Recording Your Keynote-based Presentation
Sometimes, we may find ourselves in a situation where we want to make our presentation (at least the audio part) and slides available for viewing at a later date. Fortunately, Keynote allows you to do this, by recording your presentation with the appropriately named option in the "Play" menu. Unfortunately, Keynote will only take one recording. You can't piece multiple recordings together. If you're like me and you feel more comfortable in front of an audience than recording your talk, this can be a problem. If I want to be sure of a clean, error-free recording, then the only reasonable option for me is to record it section by section.
With this limitation of Keynote, I sought to find a solution. The answer I came up with was to use iMovie to put the piecs together.
For the example below, I took the "charts" section of the slide deck I used for a brown bag presentation I gave a few weeks ago. I then broke that section into two: 1) bar charts and 2) pie and line charts. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not as comfortable recording my talk as I am in front of an audience. As such, I'm much more error-prone and required six or more takes for each of the two individual recordings. Neither is as good as I'd hope, but it should be good enough for you to see what I did. As soon as I got a recording that I was willing to live with, I went to the "Share" menu and chose "Export." From there, I exported my recording to a QuickTime movie. I then cleared my existing recording and followed the same steps for the second recording.
iMovie with 2 clips
Now that I have two QuickTime movies I need to piece them together. iMovie makes this very easy. I started by importing the two clips. Once I did that, I dragged the two clips to the project window. If I needed to, I could have done some editing: cutting off dead space, edited the audio, etc. For this simple example, I merely had one immediately follow the other. Once done with any editing that you intend to do, export or upload your video to any one of the options in iMovie's "Share" menu.
iMovie surely gives you a great deal of creative and editing options. However, it surely would be great if the more basic capability to piece together partial recordings were in Keynote itself. With that said, if you have Keynote, you are guaranteed to have iMovie (hopefully, the more powerful iMovie '09) and thus have the ability to record your presentation with the quality you expect.
A Tale Of Two Brown Bags
At the place where I earn my living, we'll sometimes have someone in the office give a "brown bag" presentation during the lunch hour. The idea is that any meetings during this hour are completely optional for all of those who are invited, which is everyone in the division. They're informational or educational in nature, where someone in the office is choosing to share what they know, what they've learned, or the product of their R&D project.
Last week, a friend & co-worker of mine and I both held our own brown bags. He presented on pivot tables in Excel and I gave a high-level presentation on basic steps one can take to make more effective use of PowerPoints. Both were lessons in the often overlooked preparation step: the dry run.
"Joe"
I'll just call him Joe for the purpose of this post in order to protect the innocent . Joe gave a good presentation on what pivot tables are and how to use them. I walked out of there with a good understanding of what they are, how they can be used, and how to use them. Not only did I comprehend his message, but I also retained it. Score one for Joe! His presentation didn't use even one PowerPoint slide at all. He didn't need them. In fact, slides would have done more harm than good. It was a great example of when not to use them.
One slip-up that left him confused at times during the presentation was when faced with giving his presentation on a different operating system. When starting his demo, he asked aloud, "now where is it on the Mac?" Right there, that told us he wasn't in control of his demo. When he did find what he was looking for, exactly where it would be found on Windows, he did find the dialogs a little different. That's to be expected, since the user interface conventions are different. However, when using this unfamiliar dialog, he often had people offering suggestions on where to click rather than him showing us.
One thing we can't count on when giving a presentation, especially nowadays, is that the host computer is using the same operating system as what we're used to. Mac users need to accept that they may find themselves stuck with a Windows machine and Windows users need to accept that they may find themselves on a Mac. What this requires, then, is a little planning and preparation. Get to the site of your presentation even earlier than you would if you knew for certain that you would be using your own laptop. If the environment is different than what you expect, do a dry run. If things are different, note the differences so that when you do give your demo, you can do it so smoothly and your audience will think you're a natural...a real pro. If you have access to a computer using the other software before you even arrive on site, do your dry run then so that you're even more prepared even sooner. I do this with all of my slides that are in PowerPoint format. If they're developed on a Mac, any slides I present at work are also run through on a Windows machine. Any anomalies are caught early and adjustments are made.
Me
My presentation, including all of the questions and comments during the talk too exactly as long as I thought it would. Practicing it about 10 times made that part pretty predictable. Of course, there could always be something to throw it off, but I planned well, at least in that regard. One thing I didn't do that hit me out of nowhere was consider the less than optimal quality of the projector. When I got to my example of a good corporate template, the template's and the projector's shortcomings became quite clear. The light gray background image was washed-out to the point where you couldn't see it. If I was using a big plasma or LCD screen, it would have been fine. However, this projector has been notoriously difficult to calibrate and I should have remembered that.
