Alper goes into some ways to execute the non-linear approach to presentations in PowerPoint. If you want your message to land with the audience, you need to know these techniques.

Episode transcript:

Matt Krause
Alper today, we’re going to talk about nonlinear presentations. And in particular, you’ve mentioned that you have two tools. Do you want to talk about… about two tools that people can use for nonlinear presentations? And we’ve talked about nonlinear presentations before on this podcast. But just as a reminder for the audience, remind us? Why is this important?

Alper Rozanes
Good question. I would say it would, it’s important because it enables you as a presenter to actively include your audience in the flow of your presentation. So the whole experience becomes something that you can ask questions, something that you can ask for input, to determine the flow of the topics, the order of the points of discussion.

Alper Rozanes
And I think it has two main advantages. The first one is, first of all, you include your audience, so you don’t risk boring them from start to finish, hey, I’m going to talk about this. So this is like one and then slide two, and then slide three. So you don’t you don’t put your audience into a situation where they may question, okay, how much more is this of this am I going to endure, and how many more slides are there? That’s the first advantage.

Alper Rozanes
And I will say the second advantage is to give your audience the impression that you’re so prepared, you’re so much in control that you feel absolutely comfortable in letting them decide the flow of the presentation.

Alper Rozanes
And in my mind, when I think about this, of course, I’m not talking about a public speaking that you’re using your presentation to 100 people, probably the situation, the scenario in my mind is you’re a department manager, and you’re presenting to the board of the company you work for on a, let’s say monthly in a monthly review, or you know, in a in an important company meeting. And it’s not a large setting, there are maybe five to 10 key people in front of you.

Alper Rozanes
And you’re in a line of other presenters, you know, presenting quarterly results, let’s say of your department, in this situation, I think it would gain you some points to be able to say, dear members of the board, I am I mean, nothing, not say these in words, per se, but you know, give the assurance that I’m so prepared for this experience that I am able to let you actually dictate the flow of the presentation. So I think those will be the two advantages.

Matt Krause
Okay, good idea. Alright, so we’ve the two tools that that you’re going to tell us about today. One is sections and the other is slide zoom.

Matt Krause
And the first one, sections, we’ve talked about that a little bit before. And so I’m pretty familiar with how sections can contribute to this. But we have never on this podcast talked about slide zoom. So I am really looking forward to hearing about the use of slide zoom to achieve this. So where shall we start? Shall we start with sections?

Alper Rozanes
Let’s start with slide zoom, because section is a broader thing, which will encompass the slide zoom. So slide zoom is something that is added to the PowerPoint in the recent versions. I don’t remember when, but maybe a year or two, it’s not that old. And what it enables you to do is to jump between slides in the presentation.

Alper Rozanes
Now, this is nothing new, by the way. I mean, we used to be able to do that before by using links or I think they were called bridges at the time. Okay. And you could do that like you could jump from slide 82 to 88 to back to 46 but you would have to do this manually, you will have to insert items onto the slides to say okay, if I click on this, go to that slide and on that slide if I click on that, come back to this slide etc. It was tedious laborsome work.

Alper Rozanes
The end goal would probably be the same but okay, now it has become so much easier to do that. And in that regard. I again I want to give you a possible scenario for using that.

Alper Rozanes
Let’s say it’s your turn to do the presentation, and you’re the Export Manager of a company and you’re presenting to the board and you start the presentation by saying, okay, normally without using this tool, you say, Okay, today we’re going to talk about our country based sales goals and how we’re doing with them. And you have four countries, let’s say you have Germany, Ireland, Austria, and Italy, that your company sells to. And what normally happens is you go over each slide each country talk about that, and, and then move to the, for example, the factory slide or the production slide that has to do with another department in your company.

Alper Rozanes
So the, the traditional way is, okay, we’re going to talk about these four countries. And here they are. Country number one, you talk about that 5, 10 minutes, country number two, country number three, four, etc, etc.

