Working Smart

Capturing Movie Clips on the Fly

I love multi-media presentations. Steve Jobs is one of the best at this. (Click here to watch his iPod Nano presentation.) I especially like using movie clips to illustrate points. They are visually interesting and emotionally compelling. They often make a point that in a way that merely telling a story cannot.

As a result, I have been looking for a program to rip film clips from DVDs, so that I could use them in my speeches. (Yes, my attorney says this falls under “fair use.”) Previously, I was using Mac the Ripper to decode the DVD file then Cinematize to actually select the clip and save it as a QuickTime movie. It was a very involved, tedious, and time-consuming process. As a result, I didn’t make much use of movie clips. Bummer.

Over the weekend, I stumbled across Snapz Pro. It is way cool! Unfortunately, the Web site doesn’t do it justice. It looks like a simple screen capture utility. However, there is far more beneath the hood. Fortunately, it is available as shareware, so you can try it before you buy it.

Technorati Tags: apple, keynote, mac, movie clips, powerpoint, presentations, QuickTime, snapz

In addition to capturing static screens and windows on your computer, you can also record movies. These can be, for example, a movie of your screen activity with narration to create, say, a software tutorial. There are some examples of these on the site, illustrating the features of the program.

However, Snapz Pro really shines in recording DVD or Internet movies. It is so simple. You invoke the program with a hotkey, start your movie, and then play the DVD clip you want to capture. It records it, then saves it as a QuickTime movie. You can even select the compression format you want. The quality is amazing—at least to my amateur eye. I can’t tell it from the original.

Once I have the movie clip, I then insert it into a Keynote slide, so that it automatically plays when I display the slide. If you are using a Mac this is worth checking out. (If you are still on Windows—you are considering switching aren’t you?—check out Comtasia Studio.)

My Daily Reading List

I read a lot. Books, magazines, blogs, and especially the Web versions of newspapers.

I am often asked what is on my daily reading list. In addition to the Bible, here's my daily list of reading.

• 43 Folders
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• Marc's Outlook on Productivity
• C\Net News.com
• CNN.com
• DrudgeReport.com
• GoogleNews.com
• NewYorkTimes.com
• OfficeZealot.com
• Tennessean.com
• The Wall Street Journal Online
• USAToday.com

I do my reading in the morning before I shower or get dressed. I'm a morning person, so it's first on my list, along with a giant cup of Starbucks coffee.

I force myself to read fast. I spend no more than an hour reading through my list. (This doesn't include books, which I read at other times.) I save articles I may want to reference in the future in a “Research” folder.

By the way, these are all stored in a Safari Bookmarks Bar in a subfolder called “!Daily”. The exclamation sign insures that it sorts first in the list. When I am ready to plow through my daily reading, I click on the list and select “Open in Tabs.” Each URL is then opened in a Safari tab. You can do a similar thing in Firefox (available in Mac or Windows flavors) or even Maxthon for you Windows diehards.

Technorati Tags: daily, reading, workflow

An Example of a Great Presentation

Business presentations are rarely inspiring. More often than not, they are outright boring. This seems to be especially true if the presenter uses PowerPoint. (Ugh.)

That’s why I was particularly impressed with Steve Jobs’ presentation last week announcing the new iPod Video. Even if you don’t have any interest in the product, it is worth watching the QuickTime movie just to see a business presentation done right. Jobs’ slides are especially impressive. Like his company’s products, the slides are simple, uncluttered, and elegant.

I was also impressed by Jobs himself. He was relaxed, articulate, and genuinely enthusiastic. As a result, his message was contagious. I’m sure people left the room buzzing about what they had seen.

Technorati Tags: apple, keynote, mac, powerpoint, steve jobs, speaking

Tom Peters on Presentation Excellence

Tom Peters has a nifty little slide show called 56 Ideas/Suggestions for Presentation Excellence. The content is great. The slides themselves are pretty weak. Ironically, he violates his own rules (e.g., “Only one point per slide”). Nevertheless, the content is great and well worth downloading.

