Learn how to make your presentations communicate better by watching as our team of experts makes over your slides and presentations to make them more interesting and readable.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Sharyn Fitzpatrick. And welcome to today’s event, Marvelous Makeovers: Presentations Edition. We’re starting. Rick is there in the background, if you hear him a little bit. But before we start …
Rick Altman: I’m here.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: He’s here. Yay! Before we do start, one of the things we would like to do is to introduce you to something new, which is a new platform that we’re using for our webinars. So, you’ll see on the bottom, you’ll see a bunch of icons, and you’re probably, “Well, what are those icons for?” Really easy.
Slides is where you’re going to see the slides on. Media player is what the audio is coming through. Speaker BIOS, you can figure out. Questions and Answers, you can probably figure out. The Resource List is where you will get the links to the handouts, copies of Rick’s slides, as well as other additional information, including a link to the Presentation Summit. We’re also going to try group chat and see if you would like to talk to each other, which is the first time we’re doing that.
And of course, please feel free to share as much as you can. And we’re hoping that you will share using the #pxpert. And it gives me great pleasure at this time to introduce Rick, who is just an amazing personality, great at his knowledge, and as we all know, the beloved host of the Presentation Summit. Rick, let me turn it over to you.
Rick Altman: Well, it’s all going to be downhill from there after an introduction like that. Thanks, Sharyn. Thanks so much for having me.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: I know.
Rick Altman: Happy summer, everybody. I hope that it’s not 105 degrees where you are. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sharyn and I are sweltering. And the fan is on. The AC is on. There, we go. This topic, this is not just a phenomenon of presentation. People just love the whole before and after dynamic.
I mean, look at all the television shows today, in which people what? They buy a tear down house and they fix it up. The group of misfits that win a football championship. How about The Biggest Loser? I mean, isn’t that just one gigantic makeover? So, I don’t really think this is something that’s unique to our industry. But one component that makes our makeover sessions so compelling, in my opinion, is that we get our content from you.
I think one thing that distinguishes our makeovers is that you all send us your content and there’s just nothing more vital than watching work that’s relevant. So, I just want to start by saying, I’m so grateful for those of you that sent me slides. This is your livelihood. I get it. And you’ve placed your trust in me or at least your hope in me that I’m going to do something that might, in some small way, improve your lot in life.
Now, Sharyn, how many stars on your conference badge? You’re a veteran these days. I mean, you’ve had what? Three, four times you’ve been to the conference?
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Yeah. I think the one coming up in September will be my fifth one and it is my favorite four or five days of every year. I look forward to it every year.
Visual Makeovers for Your Presentations
Rick Altman: And so, you’ve seen how Julie Terberg just packs a room, as we describe her as the Makeover Maven. Her sessions are just so incredibly popular. This is she here in front of just a packed room, going through her befores and afters. And as a brilliant designer, she just makes people’s jaws drop to the floor. But hers are not the only makeovers that we have however.
Mike Parkinson also does makeovers and he’s like the Message King. He’s just so skilled at taking a look at people’s messages and showing you how you can make them better. And I, too, create my annual makeover session at the conference. And mine are different, I won’t make anybody’s jaws drop. But I will take slides and I will hopefully turn them into clean, simple messages that might resonate to a corporate audience.
And that’s key here. I’m not expecting you to react with shock at all. In fact, I really don’t want you doing that. It is truly not my objective to leave you thinking, “Wow.” And thinking that you couldn’t possibly produce something like what you’re about to see.
In fact, just the opposite. I want you leaving this webinar saying to yourself, “Hey, you know what? I could have done that. I see how he did that. I see why he did that, yes, I can do that, too. It’s no big deal.” Because if your audience can’t relate to a makeover that I believe that you’ve produced something that is less than a success.
So, there are lots of definitions of a makeover just in the presentation space. So, let’s talk about this. Let’s start with the classic makeover. The awful slide, the dog’s breakfast, the ugly duckling. And this is just all too familiar. It’s no surprise why these are the most popular makeovers. Everyone can relate to the slide that undergoes some dramatic transformation, even if the end result is not a thing of beauty. Even if the after slide is just a much simpler version of that slide. That’s usually way better.
In fact, I haven’t yet encountered a visual makeover that involves adding extra content to a slide. That just doesn’t happen. Makeovers are almost always the case of reducing what’s on your slide, not adding to it. So, that’s the first one, the classic design makeover. All right.
Now, there are also what I would call message makeovers, where a well-intended presenter is saddled with slides that just tell a terrible story. You’ve probably all seen it and a bunch of you have probably done it because you’re required to. In corporate culture today, it’s practically compulsory that you start out with the About Us slide, and then the Our Unique Vision slide and people standing up there, “Well, let me tell you a little bit about our company.”
I’m sorry, but unless your mother is in the audience, nobody cares about that. They have their own issues. And good storytellers know to speak to those issues right out of the gate and wait until later to tell audiences how great they are. Nothing endears you as a presenter more to your audience members than when you give them the impression that you understand why they are in the room, you know what their issues are and you are prepared to speak to those issues right away.
And message makeovers typically are what take you from that corporate autopilot where you start out by telling you a little bit about how great you are, from that to something that’s much more audience centric. All right, so that’s number two.
Now, next. One of the great paradoxes in our community is the dilemma that PowerPoint is really too easy. People declare themselves proficient in PowerPoint after about an hour of training. And they rarely go beyond that. And as an industry, we are notoriously undertrained. And so, if you try to go anything past the surface and something doesn’t work. Well, what do I do now? We all learned how to create slides, probably when we were teenagers, or even younger, and creating slides is really pretty easy.
But then, what happens when you want to do something a little bit more involved? Many of us, we just get hosed. So, you’re to be congratulated just for attending webinars like this, because it means that that you are willing to go beyond where most people are. So, yeah, whether it’s our conference, whether it’s webinars like this or even just reading a good book that shows you some simple solutions to things with the software itself, that too, can be thought of as a makeover.
So, yes, those are technique makeovers. And then finally, speaking coaches, the world over have performed makeovers on the people themselves, who are standing up there. And now we can’t quite do that in a one-hour webinar, but many of the principles that we will discuss here can most definitely help people with that whole stand and deliver component.
And so, there you go, four different ways that you can make over the presentation experience and it’s my hope that we’re going to touch upon a little of each of those as we get going. Okay, so Sharyn, if there aren’t any more glitches or technical things, here we go. I’ve got five sets of examples that we’re going to show. And, as always, you can interrupt me anytime, if there’s some good questions coming up, even either from the people in the audience or from you.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: No problem. That’s quite an invitation. I can’t wait. Let’s get going.
