Ep 218 Advanced PowerPoint Creation Tips August 5, 2016

What's your perspective on PowerPoint? If you have to create slides all day long, every day for clients all over the world?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

I had a fascinating conversation. At least to me it was fascinating. A bit presumptuous of me to tell you it was fascinating, but I had a great conversation with Gitish Bajaj who is one of the foremost experts in the world on PowerPoint creation. He's based in Hyderabad, India. He here's the interview. Let's hop in. My special guest and co host is Gitish Bajaj. He is the editor and founder of InDesign, which is a well known website and organization devoted to helping people all over the world use and create and deliver PowerPoint slides more effectively. Geetish, thanks for joining me.

It's a pleasure being here today.

You have written books on PowerPoint. You've created thousands and thousands of decks. Walk us through your process, what people need to know and how they can work with someone like you or on their own to create more effective PowerPoint slides and presentations.

See, the first thing you need to do to create a more effective PowerPoint slide is to not start with PowerPoint. You need to really go and storyboard and decide what you're going to tell the audience. What is the message that they want to hear rather than what you want to tell them. There are two different things, what they want to hear and what you want to tell. And you have to find a way to get something that's going to work for both of you. But that's not all. You may create a wonderful presentation and you may have a wonderful storyboard and everything is great. The slides look good. But what after that? What after your slides are created, what do you do then?

What do people do? In my experience, working with corporate clients all over the world, no matter how good people's intentions are, let's have an editorial meeting. Let's plan out our goals. Let's block out time for rehearsal. As a practical matter, someone is handed off an assignment to create the slide deck and they start gathering more and more slides, more and more data, cutting and pasting bullet points, gathering slides from similar presentations from six months ago. And before you know it, this thing has been created. It's almost like a ball in chain where the speaker is now slowly ambling across the stage with this heavy chain and they feel like there's nothing they can do. They feel captive to the slide deck.

See, there are two reasons why something of this sort happens. And essentially, let's call them two scenarios. Scenario one is when the person who has designed the slides, created the slides, is the same person who's going and presenting. But then what this person could be doing is have a slide for everything and have a slide for everything that he or she is not sure about, but might as well have it, okay? And they have too much to cover and they have little time and they haven't practiced. And that is one aspect. One scenario. Scenario two, the person who's presenting is different from the person who created the slides. And this typically happens with people at a higher level, a higher executive level, where they have people to prepare slides for them. And what would happen with these people is that they just expect someone else to do everything for them, but that other person can't present for them. They actually have to go and present. And if they are not involved in the process right from the beginning, it's something new to them. So they also need to practice and sync up with all their slides and content. Only then you'll get a better presentation.

Walk us through a moment. How you envision the ideal involvement? I mean, let's say I'm Mr. Big Shot CEO of a huge company I staff to open doors for me, everything else. How can I what should I be doing when I'm working with someone who's creating a PowerPoint slide deck with me? Because I often tell people, if you just try to delegate creating a slide deck and you're given a slide deck and that's it, you're basically guaranteed complete, utter failure. As a speaker, you may have a contrarian viewpoint, but let me hear for our audience what you think the proper role of engagement is.

See, tj, what would happen in that case? We have to respect the time as a CEO or a very big position and he or she doesn't have the time to go and make slides. And we accept that. But you know, what is the message they want to give across? They know that and they better know the message because at the end of the day, they are the ones going to deliver it. So what they need to do is they have to be more involved right at the beginning of the presentation and at the end of the presentation and leave the in between longer time creating the slides to someone else. Okay, so how do they get involved in the beginning, the storyboarding process, the thinking process? They need to jot down points what they're exactly trying to say. You know, I strongly encourage, when I'm doing a training session on storyboarding for people to it might sound somewhat spiritual, but just close your eyes, think about your audience, and think about what you want to tell them and what is it that they want to hear from you. And just take a piece of paper, 100 words, 200 words, write it down over there, and you'll be surprised what people come up with. And they never imagine that this is what they want to say. And that is what I would just call it their macro statement. I would tell them to take out a headline, if you could call it that, between three and seven words. And that is the gist of everything they have put over there in those two pages and what they want to go and present about. And some people have a really tough time getting those three to seven words. So it should not be two words or one words, because you really can't have a call to action with something so small. But between three and seven words, there's almost no presentation where you really cannot get the message across within that sort of content.

And then how many total ideas, how many messages, how many numbers, how many facts do you really think is realistic for a CEO or any executive to communicate in a PowerPoint presentation? And I'm defining communication as not only does the audience understand it, but they remember it. In my own research, I have found that audiences never, and I mean never, remember more than five ideas.

No, ideas may be a little different than messages, but as far as the message is concerned, there has to be just one message for every presentation. You can't have too many messages going around. There has to be one purpose, one reason why you're doing a presentation, and that is the single message that you get across.

If you have how many separate ideas there?