Blackberry Program Switcher

Once a month, Keith Gibbons, our IT Telecom Technician, sends all of our Blackberry users a “Tip of the Month.” These are always helpful and they are a good reminder. But as a semi-geek myself, it’s rare for me to discover a completely new tip. However, this month Keith came up with a great find. It’s called The Program Switcher.

While holding down the ALT key, press the escape key to bring up the application chooser. (Keep holding the ALT key) Press the escape key until the desired program is highlighted. Release the ALT and you will jump to the chosen application.

When will I use this, you say? Let's say you are on a call on the bb and the party asks if you are available for a meeting next Tuesday. Press ALT/escape, scroll to calendar and you can tell if you are free. You can even go ahead and book the meeting! IF the app you wish to choose does not show on the app chooser ribbon, select the Home icon, then scroll normally to the desired app.

Five Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint can be a wonderful tool if used correctly. It can also be a dangerous distraction that interferes with communication rather than facilitating it. In my role as President of Thomas Nelson, I sit through scores of presentations. Most of these are on PowerPoint. Most of them are done poorly.

I sometimes think the presenter would be more compelling if he would ditch the PowerPoint and just speak. Because of this, I’ve even thought of outlawing PowerPoint in our company. But alas, PowerPoint has become a staple of corporate life. It is the ubiquitous prop that attends every presentation.

So if we can’t outlaw it, at least we can regulate it and, hopefully, try to improve it. Here are my five rules for making more effective PowerPoint presentations.

Rule #1: Don’t give PowerPoint center stage. This is the biggest mistake I see speakers make. They forget that PowerPoint is a tool designed to augment their presentation not be their presentation. You are the presenter. You are the focus. Not your slides. Not your props. And not your handouts. You are in the lead role and you need to retain that role. No amount of “razzle dazzle” can overcome a weak presentation. If you don't do your job, PowerPoint can't save you. It only makes a bad presentation worse.

Rule #2: Create a logical flow to your presentation. Better yet, tell a story. (See Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points.) The absolute last thing you want to do is turn your presentation into a random assortment of bulleted lists, which is what often happens when PowerPoint is involved. There must be a flow. Start with a good outlining program (e.g., I use OmniOutliner) or just use the one built-into Microsoft Word. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. If people understand where you are going to take them, they can relax and enjoy the ride. If they don’t, they will be distracted and frustrated.

Rule #3: Make your presentation readable. I constantly ask myself, why is this so difficult? Memorize this sentence: “If people can’t read my slides from the back of the room, my type is too small.” Now repeat it over and over again while you create your slides. If people are squinting during your presentation, trying to make out what’s on the slide, you have lost your audience. In my experience you must use at least 30-point type. Obviously, it depends on the size of the room, the size of the screen, etc. This is precisely why you can’t afford to leave this to chance. You must test your slides and make certain they are readable.

In Really Bad PowerPoint (And How to Avoid It), Seth Godin also sets forth five PowerPoint rules. In the first one he says, “No more than six words on a slide. EVER.” I think this is too extreme, but you get the idea. The more words you use, the less readable they become. I have made some really effective presentations with no more than a word or two per slide. It can be done.

Here are some other things to remember regarding text:

• Avoid paragraphs or long blocks of text. If you really, really must use a paragraph, then whittle it down to the bare essentials. Use an excerpt—a couple of sentences. Emphasize the important words. Put the text block by itself on a single slide.
  
  
• Use appropriate fonts. I recommend a sans serif font for titles (e.g., Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, etc.) and a serif font for bullets or body text (e.g., Times New Roman, Garamond, Goudy, Palatino, etc.). Most books are typeset this way because it make them more readable. The serifs help you recognize the characters (and thus the words) faster. It makes the text more readable. It’s also customary to use san serif fonts for chart labels.
  
