Tony's PowerPoint Weblog

A weblog about Microsoft PowerPoint, presentations, presentation design, and related items. 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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• 06-24-09: I know. No more apologies. But I did keep my word: "The Presentationist" is up and running. Go here: http://tonyramos.com/blog Real comments, real RSS, etc. Tweetstream on the side too. Thanks.

• 09-25-08: (1) I am back. To the tiny handful still reading this blog, this will be my last apology to you. I have broken my silence because I feel obliged to walk my talk. You expect communications advice from me, and I have not been communicating. (2) On a positive note, I am finally upgrading to a modern blog. It is in the design stage. It will feature RSS, comments, and all the good things blog readers expect today. It will be called "The Presentationist." I hereby call dibs to the name. (3) PowerPoint Live just wrapped up. I was, as before, enlightened and energized. So many of you are doing amazing things in and for this software application that I can't begin to describe them here and now, but the new blog will cover some of this ground. Stay tuned.

• 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) Cliff, Bill. Bill, Cliff.

• 11-10-05: (1) You, my valued reader community, include these smaller communities: my clients and my fellow PowerPoint MVPs. Insert classic double-yolk fried egg Venn diagram here. I was on a conference call with Microsoft and MVPs yesterday, but another phone of mine kept ringing, and I had to step away several times to answer it. I offer my apologies to both my client (good luck on your big presentation today) and my fellow MVPs for not giving full attention and instead being the source of occasional muffled background noise. Some people can hold a phone to each ear at once and still be productive. I have no reason to believe I am one of them. (2) The MVPs welcomed a new member to its community: Julie Terberg. In the past, I have referred clients to her and she to me when our respective plates get full. Geetesh ran an interview of her last year at Indezine. Welcome, Julie. (3) The MVPs heard and discussed the progress Microsoft is making on its way to Beta 1 of Office 12. As others have noted in painstaking detail, get ready for some major changes in your user interface.

• 11-03-05: Can you tell one story in five images? The Flickr group "Tell a Story in 5 Frames" asks two things of you. "The first part is creating and telling a story through visual means with only a title to help guide the interpretation. The second part is the response of the group to the visual story. The group response can take many forms such as, a poetic or prose rendering of the visualization, a critique on the structure of the story, comments on the photograph, or other constructive forms of response. Telling and enjoying stories should create entertainment for the group as well as offer insight into the universal elements that help create a story for an international audience." As you browse through the works, you'll see some clearly get it. Others don't. Don't miss "How to Dismantle an Atomic Snowman."

• 11-01-05: (1)To answer some questions I've received recently: Nope, still alive. Yes, been buried in work. No thanks, I buy pharmaceuticals at the pharmacy. We now return you to your regularly scheduled PowerPoint weblog viewing. (2) Using PowerPoint to Engage Students is a collection of abstracts and (some) links to full text courtesy of the University of Minnesota at Morris (3) "Angles of View" is a series of articles about display technology by Da-Lite (4) Superfactory sells slideshows of popular topics in manufacturing. (5) Engadget shows you how to put your PowerPoint presentation into your iPod Photo or other portable media player via jpegs. (For more impact, consider Impatica.) (6) Is your digital projector bored after business hours? Put it to use at a Guerilla Drive-In.

• 10-14-05: "Most people have the impression that they simply see what is there and do so merely by opening their eyes and looking. Of course, we may look more closely at some things than at others, which is what we ordinarily mean by 'paying attention,' but it probably seems to many people as if we see nearly everything in our field of view. However, many have experiences that seem to contradict the belief that, to one degree or another, we perceive everything in view and that our attention merely permits us to see some things in more detail than others. Almost everyone at one time or another has had the experience of looking without seeing and of seeing what is not there ... Why do we have these experiences if perceiving only requires opening our eyes?" So opens the research report by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock entitled Inattentional Blindness. Their discussion includes important considerations about perception vs. attention and how you can help your audience receive and process your message.

• 10-06-05: Get your thinking caps out. Fellow PPT-blogger Sooper points us to a thesis by Till Voswinckel entitled Presentational Visualization -- Towards an Imagery-Based Approach of Presentation Visuals (pdf). At 153 pages, I will forego my usually thorough reading of an item before blogging about it, but this is clearly something that deserves more than a skimming. After my initial, um, skimming, I get the feeling that the overall dialogue about the pros and cons of slideware in general and PowerPoint in particular will be significantly advanced by this work. Beyond bullet points, indeed.

• 10-04-05: Today's announcement of the teaming of Sun and Google is raising brows and launching browsers in search of what this means, if anything, for the future of office productivity suites. Will OpenOffice mount a challenge to Word, Excel and PowerPoint? Will it be via the Google toolbar? TechDirt, as usual, filters the hype so you and I don't have to.

• 09-30-05: Microsoft's property in Redmond, WA is a large and sprawling place, well-appointed, and not unlike a modern university campus. Likewise, late in the evening, many individual offices are still brightly lit on a drizzing and cool Thursday night. Inside are people typing away at their PCs. Everywhere are coolers containing more free soda pop than you could ever want. It's been a long time since Microserfs was published, but one gets the feeling that there is still a uniquely heady work ethic here. (Followup: Discussion of Office 12 and its support of the PDF file format has been the focus of much talk at Brian Jones' blog ever since the MVP Summit.)

• 09-29-05: PPTLive photos? Betsy snagged some. The illustrious Betsy Weber of TechSmith, makers of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio, has posted her photoset of her San Diego trip over at Flickr. That's me and Steve Rindsberg mugging. Check out Betsy's blog as well. (NeuxPower has a PPTLive photoset from 2004.)

• 09-28-05: PPTLive, Final Day: Since Microsoft unveiled the upcoming Office 12 user interface at PDC, it was ruled that they could share the same sneak peek with the entire PPT Live audience. Much appreciation went around. The bonus is we get to give input and suggest fixes before the product is finally released. See what else is being said and join in.

• 09-27-05: PPTLive, Day three: Whew. (a) What matters most is what you learn after you know it all. Half of me wants to temporarily suspend my Portfolio page from view. The level of sophistication, beauty, simplicity, and harmony with message evident in some of the slides being slung around here simply shames my stuff. I've linked elsewhere to a few of these folks in the past. You can go ahead and find them if you want. I'll be over in the corner quietly reinventing myself. (b) As paradigms go, shift happens. Visit Aspire Communications to see how Robert Lane is putting into practice his own research on relational presentation and visual interactivity via PowerPoint. (c) Power users use power tools. Many are being demonstrated and sold here at the expo (exhibitor links are here), many are inexpensive, and some are simply free. Explore, for instance, the world of PowerPoint add-ins. Lots of add-in users and even some of the creators are all around this week. (d) This week will conclude in Redmond, WA, where we PowerPoint MVPs join other awardees for the Microsoft MVP Global Summit. I'll let you know if the CEO graces us with his dance. (e) Then this fundraising 5K/1mile race that I've helped pull together happens on Saturday. (f) Then my sister Kathy gets married on Sunday at the Hilton in Chicago. (g) Whew.

• 09-26-05: PPTLive, Day two: I am in awe at what one clever Aussie can do with PowerPoint animations. Check out Glen Millar's tutorials at the top of the page at PowerPoint Workbench. Also, Robert Lindstrom and others are blogging this event in greater detail over at Visual Being.

• 09-25-05: PPTLive, Day one: Landed in San Diego early enough to catch a lively opening reception sponsored by NeuxPower, maker of NXPowerLite, a very cool tool. Then spent time with fellow MVPs and Microsoft, seeing what all the buzz was about regarding Office 12. All I can say at this point without violating my MVP nondisclosure agreement is that if you've ever spent time muttering to your screen "Why can't PowerPoint do this, that, or the other thing?...", prepare yourself to have many of those questions be happily answered.

• 09-24-05: BBC News is running a "Have Your Say" column on Microsoft after 30 Years (via Slashdot, where even more people have their say.) If you're like me, you're telling yourself, "Wow. That's a long time. I feel old. Is that gray hair?" Then you get back on track and visit the Microsoft Timeline (yup, Flash required).

• 09-23-05: More link-rich resources, all answering the most frequent PPTers' question: Where can I find images for my presentation? Visit (1) Robin Good (2) Paula Berinstein (3) Office Online (4) your own camera. You cannot overvalue option 4. Little or no cost, little or no copyright issues, your perspective, your story.

• 09-21-05: Are you involved in the business of meetings? Corbin Ball claims to offer "the most comprehensive listing of meeting industry and meeting technology links on the web (nearly 3,000)." Some are generic (CarFax, Dilbert), but many seem interesting and are new to me (One World Presentation Management, LexiconUSA, Unique Venues).

• 09-19-05: What will the user interface of the next version of PowerPoint look like? According to Microsoft's PressPass, it will look like this.

• 09-14-05: Layers of lessons are available from William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand's "Culture Is Not Always Popular," a 2003 presentation to the AIGA National Design Conference. Leaders in graphic design and founders of the excellent Design Observer (noted below previously), the pair posted their words and images about how culture informs design and vice versa. First blush: scroll through the long page to glean the bold, elemental imagery and sparse use of text on their slides. Next, go back to the top and read the content carefully. Third, if you are involved in design in any manner, contemplate their message. Would you agree with them? Fourth, how should the current culture of PowerPoint presentation design make use of these observations? Finally, did their slides walk their talk?

• 09-10-05: Tired of the accusations directed at PowerPoint for causing tragedies small and large? Here is one slide with an animated gif that could have -- and might have -- saved more lives than we know. Go to the bottom of this page and click on "NOAA’s 2004 SLOSH model: Hurricane Pam -- This is the estimated storm surge in the event of slow moving Cat 3 tracking up the Mississippi River. (PowerPoint)" Last year, several government agencies ran a scenario of a fictional Hurricane Pam. More PowerPoint files here, including, appropriately enough, one entitled "Using Technology to Illustrate the Realities of Hurricane Vulnerability." On page 6, the first bullet point reads "A Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane striking greater New Orleans, or any other major inhabited area of coastal Louisiana, would be a disaster of cataclysmic proportion." This was presented in January.

• 09-07-05: Many people offer the general guideline of "seven" (give or take a couple) as that magical, optimal number of bullet points per page, and/or words per line, and/or subsections per presentation, etc. Princeton's George Miller originated the concept of "chunking" as a strategy for making better use of short-term memory for learning and cognition. His landmark paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" was published in 1956 and continues to hold sway, but some have taken it to mean that seven bullet points makes for an optimal slide. Not so. What constitutes a good slide depends on context; read Garr Reynolds on "What is good PowerPoint design?" 

• 09-01-05: Off-topic: Grab your cell phone. Insert a new contact into your address book named "ICE." Then enter the phone number of a family member, friend, or co-worker. So, In Case of Emergency, a rescuer or hospital attendant will know whom to notify. See story at MSNBC. Kudos to the British paramedic who got the idea after the London bombings. Thanks also to Snopes for debunking some ICE myths.

• 08-31-05: (1) Simple rehash. The Washington Post finally gets around to publishing their version of the same old PowerPoint-is-bad article (registration required). (2) Complex rehash. A New York Times piece by Matt Bai entitled "The Framing Wars" recently brought the linguistic concept of framing to the fore, but the topic (and title even) had been covered before. Still, if your job involves advocating or explaining anything, this is instructive reading.

• 08-24-05: (1) The third installment of PowerPoint Live takes place soon. Hope to see many of you there. (2) While there, we might get a peek at what lies ahead in the new version Microsoft Office. (3) Test your understanding of color meanings and the emotions they arouse by playing this game. Or scan some Color Rules of Thumb for more ideas about using color in your presentations.

• 08-16-05: Speaking of tools for school, Classroom Presenter is an interesting application for instructors using the Tablet PC. Developed at University of Washington, Classroom Presenter has a basic goal of providing "an integration of computer generated slides and ink in a manner that allows instructors flexibility in delivery and interaction with the audience," according to its web page. See article "Beyond PowerPoint: Building a New Classroom Presenter" here; free download for non-commercial use is here.

• 08-08-05: It's back to school time for Microsoft. For three reviewers of the new Microsoft Student 2006 DVD (USA Today, PC Magazine and Chicago Tribune), this phrase is a timely description of the latest MS offering for the education market, but for one (Businessweek), it's a prescriptive admonition. While the application does not include Microsoft Office, it was designed to work alone from Office, but perform much better together, adding templates, toolbars and tutorials to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And at $100, there are plenty of other student "essentials" that carry a bigger price tag.

• 08-05-05: There is story. There is data. And then there is the story inside the data. Two websites recently caught my eye because each effectively uses the dimension of time to shape the story inside the data. I often help clients realize that it is not enough to think about color, size, proximity, and x/y coordinates when communicating information visually. Time should be on your side, too. (The downside? Printouts will lack the same effect.) Check out Tim Klimowicz's Flash movie about Iraq War coalition fatalities and Duncan Rawlinson's Quicktime time-lapse screencast of ordinary citizens' contributions to the wikipedia entry for the July 7 London bombings.

• 08-01-05: MVPs: we are few, we are for you. With nearly one half billion installed copies of PowerPoint in existence, and users in the hundreds of millions, Microsoft has so far granted their award of "Most Valuable Professional" to 21 of those pro users for their technical and personal contributions to the PPT community. This year, I am honored to have been named the 22nd Microsoft MVP for PowerPoint. I'll be the first to admit I can't hold a candle to many of the folks in this small group, but what great company to keep. I learn from them constantly. Likewise, the 2,600 MVPs for all 75 Microsoft products and technologies are tremendous resources for you and me both. Check out MVPs.org as well.

• 07-26-05: A special hello to Microsoft employees attending Edward Tufte's one-day course this week in Seattle (July 27 or 28). Have him sign your very own copy of his essay on PowerPoint. And remember the wise words of George Carlin: if you can't beat 'em, arrange to have 'em beaten.

• 07-24-05: Let us celebrate the other iconic business communication tool from our generation that also begins with the letter "p." Read Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes by Greg Beato. A sampling: "In the wake of the Post-it Note’s huge commercial success and enduring popularity, its development is often cited as a classic example of business innovation. Most of the time, though, the tale is synopsized, elided, reduced to a few efficient paragraphs. On the face of it, this is fitting for a product that helped usher in the era of PowerPoint presentations and instant messaging. But the story of 3M engineer Art Fry’s invention is a grand chronicle of post-industrial American enterprise. It encompasses skeptical bosses, last-ditch marketing campaigns, and that old Hollywood crowd-pleaser, 'inherently tacky elastomeric copolymer microspheres.' It deserves a more in-depth telling than it typically gets." (via Kottke)

• 07-22-05: For Richard Mulholland of Missing Link, spam is "information that I didn’t ask for, don’t need, don’t want ... A similar thing happens in most presentations that we attend, the speaker quite literally spams the audience’s attention with information they didn’t ask for, don’t need, don’t want." In a pdf document entitled Attention Spam, Mulholland writes: "Now, as we don’t come equipped with a delete button, we go for the next available option i.e. switching off. Sadly for both the presenter and the audience, once we’ve switched off to the speaker, we don’t necessarily turn back on for the good stuff; we’re too busy thinking about our next meeting…or last night’s roll in the hay. This critical mistake is the single biggest presentation killer. It comes from the belief that the presentation is about the presenter. It isn’t (Sorry for you!). Or it shouldn’t be. It’s all about the audience, what’s important to the presenter may not be (it usually isn’t) important to the audience." He then reviews "some basic rules that we feel will help you develop content that keeps you out of the Attention Spam trap." Spam a lot? Ni!

• 07-15-05: If you seek to gain an audience's trust, new research on the influence of emotional states may hold some keys for you. "Feeling and Believing: The Influence of Emotion on Trust," a recent study at Wharton, confirmed that incidental emotions (emotions from one situation that influence judgment in a following, unrelated situation) affect how willing we are to trust others. For example, the reason you gave someone a large contract may have more to do with how funny the story he told you beforehand was than with his reputation for dependability. The researchers conclude that "despite feeling we are rational beings who make clear, lucid judgments, in reality we all walk around in a sea of emotions that are likely to influence how we act in both business and social contexts." According to Professor Maurice E. Schweitzer, people undervalue the extent to which emotions influence their judgment. Correctly attributing our emotional states can counter the effects of others who are trying to manipulate our feelings. "Good sales people tell jokes and funny stories; they bring little gifts. What they are trying to do is influence people's emotional states."

