could not have been more hospitable (except for the million people in the street rioting and burning things, but they and I kept largely to ourselves). (a) The two days of my "PowerPoint as a Powerful Communications Tool" workshop went very well, I was told. It was a combination of lecture, in-class hands-on work, and homework. On the second day, attendees gave presentations demonstrating the skills they learned. (b) While I was assured all attendees were conversant in English, some of their laptops were not. Have you ever navigated around the interface of an application you know like the back of your hand but in a language not your own? It's eye-opening. Example: for French-language PPT, while in slide show mode, you do not type "b" for "black screen," you type "n" for "noir." (c) Get a remote control slide advancer with a laser pointer. It doesn't even have to have mousing capabilities. Mine has four buttons: forward, back, black, and laser pointer. And that's all most presenters will ever need. (d) It is never enough to just teach techniques, menus and commands. We spent time on communication strategy. Why should you care about storytelling or information design? How do you engage an audience? When should you use bullets? (e) More than I suspected, people are receptive to the concept of publishing a well-annotated speaker's notes printout as a handout. You know you've made a connection when your client says, "Oh, we could have SO used that technique on this project we just finished..."

• 03-31-06: Do you know the six sloppy speech habits to avoid? According to Diane DiResta of DiResta Communications, Inc., a communication skills consultancy, they are: 1. Non-words, such as "um" and "you know." 2. Up-talk, or that rising, singsong inflection at the end of sentences, making each one sound like a question. 3. Grammatical errors. 4. Sloppy speaking such as slurring or mispronouncing. 5. Speed talking. 6. Weak speak, or those wimpy watered-down words like hopefully, maybe, kind of, etc.

• 03-27-06: Bonjour from the Hotel Opera Richepanse in Paris, where I am preparing to help lead a PowerPoint workshop to a multinational group this week. This is my first time here, and I am thrilled. My host is Axios, which helps design and manage philanthropic programs to advance health care in developing nations. HIV/AIDS and cancer are two Axios specialties. 380 institutions in 81 countries are involved in the Axios donation and access programs, a unique achievement. What is not unique, however, is the method through which their story has been told. (Bullet points galore, but a great photo at the end.)

• 03-23-06: Freestyle PowerPoint at SxSW 2006 for fun and competition: BattleDecks! The rules? Competitors have 5 minutes to present on a topic. The order of the topics has been randomly selected in advance. The slides are just random. Three judges score competitors from 0 to 10 in flow, gesture, jargon, credibility, and getting through all the slides. Top two scorers compete in a final battle. "The fun was in watching presenters squirm through explaining nonsensical pie charts and ridiculous clip art," wrote the Star-Telegram. "Blogger George Kelly handily won for his absurd presentation on mobile applications for pets. Kelly drew praise for barely missing a beat when a slide of Tom Cruise popped up." Photos here and here; postgame podcast here.

• 03-20-06: Checking in with Flickr ... (a) Long before you take the stage, learn about your presentation environment, then plan accordingly. In the battle of projector versus sunlight, sunlight usually wins. (b) That snapshot belongs to the "Death by PowerPoint" photo pool at Flickr. It has 13 photos as of today, including this one, the self-styled "Best PowerPoint Slide. Ever." Worthy of a smirk at best. My humor leans more toward Kottke's Perfect PowerPoint slide. (c) Also of note, there are now almost 500 Flickr photos tagged with "PowerPoint." Some are backgrounds, some are presenters, most are images of slides. With the image annotation and discussion capabilities of the website, I foresee more presentation/slideshow publishing happening there, although no one seems to be taking full advantage of it yet. Will you be the first?

• 03-16-06: (1) Another presentation expert has joined the blogging party: Troy Chollar of TLC Creative started the new year with a new diary entitled The PowerPoint Blog. (I like the personal touches and photos, Troy. Hope you helped Lance Armstrong out with the schmutz on his jeans.) That makes about a dozen or so people blogging on this topic. I don't count -- or count on -- those few which seem to have started well, but lapsed into inactivity. (2) One active PPT blog is Maniactive, by Laura Bergells. She reports that Google "inadvertently released financial information during its analyst day. The company mistakenly included notes from an internal strategy meeting in a PowerPoint presentation provided to analysts. Ooops! Google tried to "undo" the damage by taking down the presentation, but by then, it was too late. Leaked news spreads fast. Stories and speculation on the leak flooded the internet." Heh. Privacy cuts both ways, eh, Google? (3) Andy Goodman specializes in communications for cause-oriented organizations. His recent book Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes is available online, but you can get a peek at a presentation of it here.

