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Business Communication Today

Fourteenth Edition

Chapter 17

Enhancing Presentations with Slides and Other Visuals

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Learning Objectives (1 of 2)

17.1 Explain the role of visuals in business presentations, and list the types of visuals commonly used.

17.2 Explain the difference between structured and free-form slides, and suggest when each design strategy is more appropriate.

17.3 Outline the decisions involved in using a key visual and selecting color, artwork, and typefaces to create effective slide designs.

Learning Objectives (2 of 2)

17.4 Explain how to create effective slide content.

17.5 Explain the role of navigation slides, support slides, and handouts.

Planning Your Presentation Visuals

LO 17.1 Explain the role of visuals in business presentations and list the types of visuals commonly used.

The three-step development process in Chapter 16 helps ensure that you have a well-crafted, audience-focused message. The techniques in this chapter, which reflect the advice offered by experts such as Nancy Duarte (profiled in the chapter-opening Communication Close-Up), will help you enhance the delivery of that message with creative and effective visuals.

Visuals can improve the quality and impact of any presentation by creating interest, illustrating points that are difficult to explain with words alone, adding variety, and increasing the audience’s ability to absorb and remember information. Behavioral research has shown that visuals can improve learning by up to 400 percent because humans can process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

Remember that the purpose of visuals is to support your spoken message, not replace it.

Selecting the Type of Visuals to Use

Prezis

Slides

Overhead Transparencies

Chalkboards and Whiteboards

Flip Charts

Other Visuals

You can select from a variety of visuals to enhance presentations, each with unique advantages and disadvantages:

●● Prezis. Chapter 16 discusses the differences between linear and nonlinear presentations, with Prezis as the dominant example of nonlinear presentations. The biggest advantages of Prezis are flexibility (both in how you structure your visuals and in how you access them during your presentation), the ability to incorporate video and other media elements, and a more dynamic look and feel than conventional slide shows

●● Slides. Slides created with PowerPoint or similar programs have a number of advantages: They are easy to create and edit (at least for simple slides), designs are easy to customize, and slides are easy to incorporate into online meetings and webcasts. The biggest potential disadvantage of slides is the linear nature of the presentation. Changing the flow of the presentation or jumping to specific slides is more difficult in presentation software than it is with a Prezi.

●● Overhead transparencies. Overhead transparencies are the very definition of old school, but they do have advantages. They can be created with nothing more than a marking pen, they don’t require the latest computer or projection equipment, you can write on them during a presentation, and they never malfunction. On the downside, they’re limited to static displays.

●● Chalkboards and whiteboards. Chalkboards and whiteboards are effective tools for recording points made during small-group sessions. With digital whiteboards, you can print, save, and share copies of whatever is written, too.

●● Flip charts. Flip charts are another dependable low-tech tool for meetings and presentations. They are great for recording comments and questions during a presentation or for creating a “group memory” during brainstorming sessions, keeping track of all the ideas the team generates.

●● Other visuals. Be creative when choosing visuals to support your presentation. A video of a focus group talking about your company can have much more impact than a series of text slides that summarize what the group said. In technical or scientific presentations, a sample of a product or material lets your audience experience your subject directly.

Verifying Your Design Plans

Review the Plan

Check Presentation Style

Double-Check Cultural Assumptions

Keep It Simple

Use Your Time Wisely

After you have chosen the medium or media for your visuals, think through your presentation plan carefully before you start creating anything. Discerning audience members—the sort of people who can influence the direction of your career—are not easily fooled by visual razzle-dazzle. If your analysis is shaky or your conclusions are suspect, an over-the-top visual production won’t help your presentation succeed. Review the plan for each visual and ask yourself how it will help your audience understand and appreciate your message.

Next, make sure your presentation style is appropriate for the subject matter, the audience, and the setting (see Figure 17.1). Take the time to double-check any cultural assumptions that might be inappropriate. Are you highlighting with a color that has negative emotional connotations in your audience’s culture? Would your materials be too playful for a serious audience? Too serious for an audience that values creativity? When it comes time to make design choices, from selecting fonts to deciding whether to include a photo, remember the advice from Chapter 16 and designers such as Garr Reynolds: Let simplicity be your guide. Doing so has several advantages. First, creating simple materials often takes less time. Second, simple visuals reduce the chances of distraction and misinterpretation. Third, the more complex your presentation, the more likely something might go wrong.