• 07-12-05: Posting a slideshow on the web? The PPT FAQ addresses the popular ways to display one slide at a time, but I've found greater numbers of thumbnails and storyboards introducing or supplanting online slideshows these days. Two examples: Doc Searls' keynote at Les Blogs 2005 and Greg Linden's skimmable Google Factory Tour slides (original webcast link here). See the size, get a feel, jump to wherever I desire -- I like when an online slideshow lets me do that.

• 07-09-05: Sure, being computer savvy and knowing how to network is good. But knowing the difference between who and whom may be just as important. Sandy Hausman of American Public Radio reports on Grammar for Grown Ups.

• 07-06-05: Handmade text and images married to form some of the most powerful communications you will ever see: Postsecret. What impact would you have if your slides were are strong as the messages here?

• 07-03-05: To make a visually rich multimedia experience out of your next PowerPoint presentation, borrow some lessons from rock and roll. Watching yesterday's Live 8 concert highlights, it wasn't too hard to tell which visual backdrop effects may replicated in PPT without much difficulty. Two examples: black and white photos of the leaders of the G8 nations flashing quickly in repetition as The Who sang "Who Are You?" and slow, vertically scrolling thumbnails of the flags of African nations as U2 played "One." (Link to Live 8 photo gallery.) From years ago, I remember U2, Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads, and Pink Floyd making deft use of big screens, sometimes employing just single still images or words to supplement the music and lyrics. Rent "Stop Making Sense" or "Zoo TV" for more ideas on how to present like a rock star.

• 07-01-05: While on the road (5,290 miles of it) these past few weeks, I had the opportunity to listen to a few segments of various graduation speeches on the radio. Good ones are an excellent resource on many levels. They are examples of good writing and delivery. They are timely and topical. They are compelling. They are entertaining. They teach. A few of this season's most talked about talkers: Steve Jobs at Stanford, George W. Bush at Calvin, and Jon Stewart at William and Mary. For a longer view, start with Humanity.org's "Index of Outstanding Speeches from 1936 to 2005."

• 06-17-05: For once, a dry blogging spell not brought to you courtesy of client work. I am happy to report I am on vacation with my wife and dogs. Thus far, Canadian whippet racing, Colorado mountain cycling, college town coffee breaks, and cross country driving have been the highlights. And allow me one big, fat, blatant plug for Microsoft's Streets and Trips 2005. This is damned good software.

• 06-06-05: The ubiquity of the cameraphone is transforming the traditional role of photography in personal storytelling. In a paper entitled "Emergent Social Practices, Situations and Relations through Everyday Camera Phone Use" presented at the 2004 International Conference on Mobile Communication in Seoul, Daisuke Okabe writes: "Sharing of visual information ... is a more selective and intimate enterprise than sharing of text. Users are still working out the social protocols for appropriate visual sharing, but seem to take pleasure in the adding visual information to the stream of friendly and intimate exchange of opinions, and news. Camera phones enable an expanded field for chronicling and displaying self and viewpoint to others in a new kind of everyday visual storytelling. Camera phones makes ubiquitous visual access to others possible. In other words, the gaze of others is always present as a potentiality, leading to a heightened sense of visual awareness and a growing centrality of images in the ongoing social exchanges of everyday life." Does your cellular phone have a camera? Have you used it to improve your storytelling? You now have no reason not to.

• 06-02-05: If you're the first to the party, you get the pleasure of welcoming those who come next. Ellen Finkelstein joins the growing group of those of us writing a weblog about PowerPoint and related matters. Noted here nearly a year ago, she began distributing PPT tips via RSS. Now, Ellen's Knowledge Blog is available, covering "a wide range of topics related to knowledge, including information, learning, and the brain — in points of view ranging from the technical to the spiritual."

• 05-31-05: Belated Memorial Day greetings to those of you in the United States -- an appropriate time to acknowledge our armed forces' love-hate relationship with PowerPoint. Some links: a collection of quotations about PPT (with many regarding the military); a site for collected presentations for US Army noncommissioned officers; and a caveat about not-quite-redacted PDF documents.

• 05-22-05: It's always encouraging to discover that all over the world, people know that -- and people talk about -- design matters. This double meaning is not lost on Garr Reynolds, who describes himself as a "former salaryman, former Apple employee, jazz musician, branding enthusiast, communications specialist, and design evangelist currently working in Japan as a marketing professor for a local private university." Presentation Zen is his now five-month-old weblog on "issues related to professional presentation design." An example: "Part of a more 'Zen approach' to presenting well, if you will, is learning to give up what you have learned about making presentations in the era of 'PowerPoint Culture.' The first step, then, is to stop letting our history and conditioning about what we 'know' (or thought we knew) inhibit our being open to another way, a much better way of presenting." The zen idea is apt: the best presenters I have ever witnessed exist as one with their audio-visual aids.

• 05-19-05: Another crunch period, another breather. I see people are writing about Cliff Atkinson's book (1) (2) (3) and Edward Tufte's latest long interview (1) (2). Me, I'm writing a letter to my webhost asking why outbound email delivery had been so erratic lately. Is Hypermart home to so many spammers that I'm getting filtered out? Grr.

• 05-11-05: "I am surprised at how few people bother to take notes in meetings," writes Michael Hyatt in the Working Smart weblog. "Those who do sometimes express frustration at how ineffective the exercise seems to be. In this post, I’d like to expound on why I think you should take notes in meetings and then offer a few suggestions on how to do it better." Good ideas follow. My two cents: since presenters frequently offer handouts of presentations instead of encouraging active and mindful note-taking, try to include space for their notes in your handouts. (Are you printing them your Speaker's Notes view? Still give some for space for their notes as well.) It shows you respect their thoughts and expect their interaction. Also, give your audience time to take notes. Cues as simple as a pause or a "let me repeat that" usually triggers the desired response, especially if your points -- and afterthoughts -- do not appear in your handouts.

• 05-09-05: Are you an emotionally persuasive presenter? In the recent and much-discussed article "Change or Die" in Fast Company, writer Alan Deutschman looks at current thinking about change management and includes a few ramifications for presenters: "In Louis V. Gerstner Jr.'s successful turnaround of IBM in the 1990s, he learned the surprising importance of this kind of emotional persuasion. When he took over as CEO, Gerstner was fixated on what had worked for him throughout his career as a McKinsey & Co. consultant: coolheaded analysis and strategy. He thought he could revive the company through maneuvers such as selling assets and cutting costs. He quickly found that those tools weren't nearly enough. He needed to transform the entrenched corporate culture, which had become hidebound and overly bureaucratic. That meant changing the attitudes and behaviors of hundreds of thousands of employees. In his memoir, Gerstner writes that he realized he needed to make a powerful emotional appeal to them, to 'shake them out of their depressed stupor, remind them of who they were -- you're IBM, damn it!' Rather than sitting in a corner office negotiating deals and analyzing spreadsheets, he needed to convey passion through thousands of hours of personal appearances. Gerstner, who's often brittle and imperious in private, nonetheless responded admirably to the challenge. He proved to be an engaging and emotional public speaker when he took his campaign to his huge workforce."

• 05-07-05: "Too many speakers lean on PowerPoint," writes Jim Gray for Toronto's Globe and Mail. "If you want to be a leader, you need to know the rules of talking like one." A summary of his "Lessons from Great Orators from the Past": present a story, present it in context, start slowly, don't rush it, make it personal, and keep technology in its place.

• 05-05-05: What exactly is information design? According to the Society of Technical Communication Special Interest Group on Information Design, one description may be: "The field of information design applies traditional and evolving design principles to the process of translating complex, unorganized, or unstructured data into valuable, meaningful information. The practice of information design requires an interdisciplinary approach which combines skills in graphic design, writing and editing, instructional design, human performance technology, and human factors." Other definitions exist as well. So, asks Doug Talbott, Vice President of Online-Learning, where are all the information designers? Do you fit the definition?

• 05-01-05: (1) Happy May Day, comrades! While I'd rather be outside on this beautiful, sunny Sunday dancing around a Maypole or joining my beloved revolutionary sweetheart in triumphant workers' songs, I am instead deep inside a large and secure building creating graphics for a defense contractor's $500 million proposal to help dismantle Russian ICBMs. Big maypoles, indeed. (2) Speaking of defending against dictats, Donald Norman says he finally got around to finishing his reply to Edward Tufte. Norman's bold essay, "In Defense of PowerPoint," was written in January 2004, but he says it "lay hidden in my file of 'in progress' writings. I didn't finish the essay because I gave an interview with Cliff Atkinson on the topic, but the paper goes into the issues in much more depth than the interview. So, here it is: it may be late, but the lessons are just as relevant as ever." Norman proceeds to pull no punches. An example: "It has become commonplace to rail against the evils of PowerPoint talks ... Edward Tufte, the imperious critic of graphic displays has weighed in with a document entitled 'The cognitive style of PowerPoint,' in which, among other things, he credits poor PowerPoint slides with contributing to disaster with NASA's space shuttle Columbia ... I respectfully submit that all of this is nonsense. Pure nonsense, accompanied by poor understanding of speech making and of the difference between the requirements for a speech-giver, the speech-listener (the audience), and for the reader of a printed document. These are three different things. Tufte—and other critics—seem to think they are one and the same thing."

• 04-29-05: If you're going to pull a PowerPoint prank, make sure the joke ultimately doesn't fall on you. A funny and cautionary tale from the folks at Zug.com.

• 04-25-05: Lost a PPT file? A friend recently pointed me to PowerPointRecovery from Recoveronix. It claims to be a data recovery program for crashed and corrupted PPT presentations. (Haven't needed such a beast lately, knock on wood. It was not so long ago, as you might recall, that crashes were as common as sneezes. The BSOD still lives, though. Check out Daimyo's collection of photos.)

• 04-22-05: Daring Fireball offers a brilliant "Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s 'FAQ' Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia." (via Penmachine). BTW, I've seen this kind of writing presented very effectively in PPT. Show a portion of a press release or news story at the top of your slide, let audience read, then reveal the translation below. Rinse, lather, repeat.

• 04-21-05: So Adobe bought Macromedia. Was it because of fear of Microsoft? John Dvorak thinks so. Or was it so that PDF files could merge with Flash movies and apps? Now that would make for an interesting (and non-PowerPoint) presentation delivery and distribution method. (Discussion at /. and elsewhere.)

• 04-18-05: Scott Rayburn has great insights, and he is happy to share them. "You accumulate a lot of knowledge over three decades. A few big ideas form the foundation, certainly, but it's mostly the small things—tips, techniques, odds and ends—that can improve a speaking style, streamline a presentation, buttress self confidence ... presentation coach is my conversation with you about public speaking. It’s about best practices and breaking through barriers holding you back from making the powerful presentations you want to make."

• 04-12-05: "The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind -- computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind -- creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people -- artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers -- will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys." -- Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, via Tom Peters at ChangeThis. [emphasis mine]

• 04-11-05: Introducing the "Feynman-Tufte Principle": a visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van. Read how writer Michael Shermer explains this new rule in this article from Scientific American.

• 04-07-05: I filled out a time log recently. Nearly 100 hours for one week for one client. Whew. And the rest of the PowerPoint world doesn't stop for you, but keeps chugging along. Some items that almost got by: (1) An April jest about Easter egg erotica inside a Microsoft PowerPoint template, (2) another April doozy -- "PowerPoint Secedes from Microsoft Office" -- courtesy of a new and thus far excellent group weblog called Visual Being, written by and for presentation professionals (many of whom I met at PPTLive), (3) a new presentation venue where you are encouraged to read your screen verbatim, (4) an open-source, web-based alternative to PowerPoint, (5) a corporate presentation coach urges BusinessWeek readers to begin "Saying it with Passion," (6) a (non)magazine that functions both as a work of art and ample evidence businesspeople are not the only PowerPoint hacks, (7) a thoughtful essay at Salon about how information intermediaries like you and me must be vigilant and mindful in adding value to our communications.

• 03-29-05: Three weeks without a blog entry! Ay naku! Please accept my apologies. The bright end of this workload tunnel happens in a little over a week from now. In the meantime, here's a local newspaper's spot-on writeup of David Byrne in Akron.

• 03-08-05: David Byrne's "I Heart PowerPoint" tour is generating press in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Orange County, and elsewhere. I'll be in the audience this weekend when he comes to The Rubber City.

• 03-03-05: Great stuff for instructors. "Active Learning with PowerPoint" is the topic at the University of Minnesota's Center for Teaching and Learning Services. Start with the short video workshop, then dive into the tutorials, downloads and links to resources. (Thanks to Glenna Shaw via the PowerPoint newsgroup.)

• 02-25-05: Expanding on yesterday's news, and in no particular order, here's my list of blogs about presenting with PowerPoint: Cliff's Beyond Bullets, Indezine's A PowerPoint Blog, Robin Good's Masterviews, Sooper's Powerpointless, Andrew May's Weblog, A PowerPoint Blog by Maniactive, Doug Klippert's Unofficial Microsoft Office Stuff, and me. That's eight. And that's good, because in the marketplace of ideas, it doesn't hurt to shop. Know of others? Drop me a note. (Hey Steve, might wanna update the PPT FAQ list.)

• 02-24-05: Victimized by bad PowerPoint? You can get beyond bullet points now. (I did via USPS.) As a reader here, you're familiar with Cliff Atkinson. His new book from Microsoft Press is Beyond Bullet Points, subtitled "Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate, and Inspire." While this sub-phrase sounds inviting, it's no cakewalk. Cliff's methods are rooted in scientific investigation. Taken together, his ideas do not add up to your typical how-to-make-pretty-slides sort of guide. Instead, he offers a fundamentally and systematically different approach to creating PowerPoint presentations. It involves some work, but it is one that works. He and I have talked, most recently at PPT Live, about what current research in cognitive theory and multimedia learning is showing us and how we can apply those findings to our own PowerPoint presentations. (Well, he talks. I listen.) Luckily for us, Cliff has digested the results in this straightforward, easy-to-read book (and blog). We can do this, folks. The alternative is more of the same bad PowerPoint. We all want to get beyond that.

• 02-15-05: "Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation" reports America's finest news source.

• 02-11-05: Interesting resource: Dreamstime. Stock photography for a buck a pop. Even with the great price, still doesn't compare to my favorites: Getty, Corbis and Comstock.

• 02-03-05: Introductory textbooks tell us that pixels are like grains of sand. Small and meaningless alone, but capable of expressing great and simple beauty en masse. Before the next time you arrange pixels for projection, draw inspiration from this master of sand. Awesome and delightful.

• 02-02-05: (1) Busy with multiple clients again. Please accept my apologies for the low activity here. (2) The opposite ends of the PowerPoint fan club are working the tour circuit. David Byrne is swinging by my neck of the woods soon, bringing his "I (Heart) PowerPoint" tour to nearby Akron, Ohio. Meanwhile, Edward Tufte will be in Georgia and Tennessee next with his long-running one-day course on Presenting Data and Information.

• 01-23-05: Rob Griffiths of Macworld likes Keynote 2.0. "Keynote was a strong presentation creation application in its 1.0 release," he writes in his January 21 review." With the new version, it’s become an even stronger competitor to PowerPoint. From its seamless integration with iPhoto and iTunes to its greatly improved animation and slide timing features, the new version of Keynote looks like a winner."

• 01-22-05: (1) So, how did the president do? The Contrary Public Speaker LeeAundra Temescu posts a spot-on followup analysis. (2) Happy birthday to my father, Antonio de Guzman Ramos, Jr. (known as Sonny to family and Tony to workmates) who might be surprised to learn his son is back in school again.

• 01-20-05: (1) "Don't be seduced by the siren call of PowerPoint" writes Jonathan Guthrie for the Financial Times of London. It appears, however, that the writer was seduced by the temptation of rehashing things already written. (Scroll down to read similar stories from the past two years.) (2) And speaking of rehash, President George W. Bush will be making his second inaugural speech later today. Speaking coach LeeAundra Temescu offers trenchant analysis of recent major political presentations, including a very good pre-analysis of Bush's Inaugural for Radio 2CC Canberra in Australia.

• 01-17-05: I do it on occasion. You do too, perhaps. You might even include it in your presentations on a regular basis. Either way, you've no doubt seen it. "Photoshopping grows into a subculture art form," observes Stan Choe for Knight Ridder newspapers.

• 01-14-05: Like other technologies, projectors are becoming smaller and more prevalent. (So say the reports from this month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.) Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicon Technology in Germany are working on a tiny digital projector small enough to fit in a cell phone. Your airplane's upright tray table may never be the same.

• 01-12-05: As a software company, how do you get the attention of PowerPoint users? By insisting your product does not compare to, and should not be compared to, PowerPoint. A cursory tour of Ventuz ("The future of presentations") shows this claim probably has merit. A peek at their showcase confirms this.