• 03-14-06: Along similar lines as Wurman but with far more approachable results, Gapminder.org seeks to improve the world through better visualization of data about global health, wealth, education, and development. Lots of free downloadable presentation material here. (Good use of Flash, too. One audience member at my presentation last week sought my opinion of the use of Flash within PowerPoint. I replied that, just like most all other bells and whistles often attached to data design, you should have some compelling reasons to use it. Among the best ones are: it aids in understanding, it has a time/sequence component, your boss might fire you if you don't.) (via BBP Discussion Board)

• 03-11-06: TED went to bed weeks ago, but I'm just now catching up on what went on at the "Technology Entertainment Design" conference. David Pogue of the New York Times writes, "It's four days of talks, each no longer than 18 minutes. The speakers are either famous, pioneers in their industries or just fascinating people--and often all three...They addressed climate crisis, the depletion of fossil fuels, African AIDS, third-world poverty, human-rights violations, the spiral of West-Islamic global hatred, lethal viruses, and other cheery subjects...The organizer of TED makes no bones about the fact that he wants this astonishing network of speakers and audience members to throw their expertise, brainpower and connections behind efforts to address the world's problems." Check out the Technorati tags. The photo galleries of previous TEDs display some great shots of smart people and their audiovisual aids. See for instance the TED 2005 album (click on the dropdown menu to any day's set of speakers) or visit the Flickr photos of TED 2006. Conference founder Richard Saul Wurman headed the event from until 2002, but went wild, sometimes too wild, in stretching conventional notions of information design with his 2000 publication of Understanding USA. See examples here and here and here.

• 03-09-06: Greetings to those coming here via my eMarketing seminar today with COSE and NEOSA at the campus of Hyland Software in Westlake, OH. Because of the confidential nature of some of the slides contained in my presentation, I am not posting it here for anonymous downloading. Rather, if you would like an electronic copy, just send me an email requesting such and I will reply. Write to me at tony(at)tonyramos.com. Thanks!

• 03-06-06: Time again for a peek at other organizations' design guidelines for PowerPoint presentations and other communications. Check out BAE Systems, Cargill, Case Western Reserve University, Diebold, Reuters, and US Robotics. Ask yourself whether your own design efforts help reinforce an established brand identity. Do they reinforce any negative stereotypes about boring bullet points? Do you think any of these corporate templates do?

• 03-04-06: March fourth, one of the few dates on the calendar that sounds like a military directive. Appropriately enough, today finds me in Irving, Texas working on a defense contractor's proposal. I'm learning about many different military commands (PACOM, EUCOM, CENTCOM, etc.) not normally part of my world. As an MS Office user, you might be interested to know that Word 2003 has over 1,500 commands according to this story from Scripps Howard. How commands are organized, in many ways, means a lot.

• 02-28-06: One novel way to make everyone look forward to each of your bullet points: give them their own personality. If you've ever seen The Colbert Report segment called "The Word," you know how it's done. (Would you be daring enough to try this? Not me, unless lots and lots of rehearsal was involved.)

• 02-27-06: Speakcast.com is a website of audio and video lessons on public speaking. Although geared toward the needs of those who speak to news media, it also contains great tips for presenters or any kind. The lessons are short, pithy, and updated frequently. TJ Walker heads Media Training Worldwide, the company behind the website. See his weblog for interesting tips about taping your notes to the floor or how to speak within a tight timeframe.

• 02-25-06: If you use video within PowerPoint for educational purposes, your resources just expanded in a very big way. Red Herring reports: "Search giant Google’s efforts to become a major supplier of video content over the Internet got a big boost Friday when it announced a pilot program with the U.S. National Archives to make historic movies and documentaries available online for free."