Finally, use your time wisely. Presentation software seems to encourage experimentation and fiddling around with details and special effects, which can eat up hours of time you probably don’t have. Based on your audience and the situation, decide up front how much visual design is sufficient for your purpose and then stop when you get there. Use the time you’ll save to rehearse your presentation—practice is far more important than minor design issues on your slides.

Choosing Structured or Free-Form Slides

LO 17.2 Explain the difference between structured and free-form slides, and suggest when each design strategy is more appropriate.

The most important design choice you face when creating slides is whether to use conventional structured slides or the looser, free-form slides that many presentation specialists now advocate. Compare the two rows of slides in Figure 17.2. The structured slides in the top row follow the same basic format throughout the presentation; in fact, they’re based directly on the templates built into PowerPoint, which tend to feature lots of bullet points.

Structured Slides

Advantages	Disadvantages
Easy to Create	Text-Heavy Slides
Templates Available	Repetitive Appearance
Complex Ideas	Audience Response

Structured slides have the advantage of being easy to create; you simply choose an overall design scheme for the presentation, select a template for a new slide, and start typing. If you’re in a schedule crunch, going the structured route might save the day because at least you’ll have something ready to show. Given the speed and ease of creating them, structured slides can be a more practical choice for routine presentations such as project status updates.

Also, because more information can usually be packed onto each slide, carefully designed structured slides can be more effective at conveying complex ideas or sets of interrelated data to the right audiences. For example, if you are talking to a group of executives who must decide where to make budget cuts across the company’s eight divisions, at some point in the presentation they will probably want to see summary data for all eight divisions on a single slide for easy comparison. Such a slide would be overcrowded by the usual definition, but this might be the only practical way to get a “big picture” view of the situation. (The best solution is probably some high-level, summary slides supported by a detailed handout, as “Creating Effective Handouts” on page 502 explains.)

The primary disadvantage of structured design is the mind-numbing effect of text-heavy slides that all look alike. Slide after slide of dense, highly structured bullet points with no visual relief can put an audience to sleep.

Designing Effective Slides

LO 17.3 Outline the decisions involved in using a key visual and selecting color, artwork, and typefaces to create effective slide designs.

Businesspeople have had to sit through so many poorly conceived presentations that you may hear the phrase “death by PowerPoint” to describe the agony of sitting through dull, slide-heavy presentations.

Ineffective Slide Design (1 of 2)

Lack of Awareness

Inadequate Training

Schedule Pressures

Habitual Responses

Slideument Hybrids

However, the problem is not with PowerPoint itself (or with Apple Keynote or any other presentation program). The software is just a tool and, like other tools, can be used well or poorly. Unfortunately, another reason for ineffective slides is the practice of treating slide sets as standalone documents that can be read on their own, without a presenter. These “slideument” hybrids that try to function as both presentation visuals and printed documents often don’t work well as either: They usually have too much information to be effective visuals and too little to be effective reports (in addition to being clumsy to read).

As the section “Creating Effective Handouts” on page 502 explains, the ideal solution is to create an effective slide set and a separate handout document that provides additional details and supporting information. This way, you can optimize each piece to do the job it is really meant to do. An alternative is to use the notes field in your presentation software to include your speaking notes for each slide. Anyone who gets a copy of your slides can at least follow along by reading your notes, although you will probably need to edit and expand them to make them understandable by others.

However, if creating slideuments is truly your only option, be sure to emphasize clarity and simplicity. If you have to add more slides to avoid packing individual slides with too much text, by all means do so. Having a larger number of simpler slides is a better compromise all around than having a smaller number of jam-packed slides. Remember that the primary purpose of the slides is to support your presentation, so make sure your slides work well for that purpose.

Designing Slides Around a Key Visual

Structuring

Organizing

Explaining

With both structured and free-form design strategies, it is often helpful to structure specific slides around a key visual that helps organize and explain the points you are trying to make. For example, a pyramid suggests a hierarchical relationship, and a circular flow diagram emphasizes that the final stage in a process loops back to the beginning of the process. Figure 17.3 on the next page shows six of the many types of visual designs you can use to organize information on a slide.

Ineffective Slide Design (2 of 2)

Color

Artwork

Typefaces and Type Styles

Pay close attention to these principles as you select the design elements for your slides:

Color is a critical design element, far more than mere decoration. It grabs the viewer’s attention, emphasizes important ideas, creates contrast, and isolates slide elements. Color sends a powerful nonverbal message, too, whether it’s elegance, technical sophistication, fiscal prudence, or hipster trendiness. You can study this effect as you view various websites or advertisements, for instance. A palette of cool grays and blues “says” something different from a palette of warm oranges and browns, which says something different from a palette of hot pink and lime green.

