I'm currently on a plane to Munich for our annual training event for the team where we will no doubt have some powerpoint fest (personally I prefer October fest!). I shouldn't knock it as the training is excellent, very interactive and well received by the team. However, I think we'll have a sweepstake about the total number of slides. I'm guessing 8 sessions a day * 30 slides each for 4 days is approx 960 slides. Personally, I'd really like to see 10 slides max in a 45 minutes presentation and have people talk to the slides rather than repeat verbatim what's on them. What are people thinking when they do that? That I can't actually read. Now I'm on my soapbox - well actually I'm still on the plane which is delayed because of the storms - my 2nd gripe is that people cram as much on to the slides as possible. In fact, I've done some analysis of this in the last 30 seconds. The higher up the company structure one goes, the less cluttered the slides are. When you get to CxO level, there's normally some nice pictures and graphics, only 3 bullet points consisting of 3 words and the message is articulated really well - the slides tell a story rather than being a story to read. Others try and get as many words in 8 point font onto the slide as possible. Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan when it's used correctly - it's almost a victim of it's own success. I don't think Intel is alone in this, and judging by some of the presentations I saw at VM'09 I know it isn't. Perhaps the industry should adopt a 10 slide rule. If it can't be explained in 10 slides, then either it's far too technical for my brain or the audience will fall asleep. Any tips out there on how to make presentations more fun, stimulating, interesting etc. or got any interesting death by powerpoint stories. Any takers for the largest number of slides in a deck? I mentioned that I went to VM'09 last week at Earls Court. It was good to get out of the office and talk to some customers as well as hear and see what other industry players are doing. One thing that did catch my eye (and not just mine) was the Microsoft Surface demonstration. This looked like one of those table top pub games from yester-year (ok - I'm showing my age here). Totally interactive - no keyboard/mouse - you can resize photos just by making your thumb and index finger closer together. I'm sure it won't be long until this is in a form factor that can hang on the wall. [Caption competition anyone?] I also went along to some of the presentations - with virtualisation being the theme of the show, I obviously have to write something about it. Paul D'Cruz talked about how Cisco had implemented virtualisation by adopting a unified data centre in their IT group. We've done something similar at Intel, so I was interested in a different perspective. [the Intel whitepaper can be found here: http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3489 ] On the storage side, Paul quoted a $70m cost avoidance over 4 years as a result of better utilisation of the storage. On the server side, there was a $20m cost avoidance with 75% of new servers being virtualised. The unified fabric saved $2m alone. The other topic Paul touched upon was standardising on x86 hardware - something that many IT Managers/CIO's are looking at in order to reduce costs. Overall, an interesting show….now to write that keynote presentation in under 10 slides…. ~iain
Completely agree about the powerpoints, however, be positive; +1000 slides is a good source for detailed information. Bearing that in mind, if presenters put that much time into one powerpoint can their workload be questioned? Hmmmm.
One top tip for powepointing from me is to vary how you deliver a message. Parroting what a slide says is unengaging. Turning your message into something humorous, metaphorical, story-like, or even a song and dance is MUCH more interesting. This is a great way to keep the audience, not only listening, but wanting the information you have to offer.
I too was at the VM 09 exhibition - that's my skeletal like arm in the picture. Agreed the Microsoft Surface was a very cool feature. It entertained us for a good 20 minutes before we realised that we had regressed back to the age of 5. I'm very much looking forward to an every day usage of such technology; minus the regression