• 02-24-06: Found Magazine finds interesting stuff -- words and images, mostly -- and posts and publishes their finds to a curious public. For a certain subset of that public, however, they're hitting the road with Dirty Found and taking some slides with them. LA Weekly writes, "Jason Bitner and Davy Rothbart, the two litter-ature scavengers behind Found Magazine — the journal of tossed-off beautiful/funny/sad missives — get loads of submissions they prefer not to include: photos of people’s private parts, dirty doodles and inelegant smutty prose. They’ve assembled a whole bunch of it for Dirty Found, an adult-only PowerPoint presentation that should tell you more about your fellow human beings than you may want to know." That's OK. I can guess.

• 02-21-06: Will you be in downtown Cleveland, Ohio on March 9? Come see me and two others give a joint presentation on eMarketing. "Electronic marketing is an effective and accessible method in getting your message to your target marketing," says our promo. "This session will explore the design and strategies used in websites, PowerPoint, RSS, and blogs - electronic mediums that most companies have in their current marketing mix. Attendees will be provided solid examples of how they can improve their current electronic marketing mix and understand new mediums that are now available." The other speakers are Robert Felber of Felber & Felber Marketing and Jason Therrien of thunder::tech.  This free event is sponsored by NEOSA, the Northeast Ohio Software Association. NEOSA is part of COSE, the small business division of the Greater Cleveland Partnership and one of the nation’s largest metropolitan chambers of commerce. It serves nearly 16,700 member companies. (Also from COSE is a webcast tomorrow at 11 AM Eastern entitled "Delivering Effective Presentations and Using PowerPoint" by Dana Kachurchak, President of Presentation Dynamics.)

• 02-16-06: It's official. Microsoft will call its upcoming suites of office desktop applications "2007 Microsoft Office System." Suite choices include "Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007," "Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007," "Microsoft Office Professional 2007," "Microsoft Office Small Business 2007," "Microsoft Office Standard 2007," "Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007," and "Microsoft Office Basic 2007." All but the Basic suite will include Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. (BusinessWeek, however, points to sources who say Office 2007 may be a bit delayed because, among other things, "problems with new graphics programs in the PowerPoint presentation software cause some instability.") Meanwhile, Redmond also announced the launch of the beta availability of Microsoft Office Live, a range of internet-based business services aimed at the small business community. 

• 02-14-06: (1) Speaking of new versions of PowerPoint-oriented blogs, Ellen Finkelstein (of Ellen's Knowledge Blog) has launched the PowerPoint Tips Blog. It contains the same tips as on the previous site, but now organized by date. RSS feeds are available from both. (2) Will Microsoft "Office 12," as it has been called internally and externally during development, be officially dubbed "Office 2007" soon? CNET seems to believe so. (3) FontShop believes a typeface can be as expressive as the human face. After seeing their current and smartly executed promotional campaign, I agree. The online font resource asks designers what font they are, and designers show the world. (4) Coastal Carolina University offers a lesson in interactive PowerPoint presentations via creation of a Jeopardy-style game show.

• 02-09-06: (1) Once again, apologies for the dearth of posts. The new year has been good to my bottom line, but bad to my written lines. Happily, the task named "Fix and run WordPress version of blog" is beginning to fight its way back to the top. Stay tuned. (2) Type came into being because of print. Typefaces carry a legacy of certain characteristics because of this. As we read and write for the monitor and projection screen these days, take heart that some people are working very hard to make type easier to read onscreen. Leading the pack is Bill Hill.

