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Brain rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters

Hillary Campaign sends "docu-point" to House Dems

Picture_11 Talking Points Memo (a political blog) reported today that the Hillary Clinton campaign emailed an "electability" PowerPoint deck to all House Democrats. It's slideuments like this that have given PowerPoint a bad name over the years. Nine slides, approximately  275 words,  one table, three bar charts, and two pie charts. Why not just write a proper, concise, well-designed document and send it as a PDF? Unfortunately, sending this kind of docu-point/slideument as a quick alternative to a well-crafted paper or handout, etc. is all too familiar.

A note about PZ on Twitter
Twitterpage I received several emails from PZ readers about this Hillary PowerPoint today (thank you everyone!). In future I will be posting certain links to presentation-related videos, news stories, etc. on my Twitter page that may never appear on presentationzen.com. People use Twitter in different ways. In my case, I find it useful to post links (such as hot books, bad/good ppt, etc.) that might not be worthy of a proper post on the PZ blog but are still something I think most of you will enjoy or find useful/educational in some way. This Hillary Campaign PowerPoint is a good example: it's not really something I would post on the PZ blog normally, but it is the kind of thing I will link to on the presentationzen Twitter page. Hope to see you on Twitter. (Speaking of Twitter, my pal Mitch Joel had an interesting post about his use of Twitter for Six Pixels of Separation.)

Comments

Michael Sporer

Garr;
One thing I've learned from you and from my training work is that the most important element to a presentation is the audience. They care about WIIFM (What's in it for me?).

I'm not yet "twittered" but will be soon. And yes, Hillary did give PowerPoint a bad name with this one.

andrew h

Shouting in ALL CAPS with her headers and Arial Black as a body font (surprised its not bold)... And lastly, her name is bigger and more prominent than anything else on the slide.

Ugh.

Vickie Jenkins

Bizarre. She KNOWS the House Democrats, yet she presents info in a formal format to a familiar audience.

A basic principle we teach our media training clients is know your audience and the best method of communication.

Fear may have set in at her camp, and if so, too many "strategy" cooks in Hilary's kitchen will spoil the broth.

Benny K

Glad to see you on twitter, I already enjoyed your last book suggestion!!!

James S. Huggins

You wrote ...

In my case, I find it useful to post links (such as hot books, bad/good ppt, etc.) that might not be worthy of a proper post on the PZ blog but are still something I think most of you will enjoy or find useful/educational in some way. This Hillary Campaign PowerPoint is a good example: it's not really something I would post on the PZ blog normally

I'm curious about this.

Why isn't this "worthy" of a post on the blog?

Why wouldn't you post it normally?

Mike

It's amazing to me that her campaign sent this out without noticing that the charts cut off the text on slides 6, 7 and 8.

Rick Altman

I couldn't resist -- see my makeover of Senator Clinton's slide deck as part of my coverage of this debacle:

http://www.betterppt.com/blog

Rick Altman
The PowerPoint Live User Conference
http://www.pptlive.com

jrmas

One has to love how, on slide 4, the PacMan ethos takes hold with the blue vs. red, HRC eats Barack. As in- Not this century, last century, maybe. Why doesn't she use Keynote for better default themes?

Samuli

Rick's makeover is great!

Chris

Hi - I have just discovered your blog and love it. Your passion for all that is good in the world of presentations....is fantastic.

I work for a consulting firm and recently banned the use of powerpoint with my team for a few weeks. The effect was that they at first struggled without their 'script' but then the real people started to shine through.....

Chris
http://learn2develop.blogspot.com

Nate

Perfect timing on this post. I just got into a big fight with my wife last night, because she was showing me a presentation a bunch of colleagues had been working on, and she had to add a slide too. The presentation was absolute eye murder. If I can, I will try and email you some kind of sanitized photo of even one of the slides.

So I commented on some of the slides, and when she asked me about her slide, I tried to be diplomatic and pointed out there were quite a few words for just one slide and some text alignment issues. (In context, my wife had just critiqued 2 of my presentations this week with plenty of insight, help, and criticism). Well my comments backfired and we couldn't recover the evening.

PowerPoint is ruining my marriage.

Angel

Thanks for Hillary Campaign PowerPoint. I find it useful.

Mark Normand

Hi

Two things happened - I finally got my blog off the ground as this whole topic area of presentation design has made inroads to Asia, and around this region its proving to be quite a popular corporate course for training.

Secondly, I really enjoyed the make over slides by Rick - if i get the time, perhaps I will do a version and post these up. What's interesting is how different people will interpret the data, and what data should be left on/off - leaving scope for the actual presenter to reel off some of the facts..

great post.

P.S I just got my copy of presentationzen here in Singapore...

mark normand

http://presentationslides.blogspot.com

guess handbags

great post.

P.S I just got my copy of presentationzen here in Singapore...

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