Powerpoint Slide Makeovers
Rick Altman: Oh, boy. What have I done now? Okay. So, most of these slides were sent in by all of you. And again, I’m so grateful for that. In this first one, there are always people from the company that used to be called Malt-O-Meal. Remember that famous cereal Malt-O-Meal? They are now called MOM Brands. And they are one of the most prominent makers of breakfast food today.
And they go out and they look for customers. They look for partners like this one here to a company in North Dakota, and they create slides like this that are challenging. They’ve got quite a story to tell. And like so many companies, they just sometimes get a little bit lost in the weeds. And one thing I note about slides like this is that they’re just more difficult to edit. And you can miss things like these obvious typos or grammatical errors or style issues like this because they’re just easy to lose out.
And then, there’s just the question of what a slide like this does to the whole presenter-audience experience? Who’s going to read all of this? Will the presenter give them time to read all of it? If not, why is it all here?
Secondarily, I’m a little concerned about that gradient at the top, and why we would want to reduce the contrast to the headline and the wavy line at the bottom. I like the logo down there. But that wavy line, that’s just asking for some content that goes a little too deep to encroach upon that space. So, the first thing I want to do is just clean that up a little bit. I want to get rid of the gradients at the top. I’d like to make a solid line at the bottom. And then, off we go, let’s also make the title bigger and move that down to the bottom, the company that this pitch is actually for.
Now at this point, we are ready for what many of you have seen many times. And that is what I call the three-word challenge. So, I know that for some of you, this is not new, but this is something that I think we all need to continually remind ourselves of. And that is that most of the time, our slides like this one, just have too much flotsam on them. And so, the three-word challenge, can you reduce all of your bullet points to just three words or fewer?
And while that might be very difficult to do, you must always try. As I’m going to now, starting with this first one, you can see the words that are going to gray out on your screen, those are the words that I think aren’t necessary in order to tell the story of, in this case, BetterOats or Boxes. And we’re just going to continue down the way here. Now, the words that I’m targeting for elimination, the words that are gray on these slides, I’m not necessarily suggesting that they’re unimportant.
They might be very important. They might be so important that you need to say them because what I want to remind everybody on this call is that your slides are not your presentation. You are the presentation and what you say to your audience is always going to be more important than what you show to them in the form of a slide. Now, I thought long and hard about this last one. And I decided that all of it can go. That that can be said or it can be offered in a different medium than displaying it on the screen.
So, as you can see, except for that last one, I failed every time. I didn’t get under three words, even once in these four, but I assure you that the reward is in the attempt because look what I have done now. Look what I’ve done to add to this slide. And even if I go no further. Now, this is going to be a better experience for everybody in the room.
Now, I mean, this is still a conspicuously undesigned slide. And now, what you see are all these bullet characters hanging out there leaving everybody to wonder why there are bullets in front of the all of this? Well, that’s just because most of us go on autopilot and that’s what we do. But if you take a moment, and now it’s possible to scrutinize this slide on a different level. And if you take a moment, you say, “Well, wait a minute. Those aren’t bullets. Those are headings and subheadings.”
Headings and subheadings don’t need bullets in front of them. There’s a far better treatment that’s really quite simple. And in this case, I’m just emphasizing those subtitles, those headings, with a lighter color. They’re still bold and prominent, but they don’t have to be solid black. In fact, I often like emphasizing with a different color, picking up the color of MOM Brands that you see down below. And now, this slide is done. I mean, I could declare this slide done right now.
But the beauty of the three-word challenge, the opportunity you give yourself when you hone and distill your slides like this is that now you can think like a slide designer. Prior to this, there was really no opportunity to do that. And now, you can do that. And one of the first things you want to ask yourself is, “Is there an image? Is there some image that would be evocative of the breakfast experience?”
Well, I’m here to tell you that there are just thousands of images in the public domain that would be very complimentary to this message. I mean, here are three that I picked up. Again, all in the public domain, it’d be very easy to use. Let’s just take one of these. Let’s make a full slide. Because that’s my suggestion is that when you find a good photo, just take it all the way edge to edge like this. And there’s going to be plenty of opportunity now for me to carve out some space on this slide like I’ve done here.
Now, the issue at the moment is obvious that you can’t read any of that text. And if we stopped here, this slide would be a failure, but with a very simple technique within the software. And again, many of you that have been on webinars with me that have come to the conference, you’ve seen this technique. It’s one of my favorites of all and that is to just drop a semitransparent shade behind the text. And I’m going to show you in a moment how I did that.
So, that is just a rectangle that has a little bit of transparency. But it’s creating enough contrast, so that now we have blended. We’ve blended this text with this photo that fits so well. And now, we have a slide that works. And I can shuttle in any one of those other photos. And you’ll see that each one of them, there’s plenty of space on these photos in order to be able to do this.
Now, after seeing those three photos, I went looking for some others. And also, let me just point out, I think you’ll be able to see at the bottom of the slide, it might be a little bit cut off that if I still want to have it branded and I still want to have my footer down there, that’s no problem. That’s going to fit just fine down there. Then, I went looking and I just found this absolutely killer photo.
I mean, what is more evocative of a breakfast scene than these two adorable girls having breakfast together? Now, the space on this photo is going to be on the other side. But that’s fine. I’m a big fan of right aligning text if that works. I could have flipped the photo. There’s nothing on this photo that has text or lettering. So, I could have flipped it. But I’m going to keep it like this. And playing off of these two girls, I want to change the headline of this.
And now, we have a slide that is going to resonate at a completely different frequency than our original slide. When you blend simple text messages with evocative photos, you create experiences from your audience that are entirely different than the standard one. And when you do that, not only do you make yourself a better presenter when you can free yourself from going on autopilot and just reading all the text that’s on the slide, you will distinguish yourself from 99% of the people that are creating slides today in corporate America and the world over.
It’s kind of a no brainer here, which you’d rather have as the backdrop to get 10 minutes of why you’d want to partner with MOM brands, right? So, this one’s pretty obvious.
Now, let me take a moment, and like I said, I want to show you that technique, because it’s not difficult at all, and it’s one of my favorites of all. You’re looking at the interface now. And Sharyn, I think, that you’re seeing everything from top pretty close to bottom. Let me know if that’s not the case but I want to just go ahead and work through this.
Here is the slide that you saw before we did our little trick. And here’s the trick, and gang, if you have an opportunity to make your preview window bigger, I think there are just those two little buttons, this would be a time where you might want to toggle this into a larger view as I’m working with all these small little things on the interface.
I’ll also give you as much play by play as I can. I’m going to just take the rectangle tool and I’m going to come out, and I’m going to create a rectangle, just sort of over this area right here, okay? Now, to this rectangle, I’m going to remove the outline and now what I want to do is I want to simply move it backward, so that it is in front of the photo, but behind the text. So, the stacking order is photo, rectangle, and text.
So now, I’m going to bring up the format shape task pane and I’m going to go to the fill section and I’m going to fill this with a gradient pattern, okay? Now, this gradient pattern is going to go from right to left, so the angle is going to be zero. And I don’t really need any of these intermediate stops along the way that you see here, so I’m going to get rid of both of those and the gradient stops. And this is going to sound a little silly at first, but the gradient stops are going to be from black on one side to black on the other side, all right?
But here’s the key, on the left side of this gradient, we’re going to dial up a level of transparency and I’m going to do this slowly so you can see it happening. You see here, that now the left side is becoming more transparent. I’m going to take it all the way to 100, and in doing that, that’s what makes that rectangle just fade away.
On the right side, there’s plenty of contrast. And you decide this, I don’t necessarily have to have the right side be completely opaque. I can have maybe a little bit of transparency on the right side. But no, sorry, not 90, let’s go with 10. And you play with this and you can also change how far you want this to go. I’ve just sort of eyeballed or I should say eared the left side of this, but you can see this works. This creates contrast and readability for the text and blends the whole thing together.
I love these semi-transparent shapes. I use them all the time. And you can see they’re not difficult. Now, you could be following along and taking copious notes, but you don’t have to, because everything that you’re seeing in this webinar is available to you as a download, including a 16-page handout of the general ideas with some examples. So, all of that is available to you. I mean, if you want to be following along, you can, but you don’t have to.
Branding on Slides
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: We have a question, it says from Tom, “Hey, when do you skip branding or not on the slide?”
Rick Altman: When to skip branding or not? That is an excellent question. And what I will tell you is, I don’t believe that you need to brand every slide. I think it’s fine to brand the title slide and your ending slide and call it a day. But I am tilting at windmills there, Tom. I know from my experience as a consultant, that corporate America is going to want to brand every slide more often than I will. And so I’ve conceded that point, which is why you can see that the final slide here has its branding in place. I try to make it as unobtrusive as possible, small, down at the bottom.
But in general, while I don’t believe you have to brand every slide. I don’t think I’m going to win that battle. So, I go with the flow.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: I keep trying, Rick. I do that a lot for my clients and I keep taking it off and they keep putting it back on. And then, they’ll cover it with an image and you see half the logo. So, I think we should keep working on the battle.
Rick Altman: Rome wasn’t built in a day, Sharyn.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: That’s true.
More Powerpoint Slide Design Makeovers
Rick Altman: All right. Next shout out goes to Catherine Gray. Catherine, thanks so much for sending me your slides. This one here in particular, which shows that you had quite a challenge on your hands in trying to show the various training locations and what takes place there for your organization.
And Catherine did what I see often. In order to try to create definition for elements, she puts them in boxes. And we indeed, do go box happy with our slides. This is very common. And I understand why when you are saddled with having so many elements on your slide, you just feel like you need to give each one its due. You need to try to call attention to each one. And before long, you have a cacophony of competing elements like this one.
I want to start by scrutinizing the background here because I’m not sure why we have a gray background, a gradient background, and then a darker gray background. I mean, all that does is tend to confuse the eye and reduce contrast.
So, the first thing I want to do here is just to make the background uniform, all white. And then let’s get going on the rest of this. I don’t understand why the title is underlined. I’m going to scrutinize all the underlining here because underlining is just an anachronism. That hearkens back to the old typewriter days, when the only way we could emphasize was to do it that way. Half the people on this call weren’t even born then.
And today, a hyperlink, well actually not even today, but if I go back, what, 10 years ago, underlining meant a hyperlink. But today, it really means nothing at all. So, I guess all it means is that we’re old, those of us that do it. So, I want to get rid of that also.
But first, let’s get rid of those boxes because the boxes just aren’t needed. As soon as we do that, then you get a sense of the slide can breathe a little bit more. And as I now take a look at the elements that are on the slide themselves, first, let’s get rid of the underlining and let’s go back to that simple emphasis of a softer color set in bold like this.
And next, now that I can actually see the elements, I noticed that two of the photos are identical and that leads me to believe that two of this training takes place in the same location. So, I don’t think we need four photos. I think we can do fine with three photos here.
And let’s also just do a simple little honing and distilling of the text itself. Same thing, the text is in gray, I don’t think it needs to be here. And now with that text gone, thinking like a slide designer here is going to be a much simpler proposition where let’s just take those three photos, let’s line them up together, and let’s just drop our text next to them and we now have a much cleaner slide.
Once again, when you scrutinize your slide per content, you’re going to generally be more critical than you would have otherwise. And it was that process of simplifying the slide that led me to conclude that we don’t need four photos, we only need three. Three photos fit really nicely on a vertical stack like this and there you go.
Okay. So once again, the before and after. We have eliminated one photo, a little bit of text. But mostly, once we do that, we can then just allow the slide to breathe a little bit. And my guess is that Catherine might be able to take that after slide and continue to hone and distill it a little bit because the more she does that, the better the result is going to be.
Okay, so that’s our first one. Next, we’re going to take a look at message. And this next one is all about retirement and this was sent in by Lona. Is your last name Berndt? I think I’m going to get it’s Lona Berndt and I’m very, very grateful for her as well for sending in her slides.
Starting with, it’s showing us why we might not want to use all uppercase with titles. Not only are they harder to read, but it’s really easy to miss typographical errors and spelling errors in them. I also am wondering about these dollar signs. I think maybe they’re supposed to look pixelated like that. But I think that when they were extruded out and given their 3D shape, something went wrong there, because I just don’t think that’s the look that whoever created these dollar signs we’re after.
Now, here’s what the whole deck looks like. Let’s see that slide, 20 slides here, and this is all about smart investing in eight steps, actually no, 11 steps. And there’s some really good ones here. And this whole idea of becoming a millionaire air man, that came about from this case study of Todd Nielsen, who managed a plan to be able to retire at the age of 40. And this is the magazine article that was written about him.
And so, Lona included that, and actually, I think that, that’s a really nice potential title slide here. As we work through some more of these slides, each one of these has some principles and some issues. Now, if it really is so important for you to create a grid like this, please give your audience as much contrast as possible.