Testing the slides on this projector is something I should have considered and planned for. Instead of a situation where I said, "what you should have been able to see is...," I would rather have been able to say, "what you see here is..."
The lesson in both of these presentations: when presenting, if you're using any sort of technology whatsoever, do not take anything for granted. Murphy's Law is not an exception. Plan for it and take a little extra time ahead of your presentation to do a dry run. This will hopefully allow you to make any adjustments you need to before it's show time.
Keynote ’09: Share – The Somewhat Hidden Functionality
On Apple's Keynote page, they do make quick mention of the new Share menu and how you can quickly share a slide deck with others by email. What they don't mention and what didn't seem to get any press is another feature in the Share menu: "Send to [insert iLife app here]." In this submenu, you can also send your slides to YouTube.
When creating a Pages document for my presentation's handout, I needed copies of individual slides to paste into the document. Using this menu option, I was able to save copies of my slides as images and have them automatically added to my iPhoto library. This made it far easier to add them later as needed. This new capability didn't come at the expense of the traditional export. You can still export your slides as images the old fashioned way if you so desire. However, with iPhoto's export options for flickr and Facebook, you're just a couple clicks away from other places to put your individual slides.
Granted, with the iPhoto export, you are limited to still images. If you added narration and timed transitions, you can export your presentation to YouTube as a movie. Yeah, it does seem kind of odd to choose YouTube given that SlideShare is the place people go for content like this, however, it's better than nothing. With that said I sure would like to see an option in the next version for "Send To SlideShare." That may depend on Apple and the SlideShare folks either working together since SlideShare's API is available free for "non-commercial use" and it's not maintained by Slideshare itself.
I've recently upgraded to iWork '09 and I'll be sure to share hidden gems as I find them.
Make Your Data Pop
Think what you will of him or his opinions, but Glenn Beck was the stereotypical presenter sharing data in tabular format on slides.
Some slides were more effective than others and some highlighted the perils of adding bullets after bullets or even rows after rows. You're forced to shrink the text and the message gets lost in the delivery.
Now, no matter what your data is, even if it has little economic, political, or scientific importance, it's critical to never manipulate the data. What you can and should do is format the data so that not only is it as truthful as it is in its rawest form, but that the underlying message is brought out more clearly.
With that said, let's look at a recreation of one of the slides he showed:
Within the wall of text, there's a message in there somewhere. OK, 13% believe that if you earn between $151,000 and $250,000, you're rich. Fine. Does that mean those same people think that if you earn outside that range, say $269,000, you're not rich? Of course not. That's a given, logically. Being "rich" is a state of positive wealth. You're not less rich if you're more wealthy. It's just impossible. It's a conclusion that couldn't be honestly debated even by the most semantically-obsessed individuals. Here's the key: If you're going to draw conclusions from the raw data, make sure you're on solid ground. If the data and conclusions were presented in a meeting or conference, provide the raw data in the handouts. Not only does it free the presentation from slides that make the audience work too hard to decipher, but it gives you a certain amount of transparency that shows you didn't monkey with the data to force it into the conclusion that you desired.
So, our first step is to get the data out of the table and into a chart. Since we're dealing with percentages, a pie chart is the way to go.
The pie chart using the data from the table really doesn't tell us anything that the table doesn't already tell us. It just gives the numbers a visual sense of scale. However, watching the video clip (starting at 4:41), Glenn makes his point that 20% of those polled thought those making $251,000 or more are rich. Well, based on the logic we observed above, that's not true. What we have here is not only a poorly designed slide, but an inability to read a data table.
If you apply the logic that anyone who thinks that someone making anywhere less than $251,000 is rich would also think that someone making $501,000 or more is rich, then you can create the following chart:
If you speak to Glenn's statement regarding the number of people who thought you're rich if you make more than $251,000, then you'd have the following chart:
That's a different percentage than he gave, isn't it? Well, as I said, he apparently has trouble reading data tables. What we have here as well is a slide that makes the point he was trying to make much more clearly and with more impact. Applying the same logic to the other poll answers yields:
If you want to make your data really pop and help you drive your message home, consider and focus on your message. Display the data in a way that reinforces your message, yet maintains the integrity and fidelity of the data.
