After reviewing the surveys that your class completed last week and observing the general direction that class went the other night, it seems that there are two sets of people in class: those who know Excel very well and those who don’t have any experience in Excel at all. That’s okay, because my hope is that we try to make class interesting for both groups of people. I will be asking those of you who do know Excel to come up in front of the class like Bryan did last week and helping me to lead the class on the screen.
I noticed that some people have been clicking on the web site of the Australian Toastmasters Champion, Darren Fleming, who recently commented here on my blog. Well, he has his own blog called the Executive Speaking Weblog. If you guys are interested in further refining your public speaking skills, I think this is a good place to look for continual updates.
For example, here’s a particularly interesting article on persuasive speaking. While I doubt that our class will be as unwilling to listen to your viewpoints as a 2-year-old is unwilling to take her medicine, I think it does merit the point that there is generally a “doubting Thomas” in the crowd who needs some extra convincing (or sometimes just someone who wants to impress the rest of the audience by taking the spotlight from the speaker and trying to get one over on the speaker to show how smart he or she is). Sometimes that is just an unavoidable part of public speaking, but adept speakers can turn them around and use them for their benefit.
One of the topics that we’ll be talking about next week in class is what your next step will be to utilize the skills you’ve (hopefully) learned in class in other situations. I think that good communication and the ability to speak in front of others can help us in many situations, from job interviews to business presentations to training events. One of the places I would consider looking into would be one of the many Toastmasters organizations in the area. You might want to check with your employers, because some of the larger companies have their own speaking clubs that have been organized by employees (Lilly, Raytheon, BMG, Rolls Royce, Roche are some of those).
I don’t belong to Toastmasters, so I’m not getting a referral fee from them or anything, but they are internationally recognized as a great organization, and I think if you’re interested in furthering your education in public speaking, Toastmasters would be a great place to do so.
Dan Cathy has a bigger message than “Eat Mor Chikin.”
“What you’re doing really makes a difference,” the 54-year-old president and chief operating officer of Chick-fil-A restaurants told the 200 business people at today’s Noblesville Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
Take advantage of unexpected opportunities, start with what you have, keep up with the challenges and changing expectations, never lose your sense of relevancy, and continue to grow, Cathy encouraged.
He operates the 40-year-old Atlanta-based chain of 1,356 restaurants, which in 2007 reported sales of $2.6 billion, a 16.09 percent increase of the chain’s 2006 performance and a same-store sales increase of 8.47 percent.
Just a reminder, because our course is an elective, we may have to move around the building (as we found last week). The room we met in for the first two workshops is now occupied by a core group. Last week we met upstairs in room 200. Make sure before you go to class to check with the front desk to make sure you have the correct room assignment.
Tonight should be an interesting class with a lot of speaking and make-up speeches. There will be a lot of opportunities to try different techniques “on-the-fly” as we did last week. I’m looking forward to seeing the progression throughout the night.
Additionally, here is a question to think about before class: do you think it would be effective to be videotaped so that you can see your performance as demonstrated in the Speaking Effectively video? I know that it might seem incredibly embarassing and potentially vulnerable, but I think that there could also be a great opportunity to see yourself as your audience sees you. We won’t incorporate it into this class, but it’s a technique I would like to use in the future for course development.
Put yourself in this presentation, and you can make yourself look downright saintly. Perfect for pastors presenting to Easter congregations, nonprofits asking for donations, or salesfolks who need to subliminally reinforce their trustworthy images.
The cost of a poor PowerPoint presentation is staggering. Ian Parker in The New Yorker magazine states that according to Microsoft estimates, there are more than 30 million PowerPoint presentations made each day. If we assume some relatively conservative meeting parameters of four people per presentation, a half-hour presentation on average and the wasted time due to a poor presentation is one-quarter of the presentation time, we arrive at a waste of 15 million person hours per day. At an average salary of $35,000 per year for those attending the meeting, the cost of that wasted time is a staggering $252 million and change each day.
As you can see, not only do poor visual aids and PowerPoint presentations serve to confuse and bore your audience, but in a business setting they can be nonproductive and wasteful.
Despite the potentially blasphemous title of this article, I’d like to continue the theme of bad visual aids and bad PowerPoint presentations from last week with this list of 10 things to do when you present a slide show.
Speak to your audience before launching your visuals.
Keep eye contact primarily with your audience, not with your visual aids.
Avoid reading your slides or overheads to your audience, please.
Keep text to a minimum; let images and graphics illustrate and dramatize your points.
Use a font style that is simple and large enough (generally sans serif styles at least 20-24 points) to be read at a distance.
Keep the number of points to 3 - 5 per slide.
Ensure consistency of syntax on each slide (e.g., if the first bullet point starts with a verb, all subsequent bullet points should start with a verb-it’s easier to comprehend and more powerful).
Take time to introduce - and pause to allow the audience time to absorb - any - complex information (e.g., from a graph or chart).
Put your slide titles to work: they should help deliver the message not merely give a name to the slide.
Turn off the projector or overhead to focus attention and re-claim the spotlight.
I think this is one of those moments where I can safely say that we are ALL learning in this class, myself included.
I took a few moments over the weekend to review the textbook’s online resources made available by the publisher. Unfortunately, if you go to the web site listed on the back of your Exploring Excel 2003 textbook, you get an updated version written for the Office 2007 version.
However, there is a link off of that page to the previous Exploring Office 2003 web site. You will find a link to the Student Resources page, which I believe gives you a .ZIP file of all the Excel spreadsheets that are on the CD-ROM that came with your textbook. There are also some PowerPoint presentations on that page, which I won’t be using in class, but might be of some help to you.
Actually, there’s a redundancy in that title. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, and whenever you’re on a web site and see that funky orange icon to the right, you know that web site syndicates its contents. Most often you will see these on blogs (blogs, short for weblogs, are online diaries… you’re reading one right now!).
However, with the explosion of the blogosphere (which is a fancy way of saying that people spend too much time at work reading and writing on blogs), I guess people got tired of having to waste time visiting 60 blogs during the day and only wanted to know when there was new content to view.
I was asked by the university to pass this information along. So, here you go:
Please remind your students: As of March 01, 2008 all students now have an IWU email account. This will be our primary means of communication with students. Please tell you students that it is crucial they check this account on a regular basis. Instructions can be found at http://myiwu.indwes.edu.
Instructors used to get your personal email account that you gave to the university when you registered. However, now all we get are your myemail.indwes.edu accounts. So, if you want to receive emails in the future from your instructors, you might want to book mark the MyIWU site and check your email daily.
Actually, there’s a redundancy in that title. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, and whenever you’re on a web site and see that funky orange icon to the right, you know that web site syndicates its contents. Most often you will see these on blogs (blogs, short for weblogs, are online diaries… you’re reading one right now!).