When you believe in things you don’t understand,
Then you suffer,
Supersition ain’t the way.
– Stevie Wonder

The late, great Mark Twain is quoted as having once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” This is almost certainly the case with PowerPoint.

Many of the commonly understood and accepted ways to use PowerPoint are wrong. They’re superstitions that we all believe in (or believed in at one time) for no other reason than everyone else believes in them, too. Five years ago, we all believed our smartphones were really smart. It wasn’t until Apple unveiled the iPhone that we had our first glimpse of what could be. After that, we weren’t satisfied with the status quo we had contented ourselves with just hours before.

Some prevalent PowerPoint Superstitions include:

• Add bullet points until the text box is full.
• Use images to fill up whatever whitespace is left after adding your text.
• It’s good to use lots of different fonts on every slide. People like variety.
• If you decide to make a portion of text bold, it’s good to underline and italicize, too. Extra points for changing its color.
• Random transitions give your presentation the extra-special edginess of uncertainty.

The problem here isn’t that people don’t know what rules to follow. It isn’t that we don’t require everyone to study design in school (although this isn’t a bad idea). It isn’t that there’s no one speaking up about how to do slides a better way.

The problem is that people aren’t aware of the problem. They think they know what they’re doing. They think this is how PowerPoint is supposed to be done. And since they don’t see a problem, they’re not searching for a solution.

Ordering Objects

The image to the left displays the list of commands you’ll see when you click the Arrange button. The first four commands, under the Order Objects heading, control the stack order of the elements on the slide. My guess is that if you’ve spent any time at all with PowerPoint, you’re already familiar with these four commands. Bring Forward and Send Backward increase or decrease respectively an element’s position in the stack by one, while Bring to Front or Send to Back move the object all the way to the top or bottom of the stack. But you knew that already.

Sidebar: Did you further know you can use the Selection Pane… command to open a pane that will let you edit the stack order manually? Give it a try sometime.

Grouping Objects

The next three commands, under the Group Objects heading, I assume you know as well. Group, Ungroup, and Regroup allow you to create collections of objects that will behave as one object until released.

Aligning Objects

It’s the next command I’d like to tell you about today. Under the Position Objects heading is a command called Align which has a fly out menu with several options in it, which you can see to the right.

These commands allow you to fine tune the positioning of anything on the slide. The first three commands control horizontal (left and right) alignment, and the following three control the vertical (up and down). This positioning is dynamic, meaning that it changes based on how many objects are selected. If only one object is selected, the object will be aligned to the slide. If two or more objects are selected the objects will be positioned relative to each other.

For example, if only one object is selected when you choose the Align Left command, the left-hand side of the selected object will be moved into alignment with the left-hand side of the slide. If two or more objects are selected when you choose Align Left, then the left-hand side of all the objects will be aligned with the left-hand side of the left-most object. If you want to override this default change in behavior at any time, you can do so by toggling the check box on the menu from Align to Slide to Align Selected Objects, or vice versa.

Align Left, Align Center, and Align Right will only change objects’ horizontal positions. It will not move them up or down at all. Similarly Align Top, Align Middle, and Align Bottom, will only change vertical positons. So if your goal was to have two objects line up right on top of each other, you’d have to choose two commands, Align Center followed by Align Middle or vice-versa.

Distributing Objects

The next two commands, Distribute Horizontally and Distribute Vertically, allow you to space objects evenly between to points. For instance, when you choose Distribute Horizontally, the left-most and right-most objects will not be effected, and the rest of the selected objects will be spaced evenly between the two. These commands only work when three or more objects are selected.

Aligning or Distributing Groups

The alignment commands also work on groups. Suppose you have your objects just the way you want them, but they’re slightly off center. Rather than trying to move them each over a few nudges at a time, you could create a group out of all the objects, align the whole group to the center, then release the group with the Ungroup command.

Alignment is one of the easiest ways to sharpen up the look of your slides. Take some time to experiment with the Align menu and learn how it’s commands behave in various situations. Of course you could always align objects by hand, nudging and positioning things until you have it just right, but learning to use the align tools can be a real time saving trick.

