I recently had an inquiry from a reader regarding the embedding of my avoiding death by PowerPoint video. This got me thinking. I quite often use video clips within a presentation for a number of reasons.

• They are great for demonstrating a particular technique. Ever tried to explain how do do something using only words? It’s very difficult and a short demo video does the job much more effectively.

• They can be used to compare different things. I use video clips of Steve Balmer and Steve Jobs to illustrate how different presentation styles can and are equally effective. It’s a case of finding your own authentic style rather than trying to be something or someone you are not,

• As a presentation skills trainer and coach I sometimes use a short video of an unknown speaker as a primer for analysing and feeding back. Rather than ask participants to comment on each other initially I show them a video of an average speaker and ask them to comment on what the speaker did well, what the speaker didn’t do well and finally what they could do to improve.

You are probably getting the picture by now that there are lots of uses for video in a presentation. I would however counsel against over use of video. I have listed three of the most common pitfalls below:

• Too many video clips. Less is more is always my mantra. Ask yourself, do I really need a video clip here? Remember you are your own best visual aid and anything else should add value.

• Clips are too long. I find that about three minutes is the upper limit if used within a presentation.

• Use of irrelevant clips. Sometimes I have seen people use funny video clips as energisers or mood changers during a workshop. These can work well but if they are seen as being irrelevant to the main content of the presentation you risk alienating your audience pretty quickly.

In conclusion, video can be extremely powerful and is very easy to embed within a PowerPoint, Keynote or Sliderocket slide deck. Just use them sparingly and think first.

Have a great weekend

Gavin Meikle
The Presentation Doctor

After giving a talk last night in which I used a lot of images and very little text, one of the participants emailed me with the following question:

“Dear Gavin,
I attended you very helpful presentation at the Basingstoke Country Park Hotel yesterday.  There is a 13^th tip that I would find helpful.  When I put photos into my presentations the file size grows massively and it becomes difficult to manage.  I have real difficulties e-mailing presentations with lots of photos in for example.

How do I insert photos in a PowerPoint presentation and yet keep the file size down? I know there must be a way of doing it.

I would appreciate your advice.”

My response was as follows:

“Thanks Steve – What a great question:

 For Powerpoint 2003:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA011168821033.aspx

 For Powerpoint 2007:
http://presentationsoft.about.com/od/powerpoint2007/ss/080508compress.htm

 Or you could buy a purpose built file compression utility such as

http://www.balesio.com/fileminimizer/eng/index.php?gclid=CIGrodblxZsCFVUA4wodiEucDw

 or

http://www.neuxpower.com/products/nxpowerlite-desktop/

 I haven’t tried either of these myself but i think they both have free trial versions.”

 Later in the day he emailed me back and this was his response:

Brilliant!  I’ve just reduced the size of a presentation from 27,843 kb to 519 kb.

Based on his response I thought that some of you might find these links useful too.

Today I had a response to my 7 minute video on preventing death by Powerpoint.      The poster, a student teacher asked the following question:

As a future teacher I will be using PowerPoint (e.g. for teaching grammar).
As a topic for a course it could be useful for many people in my field of education (English) to learn how to link a powerpoint to a written text (e.g. poetry; if you want to link visual images to support your story about poetry, in what way could you incorporate them into your PowerPoint).   Obviously the bullet point approach won’t work as you made clear in your presentation. Any suggestions?

Now I’m not an expert in teaching English grammar but my first thought was to use quotes from famous people which illustrate the rules you are teaching and then  design a power point slide with a picture of the person with the quote in a Speech bubble.     I’m sure that there must be other ideas out there so I thought I’d open it up to the group.  Please respond using the comments form below.

Gavin

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My recent post about a bullet point heavy Web 2.0 presentation on slideshare tickled one of you to write in and say that, although they agreed with me as to how dull and wordy the slides were, they wondered why the presentation was getting lots of hits.

Well I think you have to remember that a stand alone presentation is a very different animal from a presenter lead one.    In a live presentation, most of the content should be communicated verbally and non verbally by the human presenter rather than the slides.   In a slideshare presentation, you don’t have the presenter in either audio or visual mode so you have to rely on the slides, hence they need to contain more information.  Also you can read the information at your own pace.

If you use one slide deck for both uses, the live one will almost certainly fail because of the interference and overload that occurs when your audience are trying to listen to your words and read the script on the screen at the same time.    When we read words, we turn them into an internal audio sound track which is almost certainly out of sync with that of the presenter leading to confusion and dissonance.

So in summary, don’t design your presentation to be all things to all men.   If you need to have a version viewable on the net, make sure it’s different from the one you use to present from.   Your audience will thank you and so will I.

Recently I have been looking at a couple of free on-line alternatives to Powerpoint for producing attractive and effective visual aids to support a presentation.   There are now a whole host  and how many will survive  only time will tell.  Thankfully  this morning I found a great post that gives you links to 13 great looking alternatives.

So far I have only really played with Sliderocket and I have to say I really like it.   If you have tried any of the others, how about posting a comment here and sharing your experience with your fellow presenters.

Have you ever had the need to jump to a live website whilst in the middle of a Powerpoint presentation?   It is possible by inserting a hyperling to the site you want, within a slide or image.   The problem is that doing so results in you having to come out of Powerpoint and into your web browser and then you have to close the web browser to return to Powerpoint.

There is however a much easier and neater way.   Checkout the liveweb add in for powerpoint

All you need to do is download the appropriate version of this clever little visual basic add in and it will allow you to display a live website within a powerpoint slide.    I just tried it out and it works a treat!

My thanks go to Jerry Kidd and his excellent makeuseof.com blog for drawing this great little tool to my attention.

This video clip serves four purposes for students of presentation and public speaking skills:

1. It demonstrates the value of a clearly structured message
2. It shows how things like eye contact, body language and vocal variety engage the audience
3. It shows how simple visual aids with well chosen images add to the presentation
4. It contains a valuable message that we all should learn and take heed of.

Enjoy

Recently I was invited to give a talk on presentation skills tips to JCI Southampton.  We had a lively evening in the lovely Jury’s Inn  Hotel and I was able to record the talk so that you all could hear it to.   You can listen to it from the web or download it to your ipod.  Just click on the link here and scroll down the page till you see the audio player.

The talk lasts about 45 minutes and covers a range of public speaking related topics including; handling nerves, setting objectives, slide design, & engaging your audience.   Listen to it and let me know what you think.