Okay, okay. Now these ideas, and it's a nice term to call them ideas, is these ideas have to go and, you know, be in tune with that message. So there may be different ideas, but you have to put them all together and form one message out of that. Okay, so you. I would just call them, you know, to tell you the truth, maybe you could just call them an idea as well. They have to be so chained together to work, because if you're trying to tell too many things, you're confused yourself. Okay? So a confused speaker will never have a convinced audience. So when you have want to convince your audience, you yourself have to be convinced and understand what exactly you're trying to tell them. And you yourself said a lot of people don't remember what they have heard in their presentations. What is the purpose of going and telling them something that they will Remember or not remember in the next few minutes, step out of the conference room and already half of the content is forgotten. A day later you probably remember 25% and a week later you probably remember one or two slides or maybe nothing. So is that what the CEO wanted to express himself or herself by? No. Right. So what they have to do is they have to get a proper focus, the message over there and that is the thing that they have to, you know, give a brief to the person who's creating the presentation. This is a message that I want to get across to my audience. And anything that you put on the slides, the content you put over there has to follow this message. Anything that has got nothing to do with this message has no place to be in the presentation. And you know, that sort of makes it a lot more easier for the presentation designer, creator to go along with. And they end up creating something that the presenter, the speaker can identify with. So at the end of the day, if they end up creating something that the presenter or the speaker cannot identify with, then it's of no use. So the presenter, the speaker has to be involved in the beginning and at the end, at least we're speaking with.

Gitesh Bajaj, who is one of the most renowned experts in the world on PowerPoint PowerPoint slides PowerPoint creation this is a special co production between speaking with TJ Walker and InDesign Geetish. Many people are constantly enamored with the latest special effect dissolve, build animation feature on PowerPoint. But there are a lot of older tricks, gizmos, buttons that can be even more helpful to people. Walk us through one of them, for example, the rehearse mode.

Sure. Now that's not a gizmo. The rehearse mode has been there in PowerPoint for last 20 years or maybe more, and very few people have actually even gone and looked at it or even are aware that something of that sort exists. So why would you want to go and rehearse? First of all, what happens is you've seen it and everybody's seen it, that when you have a 60 minute slot to give a presentation and the speaker presenter takes an hour and a half, that's not very uncommon and audience is not too happy about that. And they are not very interactive. They don't ask too many questions because the time is already up and they don't want to extend it by another half an hour. So essentially when you take too much time, you are sending your audience away and making sure that they don't remember what you're trying to tell them because they are not accepting at that point of time. So if you have walk us through.

Where is the button? What does it literally do once you click it?

See essentially what happens if you go to the Slide show tab of any of the newest versions of PowerPoint. You'll find an option there called Rehearse Timings, and you'll find a second option called Record Slideshow. They're pretty similar, but what the Rehearse Timings button does, it only records the timings, whereas the Record Slideshow option, what it does, it also records your voiceovers if you have a microphone connected. It also records your animation timings, and it also records when the next slides move and timings and everything else. So with that, you would just go in front and sit in front of a computer laptop and have a PowerPoint ready over there. Play with your presentation, but make sure that you play with your finished presentation, because you want to not really make too many changes at that point of time, unless you find that you are going beyond your time allotted to you, and then you want to cut down on something. So once you do that, what PowerPoint is going to do is it's going to record all the timings over there and animation and everything else as I told you. So it's a very, very good idea at that point of time to open your presentation and choose the Save as option and save that presentation as a new presentation. So the presentation that you have and the new presentation that you have saved at this point of time, they are identical. So you will leave the original presentation alone and then take the copy of presentation and press the Rehearse timings. If you only want to look at the timings or the Record Slide show option, if you want to record everything else. And then at every slide, you would actually imagine there's an audience in front of you and speak exactly what you want to speak about. You know, this is very refreshing because when you actually go across the presentation this way, there are a lot of things that you would have never imagined before. You will actually think about them at this point of time. When you look at figures, you will go and substantiate them and make sure that everything is accurate. And a lot of this stuff is something the speaker actually encounters at the time of presenting to the audience. And he is not very well prepared for stuff like that. So that decreases his or her confidence level. So actually, if they go and practice it at that point of time, they actually do a revision of everything they want to go and say and just proceed this way, go to the end of your slides and then you can hit the escape key on your Keyboard and then PowerPoint may prompt you with a dialog that says do you want to save your timings? And you would say yes. And then what you would do is you would go to Slide Sorter view where you can see all the slides in one screen. And right below each slide you will see a time slot mentioned over there. So that is the exact amount of time that you have taken for each slide. And you can go and study that and find out where you take too much time, where you take little time, and if there is something that you spend a lot of time on, is it important? Is it important enough to break it into more than one slide? And what are the slides where you don't take too much time about? What about can you remove them? And you can also see the total time that you spent over there and you can play back this presentation. Your voiceovers are recorded, your animation timings are recorded, and your slide timings are recorded. And you know exactly where you're doing well, exactly where you're not doing well. And you can. This is a process that can be repeated over and over again. Now there's one thing that you have to remember that you are not going to play the presentation, the copy of the presentation you created when you're actually going and delivering there, because slide timings are recorded in that and you may be on slide number two. And because they are automatic timings, it might go to slide number three and four before you know it. And that's the reason I suggested that you keep an original copy of the presentation unaltered without the timings.

Gatesh Bajaj, thanks for being our special guest. Fantastic insights today. Thanks again for spending time with me today. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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