This black text should be on a stark white background, not a gradient background that goes all the way down to a navy blue. Black on navy blue doesn’t work, no matter how big your text is, and it certainly isn’t going to work for something like this. Better still, figure out some better way to present data like that.
Generally, there’s good ideas through all of these steps and some nice graphics. But generally, each of these slides, I just feel like they’re trying a little bit too hard. And the step graphic up here, I think is a little too messy. But there’s good information here, especially I really liked step seven. Step seven, I thought was really cool.
It starts like this. Now, do we really need to zoom in that car? Perhaps not. And I’m quite sure that we don’t need two words to come spiraling onto the screen like they are right now. But this whole notion that being smarter with the way you buy your cars could be an important investment. I was, really, I stopped and I looked at all of these.
And on the second slide, I went out and I watched that YouTube video. It was quite a challenge for me. I had to click on here and then up came a browser window. I needed of course a live internet connection. These are things that I’m just not sure you want to have to deal with in the middle of a slide presentation. I think, there’s a better way to show a video than to include a YouTube link like this.
And these five bullet points here, they were quite a heavy lift. Because each one built from the other and I had to do a lot of thinking about that. But again, I was quite impressed with the message that was being given and I’d like to hope that we can make that message be a little bit more evocative. And in so doing, come up with a cleaner way to approach all of these slides.
So, let’s go back to the title slide with these unfortunate dollar signs. And again, I mentioned that the second slide on this deck, there’s a magazine article, this one right here. Let’s use this, I mean, this is a really nice theme. Let’s play off of that. What if we made that photo as big as possible, free at 40? Do that as the title. And then where there’s plenty of space for a very simple message that can be dropped in there, spelled correctly also, and you even can answer that question if you want.
So, I would suggest that this would be a cleaner and a more inviting title slide. That’s the whole idea. Can you think like Todd? Can you create a strategy, where when you first get out of college that would allow yourself to retire at the age of 40? How cool would that be?
So, let’s go back over to step seven and let’s put step seven on a big old diet. Let’s fire a lot at this. And again, the second slide to step seven, was this one here, which I want to find a better way to tell you the key points of that. So back to this first one, what can we get rid of? Oh, I’m going to get rid of damn near all of this, the car payment, let’s get rid of the car, warning buyer beware. I understand that.
If it’s that important, then Lona or whoever it is for whom she’s creating these slides, you can say it. But let’s get rid of all of that. And we’ll bring back the text [inaudible] to step seven. What if we instead just took that little seven and we moved it up to the top right corner with a little bit more contrast on the slide? And now, we have this big old open canvas. What if instead, we put one key phrase?
Because if you think about this, what if I said to you, what’s the number one impediment to building wealth? The number one thing. I mean, the thing that stands in our way more than anything else to wealth. You may come up with a lot of answers to that question. Would it be that? Would it be the car payment? My goodness, I think, that’s pretty shocking, that buying your car is the thing that might prevent you from accumulating wealth.
When you get rid of all the other stuff on this slide, that statement right there, that’s pretty amazing. Now, if you wanted to integrate it with an image, that would be pretty easy to do, because there’s no shortage of cool car photos. And I found one that’s some souped up Porsche. But, really, as I’m thinking about this, once I created this makeover, I then started to think about it again. My makeover needs a makeover. Because really, the whole point here is that even a $25,000 car is problematic.
So, really, I should put some Toyota Corolla on the screen here instead of this Porsche. But either way, now we’ve got a slide that is really evocative, that makes you think, and that’s what we’re after here. The second slide of this one here. Again, this is a pretty heavy lift. That’s the key right there. The car that you spend $26,000 on, it’s actually going to cost you $33,000. And this video, in this link here, tells the whole story. It’s really quite a good video, but if you’re going to put videos in a slide, then what I want you to do is go get that video, rip it to your hard drive and drop it on your slide like this so that you can actually play the video simply and on a click.
You can see that video playing now. I’m only going to show you a little bit of this. This is all the whole question about what happens to your car payments and it’s worth showing to the right audience and it’s worth doing right. It’s worth it to get that video, rip it to your computer, and if necessary, getting the appropriate permissions to do that, and then playing it in the animation stream so you don’t have to click on anything. All you have to do is advance your slide deck and the next element in the animation stream would be this video, and it would play.
All right now, let’s go a step further here. Let’s really illustrate these points that are being made because we’re talking about an investment of $475 a month. That’s the standard car payment that we all make, $475. What if you invested that instead? Okay. What if instead, for every month from now until you retire you invested that? Well, what would the road to retirement look like if you did that?
There it is. There’s the road to retirement all right. And now, I’m going to create some stops along the way, 10 years, 20 years, 30, and 40. So, 10 years in to your quest to be able to retire early. If you would take in that $475, how much do you think that would be worth today in a standard investment? How does $100,000 sound? Okay. How about at 20 years? At 20 years, that investment will be worth nearly a half a million dollars.
These are just simple blocks, simple rectangles that I have created in PowerPoint, create a little bit of shape to them, some depths, simple shadowing. So, this is a modest attempt on my part to make them look like they’re sitting there on the road. There are graphic designers who could do a much better job of this than I. But still, you get the idea here. At 30 years, your investment will be worth over a million and a half dollars. And if you do this all the way until you retire 40 years, hence, how does $5.5 million sound?
That’s pretty incredible. I mean, I’m still shaking my head over that. And to be able to illustrate that on a slide in a way that’s just more evocative to your audience is going to really bring some power and some impact to your story. So, there were the original slides. And here’s what I’m suggesting for Lona’s makeover. And the key is that last slide, because the last slide has a lot of significant information there. But we can really just ,I think, do a better job with that. Okay. Sharyn, questions?
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Gosh, we have a lot. So, let’s see. One of the questions we have is, our brand owners are really trying to encourage us and almost say a must be done to hand out PowerPoints that have everything on a two-point type. What are the options around that?
Rick Altman: For the options …
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Can you suggest ways to get around it?
Rick Altman: I think…
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: I just say, “Go listen to Surviving the Handout Help.”
Rick Altman: Well, that’s next. I think that what is being asked is that, that there’s a requirement to stuff onto your slide every possible thing that you want to give to your audience. And so, I’m going to defer that question because that’s our next topic. But if that’s not what this person was asking, I’d like them to come back to us with the elaboration. What’s next?
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I think what it is, is I think people realize and think that all you do is hand out the slide. You maybe don’t use it as …
Rick Altman: Yeah. We’re going to talk all about that.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Yes, exactly. And I know you are. So, I think that’s where that question was. And during that, if we can also address the best use of handouts before, during, and after a presentation. We have that request as well.
