Episode transcript:

M.K.:
So Alper, what’s what’s on your mind today?

A.R.:
Well, this week I attended a pitch contest and and I noticed a couple of things and I would like to talk about some of my observations, which was the three most under-utilized but powerful techniques that any presentation software offers and I think I would like to discuss about them.

M.K.:
So before we go into the details, so just give me give me kind of a preview, a couple of sentences about what these three things are.

A.R.:
The first one is using builds on the slide to bring things one by one, which is which is a very basic feature of of all the presentation software.

M.K.:
Okay.

A.R.:
I assume ever since they existed. Okay. The second one is the slide sorter view or the like table view. If you’re using keynotes, which gives you a broad perspective of how your presentation looks like, like a bird’s eye view. And the third one is the famous, but maybe not so famous, the presenter screen, which gives you a lot of tools to go to control the flow of the presentation and help you as a presenter.

A.R.:
So I assume I would assume that they would be they would be common knowledge. But like I said this week, and not only this week but before as well, I see so many presentations which could have been delivered better if only these were used and they weren’t. So I would I would assume they’re not they’re not very common.

M.K.:
So by so by not very common. So so I know from from experience and I know from the trainings that I’ve done and the trainings that we’ve done together, that for, you know, a non specialist corporate presenter audience, you know, the marketing managers and the bridge engineers of the world, these are not common tools. But for a specialized audience, it’s been using PowerPoint for years.

M.K.:
Are you saying that even they, even those people are tend to to underutilized these tools?

A.R.:
No, I don’t think I would go that far to say this is so underutilized, but I see it so infrequently that even if one person listening to this podcast was not aware of it and started using it, I think we would help the world become a better place.

M.K.:
Okay, well, I’m always up for that. Making the world a better place. Me too. So. So let’s let’s.

A.R.:
Let’s dig a little bit. A little. Very, very small. But it’s still better nonetheless.

M.K.:
Okay, So. So let’s dig in. So. Okay, so we’ve got build presenter view. And what was the third one that you mentioned? There was the.

A.R.:
The slide sort of.

M.K.:
And slide sort of. Okay, so, so where would you like to start. Yeah, let’s pick one of those.

A.R.:
Well let’s, let’s build it one by one and start with the builders. Okay. What. Because I just to, just to go over something that many people already know, but builders are when you when you’re when you’re making a presentation, when you’re you and when you’re into slideshow mode, you can have the software to bring things up on the slide one by one.

A.R.:
Now I usually recommend all that already recommend taking crawl the slides and divide them into multiple slides so that you only have one idea per slide. I already recommend that. Okay. But sometimes there are situations where you need to show three items, for example, three ideas which are connected to each other, which is part of a hold, for example.

A.R.:
Okay. But at any moment you you’re as a presenter, you’re going to only talk about one of them. You cannot talk about three of them at the same time. Okay. But if you put three of them on display at the same time and start it, start talking about the first one, chances are that some of the audience members will be focused on on the second one, on the third one, etc..

A.R.:
And and they will they will be sort of disconnected. Okay. What I believe as a presenter, one of your responsibilities is to direct the attention of the audience. Exactly. To the to the thing that you’re talking about. So in this case, let’s say you’re talking about item number one. Okay. My proposition is that when you’re speaking about item number one, there should be on the item number one visible on the slides.

A.R.:
Okay. And you do that by using fields. So you come to the slide, your presentation mode, you click on the remote or the keyboard or whatever, and the first item comes and you talk about that. And only when you’re finished talking about it and when the time when you as a presenter decide that, okay, now is the time to talk about the second item, you click on the remote and the second item comes and there is a nice and if you’re doing this with text and I’m not talking about paragraphs, but maybe text lines short, very short phrases, let’s say you’re putting three face phrases on the slide which are going to come one by

A.R.:
one using builds is made a presentation software actually a gives you the opportunity of fading the previous ones so that they remain on the slide. They’re visible, but not as visible or as dominant as the current item that you’re talking about. I think it’s a great feature. Mm hmm. So if you were talking about three features and you have already decided that they need to take place on the same slide, they should come one by one.

A.R.:
You can, you can, you can advance manually. And when you move to the next one, the previous one or the previous ones can remain on the slide in a in a faded way to give the audience an idea of what you’re talking about. Okay. And you can you can do this not on the vortex. The beauty of this is you can build text, you can build images.

A.R.:
You can even build charts. So if you show up and get charts with four data points instead of showing the entire chart all at once and and hoping that people will focus on a certain point, you can build a chart step by step. You can first show category one and then two, and then three and so forth. So like, it’s a very strong tool that comes with with the presentation software.

M.K.:
So let’s say that. So I’m giving a sales update and I want to show I’m showing a slide. And the slide has our sales of a bar for each year. You know, there’s a bar for 27, okay. And eight, 12, blah, blah, blah. So there’s a bar for each year. So you’re saying that I could not reveal all ten bars at once with a build?

M.K.:
You could reveal.

A.R.:
Each if the narrative requires that. Wow. Yeah.

M.K.:
Okay. That’s a good to know about.

A.R.:
Yeah. Yeah.

M.K.:
So built so.

A.R.:
I mean, if it is in line with the message that you’re giving, if it if you’re going to talk for example individually about the years, Yeah. You can bring them one by one. Okay.

