Making Presentations

(This is my response to the Learning Circuits Blog’s Big Question for May: PowerPoint – What is Appropriate, When and Why? I’ve just let my memory wander through my career so far and picked out some key presentations I’ve worked on, in different formats.)

February 1994. It was my first year at work after B-school. I was asked to work on a client presentation for a new advertising campaign. I was all excited. To get an assignment to work on a client presentation in your first year in advertising was not particularly common.

So I got started. After reviewing past campaigns, analyzing the competition, crunching some market data, and speaking to the trade and to consumers, we came up with the proposition. Now it was time for me to start putting the presentation together, while the creative folks worked on the campaign.

Those were, at least in the world of advertising, the pre-computer days. They were the days of the good old acetate sheet (or transparency, as it was also known) and color marker pens. So I gathered a box of acetate sheets and a set of markers and adjourned to the conference room in the office, all by myself (I was damned if I was going to let any one work with me on this).

I pulled out the first acetate sheet and a dark blue color marker and wrote out the title of the presentation, the client name, our agency name, and the date. I pulled back, looked at it. “Nope,” I said to myself, “This is not working. The text is askew, the page is not too balanced, the all-blue text color is too monochromatic.” Then some of high school habits came back to me. I rushed back to my desk and grabbed some plain sheets of paper and a pen.

I worked on the rough draft of the entire presentation in regular paper – warts and all. Thereafter, I spent some time deciding on the color scheme for the text. Now I was all set for the final act – that of actually preparing the acetate sheets.

I wrote out the first sheet. Then I quickly turned on the Over Head Projector (OHP) in the conference room and put my acetate sheet on it. A couple of issues: the red color was not too easy to read on screen, and the text was still not too straight. The former was easy to fix; for the latter, I decided to use some lined sheets behind the acetate sheet when I wrote. Thereafter, the whole thing flowed. Of course, I wasted some acetate sheets because I made some spelling mistakes. Some others had to be discarded as I strengthened my argument. But finally, at about 3 a.m., I was done. All the acetate sheets were ready – pristine prose in impeccable bullet points. And I happily went home to change and be back for the morning meeting.

Move forward to August 1996. Now with more than two years of experience in advertising, working on presentations was no longer as exciting, but it was still part of my job. But this time, it was a more prestigious client, and so we had to do more than just an acetate sheet presentation. Take a bow, Mr. 35 mm Slide.

This time round, my process was slightly different. The initial phase – the research, the analysis, the generation of the proposition – was pretty much the same. But when it came to the actual creation of the presentation, I had to spell it out on plain paper and take it to the vendor (the production of slides was outsourced). And this time, I could insert pictures as well. Ah, joy!

I got a time slot of 4 p.m. with the vendor, and landed there with my notes, my pictures, et al. I sat with the DTP operator there and we got started. We first decided on the background color for all the slides, then the fonts and font sizes. Then he started keying in the slide text. And depending on what a slide contained, he used a corresponding template. Some times, I used to have as many as five different templates in five consecutive slides – but it was appropriate, and it made the presentation look rich. And with image slides interspersed, the whole thing looked really cool.

We were all set. The operator fired a printout of all the slides and gave it to me. He said, “Please go through each slide and ensure everything is correct. Once I prepare the slides, you cannot make any changes.” So I went through the entire set of printouts with a fine toothcomb, fixed the odd typo here, changed the odd word there, and gave him a thumbs up. He made the appropriate changes and gave the command to prepare the slides. It was around 9 p.m. He said, “This will take a few hours. So why don’t you come in the morning and pick the slides up?” I was there at 8 a.m. the next day. My slides were ready – colorful, numbered, with attractive photographs.

April 2007. Acetate sheets are but a distant memory now. And I can’t remember when I last saw a 35 mm slide. PowerPoint it is. Any presentation you want, you can do it on PowerPoint. And how does it work? Well, I’ve moved on from advertising to instructional design. And I was supposed to do a training program for the employees of a partner company on the basics of eLearning. So where do I start? Well, my laptop is on. So I just open Microsoft PowerPoint. And start typing.

Should I talk of interactivity? OK, let me add a slide here. Aren’t word counts important? Of course. One more slide. What about multimedia? Why not? Should I talk of imagery? How can I miss out on that?

Two hours later, my presentation was all done – pristine prose in impeccable bullet points.