Rick Altman: Okay. So, I’m going to table both of those because in five minutes or less, we’ll be talking all about that. Any questions about the stuff that we have just done?
Embedding Videos in Presentations
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: We did. There is a question or a comment about pulling a video off of YouTube should not ever be done. It’s called freebooting. It prevents the slide owner from getting YouTube views. I will go back and say partially, I’m not sure I agree with that because if you embed the URL or embed the file, it does count the first four or five seconds. So, I don’t know if you have a different opinion of that.
Rick Altman: Okay. Well, I might have been a little too flippant in what I said. So, let me emphasize the point that I made kind of in passing that you want to pull a video off of the internet after you get permission to do so. Well, because what I’m suggesting is that you create it in such a way that it does not send somebody off to YouTube, where then they get credit for clicks and perhaps having an impact their advertising revenue.
But I’m not suggesting that you pull a video off the internet, and then you then distribute that video to hundreds, thousands or millions of people. I’m suggesting that you put it into your presentation, so that you can show it. And perhaps, you show it with attribution, you show it with the URL in place, so that then the audience members can then go see that video on their own. But yes, all of this must be done with permission, so that you are not freebooting it. That’s a good term. I had never heard that before. I like that.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I had neither. And it’s true. But if you do embed a video and even showcase just the first couple of seconds, they will get credit for it. Just FYI. And then, we have another question concerning your handouts. People are looking for the instructions on how to do the photo transparency, can you … They said they found slides, but there’s no instructions. Are we missing something?
Rick Altman: Well, I didn’t do step-by-step on that because I just did it. But anybody who wants a step-by-step, I can provide that for them. I do have that available.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Okay. Terrific.
Rick Altman: At some point, I should have my email address here somewhere.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: I was just going to say, I’ll send your email address to everybody offline. Let me let you get back to the live event.
Audience Takeaways and Handouts
Rick Altman: Okay. So, clearly, this next topic is one of interest because several people have already noted this, and that is this whole notion of how to deal with audience takeaways. And the people attending this webinar from Cisco had indeed quite an issue with this, when they needed to explain about Microbursts. I will not try to explain Microbursts to all of you. But what I will point out is that the folks who put together this presentation felt like they needed two slides in order to do that.
Now, why would they put all of this information across two slides? Why would they do that to their audience? And I know the answer, because Cisco is a client of mine, and I helped several people with their Cisco Live presentations. And it was because they wanted to deliver this information to them in the way of a printed handout. And that created tremendous compromises for them because that … I mean, look what that’s doing to the live in the moment experience, saddling your audience with slides like this.
That’s just a train wreck waiting to happen. That impacts everybody, including the presenter, maybe especially the presenter. And that’s really the only explanation other than complete cluelessness, which is not the case in this particular instance. That’s the only explanation for why you create slides like this for the handout. So, let me be clear, your slides should not be your handouts.
When you try to create a set of slides that would succeed both as the visual component of a live presentation and as a printed handout, you will fail every single time. In 18 years as a presentations consultant, I have not yet encountered an exception to that axiom that you will fail every single time. You must think about your handouts separately from your slides. Let’s separate out the two experiences because as soon as you do that, then you can take all the content that you’re looking at right now, and you can distill it down to this.
Here are the five key points that will allow the presenter to speak to those, even to a technical audience, will speak to those in a way that makes sense. And from this now simple slide, it really was not difficult at all to find some little piece of artwork that would bring this together in some way. And so, those two slides went all the way down to here.
And the reason, the reason that we could go from this unattractive looking slide here to this nice one here, is because we are not done yet. Now, this slide gets married with this handout. And that creates a presentation package that will speak so much better of your sensibilities. What you’re looking at here is the product of about 10 minutes of work in the notes view, the notes page. Starting with about five minutes in the notes master where … And many of you don’t even know the notes master exists. You know all about the slide master.
But in your first hour of training with PowerPoint, you probably didn’t know, you probably weren’t told that there is also something that governs the global look of your notes pages. It’s is called, the notes master. And you can place any elements you want on it and move things around and change them up, so that you can create a format, which then would allow you to use your notes pages for your handouts.
And that’s what you’re looking at here. Here is all the text you saw across those two slides, placed instead on the notes page. And notice that I’ve only gone two-thirds of the way down the page. If necessary, if I need to put some more technical notes on here, I can do that. There are some footnotes, that’s 9-point type, 9-point type would be a train wreck on your slide. It is perfectly appropriate for your printed handout.
And that’s the other thing, your slides are usually 18, 24, 30-point type. You don’t need that for a handout. That’s why God invented reading glasses for heaven’s sake. So, here, the text on this is 10-point, 10 or 11-point. That’s what you want for a handout. It’s also portrait, not landscape. It’s tall, not wide. People don’t want printed things that are wide. They want them tall like this.
So, together, you are creating a presentation package when you separate the experiences. Sharyn will recall, we did a whole hour on just this topic alone. And I bet Sharyn could give you the URL to that webinar. And I’ve got articles on my website about this also, because I’m not doing justice to this in this 10 minutes. And those of you who that want more detail about how I do this, I can give this to you.
But for now, what I want you to hear from me is that, there are three critical parts to a presentation, what you say, what you show, and what you give. What you say to your audience, what you show them in the form of slides, and what you give them in the form of a printed handout. Those three things need to be different. They need to be separated, and you need to make each one of them as good as you possibly can, and you can’t do that when you try to make your slides performed double duty, that won’t work.
So, this might be the most important makeover of all of these 90 minutes. And that is the makeover that has you separating what you create for the visual component of your presentation, and then what you give to your audience.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: So, at the same time you were talking about it, I had hit send to everybody with a link to Surviving Handout Help.
Rick Altman: Thank you. Thank you. Great, great, because yeah, because Sharon and I did 90 minutes on this topic. And so, you can see all of that. And like I said, at betterpresenting.com, I’ve got articles about this. I think this stands as the single greatest impediment that content creators have toward really being able to engage with their audiences. That’s why PowerPoint lives on because people try to have their slides do it all for them and it just doesn’t work.
All right. And so, that’s the Cisco example of this. And if there aren’t questions about anything we’ve done so far, I’ll keep going.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: No. I think we’re telling people they’re really loving all of this. And I have thank you with all caps from several people, and I want that. So, I think we’re in good shape.
The Technique Makeover
Rick Altman: Cool. Okay. All right. So, next, the technique makeover. This slide needs that. Thanks to my friends at Consumers Energy for sending this to me because this is a pretty cool slide, and this tells a nice story. This is the story of how a power plant distributes electricity to the residents, and then the people who live and work in a community. But the way this is now, I have to work pretty hard to tell this story, and I’m choosing my words carefully here.