M.K.:
And so okay so builds I should know about builds. So what’s the second one. The second tool that I should know about.

A.R.:
The second tool is the slide sorter view, which gives you, like I mentioned, a bird’s eye view of what is going on in your presentation. So instead of looking at one slide at a time, one one large display of one single slide, you can look at 20, 30, 40, depending on the size of your monitor and depending on the amount of zoom you have.

A.R.:
You can look at your entire presentation at once. And the biggest benefit is and I put this this during the pitch contest this week, one of the presentation, actually a couple of the presentations were prepared by various members of the team and you could literally see the difference between when one person finished designing the first eight slides, for example, and the second person designed the slides from 9 to 16, because not only there were color differences, the phones were different in some cases in some extreme cases.

A.R.:
So it’s it’s it just gives the impression that you know, there is not there is some uniformity is missing. The design.

M.K.:
Okay.

A.R.:
This is this is one advantage of the slide sorter. It gives you an oral look on the design of the presentation, but I use it a lot. Okay. To to follow the flow of the presentation to follow and to check to see that my slides are connected. My ideas are connected.

M.K.:
Okay.

A.R.:
In a in a strong and coherent way. Okay. Not you can just use it to replace slides within the presentation and do that very easily.

M.K.:
So I could if I’m so I hear you talking about two different situations where this would be very useful, where slide sort of you would be very useful. One is if I’m assembling a presentation from, let’s say there are three different people contributing to the presentation slides, sort of you is going to help me look at the you know, is there a continuity?

M.K.:
That’s one, yes. Then the other way that slides sort of view is useful, even if it’s just me doing the presentation or preparing the presentation slides sort of view is going to help me see, okay, is there a logical flow to the presentation and do I need to use it another kind of story. Okay, So, so what’s the what’s the.

A.R.:
Do I need to replace or maybe do I need to replace the position of the ideas so that it becomes more coherent?

M.K.:
And what’s so so what’s this third tool that you mentioned?

A.R.:
Well, the third tool is my favorite. The presenter screen. I also think this has been around for a very long time, and honestly, I’m very surprised at the low usage rates. I mean, I rarely see people taking advantage of this because what it does and you need a second external monitor for this, what it does is you can have two different views, a one of you on your computer like a control panel of the entire presentation, and the computer sends only this slide to the art, to the external display.

A.R.:
So you’re basically what you see on your computer and what the audience sees on the slides become two different things. And completely different things because on your screen, if you’re using the presenter screen, you’re able to see, first of all, what is projected on the on the wall or on the screen what your audience is seeing. But in addition to that, you can see the upcoming slides.

A.R.:
So you can you can make the connection on your mind as to how you’re going to connect the ideas. You can see your position within the presentation, like are you on slides, slice between ten and 15 or 80 and 85? Okay, You can see the time that you have been speaking in the presentation. You can see the time in general, the current time, and you can also write yourself notes and and see those notes like key phrases, key reminders.

A.R.:
Let’s say you can write yourself. No one knows. No one else is going to see that. Some of you see that. And okay, so we’re going to see forget something you can just not know. They don’t they don’t see anything except for the slides that you want them to see. Okay. By the way, speaking of builds that I mentioned with this presenter, screen A, when you’re talking about the first item and your audience is only seeing the first item in the next slide part on the presenter screen, you’re already looking at your second item.

A.R.:
So you can, you can make make a smooth a connection between the first item and the second one.

M.K.:
Okay?

A.R.:
So it’s a very powerful tool. Like I said, I’m really surprised with the low usage rate.

M.K.:
I’m I’m fascinated by this description that you gave of the slide, sort of you the second one where you have a team of three or four people contributing to the presentation and slide sort of you helps make sure that there is continuity. The transitions are smooth. And I’m just curious, what did you see in this particular presenter recently?

M.K.:
Was it last week that you saw this presentation? Where was this.

A.R.:
Week? This was, Yeah, yes.

M.K.:
So I’m just curious, what did you see that signaled that? Here’s the transition.

A.R.:
It wasn’t okay. To be fair, it wasn’t different. Like black and white. The presentation didn’t start in red and continue in blues, but a big you know, when you design slides after a certain time, you get a I don’t know what the technical term for that is, but you realize things that normal people don’t. It’s you could call it like a mild design or c d or something like that.

A.R.:
So it’s, it’s small, it’s small shifts in, in the, in the presentation word for example, the title is placed a little off to the right, a little off to the left, some some basic colors changing. Oh, by the way, one of the things that helped me notice this was the team members also changed on the stage. So the first minute for the first 2 minutes, somebody spoke and then another person took the stage and spoke about that.

A.R.:
And you could see like not a dramatic change, but a significant enough change to notice that, hmm, probably these two people designed their own slides and copy paste it them. Oh, okay. Four and didn’t pay much attention to, to the to the continuity.

M.K.:
So we’re about out of time. So so that wraps it up here. And so I want to do a future episode in the next couple of weeks. Some more some more tips like this that people can use. So so let’s do that in a future episode. But that’s it for today.

A.R.:
All right. All right. You tell me how deep you want to go technically, technical wise.

M.K.:
Okay. All right. So I will talk to you soon, then.

A.R.:
All right. Good talking to you that great.

M.K.:
Thanks. Bye bye.