• 01-10-05: "It all used to be so easy" recalls Fortune magazine in "Why There's No Escaping the Blog." "... the adage went 'never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.' But now everyone can get ink for free, launch a diatribe, and—if what they have to say is interesting to enough people—expect web-enabled word of mouth to carry it around the world. Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing." (This is my way of acknowledging and thanking the tens of thousands of you reading this. 2004 was a phenomenal year for me. You are the real thing. Thanks.)

• 01-06-05: Dear Bill Gates: Did it work OK during the dry run? No one enjoys a mid-presentation blue screen of death.

• 01-04-05: What goes into a great technical presentation? Let Microsoft's Don Box tell you in his own words via this video.

• 12-28-04: During Christmas travel, I encountered what are now my two favorite large-format electronic displays. Designed by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa, The Crown Fountain in Chicago's new Millennium Park features two 50-foot high glass block towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool. The towers are activated with changing video images and lights. During the summer, water cascades from the top of each. May your holidays be just as bright.

• 12-21-04: As usual, count on Juan C. Dürsteler at InfoViz.net to provide great fundamentals in information visualization and design. This time around, he covers Bar Graphs and Best Practices with Bar Graphs. "Bar graphs or bar charts are ubiquitous visual representations, but they are not always correctly used and many times we don’t get the most out of them. We review here their essence, properties and utilization." Get more: subscribe to his free newsletter.

• 12-19-04: Creativepro.com contributing editor Brian P. Lawler details how he made a teleprompter with a laptop, Adobe InDesign, and some scrap wood. Creative pro, indeed. (via Slashdot)

• 12-18-04: Is your meeting room or family room now sporting one of those big, new high definition television screens? Want to put it to full-time use? Roku offers "high definition artwork to adorn your wall." Now you can be just like the big box retailer you bought it from. Next up for your cell phone camera: photo album images of attractive people you don't even know.

• 12-14-04: "Presenting Powerpoint slides is much like playing a sax in a jazz band," according to the late, great Rich Gold. "The slides provide the bass, rhythm, and chord changes over which the melody is improvised. When a presenter is really cooking, he or she enters that intuitional state in which each moment follows naturally from the previous in a highly intelligent manner. In flow, the presenter locks into the audience, locks into the slides, locks into the ideas, and produces a gloss that makes whole the obscure and fragmented wall writings."

• 12-13-04: So what happened at PowerPoint to the People™? Wired News files a report. (A possible late entry? Art based on PowerPoint, rather than PowerPoint-based art).

• 12-10-04: Put some theory behind your practice. Thumbnail summaries of current and historical theories of communication are posted in relative Theory Clusters courtesy of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Great overview. Handy reference when reading academic papers such as the one blogged on 12-01-04.

• 12-08-04: If you receive an awful looking PowerPoint presentation and are asked to spiff it up, you'd be wise not to blog bitterly about it. Heather B. Armstrong learned that lesson the hard way. The name of her personal, frank, and now popular online journal, Dooce, has become a verb, meaning "to get fired because of your weblog." (A client asked me to Ramocize his presentation last week. I seem to be a verb as well [sorry, Bucky].)

• 12-01-04: Veen is keen. Web innovator Jeffrey Veen blogs about "The PowerPoint Presentation and Its Corollaries: How Genres Shape Communicative Action in Organizations," an academic paper by JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski, both of MIT Sloan School of Management. "In it, they have a look at how the genre of PowerPoint presentations in business affects communication both inside companies and externally with their clients or customers," writes Veen. "It's a fascinating look at how PowerPoint has, essentially, automated lazy thought. Or, to put it another way, created bullet-point expectations for all organizational knowledge." After some rumination, Veen sums it up well: "What is the solution to all this decorative yet spurious communication? Discipline would help. I find myself getting intellectually lazy with presentations, glossing over bits and hoping to wing it in the board room. I've started experimenting with writing out everything I want to say for every slide, then printing them in the notes with the hand outs. That allows me to almost completely move away from bullet points on the screen. Rather, I can show a well-chosen image or illustration, and talk about it, then move on. I've memorized my notes, my audience has a copy. But wow, it's hard."

• 11-30-04: When taking the stage to make a presentation, it helps to be in an up sort of mood. Like Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer. I love this CEO.

• 11-28-04: Despite its origins in Flash and not PowerPoint, The Interview with God demonstrates good presentation design principles. (Click the "View Presentation" button.) Only one transition style is used throughout. Same for text appearance and exit. Just the faintest touch of animation is used. Striking but appropriate visuals (with photographers' permissions). Good choice of font and correct use of font colors against backgrounds. Light, unobtrusive soundtrack. And, of course, a finely crafted message contained in a compact presentation. Whatever your belief system, you can find inspiration in this work.

• 11-22-04: Indulge me a few self-references.  I read with some amusement the article "Bullet-point cinémathèque" on the UCBerkeley News website last week. The story highlights a few entries received in the "PowerPoint to the People" competition (blogged here on 10-19-04). Among them: art from an MIT employee who uses PPT as a creative outlet (02-08-04), a plea for support from the Winona Ryder Emergency Public Relations Unit (undated; 13th entry from bottom), and Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address (third from bottom and 02-24-04 and elsewhere). The piece also gives a nod to David Byrne (08-19-03 and elsewhere). If you're in the Bay Area and can see the live competition on Wed., Dec. 8, and would be willing to blog about it, I will link to you.

• 11-15-04: (1) Please accept my apologies for the infrequent entries these past few weeks. A client's proposal team and I are on the final few days of what we hope will result in a $1.3 billion contract. Hmm. Maybe I should start asking for percentages instead of hourly rates. (2) Using words as both art and graph, WordCount by Jonathan Harris is "an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is." Have you tried using words as art? WordArt does not count.

• 11-08-04: Giving professors gadgets without training can do more harm than good in the classroom, say college students. The excellent article "When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching" by Jeffery R. Young appears in the Nov 12, 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education, just about a year after William Germano's "The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver" from the same publication. The later piece discusses more than just "PowerPoint abuse," but how the software is used and misused still tops the list of complaints.

• 11-02-04: It's Election Day, USA, and no arsenal of political communication today is complete without its PowerPoint slides, be it from the left or right. As they say in Chicago, be sure to vote early and often!

• 10-25-04: We've always heard that eyes travel a page from top left to top right to lower right to lower left. Is that necessarily so? What really attracts the eye? The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools studied the eye movements of 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. The Eyetrack III study is geared largely toward website designers, but contains excellent, usable information for creators of onscreen presentations as well. The "heatmaps" are most interesting.

• 10-19-04: (1) Still swamped with work. My writeup about PPT Live is forthcoming. I swear. (2) A call for entries. "Recognizing that PowerPoint has now become a widespread platform for the dynamic presentation of ideas, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley announces PowerPoint to the People™, a PP competition. PFA wants to see your PowerPoint presentation whether it's hardsell, softcore, or medium cool! Both automated and live presentations are welcome. Though be forewarned: live presentations will be performed before a panel of judges not known for being of a kindly nature." Deadline is November 2.

• 10-15-04: Time well spent. I'm back from San Diego today, and still so much swimming in my head about PPT Live that I will take the time to post about it over the weekend on its own page. (A large pile of client work awaits.) But for those of you visiting here as a result of meeting or hearing about me from fellow attendees, welcome to my blog. Scroll down and enjoy.

• 10-11-04: Pure PowerPoint genius. (1) Blogged here last year, Stanford cyberlaw visionary Lawrence Lessig is also hailed by many as a true virtuoso of the multimedia-aided presentation. Courtesy of the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, his recent speech at Swarthmore on the launch of FreeCulture.org is available for download and viewing (277 MB Quicktime movie). We can only hope his popularity translates to improved presentation technique throughout the culture. (2) Opening breakfast for PPT Live starts soon, but yesterday's setup and last night's reception gave me the chance to meet other PowerPoint virtuosos face-to-face for the first time: Rick Altman, Cliff Atkinson, Geetesh Bajaj, Tom Bunzel, Troy Chollar, April Dalke, Bill Dilworth, Kathy Jacobs, Steve Rindsberg, Julie Terberg, and others. Like Lessig, these are the people to learn from.

• 10-08-04: I'm off to PowerPoint Live for most of next week. Reports to follow.

• 10-07-04: Pithy advice about type and design: "Make the shoe fit, not the foot. Rather than force content into rigid containers, create systems that are flexible and responsive to the material they are intended to accommodate." (from Thinking with Type (click on "Free Advice") via Design Observer) How many crimes of PowerPoint are committed because speakers choose to cram more stuff onto a single slide than is reasonable? My suggestion: create buttons which jump you to hidden pages in case audience members ask for more detail. After the question, resume the show via another navigation button or type "p" for Previous Slide. While having these "hip-pocket" slides means more preparation, it also means a better presentation. Do you want to be remembered for being flexible and responsive or for being inconsiderate with your eye charts?

• 10-06-04: The truth is known by Few. The writer, consultant, and educator Stephen Few founded Perceptual Edge to help you "learn and apply the best practices of information design." His articles in Intelligent Enterprise such as "The Information Cannot Speak for Itself" and "Common Mistakes in Data Presentation" are so plainly practical that I plan on printing them, rolling up the printouts, and beating bad designers on the head with them in the hope of knowledge transfer. Seriously, though, I blogged in March a response to Tufte entitled "The Great Man Has Spoken. Now What Do I Do?" The answer is read Stephen Few.

• 10-03-04: "Is PowerPoint the enemy of thought?" asks Shane Harris in the article "Missing the Point" at GovExec.com. "... clear-thinking, articulate people who use PowerPoint are transformed into muddied, monotonous speakers who shoehorn their thoughts into bullet points and anesthetize audiences with their slide shows. A growing body of research suggests that, far from illuminating people's thoughts, PowerPoint actually obscures them. And now a debate is brewing across government as PowerPoint critics and adherents ask, 'Is this any way for us to communicate?' Considering the momentous deliberations in which PowerPoint is employed, it's not such a bad question." True, but it's not such a new question, either. Harris rehashes old material (Tufte, replies to Tufte, the NASA slides, the New Yorker article etc.) covered here and elsewhere, but rightly brings the debate to forum where it needs to be heard.

• 10-01-04: Funny, fictitious files for a Friday: "Part of the detritus of the long DOJ v. Microsoft trial, these PowerPoint slides form an interesting exhibit in the art of persuasion" writes blogger James McNally.

• 09-29-04: "It’s the listener’s story about you that’s critical," says Steve Denning in A Leader's Guide to Storytelling. "... [T]he storyteller’s story is not in itself the main thing: it’s simply scaffolding that enables the listener to create a new story in his or her environment that becomes the catalyst for action. Unless the listeners are creating that new story, the springboard storyteller is merely flapping his jaws in the breeze. Similarly, in telling the story of who you are, the key thing is what the story listener goes away with. You might be telling a story about how you overcame adversity to win a high-school hockey competition with the objective of communicating your courage, your persistence, and strength of character. But if your listeners are thinking, 'What a boastful jerk!' then clearly your story is having the opposite effect of what you intend: it doesn’t matter how brilliant your storytelling, the listeners are creating a different story from the story you are telling. You need to be telling a different story or telling the same story in a different way." Yet another way of placing yourself in your audience's shoes.

• 09-27-04: "Why Is That Thing Beeping? A Sound Design Primer " by Max Lord is a smart and timely essay. "As designers, we tend to spend a lot of time talking about the visual identity of a project, but who thinks about its audible identity? Do we need to consider it at all? Art forms such as theater, film, and video games have grown to include carefully considered sounds and are clearly better off for it. By learning to include audio as an important design parameter in web or product design, we might achieve the same successful results." Clearly, this can apply to electronic presentations too, as Max pinpoints why PowerPoint's screeching subtitles and whooshing words tend to annoy us all: "This type of illustrative nonsense does little to deepen the experience of using the product and dilutes the effect of important sounds. The effect on a person sitting next to you may even be worse."

• 09-24-04: "The question facing higher education is no longer whether to use technology in teaching," writes Steven F. Jackson. "The question is now which technologies are most suitable for the myriad of courses taught ... At issue is a complex decision involving student aptitude, faculty innovation and technological choice. This article [The Use of PowerPoint in Teaching Comparative Politics] examines the use of one such technology - PowerPoint - in teaching political science courses." Among his conclusions: "PowerPoint is one of many alternatives in teaching with technology. PowerPoint works very well in comparative politics, but is far less suited to a subject such as political theory, where visual elements are limited ... What works for one subfield does not necessarily work well in another."

• 09-22-04: Do you say pop or soda? Or coke, generically with a small c? This Pop or Soda Map of the US is not only enlightening but also a fine example of "data density" that would surely warm the cockles of Edward Tufte. (Full disclosure: I have not personally viewed Professor Tufte's cockles nor have I inquired about their temperature. Some things are left well enough alone.)

• 09-21-04: Teaching companies new tricks requires a combination of approaches and technologies, says Robert Lipschutz in "The ABCs of eLearning." "During the past decade, many companies have turned to elearning systems to assist with employee training needs. To date, most of these initiatives have centered around cutting costs and making training sessions more convenient for employees. However, if implemented strategically, elearning systems can help companies increase revenue, comply with new regulations, and even boost innovation." Not surprisingly, PowerPoint is the courseware of choice. But his best advice is this: "Start with the learning, not the 'e'; the best elearning initiatives consider technology only after handling the people, process, and content issues."

• 09-20-04: Fun with PowerPoint add-ins: came across a free and handy add-in to PowerPoint that might prove helpful for those without Microsoft Project or other Gantt chart building software. Late last year, Roman Koch wrote the free Gantt Chart Builder for PPT 2000 and up. Danke shein, Roman. (Unfamiliar with add-ins? Check out this FAQ and this one too.)

• 09-16-04: Here's a great way to learn and earn your place at the podium. Writer Mark Fowler says the most popular sessions (outside of the keynote addresses) at certain tech conferences tend to be the sessions of "lightning talks." A session consists of "about 10 to 15 lightning talks — talks typically lasting individually no more than five minutes — back to back. As well as being tremendously interesting and entertaining for attendees, the conference organizers recognize that they offer an unequalled opportunity for new speakers to present for the first time without going to the lengths required for a longer talk." It surprised Mark that no document gave good guidelines for such talks, so he wrote "Giving Lightning Talks" and published it at Perl.com. Bonus: it contains smart advice for long and short presentations alike.

• 09-14-04: More slideshow tools for the masses: Flickr has introduced a new "view as slideshow" option for users' photo collections. Flickr describes itself as a "revolution in photo storage, sharing and organization, making photo management an easy, natural and collaborative process. Get comments, notes, and tags on your photos, post to any blog, share and chat live and more!" See an example slideshow here. For those without their own websites, can posting presentations as public slideshows be far behind?

• 09-13-04: To heck with "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint." If you've ever been dumped via voicemail or email (complete with bullet points), Accordion Guy implores you to examine "The Breakup Style of PowerPoint." To wit, "PowerPoint facilitates getting through an unpleasant task as quickly as possible, which is a primary goal in both business presentations and breakups. You might think I'm being facetious by blaming PowerPoint. However, history and everyday experience show us that our technology affects our culture, from things as simple as levers and the wheel to cell phones, computers and the internet."

• 09-10-04: As we approach the anniversary of the worst single attack upon citizens on US soil, email inboxes are again receiving powerful words and images of the events of that day. I received a note with a link to this Flash presentation about the Pentagon strike on 9/11 that, while conspiratorial in overtone, uses the medium with great effect. PowerPoint could have been used to achieve something similar, but this mini movie is a clear demonstration of when to choose one tool over another. (Flash required; sound recommended.)

• 09-03-04: Another new school year, another set of PowerPoint links for educators. Research and academic posters are here: (1) and (2) and (3); and resources for teachers are here: (1) and (2) and (3).

• 09-02-04: Anne Conneen stands In Defense of Decoration. "We've all seen a lot of bad decorative 'design' and what it all has in common is that it gets in the way of the information instead of enhancing it. Essentially, what a designer does is marry information and art. That's no easy task. Beauty and information are right-brain, left-brain concepts. Too much of one or the other can throw the message out of whack." So what should we do? "Mood, color, decorative elements, photography, and illustration are all born out of information, yet many times we downplay the importance of visual appeal and the power it has to attract the reader to the information. It's a fast-moving, visual world that is becoming more and more visual. It's not our job to throw visuals on the page and see what sticks, but rather to edit all information down to the essential elements, decorative and informative, and tie all the pieces together."

