Turn Off Pop-Ups When Presenting

Honestly, I’m guilty of this. I never renewed my antivirus subscription, so I get three or four messages from McAfee telling me that my Security Center is not configured properly or something. And honestly, I wish I could turn it off, but I think the only way to do it is to fork over the $50. Hooray.

In a given day, or week, or month, how many messages pop up on your computer to:

• Update Java, RealPlayer, or Windows?
• Connect to a wireless network?
• Remind you of an upcoming meeting or birthday?
• Keep you up to date on your subscribed RSS feeds?

Warning: Some of these pop-ups may appear while you’re presenting in slide show view! Not a pretty picture!

After a few minutes of inactivity (let’s say you’re answering questions), does your screen saver kick in, or does your computer go into hibernation mode?

Before you get into such a situation, right now, start making a list of the pop-ups that you see, and research how to turn them off. It’s not always easy to find the answer, because the software companies want you to see those pop-ups!

I’ve heard of even more embarrassing situations that pop-ups have created. For example, I was at a conference where they told a story of a pastor that had pornographic pop-ups on his computer because he had downloaded some spyware off a pornographic web site he had visited. Instant messengers are also annoying (both in pop-ups and in their “alerts”) sometimes if you forget to turn them off.

Anyway, if you know how to turn off the pop-ups, it might behoove you to do so.

Tell ‘n’ Show Slide Design

This is probably a strange topic of discussion, but “bad PowerPoint” has become somewhat of a hobby of mine. I attended the Midwest Scholars Conference over the winter, and I discovered there that my classroom PowerPoint slides were bad, and not bad in the good way either. I have since tried to reformat my slides into something a little less “bad”, but it is difficult to keep from bulleted lists, which are apparently a no-no because they get too wordy. The problem for me is that I look at bulleted lists and notice that they look clean and organize, but they apparently don’t facilitate learning very well.

Anyway, I think the last example on this page about the components of a presentation may finally break my overuse of the bulleted list. Perhaps while I have these few months off this summer, I may be able to utilize some of these concepts in my hundreds of slides containing bulleted lists. We’ll see. However, if you are planning on putting together a presentation for class, there are plenty of ideas and references on Ellen Finkelstein’s page you can use. I’ll try to get some more up here as they become available.

The Halo Effect

MGT 205 veterans will remember the Halo Effect. Here is a humorous PowerPoint representation of it in use.

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.

Are We Wasting $250 Million Per Day Due to Bad PowerPoint?

Here’s another bad PowerPoint/visual aid follow-up from last week’s workshop:

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.

10 Commandments of PowerPoint Presentations

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.

1. Speak to your audience before launching your visuals.
2. Keep eye contact primarily with your audience, not with your visual aids.
3. Avoid reading your slides or overheads to your audience, please.
4. Keep text to a minimum; let images and graphics illustrate and dramatize your points.
5. 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.
6. Keep the number of points to 3 - 5 per slide.
7. 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).
8. Take time to introduce - and pause to allow the audience time to absorb - any - complex information (e.g., from a graph or chart).
9. Put your slide titles to work: they should help deliver the message not merely give a name to the slide.
10. 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.

Bad PowerPoint: When Is Enough, Enough?

One of the topics we discussed on Wednesday was what the different types of learners get out of visual aids. Here is a quote from this article on bad PowerPoint presentation:

Remember, people process information in many ways. Some learn visually, others learn by listening, and the kinesthetic types prefer to learn through movement. It’s best to provide something for everyone. Let’s be very clear. Visual learners do not learn from bullet points alone; they learn from pictures, graphs, and images. Auditory learners do not learn from listening to sound effects like bells ringing and typewriters clacking. Instead, they learn from listening to an engaging speaker whose voice is powerful and who captivates their curiosity. And, kinesthetic learners do not learn from the movement of words on a slide. They learn from doing, touching, and moving around. They like to be involved and participate.

It is unfortunate that PowerPoint is designed with all these “bells and whistles” that obstruct communication, because the tendency and desire for many communicators is to put as many of these animations and effects into a presentation as possible. They tend to distract from the message, and at times can put off an audience completely. What we tend to forget as speakers is that it is not a fancy PowerPoint presentation or a flashy visual aid that will engage our audience, but our own ability to communicate our message to them in a way that interests and involves our audience.

COM 110 - Workshop 3 Postscript

I think we had a really good workshop last night, and while half the class was missing, I think it gave the opportunity for some good one-on-one discussions on improving public speaking skills. Hopefully, you will be able to utilize some of the practice techniques on your own this week to help you build your confidence and start gaining the habits that you’re looking to acquire.

We talked so much last night about bad visual aids and bad PowerPoint presentations that I thought I would do a little research today about the subject. As I mentioned last night, I’m interested too, now that I know that I officially have been declared a “bad” PowerPoint user as well. Just doing a web search netted me about 9,000,000 links, so there is obviously some sort of trend out there that others have noticed.