I am a storyteller. When I’m presenting to an audience, that’s what I’m doing. I’m telling a story. But this story sort of is like once upon a time they lived happily ever after. I mean, I’ve given you all of it at once, and it’s going to be difficult for you to digest all of this. And so, what can we do here? Now, this graphic came to me all as one image. It was produced all as one image, and it would be too much to ask the designer to go back and give me separate little things, so that I can sequence them.
But sequencing is what this needs. This needs animation. This needs some smart animation where I can sequence these elements and give them to you in bite sized pieces, so that I can tell the story better. But while, again, the perfect world is, if I had each of these pieces individually, I don’t. So, how can I do that? So, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to create some shapes in PowerPoint. And you’re looking at some scribbles that your 7-year-old could do.
This is just using the edit points to take circles and turn them into blobs. And as you can see, what I’ve done is, I’ve just tried to define each of the different pieces that I want to sequence. So, now, these are all closed shapes. So, each of these closed shapes can take a fill pattern. And so, I’m going to give them a fill pattern that is almost completely solid white. Most of you should be able to see that the elements are peeking through because there’s about 10% of transparency here.
Now, I could do it completely solid white. I like the idea of showing you the overall, but making it clear to you that you shouldn’t try to really focus on it yet. You’re just sort of seeing the forest a little bit, then I’ll give you the trees, okay? So, how does this all play out? This all plays out as animation, but not your standard animation, which typically is how things enter your slide. These are exit animations.
So, with each click that I’m going to give you, and we’re going to start. I’m going to get rid of all the text also. I think the text could be done a better way also. So, I’m going to start. This slide will start with nothing more than this. And if we were going to tell this story of how the people in our community get their power, it starts with the power plant. And that click that you’re about to see was not something arriving on the screen but something leaving.
The blob, I think that’s the technical term, Sharyn. The blob that was over the power plant exited with a one-second fade. And that, therefore, sort of brought to prominence this first piece. There’s the power plant, the high voltage transmission, it connects with a substation, and here’s my next click. The substation then distributes out to a secondary distribution area, which produces low-voltage distribution. And that’s what our rural customers will tap into is the low-voltage distribution for their farms, and for all their rural needs.
Then, the neighborhoods, the neighborhoods are going to tap into this other substation that gives them all the power that they need. Also, commercial customers, like the stores downtown, they’re also going to be able to tap in here. But our heavy industry, heavy industry has to be handled separately. They are going to tap directly into the high-voltage that comes from our power plant. And that is how our community receives its power.
One more click to give you some text along the right, I’ll integrate all the text together. And you can see, I’m such a better storyteller, with some very simple sequencing like that. There are plenty of examples of when animation gets misused. But when done right like this, there’s just few things that are better to making you a good storyteller than some smart sequencing.
Now, this one needed just a little bit of outside the box thinking in order to how to obscure everything, and then bring it back. And you saw how that was done, and you can reverse engineer this yourself on the download by those semi-transparent shapes that are set to go away with each click. Okay. And real quick, I appreciate Judy having sent in some slides to me because well-intended as it was, she showed me why, maybe you shouldn’t do this with your text because this slide all about how to think about your professional arc, and the kind of skills that you need.
Each one of these bullets was coming in on a click, they’re flying in. That is just such a lot of work. I mean, I’m getting tired of doing all this clicking, and then comes something on the right side, and I’m not really sure why it appeared, and then sure enough, there was something above it that showed up. I kind of think I’m done with this slide, but I’m not even sure. And then we go to the next one, apply soft and hard skills.
And this slide two comes in now. These are all flying in from the right. When I asked Judy about it, she said, “I wanted to bring some energy to the slide.” And I get that, I totally appreciate that. But I just think that slides like this need a different type of help than sequencing. I mean, I’m of the belief that you shouldn’t add animation to any text slides. And if you have to, because there’s so many points on your slide and you need to separate them in some way, then you’ve got bigger problems.
And now, that one, I clicked too quickly, it went to the next slide because I didn’t know that we were done. That’s the other thing when you … Most of us, we tend to forget how many things appear on our slides when we’re doing it with texts like this. Now, this next one, they all came in together as one big mash up on the left, then a second one on the right. And then, one little click for the attribution at the bottom. And then the next one, they fly in. I’m going to go quickly through these. They fly in from the right. And the final slide there didn’t fly in at all. Everything was just there as one piece.
So, this suggests to me a set of slides that just need more coordination, and they just need to give the audience the sense that you understand how they want to receive their information because I just don’t think this is it. I think that we can do better with those slides. And so, let’s start with just a simple makeover here. Here was the template that Judy started from, and I think this came with Office. So, maybe, some of you will recognize.
Why that little thing at the top doesn’t go all the way across? I mean, if you’re going to have it at all, send it all the way across. And once you send it all the way across, then you could consider maybe moving the title up into that space. And that’s what I would like to do. I’d like to put the title up in that space, and then it calls into question, why we have this navy blue bar here? It’s got some nice rounded corners and this line motif does have rounded corners.
But what if we just sort of move that into a whole different way, and played off of that little rounded corner thing. And now, let’s just move our text out where it belongs in the middle of the slide, and let’s change those bullets to pick up on that nice green color, and this is fine. So, we now have a template that’s going to work just fine for standard text slides.
So, then, how this all plays out with the slides that Judy created? We go back to this one here that had all this stuff flying onto the screen like this. And as I look at this, I see that there are points along the left, and then the three things on the right, those are actually quotes from a speaker. So, maybe, we could do this in two parts. I really think not though. I think we can do this whole thing, if we hone and distill those points a little bit, then we end up with something like this.
And now, there’s the column on the right. And if it’s a quote, let’s make it a quote. Find a quote from this Robin Crow and use it like so. And now, this is a slide that doesn’t need animation. And again, I would argue that it shouldn’t have any. We have this debate at the conference, sometimes, in the bar over a glass of wine. Should we animate text slides? I say no. And I’ll happily have that debate with any of you.
Okay. I’m going to cut that off there. And, at this point, Sharyn, you know what I’m going to do? Let’s do this. Let’s sort of do a mini wrap up here, and then I’ll keep going with this final topic, which gets pretty geeky. So, let’s hit a quick commercial here because if you enjoyed this topic today, you would absolutely love attending our annual conference this fall, The Presentation Summit.