  
• Avoid detailed reports. If you need to include a report in your presentation, hand it out. Don’t force people to try to read a ledger printout on a slide. It’s maddening! If you must show a report, use it as a picture and then use a “call out” to emphasize the part of the report you want people to focus on.
  
  
• Avoid “title capitalization” unless (duh!) it’s a title. Sentence capitalization is much easier to read. For example, “Sales are up 100% in the southeast region” is easier than “Sales Are Up 100% In The Southeast Region.” This is especially true when you have numerous bullet points.

Rule #4: Remember, less is more. Fancy slide transitions and fly-ins get old quickly. I strongly recommend that you keep things simple. A basic dissolve from one slide to another is sufficient. Have all your bullets appear at once rather than one at a time. Avoid sound effects—they serve no other purpose than annoying the audience and distracting them from your presentation. And finally, cut down the number of slides. You don’t need a transcript of your speech with every point and sub-point! People are only going to remember the major points any way.

Rule #5: Distribute a handout. For those who like to take notes, they can take them right on the handout. It also keeps people from getting frustrated when they can’t write down what is on every slide. Again, you don’t want people to get distracted and tune you out. In my experience, a handout helps them stay focused on you.

Finally, I would encourage you to hone your PowerPoint skills like you would any other essential business skill. The more you work at it, the better you will get. And the better you get the more compelling your presentations will become. If you haven’t done so already, you might want to start with my list of PowerPoint resources.

Note to Mac Users: Dump PowerPoint and use Apple Keynote instead. It is the software that first gave me Mac Envy and eventually convinced me to buy an Apple PowerBook.

A Better Voice Mail Greeting

I change my voice mail greeting everyday, so that it references the current day. Why? Because I want people to know that I am on top of my messages and their message is important to me.

Whenever I discover a recurring activity like this, I try to “template” the process. By this I mean that I try to find a solution that represents the optimal way for me to perform the activity. This is what Michael Gerber in his must-read book The E-Myth calls “working on your business rather than simply working in your business.” I then document the process (which is also a template) and insert it into my “personal procedure manual.” This makes it very easy to pass the procedure along or train someone else. From time to time, I tweak the procedure to improve it.

To template the “change my voice mail greeting” procedure, I first automated the process. I started by programming into my cell phone my voice mail telephone number and then all the keystrokes necessary to log in and initiate the “change your greeting” feature. I was able to reduce the sequence of twenty-seven keystrokes to two: I press the speed key to dial my voice mail number once, then, once I'm connected, I press a key to initiate the log-in process.

Next, I wrote a simple phone greeting script that I could reuse each day. It goes like this:

Hi, you’ve reached the voice mailbox of Mike Hyatt. Please note you can bypass this message at any time by pressing “1”. Today is [day of week], [date].

• I am in the office, but I’m either on my phone or away from my desk;
• I am in the office but will be in meetings all day;
• I am out of the office on business; or
• I am out of the office on vacation.

However, your call is very important to me. If you will leave a message, I will call you back at my first opportunity. If you need immediate assistance, press press zero-pound to speak to my assistant, Vicki Parr. Thanks for calling.

Finally, I memorized the script, using the first bullet point, since that is the one I use most often. This enables me to change my voice mail message first thing in the morning, while I am driving to work. I simply recite it form memory. By now, I could do it in my sleep.

My Favorite PowerPoint Resources

I don’t know about you, but our business runs on PowerPoint. Last Friday, I led a seminar in Atlanta on publishing strategy with a group of 55 foreign publishers. Today, I made a presentation in Boston to some investors attending a “small cap” investor conference. I couldn’t do either without PowerPoint. Or, if I could, it would be much more difficult and much less interesting.

Of course, I am not the only one in our company who uses PowerPoint. Hardly. It has become ubiquitous in our organization. We use it for Board meetings, author presentations, sales conferences, and other ad hoc meetings. To misquote a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, “where ever two or three are gathered, there is PowerPoint in their midst.”

The problem is that most people using PowerPoint have not received adequate training. In fact, most have received no training whatsoever. As a result, too many people misuse the tool. This results in too many slides, too many bullets, and too much copy. Consequently, the tool often becomes a hindrance to communication rather than an aid.