• 08-31-04: Most everyone knows that Amazon.com sells more than just books, but I guess it was just a matter of time before you could purchase PowerPoint presentations on specific topics as well, such as this one on "Emotional Intelligence." And what about eBay? This one for ministry leaders has an opening bid of ninety five cents.

• 08-29-04: In their popular blog Signal vs. Noise, those fine folks at 37signals have posted a report about their experiences last week at Edward Tufte’s "Presenting Data and Information" workshop. A snippet from "A Little Tufte Recap": "At his worst, Tufte is a passionate presenter with a clear cause ... At his very best, Tufte has some real knowledge and insight to share..." Lively reader commentary ensues.

• 08-26-04: "Who in a company knows where its photos -- past, present and future -- are located?" asks Connie Moberley for the Houston Business Journal. "The public relations staff? The vice president of human resources? In way too many cases it is often some executive secretary -- or no one at all. And don't even ask about historical images! Most corporations inventory their assets on an annual basis. Unfortunately, they nearly always overlooking the asset that helps best tell their story, represent their reputation and brand their products and services." Learn how to better manage your organization's photographic assets by reading "Get more mileage out of images in firm's photography shoebox."

• 08-24-04: PowerPoint guru Ellen Finkelstein last week joined the growing group of those now employing an RSS feed to distribute their newsletters, weblogs or commentary about PowerPoint to readers choosing to opt in. Ellen's full announcement is here. Ellen explains RSS as well. (I'd love to be feeding you via RSS as well, but I've been busy feeding clients with deliverables. Thanks for your patience.)

• 08-20-04: While many of us spend increasing amounts of time incorporating video into PowerPoint, here is a great example of a simple photojournalistic slideshow from Kansas which employs still shots, sound clips, and text. You feel as though you are there, cheering on The Rebels with the Lawrence Journal-World. (Flash required). Brilliant work by Ira J. Spitzer and World Online.

• 08-18-04: (1) Driving home to Cleveland this evening from a client site in Michigan, I noticed how our social and physical landscape changes in occasionally funny ways. On the Ohio Turnpike, there are rest areas with shiny new food courts not unlike today's malls. They greet you with gleaming teethlike ribbons of windows and yet sit amid pastures and cornfields. You can go there now and pay $3.50 for a sixteen ounces of warm, frothy milk or walk a few steps, reach under a fence, and get it from the source for free. Bonus: no lines. Drawback: poop. (2) That aforementioned landscape is detailed here at City-Data.com for your future last-minute-factoid-gathering-and-presentation-composing surf sessions.

• 08-17-04: Thanks to Cliff for alerting me to the announcement of winners in Apple's Keynote Design Contest, blogged here on 05-19-04. Viewing requires Quicktime; a broadband connection won't hurt.

• 08-15-04: "Windows update makes data safer, but not safe" writes Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News. The arrival of Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 2 has more meaning than usual because it "represents Microsoft's most serious effort yet to deal with an endemic situation, namely the company's generally woeful record on security. But it also highlights the enduring and more fundamental reality of modern computing, including the risks that accompany our mostly captive allegiance to a monopoly product." As the rollout begins, Microsoft advises WinXP users to prepare by turning on Windows' Automatic Updates. Heck, they'll even do it for you.

• 08-14-04: Using "PowerPoint" as the admonishing adjective of a freshly-coined derogatory phrase (see "PowerPoint presidency" and "PowerPoint engineering" below) seemed to quell there for a while, but it might be back. "In essence, PowerPoint mentality is viewing and acting on each slide without regard to previous slides or anticipating future slides. While this mentality may be good for absorbing PowerPoint information, its awful for managing investment portfolios," says business writer Ray Unger in The Capital Times of Madison, WI. (Also, is it me or is that page missing all possible apostrophes?)

• 08-13-04: Plain slides, but killer content. Since 1995, Patrick Crispen of Cal State Fullerton has been an invited speaker at numerous technology conferences around the country. Here are just a few of Patrick's most recent PowerPoint presentations which you are free to download and use provided you honor his two requests (give credit, make no $). Don't miss "Now That I Know PowerPoint, How Can I Use It to Teach?" (0.99 Mb) and "Google 201: Advanced Googology" (3.51 Mb).

• 08-12-04: Checking out a new application today: SmartDraw. It bills itself as an "easy-to-use program that lets anyone draw great looking flowcharts, diagrams, forms and other business graphics" without having to be an artist. My first impression is very favorable. Looks like it may be a very good companion to PowerPoint. Maybe even a serious complement to or replacement for Visio. Full review to come after I have played with it for a while. (30-day free trial version download is 6 MB.)

• 08-11-04: Came across a couple of websites that demonstrate two guidelines of good PowerPoint design: the concepts of "one idea per page" and "small multiples." The former is writ large in both the website layout and business model of Woot!, an online consumer electronics store that sells only one item per day. The latter, coined by Tufte and expounded upon by others, says that a set of thumbnail-sized graphics on a single page that represent aspects of a single phenomenon is helpful in comparing and contrasting multivariate data, assuming a uniform scale is used. This web page is clearly on board with that concept. The unifying theme here is instantaneous understanding through good design.

• 08-10-04: Gestalt theory ("the whole is greater than the sum of its parts") and how it applies to your typographic designs is the subject of a 7-minute online presentation by Mike Cuenca. The foundations of two principles of visual perception -- proximity and similarity -- are well illustrated in Gestalt & Typography. Note: this requires the Shockwave player for viewing. A broadband connection helps, too.

• 08-08-04: Another story about stories. The San Diego Tribune describes how "Successful leaders use stories to engage employees," noting that storytelling, and not PowerPoint, is the way to capture attention. (I must have missed the press release saying the two were mutually exclusive. Hmm, maybe I tossed it.)

• 08-06-04: More PowerPointedly satirical offerings from Daniel Radosh and Slate. His latest target -- because he could -- is My Life by Bill Clinton.

• 08-03-04: You scan some photographs and documents. You bring them into PowerPoint. The images look good, but your file size is nearing a googol. "I've never understood scanning and resolution and all that," you mutter as the file slowly uploads into an email which you now hope goes through without incident. You then read and bookmark A Few Scanning Tips by Wayne Fulton and you thank him. Like many in cyberspace, the newbie became the expert and ended up writing the website he had originally hoped to find.

• 08-02-04: Storytelling in business is on the rise. "...there is a growing recognition in the marketing and advertising communities of the power and persuasiveness of narratives. Stories, therefore, have emerged as the vehicle of choice to communicate ideas and messages" writes Myra Stark, a strategic planner and specialist on consumer trends at Saatchi and Saatchi. Read her online white paper "2003: Ideas from Trends -- Storytelling" to "explore the power of narrative, trace the spread of storytelling in business and consider the new directions it presents for marketing and advertising." (Need some PowerPoint-based tools for your story? Check out what Sociable Media has to offer.)

• 08-01-04: PointGuru is a new "resource for PowerPoint designers" by graphic designer Kevin Potts. He also publishes graphicPUSH, wherein he has also addressed the topic of PowerPoint. High marks to Kevin for good, tight copy throughout and a personal commitment to web accessibility.

• 07-31-04: Off-topic post: I ran 30-ish miles today in just over 7.5 hours as a competitor in the Buckeye Trail 50K. The first half took place in drizzle and downpour. The race was a slippery, muddy, hilly mess. The winner came in three hours ahead of me. The last runners came in hours behind me. Cramps, tumbles, thorns, poison ivy, knee-deep river crossings, a friend with a shoe half-soaked in blood, and the feeling of accomplishment. Sign me up for next year.

• 07-30-04: White space matters, according to a new study. "The critical importance of white space in the effective delivery of visual content is well supported by this report comparing the reading performance of four different white space layouts," writes Robin Good at MasterNewMedia.org. Both Robin's summary and the Wichita State University report support common assumptions, but since the proliferation of media has not been matched by a proliferation of designers, we would all do well to remind ourselves of these findings.

• 07-29-04: Blogged here on 03-24-04, one professor's warning about PowerPoint drew a thoughtful response from another. In "PowerPoint Is Not Evil," Tom Rocklin of the University of Iowa imagines a scenario with PPT in the role of "pedagogically useful technology." Rocklin writes, "The picture I've tried to sketch is not a picture of a perfect teacher, nor have I tried to identify all the ways that PowerPoint might be useful in a class. What I have tried to do is suggest that there are a lot of ways--probably many more than I have imagined--that PowerPoint can help teachers help their students learn."

• 07-26-04: A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda walks toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. "I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

• 07-21-04: Vocal cords are the latest part of the body experts are targeting for a lift, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. "The wobbles, the tremors, they're what we recognize as things that make a voice sound old." And as well as the usual celebrity suspects, one doctor says interest in the new technique has been particularly strong among business people and executives. "Athletes and musicians have to work hard on their talent," says one voice coach. "Very few people in a normal working environment work on their voice."

• 07-20-04: Picasa = smooth slideshows for everyone. Did you blink or did you notice Google's short-lived home page promotion of Picasa? Google acquired the digital photo application last week and offered a link to a free download on its main entry page as recently as yesterday, but it's missing right now. I've explored around the application and was left with a good impression. I was able to create a looped, photo slideshow complete with MP3 soundtrack and soft fade transitions in less than one minute. Picasa is not too different from photo organizing software that has been available for years, but consider the bar raised. Still, pundits have already started calling it "iPhoto for Windows."

• 07-19-04: You can't spell "a-ha!" without "ha-ha!" Mixing improvisational presentation skills with business insight, Second City Communications is finding success as the corporate training offshoot of the famous, Chicago-based comedy troupe. Last week, an Associated Press profile of the company says it nearly doubled its revenues last year and is expecting another healthy increase this year to about $4 million. Both teachers and students are laughing all the way to the bank.

• 07-15-04: The painterly tradition of "fooling the eye" and its current practice in technology-driven displays are the subjects of "Modern Trompe L'oeil," a visually rich slideshow by Pat Hanrahan of the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford. Although created in 1998, the slides carry timeless lessons for artists, technologists and designers alike. Big hint: one lesson is in red on the bottom of slide 31. (Also, right image on slide 27 is eerily prescient. Can you say "Apple Cinema Display?")

• 07-13-04: Gotta love those management-consultants-turned-comedians. Tip of the hat to Andy Meyers for parodying Boston Consulting Group's mid-1990s PPT style with this deck titled Romance: An Analysis.

• 07-12-04: Efficient information design means that every molecule of ink or pixel of light is pulling its weight. In Tuftian terms, you should strive for higher data density (datapoints per unit of area) in a way that promotes more understanding because data density for its own sake usually promotes less. Keep these concepts in mind as you visit the Google News Graph by Michal Migurski of Stamen Design and the Newsmap by Marcos Weskamp of Marumishi.com. On a daily basis, each takes Google's newsfeed and creates a "treemap" with areas proportional to newsmakers or news stories. The Stamen design creates a "sparkline" for each newsmaker as you click on the map, which lends a better view of news coverage over time, while the Marumishi effort is more handy for current snapshots of who's in the news.

• 07-10-04: How well are you supporting management objectives through communication and public relations? "Corporate storytelling" specialist Evelyn Clark offers this checklist to help you measure how effective your communications are meeting your organization's needs.

• 07-09-04: "White is the new blue," writes Cliff Atkinson at Beyond Bullets. The color of choice for the PowerPoint template backgrounds of industry leaders like GE, Cisco, Apple and HP "marks the beginning of clear changes in the way all of us see PowerPoint." Why is white right? 1. White gives your mind space to think. 2. White keeps your creative options open. 3. White sets a tone of openness, expressiveness and conversation. 4. White is the most flexible foundation for cross-media design.

• 07-08-04: Is there such a thing as "a PowerPoint" as in "I have a PowerPoint to show you" or "Are you going to bore me with a PowerPoint now?" As a linguistic fussbudget, I would argue the narrow case, which is no. You should use the phrase "PowerPoint presentation" or "PowerPoint file" etc. Both Geoffrey K. Pullum and Microsoft agree. But the wider reality is that when it comes to the English language, shift happens. Is PowerPoint at the Xerox-Windex-Kleenex-FedEx threshold of verbal ubiquity? And is having an "x" in your brand name a prerequisite?

• 07-06-04: The Changing Face of Document Design and Technical Communication: The Impact of Trends on How We Think About Our Work by Karen Shriver of KSA Document Design and Research is an interesting PDF of a PowerPoint handout. While trends about audience, content, genre, and professional development are discussed in depth with examples aplenty, it stands in my mind as another instance when viewing a document online probably pales to the experience of hearing it delivered live. Readers are left to wonder what context they are missing. Still, the author scores big points for using active verbs and clear organization to minimize this shortcoming.

• 06-30-04: Semi-off-topic post: WXRT is a radio station based in Chicago. It had a huge influence on me during my formative years there and they still warrant much respect. They are now streaming over the web courtesy of Radio@AOL; this alone justifies my broadband expenditures. Since 1972, XRT has defied convention by embracing the best of old and new rock and seasoning it with blues, folk, jazz, and other tunes to create a blend that is hard to pigeonhole. See their recently played list for a sampling. Just like a few blogs (and fewer slideshows), you never know what's next, but you're glad you showed up.

• 06-29-04: May flowers. A new bloom by the name of Andrew May has blossomed among the folks blogging within the Microsoft Developer Network. "Andrew May's WebLog" offers "Publisher and PowerPoint Tips from a Writer/Programmer-in-Training," according to the site. Mr. May just completed the fourth of a four-part series on creating animation effects for media and OLE objects. (The site delves into the inner workings of code. VBA programmers will bookmark this one if they haven't already.)

• 06-27-04: The Linksys Wireless G Presentation Player is a new and interesting piece of hardware aimed at people like you and me. Sounds like it's mostly a wireless network router, but connect it to a projector and then "any wireless-equipped computer within range (and with permission) can take control of the Player and project live screen images of any application running on the PC," according to a company web page. Hmm. Knowing how some work groups collaborate, this development can be a godsend, a Pandora's box, or the devil incarnate.

• 06-25-04: Teach yourself keyboard shortcuts! Work faster! Impress bosses, colleagues, and clients! Overuse exclamation points! Visit the PowerPoint keyboard shortcut collections of A Bit Better, Sonia Coleman, The PPT FAQ, MasterViews, and Microsoft. And get me some decaf.

• 06-24-04: "What do we lose in the translation from life to Powerpoint?" asks Jeff Einstein in rhetorical fashion at MediaPost.com. "We no longer have the option or the patience to write our lives in long form. We change our mission statements the way we change socks (most of us, anyway)--because we can, because we have the power to do so, and the power to do so confers all the authority we think we need. But each new technology we bring into our lives and businesses leaves a little less room, a little less time for nuance and personality, a little less time for emerging truth. Better get ready: St. Peter will be waiting for us with an overhead projector."

• 06-22-04: More evidence that PowerPoint has moved far beyond its roots to become everyman's multimedia app. From Entertainment Design magazine, a unique account of how creative individuals went from zero to full throttle in pushing PPT. Their aim was to help dancers tell "an amazingly complex tale of child slave uprisings, theological struggle, and terrible warfare" in the world premiere of Pat Graney Company's The Vivian Girls. (Catholic super-heroes with amazing powers and kittens with 500-mile tails and bat-like wings? Not your typical clip art.) File this story under "where there's a will there's a way."

• 06-20-04: "There is a need to connect the person who creates the content with the person who reads it," writes Gerry McGovern, a web content management author and consultant. "Content creation must be seen as an important and valuable task within the organization. When a piece of content delivers value, the person who created it should be praised and rewarded." Read "How to get great content from people" and see whether these ideas apply to your PowerPoint shows.

• 06-18-04: It's the summer season in North America -- that golden time when young kids are pitching tents, roasting marshmallows, and making slides. Find out how "Camps aim to make girls a power point in technology" courtesy of the Chicago Sun Times.

• 06-17-04: For teachers who are new to PowerPoint, a link just for you. "Creating Effective PowerPoint Presentations -- Points to Ponder in Producing PowerPoint Presentation" by Michael A. Russell and Walter M. Shriner of Mt. Hood Community College. Does your organization have an internally produced, introductory document like this one? Do you wish you received something like this when you first started making slides?  

• 06-16-04: (1) Just got back from a client facility in Dallas-Ft. Worth. One highlight of the visit was seeing my handiwork on six 60-foot projection screens, side by side on one wall of an enormous, high-tech control center and showplace. Site visits are usually good and productive, but this one pleased my inner AV geek as well. (2) Central to this client's presentations are its team rehearsals. While clicking through the practice show and editing on the fly, I usually observe a lot of knowledge transfer between senior and junior management as everyone hones their part of the message before an audience of peers. There is far more to be gained by rehearsing than just smooth show logistics. There is real mentoring, real learning.