Alper Rozanes
The alternative that I’m proposing by using this tool called Slide Zoom is to create, for example, a summary slide, where you have four country flags, let’s say, and percentages next to them. So it’s a very simple slide, you have four flags of the country, with corresponding percentages of having met your goals.

Alper Rozanes
So let’s say in Germany, you have 56%, in Italy, 78%, etc, etc, you show that slide, and you ask the people in front of you, okay, these are the, this is the snapshot of our goals met in the countries that we are exporting to. Would you like to go into detail per country? Would you like to see what is going on in each country? Or would you like to move to the production section of the presentation?

Alper Rozanes
And you give them the ball, and they can say, for example, well in Italy, okay, it’s 78%? Let’s take a look at what went well there? And you say, Okay, well, you click, actually, for this unit to use your mouse, click on the Italian flag, and the software automatically zooms into the slide where you have everything mentioned about Italy.

Alper Rozanes
And you can talk about that, you can talk about that for one minute or five minutes or 10 minutes independent from the necessity, you can talk how much ever you like, when you’re done talking with about Italy, you click Next. And the software takes you back to that executive summary slide with the flags.

Alper Rozanes
And now you can ask, okay, that was Italy, for example, would you like to talk about another country? And at this point, they may say, Okay, let’s take, let’s take a look at Austria. And so you repeat the process, you go, you click on the Austrian flag, you go to Austria slide, you talk about it, and you come back. And at this point, they may say, Okay, this is enough, let’s continue with the presentation.

Alper Rozanes
Instead of talking about all these four countries, which they may or may not be interested, we don’t know that because maybe they will say, Okay, let’s take a look at at each country, okay, that’s fine, we can do that.

Alper Rozanes
Or they may say, Okay, this is enough, let’s continue with the presentation. I mean, to be able to do that, again, gives you the possibility of touching on the points that they want to touch, and nothing more or nothing, and nothing less and be able to move with the presentation. And give you the the technical possibility of doing this with few clicks again, you used to be able to do this before, but it was a tedious and laborsome work, and now it has become much easier. That’s why I would recommend the use of this, this tool called Slide zoom.

Matt Krause
Okay. And we don’t have to, we don’t have time today to give people you know, a screenshot by screenshot example of how to use slide zoom. So let’s just give them at least the starter commands that you know, at the top level, you know, at the ribbon, for example, where would you go i PowerPoint? Where would you find the menu items to make this happen?

Alper Rozanes
Well, it’s under insert, there is a new tab called No, it’s not a to new tab, under the Insert tab, there’s a new button called Zoom. And when you click when you click on that, you actually get three options like summary Zoom, section zoom, or slide zoom.

Alper Rozanes
So what you do is you click on the slide zoom, and it asks you Okay, which slides Do you want to zoom in? And let’s say in this case, I select the slides of the countries like Germany, Ireland, Austria, Italy, I select those four slides. And what it does is it creates individual images of those slides and inserts them onto the slide that I’m working on.

Alper Rozanes
So now you have on the slides that you’re working on four images of those individual slides that you want to link to. And these are live links, by the way, you can click on them. And they are live images, which means when you update something on the destination slide, it is automatically reflected on this summary slide that you will be using the images.

Alper Rozanes
What I do after that is go ahead and replace those images with country flags. So now I ended up with live links of country slides, represented by country flags. And during the live presentation, when you click on each one of them, they individually go to the corresponding destination slide which is represented by by those flags. Okay. So that will be under insert, zoom, and under that it will be slide zoom.

Matt Krause
Okay. And the other technique that you’ve mentioned before is sections. Tell us more about tell us more about sections. Tell us more about that.

Alper Rozanes
Okay, it’s actually under the same button again, under insert, there is the there is there is a zoom, and under zoom, there is the section zoom. What section zoom does is basically the same with slide zoom, but on a broader level. So with slide zoom, you go to individual slides. With section zoom, what you can do is divide your presentation into sections. For example, let’s say you have four sections, let’s say again, you’re making a quarterly business review. And there are four sections like you have the quarterly report, you have the report about the team, you have a SWOT analysis, and let’s say you have suggested actions section in your presentation.