Evidently, these people are not aware that the Web is full of PowerPoint resources. I contend that in less than two hours of surfing, you can radically improve the effectiveness of your PowerPoint presentations. Here is a list of resources to get you started (in alphabetical order):

• Beyond Bullets—This is great Web site on how to use PowerPoint more effectively. The content is very stimulating—and will challenge your presuppositions. Guaranteed. This is not a collection of more templates and clipart. Instead, it presents serious thinking about the way you use PowerPoint and how to improve your effectiveness.
  
  
• Crystal Graphics—This is a great source for PowerPoint add-ins that enhance the basic program. Television-like transitions, 3D Titles, supershapes, and custom templates are some of the more popular add-ins. I have purchased several of these and found the quality excellent. My only caution is that some of the effects, particularly the television-like transitions, require some serious hardware horsepower.
  
  
• DesignSense—This company advertises itself as “graphic design training for businesspeople.” It contains a series of design lessons for people (like me!) who have no formal graphic design training. They claim that the training you receive on the site is equivalent to a 40-hour graphic design course. However, it is condensed into 12 hours of computer-based training. It costs $59.00.
  
  
• Excelsius—This is my favorite charting program. It essentially creates animated flash movies, based on Excel data. It is highly customizable and very sophisticated. This also makes for a somewhat steep learning curve. However, if you want your charts to have the “wow” factor, no other charting program I have tried comes close.
  
  
• MasterViews—This site is actually a blog. It offers a large collection of very specific and very practical PowerPoint tips. Comments from readers further enhance the value of the content. The site also offers news related to new PowerPoint add-ins and related hardware (like wireless pointers and mice).
  
  
• Microsoft Clip Gallery Live—This is Microsoft’s clipart site. It is a good resource and it’s free. However, I prefer JupiterImages.com. It’s probably worth checking here first to see if you can find what you need. If you find that it just doesn’t have enough horsepower, then you can join JupiterImages.com or some other subscription site.
  
  
• MindManager X5—This is one of the five most-used pieces of software on my computer. It will change forever the way you plan and prepare your presentations. It is essentially a brainstorming tool that allows you to create “mental maps” of your presentations. It will help you quickly get all your ideas out of your head and then organize them. In my experience, this tool provides a much faster path to the final result than any other tool I have ever used. When you are done with your map, you can export it directly to PowerPoint. Best of all, MindJet, the software developer, offers a free 30-day trial.
  
  
• PowerPoint Add-Ins—This is a collection of mostly useful add-ins written by PowerPoint Guru, Shyam Pillai. My favorites are the “Handout Wizard for PowerPoint,” which allows you to create customized layouts, “Rename Shape/Slide Add-in,” which enables you to rename slides and shapes by clicking on them, and “Toolbox for PowerPoint,” which provides a collection of Shyam’s VBA code snippets for PowerPoint.
  
  
• PowerPoint ImageObjects—This site offers a collection of what others call “floating objects.” These are graphic objects with transparent backgrounds that appear to float on top of the slide. The site offers collections of symbols and shapes, metaphor objects, numbers, bullets, and other objects. These objects are very cool and very professional.
  
  
• PowerPoint Templates Pro—This is yet another collection of professionally produced PowerPoint templates. You can purchase single templates or a collection of templates. The site’s customers include a impressive roster of Fortune 100 companies.
  
  
• PowerPointers—This site is not so much about PowerPoint as it is about planning, building, and delivering great presentations. It contains a series of very helpful articles, especially for people who are just getting started. Even veteran presenters will find plenty of helpful tips to improve the quality and impect of their presentations.
  
  
• Presentation Plates—Yet another collection of PowerPoint templates. If you haven’t found what you are looking for, this site is worth checking.
  
