FREE! E-Newsletter
Presentations Points is a free short monthly bulletin sent out by Claudyne Wilder. Every bulletin discusses two ideas for presenters and one for designers. There's also a monthly challenge for presenters and designers. Subscribe Now

June 2001

In this month's free e-news from Wilder Presentations, I'd like to discuss two ideas for presenters and one for designers. Don't forget the monthly challenge at the end.

FOR PRESENTERS:

Step 5: Energize Yourself: Diet And Exercise

In the last couple of months you've read about energizing yourself through the proper use of your voice and your eye contact. This month let's discuss exercise and food. I personally know that when I've been eating a diet of vegetables and protein with just few carbohydrates and exercising consistently, my talks and seminars are excellent. When I fail to exercise and start eating brownies and lots of pasta and rice, I feel lethargic and have a more difficult time staying connected to my audience.

BUT I DON'T HAVE TIME! First the food. You have to eat-that's not a matter of time. It's a matter of choice. At the airport on your way to a talk, do you eat the pizza or the salad? For example, while walking through the airport on the way home I saw a sandwich and salad stall. I told myself I'd wait until I got to my gate to find some food. Big mistake! Near my gate there was only a pizza stand that had run out of salads. I should have grabbed the salad while I had a chance. Then there's airplane food. On the plane do you eat the snack of crackers, cheese, and chocolate or the apple you put in your briefcase?

You have to eat everyday. With some planning, you can eat halfway decently on the road. Not great, but good enough to feel energized when speaking.

Food choices are easier to deal with than exercise. Who hasn't woken up to the alarm clock and hit the snooze button not once, but twice, instead of getting up and moving. BUT before you decide it's hopeless to exercise, consider that your exercise plans are perhaps too grandiose, especially while traveling. Certainly I, too, would like to spend hours a day-even one hour-exercising. But if you can't, a five-minute walk, five-minute yoga stretch, or five-minute quick jump around the room is better than nothing. Don't be such a purist! You will discover that you feel better when you do any type of exercise. Your body will feel more alive and your presentations will improve.

FOR PRESENTERS:

Play Your Favorite Music

Some of you have the opportunity to be in charge of the room environment before you start talking. How about playing a piece of your favorite music-acceptable to others-before your talk? As you hear the music that you love, your body will relax and you'll feel more comfortable. Whenever I've done this, people have said, "The music was great to hear as I entered the room."

If you try this, please let me know how it went.

FOR DESIGNERS:

Hints From Jennifer Rotondo

Jennifer (www.creativemindsinc.com) recently gave Paul Pirner of AVAvenue some hints about stock imagery and digital cameras. See Paul's article, "Brighten Your Presentation Visuals with Fresh Images."

Here are some of Jennifer's ideas:

When buying stock imagery, remember to review the license agreement to make sure you can use the images however you want. For example, make sure you can use the image for a trade show before building a presentation around it. If you don't check, you might find out afterwards that you have to pay more to use the image in that forum.

Digital cameras now have multiple resolutions. If you are using these pictures for a presentation shown on a LCD projector, all you need is 72dpi. You can take pictures at a higher resolution and bring them down to 72 dpi. NEVER take a picture of low resolution and then scale it up. When you print it, it will look grainy.

Stick to JPGs. They will give you the best balance of file size and quality. When you bring a 5 by 7 image into PowerPoint and scale it to 2 by 3, PowerPoint retains the file size of the original image. Even if you make it smaller, the file size remains the same. So scale your image in your image editing software to the approximate size you want before bringing it into your PowerPoint file.

TITLE HINT FOR DESIGNERS

Make every slide title different. Why? Let's say a presenter needs to go find a slide during the presentation. One way to do that is to right-click and then choose Go> By Title> to see the titles of all the slides. If many of the titles are the same, then the presenter won't know which slide to choose.

MONTHLY CHALLENGE:

Presenters

On busy days do at least five minutes of exercise.

Designers

Experiment with image size.

COMMENTS FROM OUR READERS

Eye Contact

Your May Presentation Points were very good-as always. However, I would like to add something. It must be emphasized that presenters should not speak while looking at the screen. I attend numerous presentations where the presenter is speaking while looking at the screen and having no eye contact with the audience.

For several years I have been teaching a course on presentation skills. One of the exercises has the students give a short presentation. I provide a transparency that has a map on it, along with a pointer.

Each student is asked to identify a state on the map. Prior to this exercise, I advise each student of the need for eye contact and that they should not speak while facing the screen. Guess what? Almost every one of them looks at the screen while identifying the state on the map. They swing the pointer in every direction imaginable.

My own practice has been to discipline myself to close my mouth whenever I face the screen.

Thank you.

Steven Koch, Actives, Optics and Passives Procurement Engineering

Drinking Water

I drink water during a session, but not cold, just a little above room temperature so my throat doesn't close. I also avoid air conditioning exits next to the podium or close by. I try to have the air conditioning turned off or move the podium.

Victor Garcia, VIC Producciones de Tijuana

SLIDES THAT WIN CD TESTIMONIALS & REVIEW

Here are some testimonials about Slides That Win, our new CD on designing presentations. For those of you who have Slides That Win, next month I'll be adding a "PS" about some of its wonderful features you may not be aware of yet.

"Your Slides That Win! CD is fantastic. Worth much more than the market price. Learning lots from it." Alan Michaelis, ALCAR, Inc. Industrial & Legal Multimedia, Virginia Beach, VA

"Although I am a power user of PowerPoint, I purchased Slides that Win when I was asked to run PowerPoint workshops for the Research Training Program jointly run by the University of Canberra and the Australian National University for research students in Honours, Masters and Doctoral programs. Slides that Win brings together in one package all the important strategies that make PowerPoint slide shows a dynamic and effective means of communicating, instead of being the turnoff we see all too often. Cheers." David Marsden-Ballard, President, Postgraduate Students' Association (CUPA)

REVIEW: Indezine is a site to extend your PowerPoint experience-in spheres as diverse as design, exchange, content, memorabilia, delivery, etc. The site is also home to the PowerPoint Enzine-an enzine on happenings in the PowerPoint world. For a review of Slides That Win go to:

http://www.indezine.com/products/powerpoint/addin/slidesthatwin.html

WEB SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT

Join Jennifer Rotondo of Creative Minds and George Kao from WebX on Thursday, June 21 at 1PM (Eastern time) and learn how you can benefit from effective online presentations. Web seminars are rapidly being adopted for sales and marketing efforts. However, most web seminars look and feel like a presentation delivered at a conference. Break the mold, and make a bigger impact with your audience. This web event is brought to you by Brainshark and co-sponsored by InFocus, Corbis, WebEx and Creative Minds, Inc.

To register go to http://us1.webex.com/webinar

Presentation Points, written by Claudyne Wilder, usually comes out the first business week of each month. For more information, call 617-524-7172, e-mail claudyne@quik.com, or visit my Web site, www.wilderpresentations.com.

Presentation Points may be forwarded via e-mail, printed for circulation, and quoted FREE OF CHARGE. No permission is required, but please mention where you got this information. It's also perfectly acceptable to me to post Presentation Points on your company's intranet.

To subscribe to Presentation Points, sign up at my Web site. Enjoy!

Copyright 2001, Claudyne Wilder. All rights reserved.