• 01-24-06: Right now, a team of engineers, scientists, ex-government people and I are assembling a proposal to be presented to leaders of a small but wealthy nation at the end of the month. My contribution is to create the infographics for both print and screen. After days of writing and drawing, we learned in a meeting last week that the key decision makers want the presenters to abstain from using PowerPoint. Instead, a few 11-by-17 inch informational graphic prints would suffice for the oral delivery, while a 3-ring binder containing a graphics-rich Word document would be the leave-behind. Eyes in the meeting room turned to me. We knew that winning would be contingent upon our collective abilities in visual thinking. "I want to look at it and get it in two seconds," said someone in the room. "Can you do that, Tony?" I looked at our proposal manager. He looked at me. We smiled. We smiled because we had a strategy that has worked before and hopefully will work again. Fast forward to this week. My graphics are coming along. We're far from winning this proposal - we won't know their decision for weeks - but now is a great opportunity to bring together certain themes which this blog usually revisits. 1. Story is everything. Each of our big graphics tells two short stories. The first tells how we'll help get the prospect to their desired state. The second shows what is happening once they get there. Small multiples of cartoon-like pictograms tell the first story. Annotations and call-outs around a large central image tell the second one. You read the first in linear fashion across the top, then browse around the second one in the middle. 2. Treat ink like gold. Eddie Tufte is right on this count. I remove every unneeded pixel. Every line and letter and image has to be working really hard. No chartjunk. Very little decoration. All elements must support the message. 3. Create, then re-create. Especially in a work group, pride of authorship must succumb to the overall objectives. I've lost count of revisions. And yes, many hours of work can be for naught when concepts get shelved and new strategies emerge, but our goal centers on the audience and the message. We agree on this. We press on. 4. Good writing matters. Not only is it clearer to understand, but removing jargon and unneeded words gives you more space for images, something which comes at a premium on a single sheet of paper. It's a win-win situation. 5. Others do it better. On the back wall of my cubicle are printouts of what I consider to be some of the best infographics available on the web. xPlane, blogged here before, offers a page of cases and portfolio pieces from which I have unashamedly drawn inspiration. I especially like their use of the circular callout balloon and the isometric 3D view, two techniques you'll see a few times in their work. These people are masterful. CEO and founder Dave Gray is finding lots of new fans for his "lenses" on visual thinking over at Squidoo. I urge you to check out all of the modules which comprise his "visual thinking school." It's a winning strategy. 6. If you are a national leader and you appoint your brother as Minister of Finance, there is a chance he may misspend $15 billion on himself. Trust me on this one.

• 01-09-06: Bear with me, folks. While the new blog worked for a while there, my futzing with RSS (and coding in PHP and MySQL) has completely screwed it up. I do believe Wordpress 2.0 is good software, and comes with a very helpful community of users, but it's a tough row to hoe. Especially for someone who programs at about a kindergarten level. I will have to escalate this issue to the eleven year olds.

• 12-31-05: Big change. It's high time this weblog started acting like one. Please add or edit your bookmark to: http://tonyramos.com/weblog/

• 12-30-05: Group Program Manager for Microsoft PowerPoint Brendan Busch recently started the Microsoft Office PowerPoint blog over at blogs.msdn.com. His first post discusses upcoming charting features, and reader comments follow. Other MS blogs include coverage of what's next in Excel, Word, the Office user interface, Office XML formats, and OneNote. See what other developers are saying about PowerPoint. Some nifty tips are in there, such as Noah Horton's use of Ink in PowerPoint. 

• 12-29-05: Consider the "elevator speech" -- that short, frequent, but crucial presentation we all give and receive while riding elevators or waiting in lines. Andy Craig and Dave Yewman of Fair Share Consulting say that executives who cannot, in 30 seconds, clearly explain what they do and why anyone should care miss out on sales, on funding, on alliances, and on business. These Texas-based advisors employ video to help businesses develop clear, concise, compelling elevator speeches. Their website, ElevatorSpeech.com, plays an introductory video that demonstrates with authority the success of brevity and clarity. (Not surprising to find they link to FightTheBull.com, the companion website to the book "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots." The freeware BullFighter jargon eliminator was blogged here in mid-2003.) And with respect to visual media, can you explain what you do and why anyone should care in, say, one slide?

• 12-27-05: Here in the midst of the holiday season, it's a good time to take stock of all those photos and images from the past year. If you're creating the annual family, company, or organizational retrospective in PowerPoint 2002 or 2003 this week, consider incorporating the "Ken Burns effect": a) insert image onto slide, b) resize the image to a measurement larger than the slide itself, but not more than, say, twice the width of the slide, c) apply an animation path to the image to simulate the motion of a panning camera, d) combine it with grow/shrink emphasis effects (and animate those effects "with previous") to simulate zooming, f) enter and exit image with fade animation for even more dramatic flair, and, g) make sure file isn't too large before sending it out. (No PPT02 or 03? Try Microsoft Photo Story 3, a WinXP-compatible free download.)

