The back of the napkin

Brain Rules may be my favorite book of the year, but The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam is also one of the most important business books of the year (educators will find it valuable as well). The Back of the Napkin is an incredibly useful and practical book. Remember, using multimedia is not the only way to present, whiteboards, flipcharts — and for smaller audiences — a legal pad or even a napkin at the bar can be used well as a way to illustrate your ideas. Even if you do ultimately present in slideware, you can use the techniques Dan Roam discusses to illustrate your ideas in the preparation stage, and I've even seen some people scan their hand-drawn visuals and use them in PowerPoint or Keynote later.

In The Back of the Napkin, Dan Roam says that we're all born with a talent for visual thinking, but we were often not encouraged to develop it. In the video below, the author shows how anyone with a pen and some paper can use their imagination to work through any business problem in a visual way.



Below is a video clip on Dan's appearance on Fox Business.



Here's Dan on MSNBC's "Your Business." Checkout The Back of the Napkin website (and link to Dan's blog).

Now for something completely different
Later this week I'll have the pleasure of speaking at Microsoft again about some of the ideas behind Presentation Zen, etc. So I have a question: If you could say anything (constructive) to Microsoft about PowerPoint and presentations, etc., what would you say? This includes the good, the bad, and the not so attractive. What's your opinion? What do you like about ppt? How has it improved over the years (or not)? If you no longer use the tool, why not? As a longtime user of PowerPoint — and someone who made multimedia presentations before PowerPoint was invented — I have a pretty good feel of what people like and where they struggle, but I'd love to hear from you. In fact, your input is vital. I would love to incorporate your feedback into my talk. Please feel free to use the comments section below or send me an email directly. Thanks very much!

Comments

[J.D. Williams]

I would tell them that most of their bundled themes are not great. I do like the ones bundled with Office 2007 better though because they are not as busy.

[Liju Jacob]

There should be some easy way to get to sites that sell pictures from powerpoint.
Not having to go to the site through a browser, buy/save the picture, and then import the pic.

Extending on this idea - if the person can't find a picture on the available sites - then (from powerpoint itself) - put in a request for a picture and a price he's willing to pay.

These ideas are already out there but its not possible without leaving powerpoint. I guess all I meant to say is reduce the number of steps to finding a good picture.

[Dave Parker]

If they must have a default slide layout, make it the one that imports images, etc.

[Karthik]

Hi,
I work at Microsoft and have been using your book to make my presentations better, 1 at a time. Can you tell me when exactly you will be here at MS (and the time)? I want to make sure I attend.

Thanks.

[Samuli]

Garr,

on powerpoint notes it would be nice to be able to edit the font size, format and layout on the notes box. Any formatting shows only on printed version, not on the notes box when you prepare it.

Inserting pictures is a pain, since ppt always triest to guess what is my preferred size (and quite often guesses wrong)

From formatting pictures there is one important feature missing. There is no easy way to make the size of the picture the same as the slide size. First you need to make it close enough on the formatting box, then drag it to match.

I think I could go on and on, but still I manage with powerpoint - after years of curious practice. Normally there is always a way to do the trick. You just have to find it. MS normally also guesses what I try to do and most often guesses wrong. So I would prefer them to turn off all auto formatting.

Regards,

Samurai

[tsx]

If I could ask Microsoft something for me :

Better handouts (also said above).
If they could find some way to better make documents to give out (create word document from slides+handout).
Better ppt-handout edition would be nice as well

If I could ask Microsoft something for the others :
Drop 3d graphics from all their applications.
You can see (for example) this wonderful example : http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2007/10/06/the-chart-is-the-message.aspx

Have fun,

[Saleem]

I wonder if there were a way they could include examples of great presentations using Powerpoint in interesting ways... A help link that points to a blog by an interesting Microsoft-er that highlights recent presentations that use Powerpoint well?

[Mark Normand]

Hi

I only have a few simple suggestions:-

MOVIES
Problem - any text or shape we put in front, dissappears when played as a slide show.
Suggestion - allow for text boxes and shapes to be written over the movie and kept in order when playing as a slideshow. Perhaps even place a movie in an Autoshape (like any other picture file).

PICTURE/ TEXT EFFECTS
Problem - a few new effects were added an now become default, however even these don't posses much 'wow' compared to other currently available or upcoming applications such as SlideRocket.Any add-ons or new effects must be from third party.
Suggestion - To be more web enabled, to allow new effects to be added. For example, a 'Blur' effect for a picture could be downloaded (for free?!) or for a small fee directly from microsoft and not thrid party venders.

3D:
Problem - (a)images can only be filled on one-side. (b) animation is impossible aside from slide-to-slide.
Suggestion - Each side of the (e.g. cube) could have a image fill. Custom Animation has to have a seperate optio for 3D Shapes such as 'rotate on axis' and similar animation.