• 06-10-04: "Communication usually fails, except by accident," posits the first of Wiio's Laws. Others declare "If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes damages" and "If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through." With both humor and insight, Jucca Korpela writes about Osmo A. Wiio, a Finnish researcher of human communication. "Despite being entertaining, Wiio's laws are valid observations about all human communication," says Korpela. "For any constructive approach to communication, we need to admit their truth and build upon them, instead of comfortably exercising illusionary communication."

• 06-09-04: The presentation quality continuum, as seen by Rick Altman. "Best Presentation: Truly excellent speaker, great ideas, and slides that amplify on the points made, instead of repeating them. Very Good: Truly excellent speaker, great ideas, and no slides. Still Okay: Excellent speaker, redundant slides that don't add anything. Not so Good: Bad speaker, good slides. Pretty Bad: Bad speaker, no slides. The Worst: Bad speaker, redundant slides." Read "The Tyranny of Presentation Software" at desktoppublishing.com.

• 06-08-04: Cliff blogs! If you've been following Tony's PowerPoint Weblog, you know Cliff Atkinson: a top authority on PowerPoint and organizational communications, an independent management consultant, a keynote speaker and writer, and president of Sociable Media in Los Angeles. Do yourself a favor. Visit and bookmark "beyond bullets," his new weblog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Cliff.

• 06-07-04: "Even five years ago, technology seemed external, a servant. These days, what's so striking is not only technology's ubiquity but also its intimacy," writes Diane Coutu in Harvard Business School's online newsletter Working Knowledge for Business Leaders. A free excerpt of her article "PowerPoint, Robomanagers, and You: The Growing Intimacy of Technology" includes an interview with Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who is "widely considered one of the most distinguished scholars in the area of how technology influences human identity." Turkle says PowerPoint is a good example of the challenge to understand how everyday people (like teachers and students) may be changed. "...PowerPoint, like so many other computational technologies, is not just a tool but an evocative object that affects our habits of mind. We need to meet the challenge of using computers to develop the kinds of mind tools that will support the most appropriate and stimulating conversations possible in elementary and middle schools. But the simple importation of a technology perfectly designed for the sociology of the boardroom does not meet that challenge."

• 06-04-04: We love him, we hate him, we cannot ignore him. Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Information Design -- Edward Tufte -- has released another chapter from his forthcoming book Beautiful Evidence. This new chapter, not to be confused with that ballyhooed "Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" chapter from the same tome, is called "Sparklines - Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics." Lots of reading here, and some familiar points from his previous works, but worthwhile nonetheless. (A friend recently confided that he just doesn't "get" Tufte. To the rescue comes Marty Lucas' fine piece entitled "Getting Tufte.")

• 06-03-04: (1) With tongue planted firmly in cheek, lawyer David Gould shares "The Perils of Pestering Partners With PowerPoint." (2) On the serious side, Cliff Atkinson talks with John Seely Brown and Nelson Cowan to examine the roots of our problems with -- and some solutions for -- poor PowerPoint presentations.

• 06-01-04: (1) "PowerPoint Live" happens in San Diego this year from October 10th through 13th. (See link on left -- it will remain there until the event.) I missed its debut last year due to heavy work volume, but I'm not going to miss this one. (2) NASA to "curb the practice of 'PowerPoint engineering,'" according to this article. You'll recall the Columbia shuttle accident report chided NASA engineers for their reliance on bulleted presentations. Now, NASA safety assessments concur that PowerPoint slides are not a good tool for providing substantive documentation of results. "We think it's important to go back to the basics," said one official. "We're making it a point with the agency that engineering organizations need to go back to writing engineering reports."

• 05-26-04: PowerPoint-counterpoint. Not much new ground covered here in this opinion face-off by two columnists about the pros and cons of PowerPoint. A better way to make your point—to no one's surprise—is to tell a real story, as John Porcaro does.

• 05-23-04: "Who needs information design?" asks Jane Linder of Accenture. "In spite of the benefits, most information technology professionals are not using information design. Why not? Usually they are unfamiliar with information design concepts, and they shy away from getting involved with content. Some information professionals believe their responsibility ends when they have provided access to information—and that isn't enough today. Information technology professionals have to make information design part of everyday information management." Among her solutions: "Train and recruit to build information design literacy. Tell your information management staff that making information actionable is everyone's job—and that it's not rocket science ... Pull the plug on PowerPoint training to make time for information design classes from firms that provide training in this field." (Full disclosure: I've served these consultants for over a decade now. Some have the time and the mind to consider information design. Some don't. But the vast majority appreciate its value when it's delivered.)

• 05-22-04: Even us gurus have gurus. I humbly bow to Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Kathy Jacobs. Indezine has an exclusive excerpt of her forthcoming book "Kathy Jacobs on PowerPoint." And considering all the advice she routinely gives freely at her own site and the PowerPoint newsgroup, Kathy's book should do well from karma alone.

• 05-21-04: "In this season of graduations, weddings and other celebrations, it's time to think of innovative ways to embarrass the guests of honor. What could be better than displaying their baby pictures on a big screen for all to see?" writes Larry Magid of the New York Times. "It used to be common for families to bring out the slide projector at parties and special occasions. Most of those old Kodak Carousels are long gone, but anyone with a PC or a Mac already has at least a piece of the modern-day equivalent. If you use your computer to store digital images from a camera or scanner, you can easily create a slide show that can be displayed on the computer screen, projected onto a wall or large screen, or shown on a TV. You can even share the show with out-of-town friends and family over the Internet. Displaying a slide show at an event can be a focal point for the guests. When projected on a big screen at the center of the party, it can draw people together. But pictures can also be displayed on a smaller screen, perhaps near the entrance or the buffet table, as just an extra element of the party. You can even make a slide show of a party in progress: give a guest a digital camera and then quickly download the photos to a PC to create an instant show." Read "With a Digital Slide Show, You May Upstage the Bride" (subscription required). See also "In a Pinch, PowerPoint Loads the Carousel."

• 05-20-04: Colin Purrington of Swarthmore College's Department of Biology gives sound, real-world advice for designing scientific posters, be they PowerPoint-based or otherwise. He includes lists of what to do and what to avoid. For example, "The best general advice I can give a first-time poster constructor is to describe the circumstance in which a poster will eventually be viewed: a hot, congested room filled with people who are there primarily to socialize, not to look at posters. And, because poster sessions are often concurrent with the 'wine and beer' session, chaos is further increased by hundreds of drunk, uninhibited graduate students staggering around hitting on each other. So as you design your poster, keep in mind that it must be informative, brief, and visually slick in order to attract viewers. A good motivational exercise is to imagine that you will be sandwiched between a poster on 'Teaching house cats to perform cold fusion' and one on 'Mating preferences in sex-starved red pandas.' In such a situation, your poster must be great, not just OK, if you hope to attract an audience." In the true spirit of the web, Purrington offers downloadable templates as well.

• 05-19-04: Upon this week's release of Mac Office 2004, Mac users are enjoying heightened, if temporary, attention with regard to presentation software. "Apple's introduction of its own Keynote presentation software reportedly 'threw a huge scare' into the Mac PowerPoint team," writes Nick dePlume of ThinkSecret. "Sources note that PowerPoint 2004 [for the Mac] boasts 100 new template designs and a large number of new slide transitions, including the spinning-cube effect." Also new is Presenter Tools, which David Pogue of the New York Times says is "designed especially for laptops hooked up to projectors. In this mode, the audience sees only your projected slides. But on your laptop, you see a very different, private display. Beneath a half-size version of each slide, you see your own notes; for the first time in PowerPoint, you can cheat from a script without letting the audience catch wise. Second, you see a timer, which keeps you from sabotaging your own pitch by running overtime. Third, you see miniatures of the previous slide, your current slide and what's coming up next. No longer do you risk being just as surprised by the next slide as the audience." (Yes, savvy users, you already have been using workarounds.) Meanwhile, over at Apple, the Keynote design contest is offering pricey prizes for killer Keynote presentations. Deadline for entries is June 27.

• 05-18-04: Have you ever smudged your "virtual mylar?" Me neither. But following the what's-old-is-new-again rule, the folks at Microsoft Research chose this apt metaphor to name the space where instructors can "add handwritten annotations, highlights, and drawings to slides easily and interactively during a presentation." It applies to Classroom Presenter, an extension of PowerPoint which I presume will find an appreciative user base beyond the classroom.

• 05-17-04: A large number of business presentations today include at least one image captured from the web or a software application, yet few people understand why the resulting printout can look so bad. To their rescue is GraphicPush.com, a site which offers the excellent introductory article "Capturing and Optimizing Screenshots for Print," the complete guide to capturing, tweaking and optimizing screenshots for print delivery.

• 05-16-04: Had a busy week last week. Please accept my apologies for the lack of new stuff.

• 05-10-04: Edward Tufte is an [expletive]. So says Andrei Herasimchuk in his website about design called Design by Fire as he responds to a Wall Street Journal article about Greg Storey's redesign of the now-infamous declassified White House brief of August 6, 2001 ("Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."). WSJ interviewed Tufte and others as to whether poor information design might once again be a contributing factor to poor decision making and thus a historical tragedy. Storey took the old PDB, mocked up an new one, and sparked debate. For me, this is a hard one. I can see the merits on both sides. But I think the White House is suffering from more than just bad information design. 

• 05-08-04: Keynote: the next killer app? Fool.com features rpguillory's recent post about how he/she used Apple Computer's presentation software to meet some lofty demands with surprising success. Read "A Real-World Keynote Review" by someone who flatly admits, "I curse PowerPoint with every fiber of my body. It really is a complete piece of dung ... Considering I knew nothing of Keynote (and I didn't even watch Steve's keynote introducing Keynote), I ventured out into the great unwashed known as the Internet to see what I could see. Could it handle a moving video background while displaying other objects on top? (Yes) What happens to the moving background when moving from slide to slide? (It unfortunately stops but if you design the background with that in mind and use the proper transitions, this transitional "bug" can be kept to a minimum). And as important as anything else, as this was untested software to me and I read that it did crash every now and then, was it stable enough to run for eight hours under the pressure of a live show? (It turns out, yes.) It was a resounding success." 

• 05-07-04: Hats off to Thomas Collins. His recent presentation "Creating Better Presentations: An Information Design Approach" touched a raw nerve when he suggested to his audience that endless bullet lists communicate poorly with a majority of people. Drawing on Edward Tufte, Seth Godin, Cliff Atkinson, and others, our favorite lawyer/consultant is fighting the good fight. Fittingly, his prior post at Knowledge Aforethought addresses the dangers adopting and sticking with what we believe to be best practices -- "The minute we start using terms like capturing or freezing what we know today, we run the risk of deluding ourselves that our so-called best practices are the same as 'best-possible' practices. That is a dangerous place for a knowledge worker, or an organization, to go ... All we can hope to capture are 'best-yet' practices. By using that term, we can attempt to build in a caution to others applying the practice that they are free - indeed encouraged - to improve on the organization's previous best."

• 05-06-04: It's official: Daniel Radosh is the in-house satirical presentationist at Slate. Here is his third PowerPoint-based humor entry in as many weeks. His target this time is John Kerry's military record.

• 05-03-04: "Design your speech or presentation using the same criteria you use in buying a bathing suit," write Joel Hochberger of Effective Presentations Inc. "First, it has to fit. Next, it has to reflect your personality. And finally, it should cover only the parts that are interesting!" Good one.

• 05-02-04: Once upon a time, PowerPoint had competitors. We can now visit them again. Dan's Twentieth Century Abandonware site is a pictorial and text representation of Dan Rose's amazing collection of over 1,500 non-game applications written from the 1980s until 2000. Visit Dan's pages dedicated to presentation software titles (for Windows, DOS, and Macintosh) and pay respect to Applause II, Harvard Graphics, and other long gone friends. Dan also offers some candid thoughts about the perpetual software/hardware upgrade cycle.

• 04-30-04: Our public speaking voice is rarely what we think it is. GreatVoice.com offers a few quick steps and three free forms to help you evaluate your voice. The site also offers products and courses for public speakers, voiceover talent, and phone system developers.

• 04-28-04: Visio, schmisio. "It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue," writes art critic Roberta Smith, "but in the tradition of the painter's painter, Mark Lombardi is an investigative reporter's Conceptual artist. His subject is conspiracy and scandal, his method is to 'follow the money.' His pursuit results in big airy line drawings that exemplify Conceptual art's propensity for diagrams, masses of information and showing how the world works." Another critic writes, "Because of lines and arcs connecting circles which carry the names of institutions and individual players, they look like celestial maps. Working from syndicated news stories and other published reports, Lombardi compiles and transforms vast amounts of financial and historical data into his drawings, which at times consist of hundreds of notations juxtaposed and woven into a single, unified strand or image ... In one artistic gesture, Lombardi uncovers the complexity and occasional brutality of our times - the puzzle of scandal and political intrigue."

• 04-26-04: Got a head for tales? Steve Denning does: "People think in stories, talk in stories, communicate in stories, even dream in stories. If you want to understand what's going on in an organization, you need to listen to the stories. Moreover, if you want to get anything done in an organization, you need to know how to use the story to move people." Denning is former program director of knowledge management at the World Bank and author of "The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations." Read The Sociable Media interview with Steve Denning. "As a leading authority in the role of storytelling in organizations, Steve says that PowerPoint can sometimes stand in the way of telling a story, and other times it can advance it," writes Cliff Atkinson.

• 04-23-04: How well do you know PowerPoint? The PowerPoint Newsgroup alerted me to the nifty little PowerPoint Whiz Quiz. I got nine out of ten. And if you're a whiz at other Microsoft Office applications, try the other quizzes.

• 04-22-04: History shows that while your message may be effective, your choice of a communications medium can lend dramatic effect as well. Michael Bierut of Design Observer recently saw "an example of the power that form can give content: George F. Kennan’s legendary 'Telegraphic Message from Moscow of February 22, 1946,' or, as it is better known to students of twentieth century foreign policy, 'The Long Telegram.'" (Kennan was a diplomat caught in a key moment after WWII. In a single stroke of blunt honesty and little brevity, he alerted the West to Soviet postwar plans. It likely led to Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech and the Cold War.) Bierut says he is "fascinated by The Long Telegram. Like its ideological opposite, Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, it seems to be a case where, indeed, the merger of content and form has created an icon." Is it possible to add drama to your message by choosing PowerPoint over another medium? Or by choosing what you do within PowerPoint?

• 04-21-04: 826 Valencia is a San Francisco-based writing center for kids 8-18. Click here to see the mural depicting the "parallel development of humans and their efforts at and motivations for communication, spoken and written" which adorns the building's façade. Just brilliant. (Hi-res picture here.)

• 04-20-04: Administrative Professionals Day 2004 (also called Secretary's Day or Administrative Assistants Day) will fall on Wednesday April 21, 2004. This year, think outside the flowerbox. Go and purchase a flash drive, or upgrade the books for the upgraded software, or invest in the new learning modules with PPT templates from Sociable Media. Sentimentality aside, practical gifts have a staying power and ROI that daffodils just lack.

• 04-19-04: The sales person should listen to the customer, we know, but why does the pitch too often end up with the same old slideshow? David Weinberger of Worthwhilemag.com has his suspicions. "The real role of the corporate PowerPoint deck is something else," he says. "It expresses the company myth. Even if no one outside the company sees it, The Deck tells the company who it is, what it does, what its world looks like, how it sounds and why it cares. PowerPoints are the primary way companies today create their founding myth. That myth is how they understand themselves. Ironically, they are about the worst possible way of communicating that myth to others."

• 04-18-04: Roughly 1 in 20 people have some sort of color vision deficiency, according to Vischeck. The world looks different to these people; they often find it hard to tell red and green things apart. This means that they sometimes can't see differences that 'color normal' people can see. The ramifications to your presentations are obvious. Run or download Vischeck software on your image files to simulate the three types of colorblindness and help more of your audience understand your charts and graphs as intended.

• 04-17-04: Do you put a period at the end of each phrase in a bulleted list? Do you get into arguments over it? I know I have. That stalwart writers' reference, The Chicago Manual of Style, recently addressed the proper guidelines for punctuating the phrases/clauses in a bulleted list in their new Questions and Answers page. (Click on "Vertical Lists, Bullets" in the left margin.) Yes, you might say that other authoritative style guides exist, but as Eliot Ness quipped in 1987's "The Untouchables," you must not be from Chicago. (I am. Ya gahdda prahblem wit dat?)