Across four days, we are going to cover the whole of the presentation experience from software technique, through message crafting, presentation and slide design, and delivery. We have three tracks of seminars. We have a Help Center that is a total hands-on experience. That’s the one of our Help Center reps up the top-right corner, our friend, Geetesh.
It’s a hands-on experience from morning all the way into night. We have an expo that features all sorts of new technology. We create an atmosphere at this conference that is unique for a business conference. That photo in the center was not staged. You will not be able to help, but make lasting and meaningful relationships. Part of that is because we limit attendance, if you came, you would be one of just 200 people at this conference.
We have watched business partnerships forged, permanent friendships formed. And as I have said many times in commercials like this, three couples have met at our conferences and married. So, we are indeed a full service event. All of the information is on your screen now. The date, the time, the URL, and everything else. I would love to hear from you, if you thought you might be interested in attending. And at this point, Sharyn, let’s open it up for some more Q&A.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Okay. Great. And I’ll second that, I learned so much every time I go. I feel like I’ve become better at presentations in PowerPoint design thanks to this conference. And I know I can pick up the phone and call somebody right away and get an answer, and that’s because I form that relationships at the summit.
So, we have a question from someone who says that they always want to highlight a certain word in a bullet list, is there a good way to do it that it really is effective and just not a blob on a piece of paper?
Highlighting Words in Presentations
Rick Altman: Yeah, really good question. Is a good way to do it and not to be a blob? Well, I will tell you that first off, if I want to highlight something on the screen, if I’m the presenter standing in front of a screen, my first choice will always be to use my hand, to walk up to the screen and to touch the word. That is so much more tactile and immediate and intimate.
The screen is the primary visual component of the presentation. Everybody is looking at the screen. It’s completely natural for me to interact with the screen also. I find that that’s just so much more human, that if I can use my hand instead of a laser pointer. Now, that said, if you need to highlight a word, what I typically would do is I would highlight that word in bold and in a color other than black.
So, if we have black text, I’m going to highlight the word with bold and blue. I’m sorry. If it’s white text on a dark background, I’m going to highlight that word with bold and a very soft, like a powder blue. I find that that works well for me. Now, if I have to animate that, I just so resist doing things like that. But if there’s a place where it really makes sense to do that, that I think what I do is, I would look for the new feature Morph in Office 365. And I would Morph that slide into a second slide where that word then becomes emphasized.
It’s not as easy to do it with the standard animation techniques. But you can, you could take that word and separate it to its own textbox and you could emphasize it in some way. So, it could be done. You make your life so much easier if you simply go point to that word in the live presentation.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I think you’re so right. And sometimes, just don’t have it for the sake of having it, having it because it actually has a purpose. And I think Morph is a great way to do that. I love that idea. I’m in love with Morph since it came out last year.
Widescreen vs Standard Powerpoint Presentations
So, we have another question about please address the use of widescreen or standard only. Besides being only dependent on the projection equipment, is one more effective than the other?
Rick Altman: Is one more effective than the other? One is more dramatic than the other. And in that regard, it could be more effective. Sixteen by nine is more dramatic. That’s why today, we watch movies, they’re widescreen, you get these beautiful sweeping landscapes, and that holds true in presentation also. You up the ante though, when you do that.
When you need to fill an entire 16 by 9 with some evocative image, it might be more challenging to do that. You’ll need to find ones that are much wider than they are tall, or you’ll need to really do some serious cropping in order to get it to fit. So, there are challenges with that. There are plenty of times when 4 by 3 is going to be just fine.
It’s not so much a question of projector limitations any longer. I find that just about every projector today can do widescreen. But often, you’re going to be in a room where you may only have a ceiling space that allows you to go so high. And you may find that it’s just easier for your audience if you do it 4 by 3 instead of 16 by 9. Generally speaking, you have the opportunity to create a little bit more drama and impact with widescreen.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Something else too that something that you and I kind of practice when we’re getting ready for today since this is a new platform for us. Actually, go into the room if you’re in a room and try it, put it up on the screen, see what you’re dealing with, so you don’t walk in cold and you’re kind of stuck. So, I think knowing the devil you have is much better than trying to figure it out on the fly.
Rick Altman: Being able to see the room before you speak is always good, even if it’s just so you can start visualizing what it looks like to be up in front of audience, that’s huge.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: It’s really huge. Okay, that’s it for the questions at this time. So, for those who are going to drop off because you have to eat lunch or go to another meeting, thank you, but Rick is going to stay on. So, we’re going to go to the next section.
Rick Altman: Yeah, I got one more topic here. Organization, a foundation on the East Coast, MESSA, they sent into me a fantastic slide that shows a dilemma that we all face. Now, I’m back in edit mode and that means I need to find my cursor. Hang on one second. There is my cursor. Okay.
So, let me start by adjusting my screen a little bit. I need to get down to the bottom of my screen. Hang on a second. One quick moment here. There we go. Okay. Sharyn, you let me know if the screen looks okay.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: It looks fine from my end. I’ve got it both on my tablet and on my laptop. So, it looks great.
Rick Altman: Good. All right. So, here are the 20 slides in this deck. And actually, let me get rid of that one. So, this slide two that my cursor is hovering over, that is the agenda. And I know many of you create agenda slides like this, and then oftentimes, thinking further through this, you might duplicate that slide each place where you’re changing topics, so that you give people the context.
Okay. We’re done with that one. Now, we’re on this one. And I appreciate the value of that. But I want to show you a better way to do that. Because first of all, when you create a static agenda slide, if you change it, you’re now going to be changing … You have to go back, you have to go through your deck and change all the others also.
And also, what if due to any one of a number of constraints, time or the person that you’re pitching to wants you to speak about topic number three before you have topic number one, what do you do? You’ve got to blast over to that topic, you got to go fly him through a whole bunch of slides. I want to create a better agenda slide that won’t require that of you.
So, this is a very simple representation. You can see this, there are four sections. So, first, there’s this section that represents the uniquely MESSA. The other three slides, I changed the background just so you can see that they belong to that one. The second one is green, you got this light green. We have orange, and then three slides after that. And then, you end with I think this is purple, and then three slides for that. So, four very simple sections to this slide deck.
Now, let’s go zoom in on slide number two. On slide number two, what I want to do is, I want to create more intelligence to this slide. And I’m going to do that by creating custom shows. A custom show is a definition of slides that live inside of a slide deck. From the slideshow ribbon, I’m going to go to custom slideshow, bring up this very simple little dialog box here. Sharyn, you let me know if I’m going too fast. And from this dialog, I’m going to create four separate custom shows.