  
• PresentationPro—This site offers some very cool tools not found anywhere else. For example, EmailPRESENTER allows you to e-mail a PowerPoint presentation to someone within the body of the e-mail itself (rather than as an attachment). OnlinePRESENTER is similar, in that it allows your Web site visitors to run a PowerPoint presentation on your site without having to download the presentation and run it within PowerPoint itself.
  
  
• Presenters Online—This site is sponsored by Epson. It contains a variety of helpful articles and resources related to PowerPoint software and presentation hardware. Naturally, the purpose of the site is to sell Epson hardware; however, I still found it useful.
  
  
• Presenters University—This site is sponsored by InFocus, a competitor to Epson. It is one of the best siites for PowerPoint training. It contains a number of courses that you or your staff can work through. It has tons of articles, software you can download and try, and even an “Ask the Professor” bulletin board where you can get answers to your specific questions.
  
  
• Projector Solution—This site has many resources. One article is must reading. It is called “The Art of Communicating Effectively: Tips about all aspects of pulling off a successful presentation!” It’s must reading for every PowerPoint presenter.
  
  
• Really Bad PowerPoint—This is a controversial white paper written by Seth Godin, the author of The Big Red Fez, The Purple Cow, and Permission Marketing. You may not agree with Seth’s conclusions, sbut it will definitely stimulate your thinking. I distributed the article to my staff following a very tedious sales conference presentation. They read the article, made adjustments, and dramatically improved their presentation at the next sales conference. This article is great for squashing the tendency to make your slides too copy-intensive and bullet-heavy.
  
  
• ZapIt Media—This is another collection of PowerPoint templates. But these are very different and very cool. Like PowerPoint Templates Pro, you can download single templates or collections.

Update: Here are some sites I missed on my first list:

• AbsoluVision—This is a royalty free collection of images in the JPEG2000 format. (This is the new JPEG format that offers better quality at higher compression.) These are excellent images, many them depicted as floating objects. You can buy individual images for $4.95 each or subscribe to the service for $25.00 a month or $99.95 per year. Either option entitles you to download 200 images a month.
  
  
• Indezine—This is a great PowerPoint information site run by Geetesh Bajaj, a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. It contains PowerPoint articles, links, reviews, and templates. Geetesh also sends out a weekly ezine on PowerPoint. The reviews page is especially helpful. He lists almost every known PowerPoint add-in.
  
  
• Tony’s PowerPoint Weblog—This blog bills itself as the Internet’s first business weblog dedicated to PowerPoint, presentations and related topics. It contains many short, insightful tips bound to improve your PowerPoint presentations.

If you have other resources that I have omitted, please use the comments feature on my site (see the end of this article) to share your favorites.

A Smarter Way to Communicate

I received an e-mail a couple of days ago from an executive who reports to me. He was updating me on the progress of his discussion with one of our key authors. He complained that he had left several voice mails and just couldn't get her to call him back.

I thought, That's interesting. She always gets right back to me. Then it dawned on me, I have never tried to call her. All of our interactions have been via e-mail. So, I suggested that this same executive e-mail her instead. Surprise, surprise, she responded within the hour.

It occurred to me that every person probably has their own preferred medium of communication. I know I do. If you e-mail me, you'll generally get a response within a few hours. If you leave a voice mail, it will likely be several hours and could be as much as a day. If you send me a letter—and expect a response by letter—it will generally take several days to a couple of weeks.

If this is true of me, it is probably also true of my key contacts. I need to be smart enough to realize that not everyone prefers e-mail ... or voice mail ... or snail mail. I need to determine what method they favor and adjust my style to suit theirs.

So how do you find out how they like to communicate? Well, certainly you can observe their behavior over time. But why not bypass this process and just ask? Once they tell you their preference, enter the information into their Outlook contact record or whatever CRM system you are using.

In addition, you should tell people your preferred medium of communication. I have started telling people when I hand them my business card: “The best way to get in touch with me is by e-mail.” I think this will go along way toward reducing the frustration in my day-to-day contact with the key people in my life.

© 2004, Michael S. Hyatt