• 04-16-04: No sooner than you can say the word "originality" comes another PowerPoint parody at Slate. Today they offer the PPT version of the now-famous "President's Daily Brief" (PDB) of August 6th, 2001. Daniel Radosh (blogged here long ago) takes credit for writing both.

• 04-15-04: "... and to the republic, for Richard Stans ..."  Slate gives the Gettysburg PowerPoint treatment to The Pledge of Allegiance.

• 04-14-04: David Byrne (and his dabblings with PowerPoint) might need to make room for the new indie music darlings with a red-hot projector: The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. They find 35mm slides from estate sales, garage sales, thrift stores, etc. and "turn the lives of anonymous strangers into pop-rock musical exposés based on the contents of these slide collections." Can't see them on tour? The debut CD still gets you video with audio. "We feel very strongly that the music stands on its own, but the slides are such an important aspect that we went to great lengths to incorporate the visual element of our show into a unique interactive experience for the listener/viewer,” says singer-songwriter-keyboardist-dad Jason Trachtenburg in a press release.

• 04-13-04: "The Fog Index is considered the most reliable formula for testing your writing to see how easy it is to read and understand," writes A.J. Vasaris. "It is not an index of how good your writing is but of how easy it is to understand. Good writing is another subject. But all writing must be clear before it can be good." Go to Readability.info and upload a Word file or point to a URL. You'll not only get your Fog Index but also your ARI, Kincaid, Flesch and a host of other indices. The site has an explanation of each.

• 04-12-04: Atención los que hablan Español y estudian PowerPoint: aqui esta un curso de PowerPoint 2002 muy completo y gratis. ¡Buena suerte!

• 04-11-04: Think about a non-linear approach to the story you are presenting. J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism profiles how MSNBC utilizes old media presentation and new media interactivity in "MSNBC: Complex Story Shells Deliver Flexible Interactions." If the situation warrants it, try to incorporate links to non-sequential pages or separate presentations in your next set of slides. Never tried? It's easier than you think.

• 04-09-04: Do pictures and graphics in sequence have a language (i.e., a system of syntax and semantics) all on their own? Blogger Peter Merholz explores this concept; he and respondents offer up several intriguing ideas and links which discuss the idea of a visual language. Several are links we have explored before (Tufte, xPlane, Robert E. Horn via Sociable Media) while others are new to me and equally worth a look.

• 04-07-04: Grousing at software for bad decision making and poor communication isn't just for PowerPoint any more. eWeek's Peter Coffee turns his aim toward another PC application that changed business and society in "Spreadsheets: 25 Years in a Cell." For starters, he writes, "In this 25th anniversary year of the PC spreadsheet, we can be proud of the progress we've made in decision technology. We can also be appalled by the stagnation of our decision-making practices. The things we learned to do badly in 1979, upon the debut of VisiCalc, we mostly continue to do wrong today."

• 04-06-04: Running with scissors: What do you think of Microsoft's "Great Moments at Work" ad campaign for the Office application suite? (The particular installment which touts the on-the-fly ability to change a PowerPoint presentation's data is depicted like a college basketball team that cuts down the net after a victory, taking turns with scissors to snip away at the projection screen.) The campaign began in October. We're into the fourth month of 2004. Which month will be appropriate to stop running ads for products with "2003" splashed everywhere? Kinda mimics the season-creep of televised sports...

• 04-05-04: "Effective oral presentation is more about creative thinking on your feet and basic skills than about wearing good shoes and knowing how to create a dazzling PowerPoint presentation. For years companies have sought graduates who can give dynamic talks as a key way to bring concerned parties to a common decision. But many recent graduates make the mistake of trying to let the computer, bells and whistles blaring, do all the work for them. They forget the fundamentals of oral presentation, and thus whatever polish they have quickly loses its luster." Good tips for grads and others at "Beyond Powerpoint -- Becoming an effective presenter" by Joe Schall via GraduatingEngineer.com.

• 04-04-04: This once-in-a-millennium date fondly reminds me of PowerPoint 4.0, the version that signaled the beginning of the end for (a) competing software applications and (b) conversation-centric meetings. The reason? Microsoft decided to bundle it with Office. The confluence of laptop availability, projection technology, and boom-era business managers tasked with evangelizing mission and vision statements didn't hurt either. New features included the Organization Chart utility and Wizards, among other things. 

• 04-02-04: I just bought a new digital projector. A good introductory article is here courtesy of East Bay Business Times. Many in-depth articles and reviews are here at Presentations.com.

• 03-31-04: Would the availability of a PowerPoint Design Certification make the world a better place? An editorial from Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine Online flippantly posits the idea, then readers reply. Read "How PowerPoint Is Like Melvin."

• 03-29-04: Speaking of Microsoft presentations, (1) Scott Hanselman offers a few tips if you happen to be presenting to Microsoft. (2) If you happen to be Microsoft, your slides will look like this. Check out Bill Gates' keynote slideshow last week at Microsoft Mobile Developer Conference 2004. (Note: 18 MB download. Highlights of the speech are here.)

• 03-28-04: In Redmond, WA, Microsoft offers a sneak peek at office of the future, the Center for Information Work (CIW). It represents a "companywide effort to build a prototype of what productivity technology could look like three to five years from now. Microsoft invites its corporate customers and partners to see how the CIW uses workplace scenarios to demonstrate concepts of how software can help improve the way information workers manage information overload, gain access to important data to enable faster decision-making, and stay connected when away from the office." Show and tell goes way beyond PowerPoint presentations; there's even a portion of an actual semi-truck cab in the center to demonstrate supply chain software applications. Try stuffing that into your projector bag.

• 03-26-04: "Honor and surprise some attendees by name," suggests communications consultant Kare Anderson in "Deliver Presentations That Make Audiences Care." "Be a hero to your audience by citing audience members by name as positive examples of the points you are making. How? Interview the meeting planner, sharing your main points and gathering examples she/he has heard or can discover that involve diverse people in the audience. Then, just before speaking, ask that meeting planner to point out the two or three people you are going to mention. That way, as you are making your point, you can begin walking toward the person you want to praise, getting closer and closer to him/her as you share your example so you can be at that person's side, smiling, shaking hands, even asking the audience to give that person some well-deserved recognition (applause, please)." How Oprahtic.

• 03-25-04: "As the name implies, PowerPoint is powerful, both as a thinking tool and a communication tool. For example, on an airplane I once saw an architect designing an entire house in PowerPoint. You can use PowerPoint to visualize your thoughts, and when you are done you can use it to communicate. This power is also its downfall. While people are quite sophisticated at 'reading' visual information, it’s much more difficult to 'write' visually. Because visuals are organized spatially, there are many more variables and the whole process is much more complex." Couldn't have said it better myself. Click here to read more of what Dave Gray of xPlane (the "visual thinking company") told Cliff Atkinson of Sociable Media.

• 03-24-04: A cautionary essay from a teacher regarding the use of PowerPoint in the classroom. "Technology in teaching is nothing new. We can hardly think of teaching today without books and overheads; these are hardly controversial technologies. The technology at issue these days is digital, or computer-based, technology. My experience is that digital technology can enhance our students' learning, but only if our goals for our students' learning drive its use," writes, aptly enough, Tom Creed of Saint John's University. Or, as Stephen Covey would say, begin with the end in mind.

• 03-23-04: (1) Here's one lawyer who understands the interplay of information design, knowledge management, and persuasion technology. Thomas Collins maintains a site dedicated to "thinking about how legal knowledge workers collect, and then connect, the dots." Most recently, he links to an article that underscores his point that information design is a skill that lawyers must learn. See also his essays (in PDF format) "Can Organizational Communication Survive PowerPoint?" or "Beyond Words -- New Tools Can Enhance Legal Writing." (2) I am right now listening to a live radio broadcast of U.S. Congressional panel hearings regarding 9/11. Colin Powell is discussing, among other things, his PowerPoint slides. 

• 03-21-04: Tom Bunzel at informIT asks, "Is PowerPoint just for conventional speaker support? Let's answer with an emphatic no, and investigate how combining PowerPoint with Visual Basic for Applications can make it a platform for data acquisition and a conduit for sending information to other Office applications, such as Excel." Check out "Using PowerPoint To Facilitate, Not Just Present." (Postscript: Tom Bunzel is interviewed on 03-25 at the excellent website Indezine.)

• 03-19-04: While the European Community decides on sanctions against Microsoft, a sinister twist occurs: "EC Microsoft sanctions halted by 'self-aware' PowerPoint presentation" 

• 03-18-04: Critics of PowerPoint have been outnumbering defenders for a while, but the latter have been gifted with "The Great Man Has Spoken. Now What Do I Do? -- A Response to Edward R. Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" by Karl P. Keller and Barbara L. Shwom of Communication Partners. (Summary article here and full PDF here.) An excerpt: "Over the years, Professor Tufte has given us startling insight into the world of information display. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint continues that work. Everyone should read it. But like so many other stimulating and powerful essays, we should cast a cold critical eye on it, and not accept everything it says as gospel just because it has sprung from the software tools used by Edward R. Tufte—great man though he is. It’s our hope that Tufte’s argument will make us all smarter about using PowerPoint—not simply make us feel guilty." Well put.

• 03-17-04: Happy St. Patrick's Day to those who celebrate it. Have a bit o' fun with some themed PPT backgrounds.

• 03-16-04: (1) "Reinventing The Powerpoint -- New tech tools to liven your tired old PowerPoint presentations--and give your online marketing efforts a boost" boasts the March 2004 issue of Inc. (2) The April 2004 issue of Wired will unveil David Byrne as a winner of its annual Rave award in the category of artist. Byrne's "celebration of a broken tool" (as one pundit called his PowerPoint art) helped sell copies of the Sept. 2003 issue of Wired and kept Edward Tufte from monopolizing the conversation about slideware.

• 03-15-04: Help your audience read your slides by using the right letterforms. "It doesn't matter how many hours of video and megabytes of graphics can be stuffed onto a silver platter, typefaces still serve an essential function that can't be duplicated by other means--transmitting complex intellectual and emotional messages in a very concise and precise way. But the limitations inherent to reading on-screen--especially the low-resolutions of monitors, mean that the digital designer has to be more careful about choosing typefaces that are easily readable on-screen." Daniel Will-Harris discusses "The Best Faces for the Screen." (Definitions of some of the technical terms he uses are here.)

• 03-14-04: "... The issue is not banning PowerPoint – it’s about putting constraints on it. For example, limit a PowerPoint to no more than 10 slides, no more than 20 words, and 2 of those slides have to have pictures or charts. Just as in the strict rhyming structure of sonnets or haiku, art is defined by constraints. A problem with PowerPoint is that you can just create another slide. In the first and final analysis, do we use technologies to engage our audience, or to better articulate what we want to say? There are a lot of arrogant people who believe that better articulating what we want to say is synonymous with engaging the audience. That’s not acceptable." Strong words from Michael Schrage, writer and associate at MIT's Media Lab, in an interview with Cliff Atkinson.

• 03-11-04: (1) As a former writer and editor for publications, I find it hard to break the habit of reading news with a critical eye. The Seattle Times reprints the story by Chicago Tribune's James Coates "Apreso extends the reach of ubiquitous PowerPoint." Read the piece and see if you agree with my hunch that what may have started as a run-of-the-mill industry press release became the basis for another salvo in the backlash against PowerPoint. While Coates approves of the new product, there is a snarky tone throughout. The Trib, you'll recall, published Julia Keller's "Is PowerPoint the Devil?" (2) Speaking of the backlash, noted tech pundit Robert X. Cringely offers a sobering meditation on PowerPoint in "Now Hear This." An excerpt: "It isn’t the fault of PowerPoint, of course, but in the way we use it ... Not only is it easier to throw together a stack of PowerPoint slides than it is to write that 10,000-word document, it is much easier to leave out or gloss over parts of the project that might not survive close scrutiny if they were described in complete sentences. Can you say 'weapons of mass destruction?'"

• 03-10-04: In the Birmingham Business Journal, Gayle Lantz writes, "Before you deliver your next big speech, here are a few questions to help you prepare: 1) What do you want the audience to think, feel and do as a result of your presentation? 2) If you had to summarize your main message in one sentence, what would it be? 3) What's most important to your audience? 4) How will you know you've achieved your goal for the presentation? 5) Finally, what can you do to ensure you're most effective in communicating your message?" Gayle reminds us of these and other fundamentals in "Presentation skills - what everyone should know."

• 03-08-04: Despite our increasing abilities to communicate electronically, paper consumption continues to climb. "This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don't agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers." Think about the occasions and reasons you print your presentations as you read Malcolm Gladwell's "The Social Life of Paper -- Looking for method in the mess."

• 03-06-04: Courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the school I almost went to, a new software tool to make PowerPoint easier for the disabled to use is available for free downloading. If you are interested in more information about assistive technology, Georgia Tech's Center for Assistive Technology & Environmental Access makes a great set of links and resources available.

• 03-04-04: Don Watson is fed up with management-speak. "No proposition can exist that cannot be reconciled with a dot-point in your mission statement. As a test, try it on your dog. Try saying 'Rover, my organisational values compel me to focus on your lack of commitment to putting yourself in place in the back of the ute.' See how Rover responds. Rover will look at you, as everyone looks at anyone who reads that stuff - blankly. The language of management, for which read the language of virtually all corporations and companies, large and small, public service departments, government agencies, libraries, galleries and museums, the universities, the military, intelligence organisations and increasingly politics, is language that cannot describe or convey any human emotion, including the most basic ones like happiness, sympathy, greed, envy, love or lust. You cannot tell a joke in this language or write a poem or sing a song. It’s a language entirely without provenance or possibility." Don is the author of "Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language."

• 03-03-04: (1) Putting PowerPoint in context: "Slideshow" tops a list of twenty media tools you and your team might use to manage interactions, communication, archiving, and work. Smart Meeting Design uses that list to help inventory and plan optimal media mixes for people who realize the web, the watercooler and the whiteboard are all valid collaborative spaces. (Test yourself: before you click the link, see if you can name ten tools. PowerPoint counts as one.) (2) The Sydney Morning Herald submits two more stories about PPT in education, one about university-level instruction, and one about lower grade levels. Both point to gains made by creative use of the tool.

• 03-02-04: As blogged on 09-03-03, files created in Word, Excel or PowerPoint contain hidden data that you may want to keep private. Via the fine folks at TechTV's The Screen Savers, here's a tip and a link to Microsoft's tool for Office 2002/2003 users which removes that hidden data.

• 03-01-04: Cliff Atkinson writes, "Many people have opinions about PowerPoint, but few can speak on the topic with the authority of Richard E. Mayer, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Named the most prolific researcher in the field of educational psychology, Rich is the author of 18 books and more than 250 articles and chapters. His 12 years of research in multimedia learning and problem solving have important implications for PowerPoint users." Sociable Media presents the Richard Mayer interview. You read it here first.

• 02-27-04: "Any good book or story establishes rapport with the reader/listener in many modes (sight, sound, tactile, olfactory, etc.) and if successful, transitions the reader/listener along with unfolding the story to begin experiencing the story in all of the modes. The goal is to immerse, submerge, capture, and captivate the reader/listener in the story, so that they are running on all cylinders. For everyone is visual in experiencing something, and tactile in others areas, or auditory, and every combination for everything we do. How we experience a story read or told is the process of HOW we experience that particular communication." Sage words from Gregory Leifel, in "A Story Writer and Teller Delineates How We Process Information" via Chris King's Creative Keys.

• 02-26-04: Outsourcing to a dedicated specialist the design of critical PowerPoint presentations makes good business sense for the, ahem, current developers and marketers of the PowerPoint application itself. Read how "Mastering the art of PowerPoint has paid off for Seattle's Silver Fox Productions" in the Puget Sound Business Journal. (If anything, Microsoft has long been excellent at recognizing who is good at what, then acting on that knowledge. SFP seems up to the task.)

• 02-25-04: "You've heard the expression that a picture is worth a thousand words. Great salespeople know that positive words can help them get a thousand sales ... Your choice of words can promote positive feelings, encourage customers' optimism, and lead to a sale. Using negative words can create fear, uncertainty and discomfort and, therefore, poison sales. Here are six examples of 'poison' words and their positive replacements ... " See which words Laura Laaman identified as you read "Your words -- are they positive or poison?" in BizJournals.

