2009 has been a year of sharing here at Juice. First there was our long-used DTP methodology for interactive Excel reporting. Then we released our JuiceKit SDK. Today, I want to share another bit of trickery we've used to solve a common PowerPoint presentation problem.

The challenge

Let's say you need to produce the same presentation month after month, updating the data each time. Or maybe you have a set of slides that need to go to a bunch of different audiences each with their own specific market, product, business line, or industry.

Updating all the slides by hand can be tedious, slow and error-prone. The presentation is basically the same, you simply want to swap out the underlying data. You need something that acts like a "mail merge" for PowerPoint.

Our approach

When we've helped clients with this situation, our approach has been to create re-usable PowerPoint slides (i.e. templates) that link directly to a database. This gives us the ability to stamp out new presentation by changing the raw data underneath. Simple enough to say; not quite so simple in practice. Here are a few of the hairy bits:

1. Data structuring. We populate the data into a Windows-accessible SQL database such as MS Access or SQL Server so we can use SQL queries to define the data needed for our charts and tables.

2. Slide templates. We create slides with charts, tables, and text boxes that are formatted to account for the variance in the data that may need to be displayed. Ensuring that the charts always look good is surprisingly hard.

3. Connect templates to data. Originally we rolled our own solution by creating a "templating" language that we embedded in the notes section of the slides. More recently, we discovered PTReportGen, a tool that extracts data from a data source and populates it into PowerPoint. PTReportGen allows you to connect objects in the slides (i.e. charts, tables, text boxes) to results from SQL queries from our data source. For each slide, there is a .PTR file that connects the contents of the slide to the database.

4. Scripted production. PTReportGen gives command line control, allowing us to write Python scripts to cycle through our data and populate the charts and tables in our template slides. Because we are interested in generating dozens (sometimes hundreds) of versions of a single slide, our script iterates over the database to pull different results across multiple dimensions. Below is a bit of pseudo-code to give a sense of how the scripting works to produce slides by market and by demographic:

markets = ('Market1','Market2','Market3')
demographics = ('Demo1','Demo2','Demo3')
PTRFileName = 'C:\Documents\UserName\Desktop\MyReportGenerator.ptr'

for demo in demographics:
    for market in markets:
        ReportFileName = 'PathName\FolderName\demo\market.ppt'
        cmd = 'PPTReport.exe PTRFileName -demo -market'

1. Post-processing. While most chart and data table designs can be achieved by clever template layouts, some advanced designs involve additional intervention to achieve the desired level of polish. A python script combs through the result template and adds coloration and layout improvements.

It isn't simple, but once constructed this "slide factory" is a valuable capability that can free up an enormous amount of time from presentation grunt work. Here's a short video that gives you a sense of what the process looks like. Personally, I find the production of slides vaguely hypnotic.

Other approaches and resources

We are not the first people to encounter or solve this problem. Below are a few other resources on the topic. I'd be curious if there is a native MS Office solution that I could include in this list.

• PowerPoint Automation Toolkit: "With the PPTATK, PowerPoint becomes a best-case union of a presentation tool and a report writer. With the Tookit, you can build presentations which combine static slides from a slide library and data-driven slides which display charts, tables, and graphs from structured data sources."

• PresentationPoint: "Generate new up-to-date multimedia reports with 1 click only - put real-time data in your presentations."

• Microsoft Help: "Working with PowerPoint Presentations from Access Using Automation. Create a PowerPoint slide presentation from scratch using Access data."

• Stack Overflow discussion on "PowerPoint Automation from MS Access…queries to chart?"

Presentation guru Andrew Abela recently published his first book Advanced Presentations by Design. Abela shares his 10-step technique for developing influential business presentations. Before reading this book, I thought I had a pretty good idea how to make a compelling presentation; it turns out I mostly knew how to throw together a bunch of non-boring slides. There are a few key themes that summarize the book for me:

1. Focus on your audience.

“Your presentation should be all about serving your audience. You need to show them that you see everything from their perspective — their problem, in their terms, their motivation and issues. This also means that you have to be bound by their constraints. There is no point in raising an important problem and proposing new investments to solve it if your audience just does not have any money to spend this year.” (p55)

2. Solve a problem.

“Focus your entire presentation deliberately and undividedly on solving an important problem of theirs (the audience)” (p6)

“Your objectives should be about how your audience will change as a result of your presentation: how they will think and act differently after they leave the room.” (p5)

3. Tell a story.

“An effective way to reframe your evidence and involve your audience is to present your information in the form of a story…Stories are a coherent whole, where one thing flows to the next, so we tend to remember the whole thing.” (p65)

“By presenting your information in the form of a story, by setting up a tension and resolving it, and repeating as necessary, you can create this physical desire in your audience for your message.” (p77)

If you make presentations for a living or just as a hobby, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. Abela does an impressive job of teaching his process and keeping it interesting. My one point of concern is that I felt he didn’t offer much help with the critical transformation from story outline (he recommends you shouldn’t open up PowerPoint until you are most of the way through the process) to presentation slides.

I also enjoyed this book because it connects to, and expands upon, the messages we emphasize in our design of Information Experiences for reporting, dashboards, and analytical tools. (Even the introduction gives us a nod: “I’ve become convinced of how crucial the last mile of communication is to driving organizational impact.”) Here is a short checklist of considerations articulated by Abela that bridge any communication of complex information:

• When presenting data, pay particular particular attention to what is new or different.
• Drive action. Or in Abela’s words: “What does it allow them to start doing, stop doing, or continue doing that would be difficult or impossible without this information.” (p47)
• Respecting the challenges faced by users. Understand what problems and levers the audience has available to them.
• Consider your audience “type”. How does the audience best absorb information?
• Consider the presentation environment. In what context will the audience be engaging with the information?
• Use different types of data (e.g. statistical, anecdotal). Sometimes specific data points can help focus attention better than an aggregate metric.
• Identify problems, then give people the tools to address the problem. This parallels Abela’s storytelling technique of creating and resolving tension.
• Users before technology. Usability before features. Abela notes: “Presentation and advice and tools have been developed for the benefit of the presenter, not the audience.” (p5)

I recently ran a few training sessions about how to visualize and present complex data. The high point was a series of “extreme slide makeovers” in which I honed the message and cleaned up visuals from existing presentations. Here are some ideas to tame busy, confusing slides.