Artwork: Every slide has two layers or levels of visual elements: the background and foreground. The background is the equivalent of paper in a printed report and often stays the same from slide to slide, particularly with structured designs. The foreground contains the unique text and graphic elements that make up each individual slide. The background should stay in the background, not compete with the foreground.

Typefaces and Type Styles: When selecting typefaces and type styles for slides, follow these guidelines:

●● Avoid script or decorative typefaces, except for limited, special uses.

●● Use serif typefaces with care and only with larger text.

●● Limit the number of typefaces to one or two per slide.

●● When using thinner typefaces, use boldface so that letters don’t disappear on screen.

●● Avoid most italicized type; it is usually difficult to read when projected.

●● Avoid all-capitalized words and phrases.

●● Allow extra white space between lines of text.

●● Be consistent with typefaces, type styles, colors, and sizes.

Maintaining Design Consistency

Slide Masters	Predefined Layouts
Color Choices	Titles
Font Styles	Graphic Art
Design Elements	Bulleted Text

Audiences start to assign meaning to visual elements beginning with your first slide. For instance, if the first slide presents the most important information in dark red, 36-point, Arial typeface, your audience will expect the same type treatment for the most important information on the remaining slides as well. Don’t force viewers to repeatedly figure out the meaning of design elements by making arbitrary changes from slide to slide.

Fortunately, presentation software makes consistency easy to achieve, particularly for structured slide designs. You simply adjust the slide master using the colors, fonts, and other design elements you’ve chosen; these choices will then automatically show up on every slide in the presentation. In addition, you can maintain consistency by choosing a predefined layout from those available in your software—which helps ensure that bulleted lists, charts, graphics, and other elements show up in predictable places on each slide. Something as simple as switching from a single column of bullet points to two columns can cause problems for readers as they try to figure out the meaning of the new arrangement. The less work readers have to do to interpret your slide designs, the more attention they can give to your message.

Creating Effective Slide Content

LO 17.4 Explain how to create effective slide content.

With some design fundamentals in mind, you’re ready to create the textual and visual content for your slides. For every slide, remember to watch out for information overload. When slides have too much content—textual, visual, or both—particularly for several slides in a row, viewers can’t process the incoming information fast enough to make sense of it and eventually tune out. Keep your slides clear and easy to grasp, and pace the flow of information at a speed that lets people connect your ideas from one slide to the next.

Writing Readable Content (1 of 2)

Limit Each Slide to One Thought, Concept, or Idea

Limit Text Content to Four or Five Lines with Four or Five Words per Line

Don’t Show a Large Number of Text-Heavy Slides in a Row

Write Short, Bulleted Phrases Rather Than Long Sentences

Use Sentences Only When You Need to Share a Quotation or The Like

One of the most common mistakes beginners make—and one of the chief criticisms leveled at structured slide designs in general—is stuffing slides with too much text. Doing so overloads the audience with too much information too fast, takes attention away from the speaker by forcing people to read more, and requires the presenter to use smaller type.

Effective text slides supplement your words and help the audience follow the flow of ideas. In a sense, slide text serves as the headings and subheadings for your presentation. Accordingly, choose words and short phrases that help your audience follow the flow of ideas, without forcing them to read in depth. You want your audience to listen, not to read. Use your slides to highlight key points, summarize and preview your message, signal major shifts in thought, illustrate concepts, or help create interest in your spoken message. If the audience can benefit from additional written information, provide those details in handouts .

When writing content for text slides, keep your message short and simple (see Figure 17.5):

●● Limit each slide to one thought, concept, or idea (without dividing things so far that the audience has trouble seeing the big picture).

●● Limit text content to four or five lines with four or five words per line. For selected slides, it might make sense to exceed these limits, but do so infrequently.

●● Don’t show a large number of text-heavy slides in a row; give the audience some visual relief.

●● Write short, bulleted phrases rather than long sentences.

●● Use sentences only when you need to share a quotation or some other text item verbatim.

Writing Readable Content (2 of 2)

Phrase List Items in Parallel Grammatical Form

Use the Active Voice

Include Short, Informative Titles

Use Visuals to Convey the Bulk of Information

●● Phrase list items in parallel grammatical form to facilitate quick reading.

●● Use the active voice.

●● Include short, informative titles.

●● When combining visuals with text, the more information the visual can convey, the less work your text needs to do.

