Sunday, March 19, 2006

Powerpoint "12" Rocks!

Woohoo! 2:22AM on a Saturday night, and I've finally finished my Powerpoint deck for the presentation I'll be giving on Monday! Feels like college all over again.

I decided to go all out, and scrapped all of the slides I had initially thrown together. As one of my favorite professors in school used to say, "Always throw the first one out" -- of anything you build!

The new version is waaay cooler than the previous one. How?

1. It's written so as to completely hook the audience through tried-and-true story telling structure (with conflict, resolution, and all)!

2. It has zero bullet points.

3. It has a theme that ties together both the words and creative images throughout the deck.

4. It has interesting screenshots interspersed throughout the deck.

5. It still has enough technical content, mainly in the form of architecture diagrams, to meet the expectations of the technical members of the target audience.


This was also the first "real" presentation I've put together in Powerpoint "12" (soon to be Office 2007). All I've got to say is... Wow! Once folks start using this, they'll never be able to go back. Here's a review with some screenshots (warning: it's still beta, so the UI's not quite 100% polished).

Sidenote: The Office "IGX Graphics" are *awesome*. I have a friend who works on the IGX team, and until now, I had no idea how useful and amazing his product was.

In any event, after reading Beyond Bullet Points and put the ideas into action... I've gotta say... I totally buy in.

Let's see how Monday goes... time to sleep.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've got PowerPoint 2007 as well. But the slide transitions don't work for me. Have you noticed this too?

adamjh said...

Hmm. Slide transitions seem to work for me. Have you upgraded to Beta 1 Tech Refresh?

If you send me an email with the build of PowerPoint you're using and the specific steps you take to repro the problem, I'd be happy to forward the information along to the PowerPoint team!