• 02-24-04: Googling for PPT - part two: Apparently, among the most popular web pages regarding PowerPoint is Peter Norvig's celebrated version of the Gettysburg Address (blogged here long ago). In fact, today it ranks fourth out of 7,200,000 results in a Google search of "powerpoint." Great ranking, no? It should be noted Mr. Norvig serves as Director of Search Quality at Google.

• 02-23-04: Watching the brilliant movie "American Splendor" this past weekend, I was reminded how much punch the verbal-visual language of comics can pack. Even Edward Tufte agrees: "The cartoon style is sometimes good in explaining things; the words are right there with the illustration, complete text-image integration produced by the same hand behind both text and image. And the mind behind that hand has to have a good understanding of the content ... The cartoon short stories of Harvey Pekar (drawn by different illustrators/cartoonists) are quite powerful and moving."

• 02-20-04: "When pondering the the most impactful technologies since the dawn of mankind, Business 2.0 identified the presentation management software program Microsoft PowerPoint as one of the most influential innovations. But in reviewing the net effect of this technology, it may also be labeled as having minimal impact on business productivity, and a negative influence on 'quality of life.' The reason is that with presentation software now within nearly everyone's reach, much more time is spent on the presentation itself rather than on the content. Trying to make the messenger as beautiful as possible through endless iterations in many cases has resulted in much less attention placed on the message itself ... Appealing images can be impressive, but only powerful content can result in true positive differentiation." From "The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers" by Richard Smith and James M. Citrin. See the site and book.

• 02-19-04: More PPT news from campus: This month, publishing giant Thomson Corp. tapped the small, Youngstown, OH-based Turning Technologies for TurningPoint, an application that provides instructors with classroom response systems that integrate with PowerPoint. Real-time polls, quizzes and exercises can be performed onscreen without the instructor leaving their own slides. According to the press release, Thomson Higher Ed will combine TurningPoint with Thomson's book-specific content.

• 02-18-04: "PowerPoint's latest destination seems to be the classroom. More and more teachers from elementary schools to universities are abandoning blackboards for computer screens, or using a combination of the two. But even as many professors are enthusiastically adding PowerPoint to their toolbox, some wonder whether it belongs there at all." Shanthi Manian examines theory and practice of PowerPoint critics and fans at Georgetown U. in her cover story "Projecting Fluff -- Is PowerPoint making students dumber?" for The Georgetown Voice.

• 02-17-04: "Presentations are becoming increasingly visual and less textual. Converting every concept into an image is the challenge and, at the same time, the solution," advises Juan C. Dürsteler at InfoViz.net. He supplies a short review of some basic rules for creating Conceptual Presentations. (Inf@Viz, an online magazine, is an excellent resource regarding information visualization and has been blogged here in the past.)

• 02-16-04: Just seven tips, Mr. Veen? PC Magazine up the ante. Read their 15 Top PowerPoint Tips.

• 02-15-04: Jeffrey Veen shares his Seven Tips for Better Presentations, and his readers share a few more.

• 02-13-04: Googling for PPT: Along with Acrobat and Word files, PowerPoint files are widely downloaded documents from websites. Savvy searchers know that the search query qualifier filetype: limits their searches to files whose names end with a particular extension. For instance, Googling Tufte filetype:ppt will find only PowerPoint files containing the text "Tufte." For PDF files, you would Google Tufte filetype:pdf. More tips here.

• 02-12-04: Is PowerPoint to your network as carbs are to your diet? The idea famously preached by Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy, then picked up by the US Navy, continues to be echoed this week in CIO by Tim Buckley, CIO of the Vanguard Group. (A dieting tip from the PPT FAQ: "Why are my PPT files so big? What can I do about it?" A tip for PPT XP and 2003 users: Format | Picture | Compress ...)

• 02-11-04: Macromedia has updated Breeze, a nifty application that imports PowerPoint presentations into Flash for online collaboration, conferencing and presentation. While they are not the only player in this field (which includes Microsoft, Lotus, Web-Ex, and others), their current market position as the makers of Flash will no doubt make Breeze an attractive option for large organizations. (Smaller companies and individuals might want to consider alternatives such as Stream Presentations or Impatica.)

• 02-08-04: Clear eye for the chart pie: View a few samples of PowerPoint-based art by Michael Lewy, an MIT employee and visual artist. Seems David Byrne is neither the first nor only "PPT artist." Still, I'd prefer Lewy's other artwork over his chartwork.

• 02-05-04: Information design as applied to social networks intrigues me. Fellow Clevelander Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com created network maps of political books based on purchase patterns from major web book retailers. The networks reveal a divided populace ... at least among online book buyers. See his 2003 and 2004 results.

• 02-04-04: A personal prescription for better presentations: "It's the Story, Stupid — Don't Let Presentation Software Keep You From Getting Your Story Across" by Doc Searls. Although I would beg to differ with the co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" on certain points (e.g., "I'm actually rather fond of the silly-looking clipart that comes with PowerPoint"), he gets it right overall: "Presentations are as much about slides as poetry is about handwriting." See your doctor today.

• 02-03-04: A handful of Korean Davids take aim at the Redmond Goliath in the slideware coliseum. Good luck, Haansoft et al.

• 02-02-04: (1) Further observations from the field regarding the "PowerPoint Presidency" here and here at DigitalMediaTree.com. See 01-14-04 post below. (2) Apply new master: if you feel adept at PowerPoint for your studies, why not use it for proposing marriage? It happened in Scotland.

• 01-30-04: Another look at the line in the sand between the Tuftians and the "don't-blame-the-tool" camp, this time from an embed with an Australian press pass. Read Sue Cant's fair and balanced "Power, up to a Point" from the Sydney Morning Herald. This is one of the better recent newspaper pieces.

• 01-29-04: Tired of claims that PowerPoint can "dumb down" important communication? This piece shows that you can "dumb up" without slides. Too many words, and a few wrong ones, can bury a message just as easily.

• 01-28-04: Another summary "What's Wrong with PowerPoint -- and How to Fix It" type of article, this time by David Coursey of ZDNet. David's six main points: 1: Do the presentation first, then the slides. 2: Artwork has killed more presentations than it's saved. 3: Animation is for cartoons. 4: Present more than the slide. 5: Use the notes pages. 6: Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

• 01-27-04: "Scientific communication is in the process of metamorphosis. Will it change into a dung beetle or into a beautiful butterfly? Here is one possibility that some might argue is as frightening as Kafka's story," writes Ronald E LaPorte and others in the British Medical Journal. "Papyrus to PowerPoint (P2P): metamorphosis of scientific communication" investigates the shakeup that slideware is causing the 300-year-old tradition of scientific publication and peer review. "This metamorphosis is taking place and is driven by a juggernaut called PowerPoint." (Bonus: in the interests of science, a PPT version of the article is also posted, asking readers to compare and opine.)

• 01-24-04: A foreshadowing of our current societal PowerPoint angst turns up in a historical reflection published in Proposal Management, the journal of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals. In the early 1960s, Walter F. Starkey and others at Hughes Aircraft recognized their then-radically different storyboarding technique for creating proposals meant "difficulties in writing and editing would necessarily have to be overcome to fit the detailed technical narrative into such a pattern." But one team member "had propelled the authors into the recognition that traditional editorial elegance was incontestably beside the point when having to spoon feed hard arguments to soft customers."

• 01-23-04: A call for papers: Cliff Atkinson of Sociable Media has assembled a hefty listing of recent research papers, articles and reports surrounding PowerPoint, multimedia and communication. This compilation, with many excerpts, reaches far beyond the usual trade and business magazines. Know about something to add? Drop a line to Cliff.

• 01-21-04: Writing within tight space constraints has been a longstanding challenge for presenters. So too for journalists. Editor Larry Larsen at PoynterOnline has collected 1,000 notable headlines -- good, bad and ugly -- with the help of his readers. Think about some of these the next time you click to add title.

• 01-20-04: Like whiteboards and Blackberries, PowerPoint may be regarded as a "communication prosthetic" writes Neal Stephenson for Whole Earth. "[M]ost people have to work with fellow human beings. Which means communicating with them. But communicating with FHBs is hard. Some can do it by drawing pictures, others by interpretive dance, oratory, cinema, or sonnets. But some can't. Thus Powerpoint. To people who can't communicate, it is what the dialysis machine is to people who don't have kidneys."

• 01-19-04: "Sure enough, as the student clicked through the presentation, I was immediately struck by the clean graphics, the strong colors, and the digestible writing. Then, suddenly, he was done. This was the extent of his report. But its content was no deeper or more complex than what one commonly sees in civics papers done elsewhere, with pencil and paper, by seventh and eighth graders. Mystified, I asked the student how he'd used his time. He estimated having spent approximately 17 hours on the project, only seven of which had been devoted to research and writing. The rest went to refining the presentation's graphics." A description of an 11th-grader's PPT report, from the opening paragraph of "Point. Click. Duh.", a chapter from the book The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved by Todd Oppenheimer.

• 01-18-04: (1) Giving a keynote address? Web innovator Jeffrey Veen gave one with a summation that borrows a few techniques from a preaching class: repetition, memorable phrases, a direct call to action. A good tip, especially from someone with a bio like this. (2) But then again, it's just as beneficial, if not more so, to refer to a master of the craft. (This speaker would have been 75 tomorrow.)

• 01-16-04: (1) PowerPoint is soooo out, says the Washington Post. Handouts are in. (2) Splitting the difference, Pittsburgh-based Maya Design Inc. offers an illuminating example of using PowerPoint's Notes view to unclutter the slide while providing full text for a more comprehensive handout. Read Paul Gould's Evil Genius (The Good Side of PowerPoint).

• 01-15-04: Business presentations are prime branding opportunities, or so goes the mantra. The power of branding is given an interesting test by the Vienna-based artists at Monochrom.at. They asked Austrian citizens to draw twelve logos strictly from memory. Click on each logo to view results.

• 01-14-04: (1) More David Byrne coverage here, courtesy of National Public Radio. See gallery pop-up with five examples of his PowerPoint art. (2) PowerPoint-as-Derogatory-Adjective Syndrome, part two: the "PowerPoint Presidency." And while not using the label per se, Fox News seems to have noticed Bush's bias for bullets. Bullet points, at least.

• 01-13-04: Is "PowerPoint Engineering" a deservingly derogatory term? A contributor at Everything2.net offers a definition, but closer reading reveals a dysfunctional process as old as business itself. Once again, unfortunately, PPT takes the blame.

• 01-12-04: "I soured on PowerPoint long ago while interning at a national lab. I developed a PowerPoint presentation with complete sentences and good parallel structure. My boss turned all the sentences into fragments and all my verbs into nouns. I was told the sentences and verbs weren't professional. This isn't PowerPoint's fault, but it seems there is an unwritten manual that enforces these habits of unclear thinkers," says one of the many contributors to a Calpundit.com thread of discussion entitled "PowerPoint Haters Unite." What are our other unwritten rules? Should we break them?

• 01-09-04: Consider PowerPoint and Kishotenketsu. Blogger Charles Eicher notes how "Powerpoint presentations are an embodiment of a formal managerial hierarchy" by contrasting it with a more Eastern method of communication. "In this system, the supporting points loop around the main point without creating a linear argument. The points are intended to only obliquely reference the main point, it is up to the reader to infer how this relates to the main thesis." (More about cultural predispositions in business communications here.)

• 01-08-04: Presentations, like other content made, distributed and guarded within your organization, require careful management. The market for enterprise content management shows few signs of slowing; indeed, CRN reports a flurry of mergers and acquisitions in this arena will continue into the new year. Seems more companies want to help you answer that often-asked question, "Where the hell is that slide...?"

• 01-07-04: "Given the steady advance of technology, it's not that much of a surprise that [the company] can match its past efforts even while attempting more daunting scenarios ... What's more impressive, and in the end more important, is the high standard of storytelling ..." Is this about a group of talented presenters? Or a bleeding-edge tech consultancy? Sort of. The point is that a compelling story is as central to their jobs as it is to yours and mine.

• 01-06-04: What does one of the world's leading authorities on usability say about PowerPoint? As cofounder of the Neilsen Norman Group and author of the classic "The Design of Everyday Things," Don Norman is a strong advocate of user-centered design and simplicity. Surprisingly, Norman reveals in an exclusive interview that he disagrees with PowerPoint's most vocal critic, information design guru Edward Tufte. You heard it here first. (Also, watch for the David Byrne interview on cable's CNBC this week. Given his many rounds in the media lately, this may be the cycle killer.)

• 01-05-04: Slideshow road warriors take note: FedEx will acquire Kinko's for $2.4 billion. The copyshop giant has 1,200 stores, 400 of which operate 24/7, and 134 of them already sport FedEx-staffed retail counters, according to the press release. The market space for document production and delivery just got more interesting.

• 01-04-04: How do you map business processes? In this overlooked area of information design, many have followed the standard box-arrow-triangle-circle method to sometimes poor results. While the British firm Kay Initiatives Ltd. scores points for insight by applying the advantages proven by one design solution (the legendary London Underground train station diagram) to another (the design of business process and systems flowcharts), time will tell whether novelty or insight will propel business process mapping by tube. (Download the PPT template and PDF guidebook if you want to try your hand at it.) No matter how you get there, clean, intuitive design should be your destination.

• 01-02-04: Still more Edward Tufte, this time an interview with Dan Nadel of I.D. Magazine. (Link here, then choose "Q+A - Edward Tufte" from "Previous Q+A's.") In the interview, he elaborates on the genesis of and reaction to The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, that seven-dollar, 28-page pamphlet whose sales are now approaching 20,000. Perhaps jokingly, Tufte calls it "the only success story in e-commerce." Right. (Tip of the blogger's hat to Cliff Atkinson for the link.)

• 12-27-03: I have some time to catch up on reading this week. If you do too, then check out what writer/inventor/sage Rich Gold offers here -- essentially a book, but in PowerPoint slides and notes. Graphics are notable for their hand-drawn quality; text for its, um, plenitude.

• 12-23-03: (1) Now that 2004 is nearly here, it's time to ask whether upgrading to Office 2003 is warranted. Let's compare. (2) Okay, let's really compare. (3) Blogger Felix Salmon ruminates on Byrne, Tufte and others while asking "Who will stick up for PowerPoint?"

• 12-20-03: Academic lecturers are no less immune to the problems of presenters anywhere else. Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, William Germano offers a pithy "baker's dozen survival tips for academic speakers" in The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver. (The paragraph entitled "PowerPoint is for Sissies" might provoke a thought or two.)

• 12-19-03: (1) More David Byrne coverage is appearing, this time as an interview from MS/NBC/Newsweek and a short writeup at The Motley Fool site. Good to know the guitarist/artist/slidist can laugh at his own "smarmy boho tendencies." (2) Imagine you're a PowerPoint slide that some bright young entrepreneur showed to a venture capital firm before the dot com boom went bust. You had your moment and now you're history. Where should you rest in peace and still mean something to someone? Right here.

• 12-14-03: It's the New York Times, again. Rehashing Tufte's opinions about PowerPoint, again. Discussing the Columbia findings, again. "PowerPoint Makes You Dumb" was written by Clive Thompson (alternate link here). For more a stimulating read, however, visit Slashdot's lengthy thread of raw opinion, war stories and banter about PowerPoint that the Times article sparked. [12-15-03: For a formal rebuttal to Thompson, read Mike Gunderloy's piece for ADTmag.com: "PowerPoint Doesn't Make You Dumb."]

• 12-12-03: How would you feel if your child received a certificate for "giving a confident PowerPoint presentation"? Writer Susan Maushart of The Australian had mixed feelings when this happened recently, especially in light of how her daughter's school is defining the "new literacy." Maushart says, "Give Gobbledegook the Bullet Point."

• 12-10-03: As reported on 8-19-03 below, artist David Byrne has added PowerPoint to the tools of his trade and, like many slide-slinging road warriors, is taking it to the streets. Wired again gives the talking head a headline, this time from Los Angeles, where he was attending a series of events promoting the release of Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, a book of images and essays, plus a DVD which plays five of his PowerPoint presentations accompanied by original music. 

• 12-03-03: "Presentation tools don't skew data, people do," writes Peter Coffee in eWeek. His article for IT professionals entitled "Perception is Reality" pays respect to but ultimately parts company with Edward Tufte's opinion that PowerPoint itself is flawed.

• 12-02-03: Thinking about posting your PowerPoint presentation on the web? Writer and communications consultant Amy Gahran, via her Contentious blog, pleads that you reconsider. Readers then post their reactions, pro and con.

• 11-24-03: "Death by PowerPoint" has become a popular phrase. "Death with PowerPoint" might become one too, if a funeral trend spotted in this article gains more steam.