• 12-20-05: Speaking of book publishers, their output on the topic of PowerPoint continues. Fellow PPT MVP Geetesh Bajaj wrote Cutting Edge PowerPoint for Dummies. It was released this month. Also, new MVP Julie Terberg recently co-authored Perfect Medical Presentations and won the British Medical Association's annual book prize in the Basis of Medicine category. Echo Swinford's Fixing PowerPoint Annoyances will be out soon, but you can get a taste here. Educators and VBA users should check out David Marcovitz's Powerful PowerPoint for Educators. Cliff Atkinson has a companion book list for Beyond Bullet Points. And Oxford University Press sent me a review copy of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know About Making Speeches and Presentations. I've touched on other PowerPoint and presentation-related books here before, but Geetesh does a good job of noting some PPT books in various categories. He adds that "the most magical ingredient in any presentation is imagination - so just reading a book is not enough." Write on.

• 12-19-05: (1) Well, that was a nice week last week. Did some work for both old clients and brand new ones. Received a phone message from a book publisher interested in my input. Got a large and long-overdue receivable deposited. Met some very creative people at a holiday party, including a cartographer. Wrote a short bio for an upcoming panel presentation I'll be doing in the spring. Turned down an offer for a full-time job. If you're a small business and/or self-employed like me, these are the weeks you live for. (2) Robert Lane of Aspire Communications (noted here on 09-27-05) would like your help as a beta tester for his upcoming "Relational Presentation" e-course. He writes, "Currently we are beta testing an e-lesson that shows several very useful techniques used commonly with Relational Presentation. This lesson will be available for general viewing by mid-January, 2006. If you would like to beta test it now and give us feedback, send us a note to beta@aspirecommunications.com and we'll be glad to add you to the list." Open this link, then find the invisible link below the paragraph. This module demonstrates the creation of his popular "Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?" presentation. Adds Robert, "We’re still working on the video components, but the lesson plan, as is, highlights some important techniques. All I would ask is feedback on effectiveness and design."

• 12-12-05: We know how to find PowerPoint files on the internet. Now comes an advancement in finding and viewing presentations in their full multimedia glory. Mediasite.com (from Sonic Foundry) has recently started offering "free, on-demand access to a steadily growing database of online technical content created by hundreds of experts." I've peeked at only a few, but each worked fine, streaming audio and video of the presenter and the corresponding slide into a single non-resizing window. No downloads or plug-ins were required for my WinXP system. The 7,000+ rich media presentations are searchable by title keyword; many reside at educational and government domains. Most viewed presentations include ones on medicine, distance education, and management. Have something to offer? Mediasite invites you to submit a presentation and "share your expertise with the world." And if you're a regular presenter, Mediasite may be a good resource for not just content, but also cues on speaking styles, slide design, and what makes an effective presentation. For instance, check out the presentation of Italian designer Alberto Alessi. Great images and good content, but too bad he lacked: a) an external controller for his laptop, b) a lavalier microphone, c) some cough drops.

• 12-06-05: Maybe for the sake of history, or novelty, or simply by the mere fact that it wasn't too long ago, the original deck of 23 PowerPoint slides outlining the idea that would become Google is still available to view online. Who knew this would portend such fear and loathing?

• 12-02-05: Present with a storyline, and you will win. Last night's episode of that popular NBC product-placement show, The Apprentice, featured two teams competing with their productions of mock commercials for Microsoft Office Live Meeting. One team crammed too much content into too little time, forcing them to resort to, among other things, quickly flying boxes of small text and complex visuals with little context. The other team's commercial focused on people suffering from a problem, finding a solution, and enjoying the benefits. Guess who got fired. 