Creating Charts and Tables for Slides

Reduce the Detail

Simplify

Shorten Numbers

Limit Data

Highlight Key Points

Adjust Size and Design

Charts and tables for presentations need to be simpler than visuals for printed documents. Detailed images that look fine on the printed page can be too dense and too complicated for presentations. Remember that your audience will view your slides from across the room—not from a foot or two away, as you do while you create them. Don’t force the audience to study your charts and graphs in order to get the message. Follow these guidelines:

●● Reduce the detail. Eliminate anything that is not absolutely essential to the message. If necessary, break information into more than one slide. If a deeper level of detail is helpful or necessary, hand out printed visuals that people can review during or after the presentation.

●● Simplify. For example, if a bar chart is segmented by week, don’t write “Week of 12/01,” “Week of 12/08,” and so on. Use the “Week of” label once and then just include the dates. Similarly, you might be able to remove the vertical scale from the left side of the chart and just show individual values above each bar.

●● Shorten numbers. If doing so doesn’t hide essential details, you can round off numbers such as $12,500.72 to $12 or $12.5 and then label the axis to indicate thousands.

●● Limit the amount of data shown. Line charts look busy when they have more than two or three lines, bar charts look crowded with more than five or six bars, and tables are difficult to read if they have too many rows or columns.

●● Highlight key points. Use arrows, boldface type, and color to direct your audience’s eyes to the main point of a visual. Summarize the intent of the graphic in one clear title, such as “Earnings up by 15%.”

●● Adjust the size and design. Modify the size of a graphic to accommodate the size of a slide. Leave plenty of white space so that audience members can view and interpret content from a distance. Use colors that stand out from the slide’s background and choose a typeface for labels that is clear and easy to read.

Adding Animation and Multimedia

Four Categories of Animation and Special Effects:

Functional Animation

Transitions and Builds

Hyperlinks

Multimedia

Today’s presentation software offers a wide array of options for livening up your slides, including sound, animation, video clips, transition effects from one slide to the next, and hyperlinks to websites and other resources. As with every other visual element, the key is to make sure any effects you use support your message. Always consider the impact that all these effects will have on your audience members and their desire to understand your message.

Functional Animation: PowerPoint and other presentation packages offer a mind-boggling set of tools for moving and changing things on screen. Although you can animate just about everything in a presentation, resist the temptation to do so. Make sure each animation has a purpose.

Transitions and Builds In addition to animating specific elements on your slides, you can choose from various options for adding motion between slides. These slide transitions control how one slide replaces another on screen. Subtle transitions can ease your viewers’ gaze from one slide to the next. Builds are much more useful than transitions, at least when used with care and thought. These effects control the release of text, graphics, and other elements on individual slides.

Hyperlinks: Hyperlinks and action buttons can be quite handy when you need flexibility in your presentations or want to share different kinds of files with the audience. A hyperlink instructs your computer to jump to another slide in your presentation, to a website, or to another program entirely. Depending on your presentation software, hyperlinks can be underlined text, invisible hotspots in graphical elements, or clearly labeled action buttons.

Multimedia Elements: Multimedia elements offer the ultimate in active presentations. Using audio and video clips can be an effective way to complement your live message, such as including a recorded message from a company executive or scenes from a customer focus group.

Integrating Mobile Devices in Presentations

Eliminate Projection System

Use Slide Broadcast Systems

Send via Subscription

Smartphones and tablets offer a variety of ways to enhance presentations for presenters as well as audience members (see Figure 17.6). For example, you can get around the problem of everyone in the audience not having a clear view of the screen by using systems that broadcast your slides to tablets and smartphones. In fact, these systems can eliminate a conventional projection system entirely; everyone in the audience can view your slides on their mobile devices. You can also broadcast a live presentation to mobile users anywhere in the world. Each time you advance to a new slide, it is sent to the phone or tablet of everyone who is subscribed to your presentation.

Completing Slides and Support Materials

LO 17.5 Explain the role of navigation slides, support slides, and handouts.

Just as you would review any message for content, style, tone, readability, clarity, and conciseness, you should apply the same quality control to your slides and other visuals.

Reviewing the Slides (1 of 2)

Readable

Consistent

Simple

Audience-Centered

As you look over your presentation for the final time, make sure that all visuals are:

●● Readable. Can text be read from the back of the room? Does the text stand out from the background?

●● Consistent. Are colors and design elements used consistently?

●● Simple. Is each slide and the entire presentation as simple as possible? Can you eliminate any slides?

●● Audience centered. Are the message and the design focused on the audience?

Reviewing the Slides (2 of 2)

Clear

Concise and Grammatically Correct

Focused

Fully Operational

●● Clear. Is the main point of a slide obvious? Easy to understand? Can the audience grasp the main point in just a few seconds?

