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Many bullet point heavy presentations are in fact speeches. You read and correct every paragraph over and over again and after hours and hours of work you see that you got it exactly right this is what you want to say!
Congratulations, you have arrived at the starting point of your presentation design project, not its end.
Whenever I need to send out a version of a presentation, I tend to do it in the morning after I had a chance to glance over things one more time, making small corrections here and there. Sending a deck straight after a big design push leaves errors that can easily be fixed by a well-rested mind. Story flow design in particular gets a bit hazy when you are in the trenches to turn out one slide after another.
Continuing my post from yesterday about interpreting feedback and deciding who to ignore, and who to believe.
In very short presentations (15 minutes) you can get away with a small glitch in your story flow. Your audience will get the whole picture fairly quickly, even if there was a slide bump in the way you told the story. You like to tell the story this way, the test audience liked it the other way, so be it.
A big red flag though will come from the sort of (content, substance) questions people ask.
Questions are important indicators of whether the audience got your message, or not.
Feedback can come from many different audiences, what to use, what to ignore? Some pointers.
Your mother will be really honest, but she loves everything you do, and is (likely) to be not credible when it comes to evaluating pitches, and probably also not the right target audience (if you are not raising from very close friends and family)
Busy venture capitalists are credible, and the right target audience, but not always honest (especially if they just turned you down). A vague compliment, your presentation is great, it is just not the right fit for us, could still mean that the presentation was a disaster. Small generic comments such as suggestions to cut the amount of slides, make better visuals, focus more time on the pain point, can create a lot of work for you completely uproot your approach to the presentation, while not necessarily true.
A geeky engineer can be honest, credible, but not the right target audience. When she thinks everything is absolutely clear, the other 99% of people might not be able to understand it at all.
In short, it is OK to ignore feedback from people. On the other hand, look out for genuine useful feedback from people who are credible, honest, and fit right into your target audience.
SlideProof is a neat PowerPoint plug in that cleans your presentation of common small mistakes - automatically. Misaligned boxes, titles, wrong page numbers, you name it. A bit like the Roomba vacuum clean robot, a spell checker on steroids. You have complete control over the changes though, so nothing unexpected will happen to your slides, which is crucial since my guess is that most of the vacuum cleaning of presentations will happen just before the live presentation.
Fixing small mistakes might not be crucial to get your message across, but it does make a huge difference in the overall impression you leave behind. A bit like polishing your shoes.
SlideProof only runs Windows so I did not have a chance to test drive it myself (I work on the Mac platform). Please share your experiences in the comments if you managed to check it out.
Many people write bullet point slides because they find it hard to come up with a visual composition of what they want to say. The trick: look at the basic action in your sentence:
A good presentation uses very simple data charts. Often, in the last minute, changes are made to the data: it is easy to change a number in PowerPoint here and there.
In most cases the first versions of these simple data charts were extracted from very complicated Excel sheets. And here is where the trouble starts. After a few PowerPoint iterations, the presentation and the backup model is no longer consistent. This is fine if the presentation was a one-off event, but most of the time, the Excel model will live on for future iterations.
The solution is to include a worksheet in your Excel model that pulls the data exactly as it goes in your charts. Put in the correct rounding, everything. Anyone who wants to change the numbers, need to make changes in the Excel model to get the numbers to change.
And yes, sometimes that might involve a goal seek.
If these charts frequently change, you might even consider designing a presentation in Excel. Excel has the same chart and shape design tools as PowerPoint, and you can create direct links between charts and work sheets without having to copy things across. See a previous post (2009) on this technique.
The Associated Press will start using a bot to generate verbatim on company earnings reports. The system takes as input the financial data, and then recycles that into human stories: earnings went up 3%, which is 0.5% higher than the financial services average and leads to an expected gross margin of 46% in Q3.
I never understood the point of journalists spelling out information in sentences that is much better communicated in graphs. Proof is that this translation is easily automated. The only use I can see is in translating data to audio for people who cannot take their eyes of the traffic and still want to digest data.
Instead of using the bot, AP should invest in better data visualisation.
Some draft investor pitches I receive dive straight into the nuts and bolts of running the company, business model options, and roll out strategies.
But maybe it is better to first take the time to explain what your idea actually is. It may sound boring and obvious to you, but someone who has not spent the last 2 years working alongside you, these 10 minutes of explanation are a good investment.
Issues that are hugely important to you such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, go-to-market analysis can wait until you have managed to communicate what you are doing, what problem you are solving.
In a recent project, I had to visualise the 5 year IT spend plan of a very large company: different business processes, different applications, different responsibilities, different timing, some were build, some were buy, different budgets.
Rather than pages of bullet point slides, I went for a simple table that showed the applications by business division, around 60 boxes. Then this - relatively complex - structure was repeated over and over again, each time with a different set of highlights and colour codings. After the first few repeats, the audience will slowly start to recognise the position of the applications on the grid, and i can introduce more complexity.
Here are some techniques to deal with complex tables and lots of different data set: