Tips and Tricks

The Office 2007 Suite has improvements sprinkled throughout; one of my favorites is one that’s long overdue. For all the academics out there, I’d like to explore the Citation and Bibliography tools in Word 2007. For the last 10 years, creating a running bibliography has been a complete labor – the new Citation and Bibliography tools are a great addition.

First, adding a new reference to a document: instead of typing it directly onto the page, you place information into a running bibliography file, and a document field is inserted at the place you need your reference. Click the References tab, and select Insert Citation. If you’ve already inserted a reference to a document of some kind, you’ll see it listed there. If you need a new reference document, you’ll see Add New Source to create a new listing.

Choose Add New Source, and fill in the information about your reference material.

Once this is complete, you can insert the citation as often as you like.

The interesting thing about this is that all references you create are added to a master list, which you can use to bring in repeated references from earlier documents you create. In fact, you can manage the master list, removing references and bringing them into documents, by clicking Manage Sources in the References ribbon.

Finally, you can add a bibliography – simply by clicking Bibliography, choosing the type of bibliography you’d like to add, and voila!

The killer part of this tool that I absolutely love is this – I always found myself having to go back and use a different style of reference after I’d written my document. If I had chosen MLA style, the request would be for Chicago, and vice versa. It always involved me scrolling through my document slowly and making edits. Now, however, you just have to choose the drop-down menu for Style, and choose the style you like. All your citations are immediately changed to reflect the appropriate style.

Do learn more about Word 2007 and the Citations and Bibliographies group of the References Ribbon, take our Word 2007 course. It’s guaranteed to show you tools you never knew existed – and tools that will make your job easier.

I purchased slide:ology recently to help me in presenting information to my classes. After reading through it, though, I found a number of things that help with more than just presentation design.

About the Book

Nancy Duarte is the CEO of Duarte Design, a Silicon Valley company focusing on presentation design. They are the group that helped Al Gore with his famous ‘Inconvenient Truth’ presentation. Nancy knows her stuff.

She set out to write a book that “covers how to create ideas, translate them into pictures, display them well, and then deliver them in your own natural way. It is NOT a PowerPoint manual.” Indeed, it is anything but a PowerPoint manual. Instead, she focuses on what makes a good transition vs. a bad transition; how to let the slides speak for themselves; and how to best integrate yourself into a presentation experience – instead of making your presentation into a ‘read the bulletpoints’ exercise.

There is so much about successful communication and successful graphics in this book, that it really is two things: a business communications book, and a design book. Pick it up for either of those two reasons.

Contents

Slide:ology begins with chapters entitled ‘Creating a New Slide Ideology’ and ‘Creating Ideas, Not Slides.’ These are two important chapters for getting you off the metaphorical couch and into the game. If you aren’t ready to communicate in a new, more effective way after these chapters, you should reevaluate a little. They get at the heart of what is wrong with presentations in today’s world, and set the stage for some really important chapters regarding graphics and animation.

Once you get through the beginning, planning phases, this book becomes less about business communication and more about the fundamentals of good design. Chapters regarding how to effectively display diagrams and data lead off – if you’ve ever put up a slide trying to tell someone about ‘the numbers’ going up or down, PLEASE read these chapters a couple of times. Then, there are five chapters simply about color, alignment, pictures, and movement. These chapters pertain to anyone hoping to design anything. These chapters are why I wholeheartedly recommend this book not only to presentation designers, but beginning designers of all kinds. If you’ve ever wanted to know why a particular color made you feel a particular way, Nancy addresses it.

Finally, there are two chapters that bring it back home to business communication. The first is interacting with your slides. As this blog goes on, I’ll be addressing presentation skills – but I think Nancy does a really great job of beginning the process. We don’t all have time to seek out a public speaking coach. For the rest of us, we need to pick up some skills and hints from anywhere we can. The last chapter is simply Duarte Design’s manifesto – the five theses of the Power of the Presentation. They are simple and to the point, and I think they are right on the money.

My Favorite Points

As someone who straddles the line between public speaker and design professional, I’m sucked in by nearly every word in this book. However, here are my three favorite individual pages:

Page 72: Highlighting What’s Important

I think we all fall victim to the ‘I need to get this done’ mentality from time to time. When this happens, we start thinking that we are communicating successfully… but something falls flat. People leave the presentation without a drive, a motivation. Why is that?

It’s because we don’t focus properly on what’s important. On pages 72 and 73, Nancy focuses on how to emphasize the important information in a chart. Her lessons, though, can be applied to literally anything. With the correct focus, even given only a short period of time, we can deliver the crucial information to our audience.

Page 186: Taking Lessons from the Movies

I legitimately had never considered what gave me uneasy feelings while watching animation. Pages 186 and 187 dissect what movement does to the viewer, and I think it really adds to my skillset.

Page 253: Treat Your Audience As King

This is a very simple directive, and one that I remind myself of at least twice a week. This pertains to many things in life beyond the presentation stage, and I have to hope that I’m treating you, my reading audience, as king. Please feel free to comment on our postings anytime – we’d love to hear what you think!

In Conclusion

I’m sure you can guess by my gushing here that I wholeheartedly endorse this book. To summarize, I think that it is stunningly effective at delivering a huge amount in concise form. I’ll try to strive for that goal in this blog, as well.

Slide:ology is a powerful book for designers and communicators alike. If you’d like to learn to communicate more effectively in a business environment, try out any of our Professional Development sessions; I’m particularly fond of Presentation Skills for the Professional. Also, as a designer, you may be interested in classes about Web Design or Print Design.

I was reading some back posts on one of my favorite blogs, and stumbled across Garr Reynolds speaking about Engaging Presentations on Presentation Zen. He lives in Japan, and uses Japanese principles of simplicity, beauty, harmony, and zen to address what’s wrong with modern presentations. In this article, he specifically speaks about technical presentations, and what’s lacking in most. Included in the post is a really great TED Talk. Please take a few minutes to really absorb the points of the post, and of the lecture.

Whenever you’re a self-taught user of a program, certain tools slip through the cracks. I’d like to focus on five tools that you may have missed in Microsoft Outlook, and what interesting functionality they add.

(1) Advanced Find:

Outlook is pretty decent at finding things most of the time, but sometimes you need something a bit more detailed. If you find yourself only with the knowledge ‘the person who sent it to me had a GMail account,’ you can find that. Click Tools – Find – Advanced Find in Outlook 2003; click Tools – Instant Search – Advanced Find in Outlook 2007. Once there, you can search by the normal criteria: ‘Who sent it to me? When?’ but also, you can go to the Advanced tab and search based off any field in the email (or contact, or meeting). Then, you can search not only by the actual value in that field (date is 12/31/07), but by a part of that field (email address contained ‘@gmail.com’).

In my example picture, not only did I search based off the ‘From’ email containing ‘@gmail.com’, but I also remembered that some guy named Bob was CC’d on the email. That can go into the search as well.

Finally, as you can see at the top of the box, you can also search all the subfolders of your Inbox. A very powerful tool!

(2) Search Folders:

Most people who see Advanced Find in action immediately hope for something quicker. In fact, one of the most-repeated requests I get is – ‘can I see all the emails from my boss quickly?’ Absolutely – the secret tool is the Search Folder.

Search Folders can also be called ‘Saved Searches’, because that’s all they are. If you create a Search Folder, you’re creating a search based off particular criteria that can be repeated in an instant. Here’s the steps:

Go to the left-hand panel in your Outlook and find the section labeled Search Folders. If you look in that section, you’ll see Flagged For Follow-up, Large Emails, and possibly a couple others. These are searches Microsoft thinks you need. To make a search that looks for your boss’s emails, right-click the Search Folders section, and choose New Search Folder. Then, find the option to search for Mail From Specific People. Simply click the Choose button and put in your boss’s email address!

(3) Categories:

Categories are powerful for one, specific reason – they are the only way of organizing your emails, meetings, contacts, and tasks based off the same criteria. They’re a little different between Outlook 2003 and 2007, but here’s the general gist of the tool:

When you right-click an email, meeting, contact, or task, you’ll see an option that says Categorize. Use this to set a Category (with or without color-coding) on your item. Then, repeat the process for anything else that falls into the same category. Finally, when it’s time to search out the items related to the same category, open your Advanced Find feature (discussed earlier).

First, click the drop-down at the top of the screen that says Mail (or Contacts…) and choose Any Type of Outlook Item. This will search your whole Outlook system. Then, choose the More Choices tab, and select the Category that you applied earlier. Just like that, you’re bringing together a whole history of emails, meetings, and contacts that are related to the important project you’re working on.

(4) Automatic Formatting:

Automatic Formatting is the option to apply color or fonts to an incoming email based on things like who the sender is. This can be a real joy for anyone who sits at their computer waiting for that ONE email to come in. To set up Automatic Formatting, first go to your Inbox.

Once in your Inbox, click Tools – Organize. Select the option to organize yourself By Color, and you should be given the chance to choose the color that you associate with a particular type of email.

(5) Rules:

The final tool is a real doozy – Rules. The way I always explain rules to my students is: think of anything you do that could be repeated by a robot. Now, get the robot to do it.

Click Tools -> Rules and Alerts. Then, choose to create a new rule. You’ll see that you have the opportunity to choose a preset template, or to start from scratch. Let’s say that you wanted to move all emails from a special client to your Special Client folder.

Simply choose the template that says ‘Move messages from someone to a folder.’ Move down the screen to your Step Two section.

Click the link for ‘people or distribution list’, and choose the appropriate address(es). Then select the ’specified folder’ link, and choose the folder you want to move it to.

This post was intended to open your eyes to a few tools you should be using – to get real experience with them, and to be able to ask an expert how they work, check out our classes. Our Outlook and Outlook 2007 courses are very popular, and the Manage Your Everyday with Outlook class really helps a lot of people.

In an earlier post, I described the idea of Signal vs. Noise as a metaphor for your Inbox; today, I’d like to use it to address presentation design. By focusing as much as possible on the signal (your message), and cutting away the noise (everything else), we can make truly effective, attractive, interesting presentations. Here are three methods for increasing your signal-to-noise ratio:

(1) Animation

You may feel you’ve heard it all before about animation. When trying to create an effective presentation, it is important not to overanimate. This gets pushed by a lot of people to the point where they simply make the statement: ‘Don’t use animation.’ I won’t say that.

Animation can be a punctuation to your presentation that helps drive a point home. The most important thing you can remember regarding any kind of design is that you shouldn’t use a particular tool because you can. The tool should be used to its best effect. In the case of animation, too much animation just becomes noise. If everything is animated, you can’t tell what’s important.

So, what’s the right amount and type of animation?

The right amount: I’m not going to cop out and say ‘enough.’ There is a lot of ‘feel’ involved in using the right amount of animation, so try two things – first, try animating no more than two items in your entire presentation. One is better. If you do this, you’ll start to train yourself about what’s most important, and what can use the animation the most. Second, surf the internet. Look at the really professional websites out there – then write down ‘how much’ animation was used, and what was the ‘right use’. You’ll find the animation is still used very sparingly.

What is the right type of animation: the right type of animation is very simple.

Does your animation assist in telling your story? Communicating the information you need? If the answer is no, you’re using the wrong animation. Animations that build one idea on top of another, or that develop the relationship between two things, are good things.

One last pointer: speed up your animation. Do it now. Every person who is new to design creates animations that are interesting to them, but too slow. It’s because we like to watch the animation and make sure that it works the way we want. For the person watching the presentation, though, it comes off as ‘look what I can do!’ Every professional animation you see on TV happens faster than you’d think.

(2) Text Quantity Per Slide

Unfortunately, one of the most-asked questions in presentation classes is ‘how much text should I put on the slide?’ Everyone’s heard the ‘Seven bullet points with seven words’ or ‘No more than four bullet points’ or ‘no less than 32pt font’ rules. Immediately forget every one of them.

The problem with having a lot of text on your slide is that your audience reads your slide instead of listening to you. If they can’t hear your message because of other things distracting them – that is the definition of noise.

I recommend to every student to put no more than a single idea on a slide. That’s not a single word, or even a single phrase – a single idea. An idea can be the comparison between three things, but only that comparison should be on the slide. If you make the slide busier by trying to explain a second idea, your audience will lose the message.

The biggest complaint I hear after that recommendation is that the audience will be taking the slides away with them, and they need to contain all the content. To that I simply answer – put it in the notes field of the presentation. If it is on the slide and it detracts from your communication, find another way to provide that information.

(3) Design vs. Decoration

I know what a lot of readers are thinking after reading my request to reduce text on slides; you’re waiting for me to tell you to use a big, pretty picture on the slide. I’m not going to do that.

Sometimes, a big picture of something is exactly what the doctor ordered for your presentation. However, never, never put anything on your slide that conflicts with your message. If you’re telling people in your company that a new product will make a significant profit, a picture of a woman in a field smiling does not help the message. Either your slide communicates, or it detracts from your communication.

One of the easiest ways to keep yourself sane when designing is to ask the question: ‘Is this for decoration?’

If the only purpose of something in your slide show is to make it prettier or more interesting, remove it. If it helps communicate, then it is part of your design.

To hammer this point home, I couldn’t find a single reason to add a picture to this post. So I didn’t.

If you’d like to have a longer conversation about effective presenting, please check out our classes on PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, Presenting Data In PowerPoint, or Presentation Skills for the Professional.

There are some very powerful functions in Excel that few people ever use: the Database Functions. If you have a table of information from which you’d like to ‘get’ a value, or maybe even if you’d like to add together or average a few values that meet the same criteria, they’ll let you do exactly that.

First, get a table of information, like the one below. It doesn’t have to have a ‘unique identifier’, unlike VLOOKUP. If it has multiple columns that you can use to identify the information, like ‘Department’ and ‘Division’ and ‘Category’, then you can actually use all those columns in combination with each other.

Next, you’ll need to set up your criteria. On your spreadsheet, you need to provide the column that you’re using, and the criteria itself. In the example below, if you want to ‘Get’ one record, you’re going to look through the SalesPerson, Customer, and Quarter columns so that we can be assured we’ll only return one value. There should be only one match for the sale Richardson made to Prince Paper in the first quarter.

Then, open the Insert Function dialog box, and look for the Database category of functions. The one you want is the DGET.

DGET needs to know where the table is (cells A6:F38), the column that has the values in it (F6, the ‘Commission’ column), and the criteria you set up to return the value (I6:K7, the SalesPerson, Customer, and Quarter labels, and the values that are under the labels).

DSUM is another popular request – the ability to add up all the sales that meet your critera. Your criteria needs fewer columns, because you’re not just trying to return one value, you’re getting a lot of them and adding them together. Choose the DSUM function from the same Insert Function dialog box.

Then, use the same table range for the first input, use E6 to specify the ‘Sales’ column, and the criteria you’ve put on your worksheet.

As you can see, they return the values from the table very easily, and if you change the criteria, your value returned changes. This is a great tool for retrieving business data from large tables of information.

If you’d like experience with the VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and Database functions, try either our Excel 2003 or Excel 2007 courses. For more cool functions you should be using, keep checking back with us on the blog.

In case you’re not already, I’d highly recommend checking out our daily tips and tricks on Twitter or Facebook.

The daily, shorter format allows me to shoot off interesting websites, books, or shortcuts as I find them. This site, on the other hand, allows me to be more verbose about things, and maybe get across a real tutorial.

One of the guiding principles you should remember when designing anything is:

“The human brain likes patterns.”

When I say that, I don’t mean that we like paisleys or flannel; I’m saying that our brains latch onto repetition. Here’s a real-life example:

Let’s say I have a quarter. What are the odds I get heads when I flip it? 50-50 – even odds. What about the next time? The next time? The point is, that no matter how many times I flip the coin, I always have the same chance of getting heads and the same chance of getting tails.

But, in real life, when you flip ‘heads’ three times in a row, most of us would bet on tails ‘because it’s due.’ In reality, nothing about the pattern of three ‘heads’ in a row has any bearing on whether the next one is heads or tails. Our brains latch onto patterns, even when there isn’t one there!

How do we use this in design? Simple. The more patterns we repeat in our design, the more our audience ‘figures out’ what we’re doing. The more you can figure out a design, the easier it is to use. Now, how do we apply that to typography?

One of the simplest, and most repeated examples of bad typography choices is the constantly-changing font. I just received a promotional email earlier this week that included 7 different fonts. I can tell you from personal experience – it was not a good-looking email. I spent most of my time reading the email thinking ‘why is this so strange?’ By keeping a consistent font throughout a design, we cause less confusion with our audience. Our brains calm down because they can recognize the repeated choices.

At the same time, if your entire document contains only one font, pretty soon you’ll start to feel bored. There’s a fine line between calm and boring, and you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of that! So how do you spice it up? You choose a complementary font.

It’s very important to understand the idea of a ‘complementary font.’ To see this in exercise, check out the figures below. In the first graphic, your brain again is confused, and you may not be able to pinpoint why. In the second, there’s a clear distinction between the different pieces of text.

The reason the second figure is so much clearer than the first is this: the two bits of text in the first figure are from the same ‘family’ of fonts, the sans-serifs. One is Arial, the other Verdana. They’re so similar to one another, with subtle differences, that you’re more focused on the distinctions than the text on the page. By selecting one serif and one sans-serif (Times and Arial in this case), we create a clear difference between the fonts that’s easy to see. It calms the brain, while at the same time creating enough difference to make it interesting. Again, the most important thing to remember here is – create patterns the brain can easily identify, and your design will be more widely useable.

Try out the following ‘complementary’ font choices in your next design, and you’ll see it come together a lot more easily.

To have further conversation about font choices in design, try out our courses Web Design Theory, the Guided Web Design Lab, or the Guided Print Design Lab. You’ll be able to discuss directly with someone who has practical experience in the field.

There’s a metaphor for many things in life that’s derived from a nerdy concept in electrical engineering: your signal-to-noise ratio. Today, I’m going to apply the idea of increasing your ’signal’, or message and decreasing the ‘noise’, or everything else, to some office productivity ideas.

When you start looking at your Inbox in Outlook, I think most people can agree that there is a lot of ‘noise’ in there – low-grade content that gets in the way of you doing your job effectively. In an earlier post, I put up a video about Inbox Zero. The basic premise of Inbox Zero is to clear the way in your Inbox so that important information and requests don’t get lost. Everyone, for the sake of their sanity, should be looking for their strategy to cut through that noise and get to the important signal. One idea that’s been thrown around is the ‘Do-Delegate-Defer-Delete’ strategy.

Basically, every email that comes in can have something done to it. Action #1 – DO it. Simply read the email, execute whatever action the email requests, and then delete it from your Inbox (or at least find somewhere else for it to be archived). It’s not always possible, but when it is, it’s very effective.

Action #2 – it’s not your job. Forwarding your emails to someone else is such a freeing experience! Send the necessary information to the person who will execute the action, then stow the email for a week for a checkup.

Action #3 – Defer this is what most of us do, but not in an organized way. You’ll need to come up with a strategy for setting time aside. It’s up to you, but try this one out and see if it works: Click the ‘Folders’ button in the bottom-left corner of your Outlook. Then, when you can see Tasks in the panel on your left, drag the email in question to your Tasks. This will immediately create a new task for you, which you can schedule (and put a reminder on). It’s much more efficient than just hoping you’ll remember to get back to it!

Action #4 – It’s not everyday that you get to delete the stuff in your Inbox, but when it happens, take advantage.

Are you a packrat like I am? Try out this tip from home organization that’s been revamped for the digital world: at home, you can put all the things you’re debating throwing out into a box. Tape up the box and put it in your garage. If after 6 months you’ve survived without any of it, you can throw the whole box in the garbage. In your Inbox, create a folder called ‘The Box’. Throw your old emails (the ones you can’t stand to throw out) into The Box. Then, after six months, delete The Box and start all over again.

Do you find that your Inbox is ruling your life? Try out our Manage Your Everyday With Outlook course. I think a few housekeeping strategies, reworked for the office, can really do a lot of good for people.

Welcome, readers, to installment #2 of Design Fridays. Today, I’m going to address a new ‘Best Practice Tool’ Adobe added to Photoshop in version CS3: Adjustment Layers.

Photo editors are continually faced with the need to correct color in photographs – making a vacation photograph less ‘reddish’; turning a cool picture Black & White; bringing out the bright colors to make a picture ‘pop’. Until version CS3, your option was to click the Image menu, slide down the menu to Adjustments, and make a selection. There are a lot of very powerful tools on this menu, but the drawback is this – if you realize it’s a mistake, you’re left Undo-ing backwards until the change comes off the photo.

The new alternative: Adjustment Layers. Many of the same tools on the Adjustments menu are available through an Adjustment Layer, and the benefit is that you can simply alter the layer, or delete the layer. It makes an already powerful tool powerful AND dynamic. To give you an example, I’ll try turning a photo Black & White:

First, find your Layers palette on the right side of your screen. Then, click the button that looks like a black & white cookie at the bottom of the palette. You’ll see options for Levels, Color Balance, Black & White… a lot of the good features you need. Let’s try Black & White.

Notice that you get all the same options from Image -> Adjustments -> Black & White. However, when you click OK now, you have a new layer sitting on top of your original layer. And there are four very powerful options at your disposal.

#1 – you realize that you need to alter your choice. Bring your mouse to the layer with the Black & White choices, and double-click. You’ll get the exact same panel, with the same choices you made earlier. Make an adjustment and click OK – you’ve got a different flavor of Black & White.

#2 – you’re working on the file, and would really like to see the photo in full-color again (temporarily) as you’re working. Go to the layer with your Black & White adjustment, and click the ‘Eyeball’ icon. You’ll get your full-color version back, and you can always turn the ‘Eyeball’ on again to see the Black & White version.

#3 – You realize, three weeks from now, that you actually need the file full-color. Click the Adjustment Layer, and click the ‘Trashcan’ in the bottom-right corner to Delete the layer. No matter when you need to undo – you can.

#4 – You want to do one of those trendy photos where part of the photo is Black & White, and the other part is full-color. Simply click the Adjustment Layer’s Layer Mask icon, and paint with a black paintbrush anywere you want to see color again.

I think that if you use Adjustment Layers, you’ll find the flexibility really benefits your end product. If you’d like to get some practice with the tool, try out our Adobe Photoshop course. Good luck!