Alper Rozanes
And let’s say you have 100 slides in your presentation, and each one for the sake of clarity, let’s say each section consists of 25 slides. What you can do in PowerPoint is divide your presentation into four sections of 25 slides each, call them, give them individual names. And, and then what you can do in the beginning of the presentation is use the section zoom to tell PowerPoint, which slides are your section headers, let’s say, and insert them into the slides.

Alper Rozanes
So when you go to the presentation mode, you will have again, four images representing the section headers of that you mentioned yet that you determined in the presentation, so now when you click on them, it will go to those corresponding slides, which will represent the beginning of each section.

Alper Rozanes
So instead of instead of, instead of telling your audience okay, we’re going to talk about the first part, and then the second part, and the third part, and then the fourth part, you give them the opportunity to be able to say, look, for us, actually, the SWOT analysis is the most important one. So let’s start with that section.

Alper Rozanes
Okay, so when you click on that, you suddenly find yourself in the beginning of the third section of the presentation, which would be the 51st slide, let’s say, and in order to do this, you don’t have to exit the slideshow, you don’t have to scroll, you don’t have to show your screen, you don’t have to go back and restart the slideshow and everything. This is all in front of you.

Alper Rozanes
What it does is it gives you again, these are live links as well. So any update you make on the on the section header slide will be reflected automatically on this executive summary page. So what you can do is, you click on the SWOT Analysis section, you go there, you present those 25 slides. And when it is over, you come back to the first slide with your live links. And then you can ask again, okay, that was the third section, which one would you like to continue with?

Matt Krause
And you mentioned this earlier a few minutes ago. But tell us again, the the menu options. Tell us again? How would we just on a high level how what what tabs on the ribbon would we click to to make this happen?

Alper Rozanes
Well, before clicking on the tabs, I need to mention that the section zoom requires you to have sections determined beforehand. So on on the regular presentation, you have, let’s say 20 slides from one to 20. But first, in order to be able to use this you need to create sections, so you tell the software for example, my slides, my slides between one and six are my first section. My slides between seven and 10 are my second section.

Alper Rozanes
So you tell the software okay, my presentation consists of four sections and these are these are the slides that correspond to each section. And you do that by selecting the slides, for example, let’s say you’re using the, what’s it called? I’m going to check that the slide sorter, okay, let’s say you’re using PowerPoint and in Slide Sorter you’re seeing all their slides. So in that, in that view, you select the slides that you want to dedicate as a section, you select them, you right click, for example. And in that you can say, Add Section.

Alper Rozanes
What that does is create a new section and you can give it a name, so first you need to do those. When when you when you have established, which sections are going to include which slides, then you go to insert, again, the same part on the main menu, you go to zoom, and now we will have the section zoom, active, because if you don’t have sections determined in your presentation, you’re going to you’re not going to see that.

Alper Rozanes
Now, you, you click on the section zoom, and what it will bring you is a window with those sections that you determined. And then you will be able to choose what they are. And it will give you the opportunity to insert those into the slides. And you will be able to use them as as live links.

Matt Krause
And a third technique that you mentioned, and we won’t have time to go into it today. So we’ll reserve this for a future episode. But you mentioned that this can also be accomplished with morphs. And I think morphs are immensely cool. But I haven’t seen them used a lot for these nonlinear presentations. So I am totally looking forward to hearing about how to use morphs to accomplish the nonlinear presentation.

Alper Rozanes
Yeah, morph morph seems to have seems to have a lot of uses which can be put to good practice. And on a different episode, we can talk about them including, how it can give you the tools to to do nonlinear presentations to increase the interactivity. You’re definitely right about that.

Matt Krause
Alright, So that about wraps it up for today. And is there, before we before we close up for the day? Is there anything else that you want to add?

Alper Rozanes
I’m sure that are but we’ll save them for another episode.

Matt Krause
Okay. Well, thank you very much Alper, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Alper Rozanes
Thank you.

Matt Krause
Okay. Bye. Bye.