This first one and I’m just going to be working off of the four topics here. It’s called, Uniquely MESSA, and it is going to be these six … Oh, so sorry. These five slides right here. Okay. Next, I’m going to create a slide deck called, Health Reimbursement. And when we’re seeing one of the limitations of this dialog box. This doesn’t give me any little slide thumbnails. So, I may be off in the ones that I’m picking here, but bear with me.
So, I’m going to take these three. I think it’s just those three. It’s probably more. I’m going to have to fix this a little bit later. And I’m going to now say, okay. In fact, I know exactly what I need to do to fix this. And you know what, I’m sorry, I screwed that up. I didn’t save the first one when I created the second one. So, let me go back.
Uniquely MESSA, that was these right here, add. I didn’t say, “Okay.” Now, there’s two of them. Okay, they’re in the wrong order, but you’ll forgive me for that. Next one is going to be called, Moving From Self-funded. And I’m going to guess that it’s this one. These right here and this one, those four. Add, say okay. So, now, there’s three of them.
Finally, this last one is going to be called, Resources. And that’s going to be these final slides right here. Okay. Add them. Say, okay. Close this. And let me just point out that it probably would have been better for me to do this in this view right here. And if I go back, I want to just see if I did those right. Uniquely MESSA, let’s edit those. That should be slides 3, 4, 5 and 6. And so, if I do that again, it would be slides 3, 4, 5, 6, add that, okay. There we go. We’re done.
All right. And so, now, I have these custom shows, why have I done all of this? I’ve done this because now, I’m going to go back to these four little boxes, and I’m going to apply intelligence to them in the form of inserting an action on each one. And the action is going to be a hyperlink to a custom show. That’s one of the options that I have. Hyperlink to a custom show, to which one, to this one called, Uniquely MESSA. And I’m going to make sure I click this little box that says, when I’m done showing those, return me to this slide here.
All right. So, that’s one. Next, Health Reimbursement, hyperlink, custom show. Health Reimbursement show and return, okay, and okay. It’s possible that I’m going faster than your window is, I’m just now repeating these actions for the orange one. Hyperlink to the custom show called Moving From Self-funded. And I’ll do this one more time with the bottom one Resources, hyperlink, custom show called Resources. Okay and okay.
All right. So, I did that pretty quickly. But now with that intelligence in place, watch how interactively I can work through this slide deck. Let me press F5. Let me bring this up. And after the title slide, here comes my agenda slide. It’s slide number two. And on this agenda slide, now, let’s say that we’re sitting down, and you say to me, “Hey, Rick, I got a plane to catch, I want us to start with Health Reimbursement. Can we do that?” And I say, “Well, of course, we can do that.”
Look at my cursor, you see how my cursor changes to be a little finger for all of these? I’ll just go up here and I’ll click on Health Reimbursement. And that did not work. Why did it not? Oh, sorry, that one worked. Let’s say that you wanted me to go to Moving from Self-funded. So, now, there, we click on there. And now, as I work through these slides, these are all the slides for the section called, Moving from Self-funded.
And when I’m done, I come right back to here where I can now go to the next one. And the next one is, whichever I say it is, Uniquely MESSA. There is Uniquely MESSA. One click on that, we’re going to work through those slides, and we’re right back here when I’m done. We don’t have to worry about multiple slides that act like the agenda. There’s only one of them in this deck. Here’s Resources. And then we’re done and we come right back here.
Now, I want to drop back out for a second because this one didn’t work. Health Reimbursement didn’t work. I did something wrong there, and I want to find out what I did. Back at the moment, I can’t even press Escape. There. Okay. So, let’s go back and see how I screwed this one up. Insert action, Health Reimbursement. So, I did the wrong … Well, that’s correct. That should have worked. And for the life of me, I don’t know why it didn’t. Just one second here. Health Reimbursement, edit. Oh, there’s too much here.
So, it was actually doing it, but it was starting on the same slide. So, I messed up this one, but I can fix that by just grabbing these slides that were part of that. Add them. Say okay. Now, that should work. Let me try it again because the intelligence of where this goes is still there. There we go. And so that’s how I wanted this to be. And when we’re done, right back here.
Now, I could work through this slide deck linearly also. I could just advance to the next one. I could also create a hyperlink on any slide that takes me back to here, so that I can then move to any other section at any time I want it. And if we’re working through this section right here, but I decide I only want to show the first two slides, this one and then this one. That’s no problem. When I’m at this slide right here, I just press Escape, and I instantly stop the custom show and go back to the running of the main show. So, that’s …
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Wait. Let me interrupt you for just a second, because I think there’s a great comment that came in from Lisa. She said, “Going back to the agenda slide, each time brings the logo back to the eye, which is why we’re no longer putting the logo on every slide.”
Rick Altman: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That …
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: The comment I like where we had our earlier conversations.
Rick Altman: Yeah. I see Lisa’s question here in the Q&A panel. And so, that comes back to this argument. Do you want it on every slide? Or do you want it on just certain slides? This actually might be a good compromise. In this case, this will bring the logo back to the person’s eye at each section change, but not on every slide.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: I think it’s a great compromise, and I think it’s something more people should do. And I think especially as we have some new tools coming from PowerPoint, it gives you more opportunity to do this.
Rick Altman: Very good. Now, I just realized something. The download has this slide deck and its before state so that you could experiment and try this on your own. If people would like to see, like me to send them what this slide deck looks like in its after state, they can email me. And Sharyn, do put my email address in the set of resources, so people can reach me.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Okay. Great. I’ll do that. And then I’ve also put it into this, and I’ll include it in the post event as well.
Rick Altman: Okay.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: We do want to answer one question, because we’ve had a couple of people. Yes, we are recording this session, and we’ll make it available within two days. You’ll get an email telling you where you can download everything as well. Or you can also check presentationxpert.com/webinars, and it will be on our webinar page. Rick, it’s about 12:25. So, I’m going to give it back to you. I think, if we have no other questions, we’re running pretty short towards the end of time here.
Rick Altman: And I’m good. I’m good to be done. I’ll thank everybody one last time. I loved all the questions. Makeovers are one of my favorite topics and I know it’s one of yours also. Like I said at the conference, we solicit submissions for about a half a dozen sessions. They are always the most popular. So, I’m very grateful for having this opportunity to address one of my favorite topics with one of my favorite communities of all, my peeps in the presentation community. Thanks so much, everybody.
Sharyn Fitzpatrick: Yes, myself as well. I always learn so much even though I see a lot of this content. I’m always learning something new with Rick that I get to use. So, we want to thank everybody for coming to today’s event and you’ll see a recording. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us and we hope you have a great rest of your day.