• 11-30-05: The more you forget, the better your memory? Edward Vogel and others at the University of Oregon conducted a study of brain activity in subjects performing a task in which they were asked to 'hold in mind' some visual objects and to ignore other objects. The research revealed significant variation between individuals in their ability to keep the irrelevant items out of awareness. "Until now, it's been assumed that people with high capacity visual working memory had greater storage but actually, it's about the bouncer – a neural mechanism that controls what information gets into awareness," Vogel said. In other words, awareness is not determined only by what we can keep 'in mind' but also by how good we are at keeping irrelevant things 'out of mind'. This also implies that an individual's effective memory capacity may not simply reflect storage space, as it does with a hard disk. It may also reflect how efficiently irrelevant information is excluded from using up vital storage capacity. (Link) So what does this mean for your slide designs? Just more proof of first principles: show your audience only what is relevant; help them detect patterns, keep distractive objects to a minimum.

• 11-29-05: (1) "Today, anyone with a digital camera and a personal computer can produce and alter an image," writes Christine Rosen in an article titled "The Image Culture" for The New Atlantis. "As a result, the power of the image has been diluted in one sense, but strengthened in another. It has been diluted by the ubiquity of images and the many populist technologies (like inexpensive cameras and picture-editing software) that give almost everyone the power to create, distort, and transmit images. But it has been strengthened by the gradual capitulation of the printed word to pictures, particularly moving pictures—the ceding of text to image, which might be likened not to a defeated political candidate ceding to his opponent, but to an articulate person being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language. Americans love images. We love the democratizing power of technologies—such as digital cameras, video cameras, Photoshop, and PowerPoint—that give us the capability to make and manipulate images. What we are less eager to consider are the broader cultural effects of a society devoted to the image." In a stunning display of originality, Rosen then proffers Tufte and McNealy to buttress a section subtitled "The Closing of the PowerPoint Mind." And while I agree that the power of the printed word may be diminishing in society, criticisms of technology's detriment to discourse have been with us since telegraphese. (2) Instead, let us celebrate the proper and powerful pairing of text with images: HistoryShots. I bet Tufte would approve. (both via Design Observer)

• 11-22-05: As we head into the frenzy of retail madness season, here are are few pointers for computer shoppers. (a) Microsoft has not yet specified what will be the minimum system requirements of its upcoming Windows Vista operating system (and won't know until summer 2006 at the earliest), but does offer some general guidelines for now: "512 MB of RAM or more, a dedicated graphics card with DirectX 9.0 support, and a modern, Intel Pentium- or AMD Athlon-based PC." (Link) My guess is that minimum requirements for Office 12 would be similar. Might be wise to increase the RAM and hard drive sizes to what you can reasonably afford, especially if you're incorporating sound and video in your work and play. (b) If you simply must shop on "Black Friday," DollarHacker has a few tips. (c) Meanwhile, over at Google, their Froogle shopping search engine added a new feature to let people find products and services for sale in bricks-and-mortar stores near locations they designate. (via SearchEngineWatch)

• 11-18-05: (1) Microsoft just released Office 12 Beta version 1. Let the fun begin. (Hope they improve the automated checking of grammar and spelling from previous versions.) (2) Seth Godin shows you How to Run a Useless Conference. "Think about the most powerful learning moments you’ve ever had. My guess is that they didn’t take place in a darkened meeting room."

• 11-15-05: "The inability of the American worker to write a good sentence is costing American business good money," writes Gary Beach at CIO. He cites a 2004 report by the National Commission on Writing, which confirms much of what one would expect (e.g., good writing is a threshold skill for employment and promotion, poor writers most likely will not be hired, etc.), but also brings to light how critical the intersection of visual and verbal literacy has become. The report ranks e-mail as "the number-one form of writing in America, followed closely by presentation/visual writing." Find the full report here. (via Knowledge Aforethought)

• 11-14-05: How do you make an effective information graphic? The infographic design process is neatly summarized in a one-page pdf by Dr. Alessandro Segalini of Bilkent University. (via InfoDesign)

• 11-11-05: (1) Our buddy Cliff Atkinson has been making big strides lately with Beyond Bullet Points (blogged here in February). Book sales are good, certification classes are forming, and a high-profile trial was recently won with the help of his methodology. If you weren't one of the 1,200+ who attended the Nov. 3 webcast of "The PowerPoint Storyboard - Unlock the Visual Power of Your Persuasive Story," see the Sociable Media November newsletter for links to a one-hour recording, a pdf version, and other materials. Peek into the Beyond Bullet Points discussion board, too. (2) Bill Gates' slides look like this. (3) C