1. Search Folders

As described in previous posts, Search Folders are a powerful, underutilized part of Outlook. A Search Folder is a saved search, which means that you can retrieve results from your Inbox like ‘All emails from James Joyce’ or ‘All emails about Project X’ simply by clicking the Search Folder.

2. Rules

Anytime you find yourself repeating the same organizational steps over and over again in your Inbox, look into programming a Rule. Rules can do things like reply to particular emails with a templated response, or redirect all emails from an important client into a folder for that client.

3. Categories

Categories are a powerful tool in Outlook – right-click any email or meeting, and your categories will appear. Later, you can use categories in one of two potent ways:

– Search Folders: by categorizing your emails as they come in and creating a Search Folder for that category, you remove the necessity to drag-and-drop between different folders in your Inbox. This may not seem important now, but come see me when you’ve got 150 folders you have to maintain.

– Advanced Search: the most important benefit of categories is your ability to apply them to EVERYTHING. Create a category, and soon you’re able to find the meetings, contacts, tasks, AND emails related to that category, with one search.

4. AutoReplace

In Word, AutoReplace is the tool that takes (c) and turns it into the copyright symbol. If harnessed correctly, you can replace any misspelling that you habitually make, or create an autoreplace that takes a code from you and create a long string of text.

5. Fields

If you want to enter today’s date, or create a Table of Contents, or have a page numbering system that can be switched between Roman numerals, Arabic numbering, and lettering, you need Fields. A field is a programmed portion of your page in Word that is responsible for outputting not a set result, but a dynamic value. That means tomorrow, the ‘Today’s Date’ field will pick up the new day. Or that the Table of Contents will pick up the new section you decide to add.

6. MailMerge

One use of fields is the ability to bulk email or create envelopes for everyone in your contact list – MailMerge. Using MailMerge, you’ll be able to simply type a letter and specify “First Name”, and Word will replace it with the first names of everyone you want.

7. AutoFilter

With a large quantity of data, it’s often important to isolate records that meet a certain criteria. In Excel, all you have to do is select the data that you want filtered, apply an AutoFilter, and get to work. You’ll find that there are drop-down arrows for every column, and if you want to show only the employees in IT, you should be able to do exactly that with two clicks.

8. Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts

When it’s time to go above and beyond filtering, Pivot Tables will allow you to take that large quantity of data, filter it, then run subtotals, averages, maximums, minimums… the possibilities are endless. And understanding Pivot Tables only takes about 15 minutes!

9. IF Functions

Most people can grasp SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, COUNT, etc. When the time comes for your functions to make decisions, however, like ‘Only add these numbers together if they are both sales from 2008′, then you need the power of an IF. There are many varieties – SUMIF, COUNTIF, and you can nest functions with an IF to make them more powerful.

10. Presentation Shortcuts

When in mid-presentation, sometimes you just need to darken the projected screen for a couple of minutes while a side conversation plays out. Turning the projector on and off is sloppy – try the ‘B’ key on the keyboard. There are a ton of those shortcuts that make your presentation that much more potent.

Over the next several months, these and many other tips will be thoroughly examined in this blog. In the meantime, look over an Excel manual, or take an Outlook class from us, or just start clicking around. You’ll be amazed at what you can pick up just by clicking random options.

Idea #1: Don’t Give a Presentation

Hear me out on this:

Is the data easily misunderstood?

Do you have to convince anyone of your points?

Do your people have 10-15-30-60 minutes where they’re not doing anything really important?

If you answered ‘no’ to all three questions, why are you wasting everyone’s time? Some things can be emailed and understood. You’re neither that important nor that interesting to be giving random presentations for no legitimate reason. Self-editing is an important skill to master.

Idea #2: Know What You’re Talking About

In an earlier post, I mentioned putting the bullet points that you really want to talk about into the ‘Speaker Notes’ section of your presentation. Here’s the idea, a little more thoroughly fleshed out:

It has been studied extensively, and people can not read and listen at the same time. Therefore, putting bullet points on the screen and talking over them will result in less comprehension and retention. You should really shoot for far less text on every slide – instead choosing to communicate through other channels. If you want the audience to have your speaking points, don’t put them on the slide – instead put them in your speaker notes and provide a printed copy for your audience members – after the presentation.

Now, I find a lot of people hear this advice and still don’t heed it. When pressed, they can’t give a solid reason why they’re so attached to text on the screen. Here’s the real reason we all love text on the screen:

‘As you can see from the slide, ladies and gentlemen, our revenue rose by 32% because of three factors…’

We love to be able to turn and read the screen, to be reminded of our points.

Very few of us are paid, professional presenters. Most are professionals at other skills, like programming, or accounting, or fundraising. Presenting is a secondary, often terrifying, part of our job. We like the training wheels to stay on if at all possible. Break that habit, now. If your audience deserves a quality, engaging, persuasive presentation, do whatever is necessary to make that happens. It begins by practicing your presentation.

Idea #3: Be the Center of Attention.

It’s interesting what happens in many presentations – the presenter feels like stage dressing, like someone who’s being paid to lead us through a deck of slides. But nothing could be further from the truth. No person in that room came here today because they were going to be shown PowerPoint slides. They came into that room because you, the presenter, were going to communicate something important to them. Own that.

One of the easiest ways to be the center of attention is to, from time to time, cut off the presentation. It’s very simple. Either, on your keyboard, hit the ‘B’ key – for black screen – or actually schedule black screens by having blank slides in your presentation. If you have something important to say, make sure that your audience is paying attention to you – and not thinking about the third column in your chart.

For more presentation tips & tricks, try out our classes on PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, Presenting Data In PowerPoint, or Presentation Skills for the Professional.

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To help you through those moments, you may want to use Microsoft’s Command Reference Guides:

• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Outlook

Each of these is a direct translation of your old tools to your new tools. If you’d like an in-person walkthrough of how these work, try out our Office 2007 Tips and Tricks class. If you find that you want more detail, we have three-day courses in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, and two-day courses in Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft PowerPoint. Also, there is a one-day course on Microsoft Visio

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.

(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.