Well, my wish list anyway.....
Cheers and hope it goes well with Microsoft!

Mark
http://presentationslides.blogspot.com

[Vijay]

I made a presentation to a group of people who seem to like bullet points / text / data on every slide (Academia, anyone?). I read your book and applied visual techniques as best as I could and I used Powerpoint 2003.

After the presentation, I wanted to give my audience a printed version of my slides along with the associated notes to take away. But there was only one "Notes option" while printing, which meant I had to print multiple copies of each of the 25 slides to have the notes on it.

I decided to save the earth and gave them a consolidated word doc instead! At this point I realized how useful it would be to have a printing option for notes, similar to the handout option (with 3 slides per page) and have the notes by the side instead of those blank lines.

[Vijay]

I made a presentation to a group of people who seem to like bullet points / text / data on every slide (Academia, anyone?). I read your book and applied visual techniques as best as I could and I used Powerpoint 2003.

After the presentation, I wanted to give my audience a printed version of my slides along with the associated notes to take away. But there was only one "Notes option" while printing, which meant I had to print multiple copies of each of the 25 slides to have the notes on it.

I decided to save the earth and gave them a consolidated word doc instead! At this point I realized how useful it would be to have a printing option for notes, similar to the handout option (with 3 slides per page) and have the notes by the side instead of those blank lines.

[Dan Roam]

Garr,

Please pass on to the folks at Microsoft that PPT is just a tool... like a hammer. We don't blame the hammer if our house is badly built. Nor should we blame PPT if our communications fall down. But like any other tool, PPT shouldn't be used every single time we need to build an idea. We need more in our toolkit.

During my work as a consultant at Microsoft, I've seen that up in Redmond they're no better nor worse than any other corporation in overusing PPT. My suggestion: propose that whenever they think about sharing an idea, spend a moment thinking about some way OTHER than PPT to convey it. Tell a simple story, sketch a basic picture, walk your audience step-by-step through an equation; there are lots of options.

We *must* not get caught up in the laziness of business thinking that comes with the ease of using PowerPoint. Relying on that one tool exclusively is really starting to make our brains into 8.5 x 11" rectangles. Our brains are squishy for a reason. Please ask the Microsoft folks to start thinking about what comes after PPT. If *they're* not thinking about it, then we really should be worried.

- Dan

[Nevine Henein]

Unfortunately, I frequently have to prepare those hated combination slide/documents with a lot of text in them. I am used to formatting in Word which allows me to define my own Styles and saves an amazing amount of time. It would be great if Powerpoint would offer this option instead of making me apply numerous formatting steps to each chunk of text. Even using the Slide Master isn't flexible or time-saving ebough. I use Office 2003.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to say that this website has been a revelation to me. I now cringe, every time I have to prepare a bulleted list (loved by my boss and clients).

Thank you

[Mike Peter Reed]

I'd tell Microsoft to copy Keynote and then improve that. Powerpoint is not tactile enough for me and not freeform enough. I don't want software imposing its will upon me, I want to be able to express my idea in as few mouse-clicks and configuration items as possible. I want a canvas with typesetting and easy object embedding which is well presented to me and rarely shows the hourglass. Microsoft already lost me as a customer though, they have to do better than Keynote to win me back.

[Chris]

Garr,

Please ask them why, oh why oh why oh why, they absolutely refuse to spend any time and effort on training their own people to present.

My company does a lot of work with Microsoft and I attend about 12-15 MS events every year and I have sat through some truly dire presentations that break every single rule of presenting - reading overcrowded slides, talking to the floor, talking to the screen, trying to present and hour's worth of material in 20 minutes, etc. Many of these have been from people with global and continental levels of responsibility - MS is their own worst advertisement for the use of PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is a tool but, in the wrong hands, it can be used for evil.

[Ellis Pratt]

It would be nice for PowerPoint to support single sourcing.

You could have a "bucket" of re-usable slides and slide objects. If you update a slide, then all slides that use it would be updated.

The benefits - presentations would be more consistent, quicker to put together and maintainable.

Author-it achieves this by generating HTML and XML based slides, but it would be nice if PowerPoint could do that too.

[zenator]

very cool piece on "back of a napkin". looking forward to learning more about that!!

[Dave Gray]

Hi Garr,

I happen to think PowerPoint is a wonderful tool for presenting. However, people use PowerPoint in at least two other ways that I am aware of:

1. As a thinking tool, and
2. To create stand-alone documents for sharing, either by email or online.

I think PowerPoint can be -- and is -- highly valuable as a knowledge management tool, and what I'd like to see is some development in these areas that are outside the realm of the presenter on the stage.