●● Concise and grammatical. Is text written in concise phrases? Are bulleted phrases grammatically parallel?

●● Focused. Does each slide cover only one thought, concept, or idea (or summarize a group of related ideas)? Does the slide grab the viewer’s attention in the right place and support the key points of the message? Are arrows, symbols, or other techniques used to draw the audience’s attention to the key sections of a chart or diagram?

●● Fully operational. Have you verified every slide in your presentation? Do all the animations and other special effects work as you intended?

The slide sorter view (different programs have different names for this feature) lets you see some or all of the slides in your presentation on a single screen. Use this view to add and delete slides, reposition slides, check slides for design consistency, and verify the operation of any effects. Moreover, the slide sorter is a great way to review the flow of your story.

Creating Navigation and Support Slides

Title Slides	Agenda and Program Details	Navigation Slides
First Impression	Communicate Agenda	Guide Audience Through Your Outline

Now that the content slides are ready, enhance your presentation with several slides that add “finish” to your presentation and provide additional information to benefit your audience:

●● Title slide(s). Make a good first impression on your audience with one or two title slides, the equivalent of a report’s cover and title page. A title slide should contain the title of your presentation (and subtitle, if appropriate), your name, your department affiliation (for internal audiences), and your company affiliation (for external audiences). You may also include the presentation date and an appropriate graphic element. Depending on the amount of information you need to convey at this point, two title slides might be appropriate: one focusing on the topic of the presentation and a second with your affiliation and other information. This second slide can also be used to introduce the speaker and list his or her credentials.

●● Agenda and program details. You can use these slides to communicate the agenda for your presentation and any additional information your audience might need. Because presentations pull your audience members away from their daily routines and work responsibilities, they can have questions about anything from break times or lunch plans to the password needed to log onto the facility’s wireless network. By answering these questions at the beginning of your presentation, you’ll minimize disruptions later and help the audience stay focused on your message.

●● Navigation slides. To tell your audience where you’re going and where you’ve been, you can use a series of navigation slides based on your outline or agenda. This technique is most useful in longer presentations with several major sections. As you complete each section, repeat the slide but indicate which material has been covered and which section you are about to begin (see Figure 17.7). This sort of slide is sometimes referred to as a moving blueprint. You can then use the original slide again in the close of your presentation to review the points you’ve covered. As an alternative to the repeating agenda slide, you can insert a simple bumper slide at each major section break, announcing the title of the section you’re about to begin.

Creating Effective Handouts

Good Content Recommendations:

Charts or Diagrams

Articles and Technical Papers

Case Studies

Recommended Resources

Copies of Presentation Slides

Handouts, any printed materials you give the audience to supplement your talk, should be considered an integral part of your presentation strategy. Plan them in tandem with your presentation slides so that you use each medium as effectively as possible. Your presentation should paint the big picture, convey and connect major ideas, set the emotional tone, and rouse the audience to action (if that is relevant to your talk). Your handouts can then carry the rest of the information load, providing the supporting details that audience members can consume at their own speed, on their own time. You won’t need to worry about stuffing every detail into your slides because you have the more appropriate medium of printed documents to do that.

Possibilities for good handout materials include the following:

●● Complex charts and diagrams. Charts and tables that are too unwieldy for the screen or that demand thorough analysis make good handouts.

●● Articles and technical papers. Magazine articles that supplement the information in your presentation make good handout materials, as do technical papers that provide in-depth coverage of the material you’ve highlighted in your presentation.

●● Case studies. Summaries of business case studies can make good supplemental reading material.

●● Recommended resources. Lists of websites, blogs, and other online resources related to your topic can be useful. For each source, provide a URL and a one- or two-sentence summary of its content.

●● Copies of presentation slides. Audiences often like to have print versions of the slides used by a speaker, containing the speaker’s comments about each slide and blank lines for note taking. Use the page and print setup options in your software to choose the more useful arrangement.

Distributing the Handouts

Timing

Nature of Content

Personal Preference

Timing the distribution of handouts depends on their content, the nature of your presentation, and your personal preference. Some speakers like to distribute handout copies of their slides before the presentation begins so that the audience can take notes on them. Doing so can be risky, however, particularly if you’ve organized your talk with the indirect approach, because the audience can read ahead and reach the conclusion and recommendations before you’re able to build up to them yourself. Other speakers simply advise the audience of the types of information covered in handouts but delay distributing anything until they have finished speaking.