1. Simplify your slide master, make room for content. Fancy borders, elaborate fonts, and background images do little to impress your audience. They leave little room for communication, either. For those saddled with frilly corporate slides, you’ll have to take on the Brand Standards Police.

   It may help to get quantitative. Consider this PowerPoint standard slide master. Less than 50% of the total slide area (highlighted in green) is available for content.

   

2. Say something once, why say it again? The Talking Heads sang: You're talkin' a lot, but you're not sayin' anything / When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed / Say something once, why say it again?

   Wordy slides can be confusing and tedious. The author is using a lot of words—and often lots of qualifiers—in hopes that the core point lies somewhere within. The burden of synthesis is shifted to the audience. That’s not fair.

3. Make one point per slide. The take-away sentence on your slide should clearly state your point; the data on the slide should support that point. Any information that is tangential to the key concept can be pushed to an appendix or supporting slide.

4. Redundancies cause unnecessary repetition. I was surprised in my slide makeovers how often I found information that could be consolidated to simplify the slide. Redundancy came in many forms: multiple graphs repeating the same legend, axis labels that are described in a chart title, restating the same point.

5. Christmas is over, take down the decorations. Clear out clip art, “screenbeans”, and other images used to dress up the slide. Most effects are less “dazzling” than you might think. Eliminate gradients, shadows, 3D effects, and most animations. These design effects were exciting 10 years ago. But if they don’t help you communicate, move on.

   On the other hand, consider using full-screen photos as a way to convey a idea or theme, accompanied by few words. Here’s an example from a presentation I gave a few months back:

   

6. Reduce chart-junk. Excel and PowerPoint charts come pre-packaged with a heaping helping of chart-junk (“unnecessary or confusing visual elements”). Here are a few things I change in a default column chart: no shaded background, grey gridlines, no chart outline, no y-axis line, no column outlines, turn off auto resize text, change column colors to increase contrast. If you want to save yourself from chart-junk induced carpal tunnel syndrome, check out Chris’ chart cleaner Excel add-in. Sometimes charts aren’t necessary at all. If you’re using a pie or stacked column chart to show a single data point, the number alone will do the job more clearly.

   

7. Delete your “Text-junk” too. Text can contain “chart-junk” too—visual distractions in text that dilute your message.

   • Title Capitalization or Other Excessive and inconsistent use of Capital Letters. Title caps doesn’t make sense to use and is more difficult to read.
   • Underlining. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, use bold or italics.
   • Don’t use bullets when there is only one item or sentence. People have become so accustomed to using bullets that they’ll use them when they are totally unnecessary.
   • Bad fonts: The worst is Comic Sans MT, as the LMNOP blog describes: “These days, just like an e-mail from an “@ aol.com” address has a distinct lack of credibility, an e-mail written in this font makes the sender seem ridiculous and out of touch.”

8. Simplify style and formatting. Inconsistent colors, fonts, font sizes, and other styles are a subtle distraction. Limit yourself to three font colors (emphasis!, normal, low-emphasis), three font sizes, and three font styles. Here’s an example.

   Three colors

   

   Three sizes

   

   Three font-styles

   

   Putting it all together

   

All these points can be summed up as: Make everything on your slide serve your story. Best wishes for 2008!

Death by PowerPoint » SlideShare

Quick inspiration for great presentations.

Role Modellers - Home

Software to manage human collaborative work via a workflow motif. Driven by Human Interaction Management.

Last week, Google released Presentations to fill out their portfolio of online, collaborative document types (they already offer text documents and spreadsheets). The Google folks were kind enough to include us in a round of beta testing a few weeks back, giving us a chance to preview this application, find bugs, and offer feedback.

If you give Google Presentations a try, you may be struck by its limitations. It doesn't offer much flexibility in creating presentations, especially when compared to Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. The best you can do is create simple text slides on a few predefined templates. On the other hand, it offers unique capabilities you don't get with desktop applications. In particular, we were impressed with how easy it was to share a presentation live online.

I have started to wonder whether calling Google Presentations a "web-based competitor to PowerPoint" or "a PowerPoint clone" was simplistic and misguided. Lumping together software tools is a natural reaction to long lists of features and techno-terminology. Software vendors don't make it any easier to distinguish the differences when they attempt to convince us that their solution is the complete, do-everything tool to satisfy all your [presentation/data analysis/communication/networking] needs.

So, we assume our software tools fall into neat buckets. We assume the tool we are using today do everything we need "well enough." And we assume any new tool is a direct competitor to what we use. As a result, we are severely limited in what we can achieve.

For a long time, I was a fan and a heavy user of PowerPoint. It did what I needed. Perhaps I told myself that what it did was all I needed. A while ago, I had to break off this exclusive relationship.

Now, I find myself using a bunch of different tools to communicate information. On the one hand, this has made my life more complicated. There are new applications to learn and the hassle of moving documents around. But in other ways, it's easier. I use tools designed for the task at hand. And I have opened up a whole new realm of what is possible in terms of organization, polish, and audience engagement.

The table below shows the activities involved in business presentations. For each activity, I have a rough assessment of how well PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Presentation perform. I also list the current Juice toolset.