If you want to show a lot of data, spread it out onto multiple slides, with one key message per slide.

The slide shown above comes from a recent seminar.   Too many bits of information on a single slide dilute the message.  In addition, the slanted writing in the background also competes with the data for attention.

If you are not familiar with Garr Reynolds and his presentation zen blog/books, take a look at some of his great examples of having just one key message per slide.  His books are listed in the right column with other reading suggestions.

The presentation was divided into 3 sections:

• Act 1 – create the story
• Act 2 – deliver the experience
• Act 3 – refine and rehearse

During the first section, Carmine Gallo, the presenter and author of the book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs”, offered a suggestion which is “Stick to the rule of three”, which he obviously did by dividing his presentation this way.

Below you can find  the slide set from SlideRocket which was used during the presentation. Every slide was created entirely with SlideRocket. Unfortunately it has no audio, but maybe soon the full recording will be available on the SlideRocket site.

I had suggested to the event organizers to allow Skype dial-in for the audio portion of the web-conference, and they arranged a toll-free Skype number which worked very well.  When called in, there were already 40 people connected using the Skype audio conference.

Thank you SlideRocket!

1. [Public] everyone
2. [Private] Only me
3. [Private] all people I follow

You can also tick the check-box and select “give me a secret URL”.  The URL provided can be copied and pasted into an e-mail message to enable selected contacts to view the private presentation.

If you just want to see how a presentation will look in Slideshare, but don’t want anyone to see it yet, just yourself, choose Private (only me) and do get a secret URL.  The private slide show will only appear in your presentation listing.

These options can be modified at any time, so you can change a private presentation to public or viceversa.

An important detail is that Slideshare does not support PowerPoint animations, and has trouble with certain fonts, so if you use animations or unusual fonts, you may not like the result. In this case, it might be better to use an alternative service. I will write about some of these in a future post.

At one time the camera did capture the screen, and this is what I saw:

The title of the projected slides was prefixed by “White paper”.  The previous and next slides were the same.

If you are presenting the key findings written in a white paper, do not copy to the slides the text of the white paper.  It is not appropriate for a slide.  You should select key facts and make a visual slide for each one.  Some of the paragraphs (justified like a printed document!) were referring to individual statistical results, wouldn’t they have looked better again with a visual slide and a large number as a caption?   Look at a  post titled “What is good PowerPoint design” on Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen blog to see a couple of  examples of what I mean.

If the audience is interested in the details, post the complete white paper on a website for them to download; don’t distract them as they try to read the text in these types of slides.  Use slides to your advantage, to enhance your presentation, to reinforce and convince your audience of your position, not as a copy of your speech.

I will comment more on the Women & Technologies slide presentations as soon as they are posted.

If you are getting ready to present at an important conference,  why not take advantage of some of the presentation checkup services I offer?  Or you can start by asking me for a free slide check.