The Essence of A Great Presentation
Whitney Johnson – Harvard Business Review

Why Whitespace Matters
Paul Boag – boagworld.com

Fear of Public Speaking
Janice Tomich – janicetomich.com

2010 Annual Top 50: loved.
Bobbi Sheridan & Mike Belschner – bobbiandmike.com/blog

Acceptance Speeches Improved By Strong Openings & More Tips For Better Acceptance Speeches
Lisa Braithwaite - coachlisab.blogspot.com

10 Ways to Prepare for a TED-format Talk
Nancy Duarte – blog.duarte.com

Joseph Campbell on the Hero’s Journey
Jenny Blake – lifeaftercollege.org

Why Do Animated Videos Work?
Lee Lefever – commoncraft.com

6 Ways to Be A PowerPoint Superhero
Jon Thomas – presentationadvisors.com

I just posted a new set of slides on Slideshare this morning. They’re from a humorous speech I gave at Toastmasters this week. I modified the slides so they would make sense without me being there to speak.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting everyday anymore, as I was doing up until a few weeks ago. Based on some thoughts that were inspired by a note on Facebook by Jesse Desjardins (which I couldn’t find today. Jesse, if you read this, can you post a link in the comments?) I’ve decided to spend more time on making my posts more visual by actually creating slides instead of just text. Posting text-based posts every day was making me a better writer, which is good, but I wasn’t really becoming a better presentation designer, which is one of my goals with this blog. I also hope this will make my posts more interesting and enjoyable for you, and that that will help the ideas I share here to spread farther than before.

Basically this change means higher quality posts less often. I’m still spending a similar amount of time per day on the blog, but I won’t have something new to share everyday. There will probably still be text-based posts from time to time, but I hope to make presentations like the one above the norm. As always, you can also follow me on Twitter to get your daily dose of great presentation articles and links.

I’ll give this a shot for a while and see how it goes. I’d love to have your feedback. Do you like the slides above? Did you like the old way better? Let me know!

Tools are like languages: they may look and sound completely different, but the ideas and emotions behind them are universal.

There are all kinds of tools out there to help you build stunning presentations. All of these, no matter what they tell you, will also help you build garbage slides. The difference is in how you use them. That’s the stuff everybody wants to know but so few actually seek out. It used to be hard to find good instructions for using slideware, but in the past few years all kinds of resources have emerged in the form of books, blogs, webinars, and in-class training. Nowadays, just seek and ye shall find.

The skills to look for in a presentation designer (or to develop in yourself if you’re becoming one) are not whether they can speak Photoshop, or Adobe Premiere, or really even PowerPoint, although fluency in all of those tools is certainly a plus. What you want is someone who knows how people learn. Someone who’s good at understanding and explaining. Someone who can quickly grasp your information and then help you turn it into story.

Unfortunately it’s harder to display those skills on a website.

But once you acquire THOSE skills, once you speak presentation, you won’t worry so much anymore about tools. You’ll still need to have the latest tools and know how they work. But people never change and neither do the basics of how to reach them.

Having too many slide elements distracts from your message and annoys your audience.

I know that I obsess over Powerpoint design much more than most, but today I saw such egregious, flagrant disregard for layout and animation ettiquette that I just have to mention it.

It was really close to being perfect when the slide initially appeared. A simple, full-bleed, long-shutter-speed image of a rocket being fired into the night sky. Dynamic, simple, eye-catching.

I can remember thinking, “now that’s a good sligh.”

I said ‘sligh’ because that’s as far as I got before the slide’s other elements started appearing.

First, a huge, gaudy, silly-looking, sci-fi spaceship thingy slides from the lower left to the upper right and stops.

Then another picture of a rocket, complete with trailing cloud of smoke, rises straight up on the left side.

Then another rocket, rises right next to that one.

Then a Word Art bubble appears off-center near the middle of the screen.

One by one, more elements appeared (with poorly chosen transitions) until every single inch of white space is completely gone.

Eventually the slide was so cluttered, there was really no telling what it’s message was. It did more harm than good to the company’s image when the logo finally appeared in the lower left.

The Point

They say a good designer knows not only what to include, but what to leave out.

This slide was perfect when all it contained was one image. A well-chosen image gives your audience one idea to consider. An image can complement well typeset text by visually reinforcing the meaning of the text.

I have no doubt in my mind that the designer of this slide was well-intentioned, thinking he was making the most effective use of all the space that was there. These slides were at a huge conference. The right to have a slide in that slideshow between speakers no doubt cost a pretty penny and the slide would be seen by hundreds of potential clients. He was really getting his money’s worth out of every inch of that slide, he thought.

But by trying too hard and placing too many elements on the slide, all of the elements lost significance and ultimately meaning, and the slide failed to communicate anything. All that money wasted.

Have you ever seen something like this? Have you ever created something like this? I have. I promise to stop. And you should, too.