• 11-21-03: Another level-headed PowerPoint advice piece appears in the media: The Arizona Republic tells readers "Here's how to polish your presentations."

• 11-20-03: A testament to the power of a simple line graph can be found here. No 3D, no gradient shading, no bells and whistles. As Edward Tufte says, if your charts are boring, it's because you're looking at the wrong data.

• 11-19-03: The pros and cons of teaching with PowerPoint are briefly discussed in the Rocky Mountain Collegian. It is interesting to observe that some students do recognize the potential pitfalls.

• 11-13-03: Who wants to be a game show host? At TeachNet.com, contributor Mark Damon shares his PPT files with you to build your own classroom versions of Jeopardy, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Hollywood Squares, and Weakest Link. (Postscript: More game samples are at PTTInc.com.)

• 11-10-03: The Toronto Star is fighting the good fight, offering the basic but prescriptive article "Countering 'Death by PowerPoint'" instead of simply complaining about how PPT is being used. The Star quotes PPT rock stars Cliff Atkinson and Dave Paradi.

• 11-08-03: I still run across interesting reviews of Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint." Written in June 2003, this short but breezy piece by Dean Allen in Textism is but one example. Also, in October, National Public Radio took the PPT's-questionable-effects-on-education angle with this piece. The PowerPoint backlash continues.

• 11-06-03: Less than one month after its release, Microsoft Office 2003 gets its first critical update. The update fixes a problem that can occur when a user opens or saves a PowerPoint 2003, Word 2003, or Excel 2003 file that contains an "OfficeArt" element that was modified and saved in an earlier version of Office, reports PC World.

• 11-04-03: Ah, Macintosh zealots. I used to be one, way back during the Reagan Administration. Nice to see they're still out there, writing about applications like Keynote in comparison to PowerPoint. This review is noteworthy for its description of Keynote's rendering capabilities.

• 10-31-03: What is the best year of all? It's "Year 3," writes John Brandt for IndustryWeek. In virtually every PowerPoint presentation of a strategic plan or budget he can recall, "Year 3 stands out like a shining city on the hill, a place of beauty, peace and profit toward which we corporate soldiers marched."

• 10-27-03: The Boston Globe reports that in June 2004, Kodak will cease production of their 35 millimeter slide projectors. Sigh. The Carousel is going the way of the carousel.

• 10-23-03: Some first impressions of Microsoft Office 2003 are rolling in. Early opinions: XP users might be underwhelmed, but Outlook addicts might rejoice. As usual, PCWorld offers some detailed views and Slashdotters weigh in with too many messages. PowerPoint improvements? The new Viewer, full screen video, and password protection. 

• 10-22-03: "Most slide presentations are as excruciating as a badly dubbed chopsocky action flick," writes Anne Schukat in Business 2.0. "So we sought help from the black belts of this mysterious craft." Read "Kung Fu Secrets of the PowerPoint Masters."

• 10-19-03: Don't use PowerPoint as a shield between managers and workers, says Harvard's Leslie Perlow, an anthropologist of corporate culture. There are many ways to silence conflict in the workplace, and rosy slideshows are but one of many ways people avoid dealing with tough issues. The Trouble with Silence at Work was written by Stacy Teicher.

• 10-15-03: At Presenters University, Ellen Finkelstein writes about "How (and How Not) to Use Builds in PowerPoint." Her three sensible warnings toward the end of her tutorial should be hard-coded into the next version of PowerPoint Help.

• 10-14-03: A PowerPoint star in the offing? One blogger shares his enthusiasm for the presentation style and slides of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig.

• 10-11-03: The first "PowerPoint Live" conference begins tomorrow in Tucson, AZ. Couldn't make it this time around, but it sounds promising, given the agenda and list of presenters. We're looking forward to hearing about the outcome.

• 10-09-03: Whew. Been busy with client work lately, so my apologies for the recent lack of posts. Today's tidbit: a follow-up to my 8-16-03 post about Microsoft's decision to leave PowerPoint 2003 off of the XML train in contrast to all the other Office 2003 applications. Turns out that Redmond was lacking "development resources" in its PPT team, according to ZDNet. Hmm. Maybe they were all working on the new version of the PPT Viewer. (This previous Viewer, if it were a canine, would be in midlife about now.)

• 9-29-03: The "PowerPoint backlash" debate earns yet another short piece in this past Sunday's New York Times. Writer John Schwartz notes that the independent board investigating the Columbia disaster devoted an entire page of its final report last month to Edward Tufte's damning analysis of how PowerPoint may be to blame. However, Schwartz also quotes Microsoft and PPT supporters. For a fair and balanced article, see "The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide." (Fox News lawyers: hit email link below to begin legal proceedings. I could use the web traffic.)

• 9-26-03: Don McMillan claims to be the only comedian working in PowerPoint. (Bob Hirschfeld might disagree.) One immediately funny item on Don's homepage: "To view Don's NEW demo video (22MB, 7 min) click on the image." Ha ha. Hey, Don, most of the wired world still has dialup.

• 9-24-03: Journalist sitting in audience watches presentation of Intel business development VP give "truth-stretching" talk about Wi-Fi and Centrino to a small regional trade show. Journalist is next to present. During Intel's talk, journalist modifies his slides to debunk prior speaker. The lessons? A) Know your audience as thoroughly as you can, and, B) Agility pays.

• 9-21-03: Does converted PowerPoint constitute "real' e-learning? That is, can you take basic slides and turn them into software that interacts with and provides feedback about a user's performance? The Training 2003 conference in Atlanta put 12 vendors to the test and announced winners in four categories.

• 9-19-03: The original information-rich graphic -- the map -- got a boost from the Microsoft gang. Yesterday, Microsoft released MapPoint 2004 business mapping software, which will now be included in Microsoft Office. People like me say, "Thank you, Bill." Others will say, "Lord, how much more bloated could MS Office become?"

• 9-17-03: "One way or another, your visitors' expectations should be the primary driver behind your decisions on copy length." Copywriter Nick Usbourne sheds light on a perennial dilemma. While aimed at online and newsletter writers, his first and second essays on "Long or Short Copy?" discuss key points for presenters, especially if you're using PowerPoint for a job more suited to Quark Xpress. (I'm guilty. Are you?)

• 9-15-03: It's hard to sit through a corporate presentation today without encountering a flowchart. Rules for creators of flowcharts bear repeating, I think, given how many poorly designed ones I've seen over the years. Jesse James Garrett provides a great public service by sharing "A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design."

• 9-13-03: PowerPoint 2003 is nearing release. What's in it for us? Here is what Microsoft says, and here is what Small Business Computing says. (The free "Producer 2003 for PowerPoint" add-in for adding audio and video clips promises better synchronization between slides and clips, but I'll believe it when I see it.)

• 9-12-03: "To make a good information graphic is not an easy thing. It is fundamental to know what purpose it serves and to whom it is addressed, but it’s also convenient to follow a coherent process in order to correctly make it," writes Juan C. Dürsteler at InfoViz.net. "In the end, making a good information graphic consists of facilitating the understanding of complexity, instead of complicating what is simple." Juan shows the process here.

• 9-09-03: Template art makes for template thinking, writes Jamie Mackenzie. "Computer software penetrates and influences our culture in ways that too often escape scrutiny and discussion. The pervasive use of mediocre clip art and templates associated with a narrow range of desktop programs is just one by byproduct of a new trend some are calling 'microsoftness.'" Now there's a new word to kick around.

• 9-08-03: Who among us, honestly, has successfully fought the temptation to Photoshop Osama bin Laden's face onto a penis and include it in a presentation? Someone? Anyone? Bueller?

• 9-03-03: Careful with that file: Microsoft documents often contain hidden data regarding authorship, version or even fragments of earlier versions or other files entirely. The BBC reports that researcher Simon Byers conducted a survey of Word docs on the net and found that many of them contain sensitive information. Byers said that about half the 100,000 documents he gathered from the net had up to 50 hidden words, a third up to 500 words hidden and 10% had more than 500 words concealed within them.

• 8-30-03: Forty years ago, Rev. Martin Luther King gave one of America's most memorable presentations. A writer from The Charlotte Observer wonders if we have become too calloused by bullet points, multimedia, and lying officials to pay any more attention to simple, well-honed speeches, or whether they are out there at all.

• 8-29-03: My web host, Hypermart, has had very bad things happen to their servers, and is now serving up backup copies of their customers' sites archived from over two weeks ago and URL aliases are not working. This does not bode well for those of us with frequent updates. Retroactive apologies are due to you when you finally read this.

• 8-25-03: "Hearing spoken text and looking at graphics is best way to promote user recall," say two authors of a study on the effects of multimedia components on learning. The research was presented at the 41st annual meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in 1997.

• 8-21-03: Timely as ever, Dilbert weighs in not once but twice on the PPT controversy.

• 8-20-03: Infographic guru Edward R. Tufte proclaims "PowerPoint is Evil" on the soapbox provided by Wired. (This is essentially his "Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" essay I blogged earlier, but reduced over a hot stove.)

• 8-19-03: Hot on the heels of the post below, David Byrne offers up his own explanation of how he moved from hating to adoring PowerPoint. "Learning to Love PowerPoint" appears in the Sept. 2003 issue of Wired.

• 8-17-03: More interesting goings-on at the intersection of art, commerce, Times Square and Redmond, WA. Read about "David Byrne's Alternate PowerPoint Universe" in the New York Times.

• 8-16-03: Software news: Although the Microsoft Office 2003 train is almost ready to leave the station, looks like PowerPoint won't be boarding through the XML coach.

• 8-12-03: "I know a woman who disciplines her children with PowerPoint briefing charts..." So begins a Citypaper article from March/April 2001 titled "PowerPointless" by Joab Jackson. Read this screed, then decide if the publication date's proximity to April 1 has any bearing. I think it might. At least I hope so.

• 8-11-03: Have your presentations ever been ridiculed as smokescreens? Well, with apologies to Andy Warhol, I hereby predict that from now on, a popular metaphor will become literal every fifteen minutes.

• 8-10-03: A professor makes the leap to PowerPoint and has some keen insights along the way. "My PowerPoint Summer" was written by Robert Sommer.

• 8-8-03: When I design charts, diagrams and illustrations, I strive for understanding first, and decoration last. In my dreams, I'd be a fraction as good as this guy.

• 8-6-03: Simran Bhargava might enjoy hanging out with these folks. They are storytellers.

• 8-5-03: "You guys out there who make presentations, please think of us in the audience. Tickle us, tease us, tell us a story, connect with us. Tell us about your start-up not just through hard data. Tell us about the nights spent working, the panic when the money ran out, the special joy when you got the first account ... Tell us about all that. And then bring on the PowerPoint slides if you must. As soldiers-in-waiting. Not the commander of the whole show." Simran Bhargava implores us to start "Bringing Business Presentations to Life."

• 8-4-03: Is it possible to show two presentations from one computer connected to one projector on one screen? It is now, thanks to DualPoint.

• 8-1-03: Three years before Gen. Colin Powell's historic multimedia sales pitch for war on Iraq, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the US military to cut to the chase with the burgeoning bells and whistles in its presentations, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• 7-30-03: The urban legend debunkers at snopes detail an intriguing but true story: two businessmen vent their spleen about a dropped hotel reservation not through an angry letter or phone call, but a now-legendary presentation.

• 7-29-03: It is "easy to dislike or even loathe PowerPoint. Too easy, in fact. Think about it for a moment: Which came first on the evolutionary ladder, stupidity or PowerPoint? For all the demonizing, PowerPoint is just a tool. And we should all know by now that tools are like messengers: They shouldn't be shot, they should be feted because they tell us something about what's going on beyond our headquarter's camp." Ah. A more balanced and sensible reply to PPT detractors from Adam Hanft, writing for Inc. Magazine.

• 7-28-03: Here's a modern scenario: You are presenting. Your audience members are typing away ... writing to each other about you. "Enabling wireless technology in university auditoriums has led to a back channel of communication for students to reveal their thoughts," says the New York Times.

• 7-24-03: Yawn. Must have been a slow news day on the media beat. Yet another "let's-pick-on-PowerPoint" ad hominem, this time courtesy of Mediapost.com.

• "Words and pictures can work together to communicate more powerfully than either alone," says William Albert Allard, photographer for National Geographic. Amen.

• Rear projection screens? LCD screens? Plasma? VR? Au contraire ... the future of display media is toast.

• Secure those slides! Two recent incidents with presentations mirror the trouble with errant e-mail. Who sees what slides from whom is making news. See this story and this one.

• Large organizations have teams and tools to make presentations look consistent. Take GE's page on brand identity, for example. (Medium- and small-sized organizations, of course, can call on me.)

• Rumor has it that a PowerPoint presentation plays a bit part in the new movie "Legally Blonde 2." Oh joy.

• Deloitte Consulting understands clarity. Their free "Bullfighter" add-in for Word and PowerPoint scans corporate communications for unnecessary jargon and suggests replacements. Bully for them! (But if we locked Bullfighter in a room with the Dack.com "Bull$%&t Generator," which would win?)

• Modern technology spreads old message. "At church, it's lights, computer, sermon," says the Cincinnati Enquirer.

• USA Today reports that "Amazon's best-selling e-book is an online-only book about Powerpoint software for $1.99." However, one Amazon reviewer cautions, "This isn't a book, it's a ten page pamphlet with one idea ... not worth the $."

• I had not yet encountered any references to PowerPoint being used in postmodern multimedia performance art pieces. Intentionally, anyway. Then I saw this. If you know of any of PPT standup comics -- again, intentional ones -- please let me know. (Postscript: I finally found a comic, Bob Hirschfeld, courtesy of WSJ.)

• Writer Daniel Radosh gives the "Gettysburg" treatment to works ranging from Hamlet to Lolita to modern-lad magazine Maxim. Welcome to The PowerPoint Anthology of Literature.

• I used to work for Accenture, the artists formerly known as Andersen Consulting, who began their long battle for independence from Arthur Andersen years before the world heard of Enron. Few writers have summarized the story as succinctly as this one has.

• Classrooms and boardrooms are among the first to be equipped with the latest in presentation technology, but courtrooms are catching up.

• Two designers duel it out, armed with PPT, wry humor, and too much free time. Part blog, part spoof, and part (as in not whole -- they seem to have left it hanging in August after three of a promised seven rounds.) Cute nonetheless. Don't miss the deck from the Winona Ryder Emergency Public Relations Unit.

• Edward R. Tufte, the dean of the graphical display of data, has important stuff to say about communicating and miscommunicating through slideware.  A review of the essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" is here. Essay may be obtained here. A summary parody has been posted here.

• Beyond the presentation, what else are you giving to your audience? "Handy Tips for Effective Handouts" by Marjorie Brody.

• Apple Computer recently launched its answer to PowerPoint. The new Keynote application may not move Wintel users to the Mac, but Jobs & Co. are still banging away at the Gates. This is a good thing.

• This fellow may know something about ubiquity. Is it coincidence that Nihal Mehta of ipsh.net, formerly of Microsoft's PowerPoint team, is now enabling marketers to text-message our cell phones with ads?

• Is your organization interested in providing narrated presentations over the web? Macromedia, the company that brings you Flash, acquired Presedia, an online presentations and e-learning company. Both press release and demo, this 12-slide presentation takes about 10 minutes to hear and watch. This is what's coming, folks.

• The New Yorker can address just about any topic in a long, casual, yet thoughtful manner. In May 2001, the magazine cast an eye toward PowerPoint. The article "Absolute PowerPoint: Can a software package edit our thoughts?" was written by Ian Parker.

• In a unanimous ruling, the Arizona Court of Appeals has said there is nothing inherently illegal or unfair about a prosecutor using a PowerPoint presentation in an opening statement. The judges refused to overturn a criminal conviction based on the activity. PowerPoint continues its march across the land.

• "Executive presents PowerPoint eulogy at mother’s funeral." A story, so to speak, from Australia.

• The Chicago Tribune article below was no doubt influenced by (and cribbed in part from) this now-classic version of The Gettysburg Address, pulverized through poor PowerPoint.

• PowerPoint is a tool. Some love it. Some hate it, but I suspect they actually hate how it has been used by too many inept presenters. An article entitled "Is PowerPoint the Devil?" by Julia Keller.

• The PPT FAQ List - No self-respecting PowerPoint guru would neglect to pay homage to Steve Rindsberg and his PowerPoint Frequently Asked Questions list.

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© 2003-2006 by Tony Ramos. Send email to tony(at)tonyramos(dot)com or call me at 216-702-7796.

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