Consider the following: It's not easy to use PowerPoint like this:

1. First, to think through your ideas. I use index cards for this. PowerPoint could improve its usefulness as a thinking tool by improving the interface for sketching (Useful for those of us with tablet PC's), and offering more options for organizing slides. The slide-sorter mode is helpful, but with index cards I can stack them or arrange them in columns, like cards in a solitaire game. Why can't I do things like this in PowerPoint?

2. Second, to present your ideas. PowerPoint could be improved here but I think it does this pretty well. I use PowerPoint for this.

3. Third, to share your ideas after you have presented, in some kind of stand-alone format. I use PowerPoint for this also, but in order to create a meaningful stand-alone document I have to start over. It would be nice if I could make one document that serves both purposes, and then change the layout with the flip of a switch.

I wish you luck in your conversation with Microsoft.

[Bob Harvey - alias Tork & Grunt]

Hi Garr

PowerPoint is a great vehicle for projecting visual material to support what you want to say, but there is so much more that it could do if the developers thought like audience instead of thinking like presenters.

However, there are still things it could do for presenters....When I watch digital TV I can have a small screen in the corner running another channel.

It would be great if we could have the laptop screen split like this, showing mainly notes pages (which is the real speaker support) and with the small corner screen showing what the projector is showing the audience(because that's the real audience support.) I think this is the essential step in moving presenters from the comfort zone of bullets to the impact of visuals.

As for handouts, I'd like to be able to produce a document which had all of the notes pages material with the option to include some of the visuals, where appropriate. Keep up the good work! - Bob

[Benjamin Mitra-Kahn]

Hi Garr,

Thanks for the great blog, and good luck with MS, I just wanted to voice a few suggestions:

Text:
Could we please have some simple clean effects to edit the text beyond the standard stuff. A little along the lines of the photoshop offerings would be nice, like, anti-aliasing text, sharpening, simple backdrops and basic shading. It would help with making clean easy to read slides.

Video:
Maybe I am not good enough with the tool, but embedding video on a slide always causes problems, especially if we want text, and then if it works, having the text change then is pretty much impossible. This makes it very hard to use videos for anything useful, or for editing and adding text to videos.

In the same vein, with so many videos only available on-line an intuitive (and working) way of allowing on-line video to be embedded would be very helpful, and this should be extended to include services like Google Earth and similar, as the films and images of the globe spinning and focusing on an area would be great to have available. Then the possibility for having text on top of this, would be great too.

A good idea?
Writing this down, it occurs to me that one might suggest a way of implementing this really easily, which would be to make it possible to have layers on a slide (as in photoshop), where each succesive layer is transparent, and one can choose which layers will react to mouse/pointer clicks. That might be a seemless way of allowing 2D animation and applications to run smoothly.

I hope that makes sense, Best Regards
Benjamin

[Wayne Botha]

The Presenter View doesn't work when using a remote presenter. In Presenter view, the keyboard shortcuts don't work, which renders my remote presenter control useless.

I want to see my notes in the Presenter View and use my remote presenter to advance slides, as well as use the "B" button to black out the slides.

Please ask Microsoft to enable the keyboard shortcus in Presenter View.

[keithpeter]

Picking up an idea from zenator up the screen, how about making it easy to make 'screencasts'?

I'd like to be able to jack a microphone in to my laptop, press F5, and speak through my slides, and then save a video (wmv format would be fine) of the 'screencast' at YouTube like resolution and e-mail it to students who missed the session.

I can do that in KeyNote, but my colleagues at College are not going to buy Macs anytime soon.

[Samurai]

Garr,

one more thing that is never needed on a presentation and tells that powerpoint is designed for sliduments.

If you paste a graph from MS Excel, you actually by default paste the whole excel file inside the presentation. Double click it and the file opens.

Think about how many times people paste a summary graph from a file that might contain confidential information. And how these files get sent by email and live their own life.

Propably MS could be sued over this bug by someone who accidently sent confidential information. This feature (or bug) has existed 10 years or so.

I can not think of a situation when this feature is needed during presentation. It is only needed in a slidument - and even then sending the Excel file separately would be more suitable and controlled way to distribute just the information intended to be distributed.

Samurai

[Ian]

Hi,

I use ppt as a tool, so the work I am doing will dictate if I use it or not.

We keep blaming ppt for the problems, it is the limitations of the designer that must be addressed, thankfully as your site etc does.

Use ppt as one of the tools from your presentation palette, the real issue is to understand what you are doing as a designer of presentations and introducing more tools to your palette.

[Jon Swerens]

These are great questions! My only request is please post your talk online somewhere afterward. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to see it.

[Zack Hiwiller]

Garr, you have some great suggestions above (especially re: handouts, which I echo), but my biggest peeve with PPT is that I can never start with a blank slide. It's always wanting to throw default text boxes and junk in there. I assume I can set a default template with this gone, but it is probably the reason we see the same boring-looking decks time and again.