Understanding life

McDull is a male pig who can be distinguished by a birthmark on his right eye. He has a heart of gold, but he isn't very smart and ordinary in every way; nevertheless, he has many dreams. However, every time he tries, he fails; he is disappointed, but tries again, exploring other dreams. In this way he creates his own colourful world. He lives his life simply and naturally. He is not perfect, but his attitude towards life, namely of never giving up, makes him a popular character.


The name McDull actually has a story itself. When Mrs Mak was going to give birth to McDull, she saw a magical plastic basin(pronounced roughly as "dull" in Cantonese) flying over her head. Believing it a sign from the gods, she named her son as "Dull".

Thank you for your attention!

So the other day I was avoiding productivity around the house when I heard my stepdaughter Melon Ball (not her real name) calling from another room. “Hey, Bob,” she shouted, “come look at what I did.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Come look at what I did” can be interpreted so many ways, few of them good. Melon Ball’s 12, so I don’t have to worry that “what I did” was to decorate the walls with finger paint or use my laptop bag as a creative toilet, but I do have to worry about her, say, infecting the computer with a virus known for opening portals to the fiery pits of hell.

I walked slowly toward the source of Melon Ball’s voice. Bad news doesn’t officially become bad news until you actually hear it, so I figured there was no big rush.

I found Melon Ball seated in front of the computer, with my daughter Gustavo (not her real name) looking over her shoulder. A quick glance confirmed that they were neither playing tic-tac-toe with a wargaming government mainframe nor disrupting the space-time continuum. Off to a good start.

“Watch this,” Melon Ball said. “I made it for Mommy.” I saw that she was noodling around in PowerPoint.

Really? PowerPoint? I use PowerPoint at work. Seeing Melon Ball and Gustavo fiddling around with PowerPoint was like catching them making coffee in the kitchen and complaining about the government. I was momentarily less certain about the space-time continuum still being intact.

“It’s really cool, Daddy,” Gustavo said.

“OK,” I said warily. “Let’s see it.”

Melon Ball hit play and let her slideshow rip. I immediately noticed her presentation was set to music. I don’t know how to add music to a slideshow. The kids weren’t just making coffee; they were fixing the freaking copier. I made a mental note to start paying closer attention to the children.

The title slide popped up. It read Frisco U Will Be Missed Dearly. Frisco was the beloved family cat that we’d had to put to sleep just a few months ago. He started as Colette’s cat 15 years ago, and she still gets emotional when she thinks about him, so she tries not to think about him too much these days. It’s a little bit of a touchy subject.

And Melon Ball had apparently created an entire PowerPoint presentation about him.

Oh, but it gets better. The second slide said R.I.P. and had a picture of Frisco in the middle. I realized it wasn’t just any picture; it was one of the pictures we took the night before the old man’s final trip to the vet. That had been a very sad night in our house. Colette and the girls had cried a lot. I mean, a lot. The girls had insisted on having pictures taken with Frisco, despite the fact that they were clearly sobbing their heads off in each one. We kept the pictures because the kids wanted them for whatever reason, but Colette and I go out of our way not to look at those photos. We prefer to remember Frisco as the quirky, fat, charmingly stupid cat he was in his prime. In the pictures from his last night, he’s…well, he’s just not at his best. I’m kind of a cynical heartless curmudgeon and even I don’t like looking at those shots of the old boy.

And there Frisco was, looking terrible, next to the letters R.I.P. Not only that, but the next five slides were nothing but full-frame photos from that night. Sickly cat and sobbing children abounded. It was like making a tribute to your late grandma and starting with the pictures of her in her hospital bed.

I stared, slack-jawed, at the monitor. “And you made this for Mommy?”

“Yeah,” Melon Ball said. “I made it because she misses Frisco so much. I showed it to her once, but she said it made her too sad, so I added more happy pictures at the end.”

“Oh.” Really, I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Sure enough, after the first five or six pictures, the slideshow shifted away from the creepy “last supper” shots and onto cheerier shots of Frisco playing with toys or wrestling with the other cats or whatever. OK, this is better, I thought.

Then we got to the final slide. It read, "WE MISS YOU!! We can’t wait to see you some day again. Wish you were here to refill our empty HEARTS!!"

To refill our empty hearts. Yeah, that’s going to cheer Mommy right up. It will cheer her so much she’ll run straight out to the nearest liquor store. I tried to think of a way to diplomatically suggest a few edits, but before I could say anything, I heard the back door open. It was Colette returning from an errand.

Yikes.

Melon Ball whirled around. “Mommy, come here! My slideshow’s all done now! Come look!”

Colette’s voice from the other room sounded stricken. “Oh, Melon Ball, I don’t want to watch that again. I’m proud of you for making it, but—“

Melon Ball cut her off. “Yeah, but I added more pictures so it won’t make you cry again. Come look.”

“Did you take out the sad ones?”

Pause. “I added more pictures,” she said. The kid has a future in politics. “Come look.”

And at that point, Colette was hosed. Melon Ball was so proud of her presentation – which I later learned took her hours to put together – that Colette had no choice. She shot me a look as she came into the room. All I could do was shrug and wince in return. I put my arm around her and resolved to run out to the store for a bottle of wine after the kids were in bed.

And so we watched, all of us gathered around the computer as the peacefully resting ghost of Frisco attempted to fill our empty hearts once more. I have to say, I was impressed with Colette’s ability to hold it together and smile for Melon Ball afterward. She even gave the kid a big hug. Fortunately, Melon Ball didn’t notice how quickly Colette left the room, or that she took longer than usual to come out of her room.

Melon Ball turned to me. “So did you like it, Bob? It makes me really miss Frisco.”

“Yeah,” Gustavo said. “It makes me really miss him, too. He was such a good fatboy.”

“You did a good job, Melon Ball,” I said. “Really good.”

What I didn’t say was, I need to go redo my will and add in a new addendum: at my funeral there will be no commemorative PowerPoint.

Thank you for your attention!

Well, we finally arrived at the last day of my Bullet Point Boot Camp. We’ve covered several different topics:

Day 1: Consistency
Day 2: Bullets
Day 3: Layout/Structure
Day 4: Usage / Text Density

On this last day, I’m going to finish up the last two topics related to bullet points — content and delivery.

Content and bullet points

 Content is king, right? We’re constantly reminded that content is the most important part of your presentation. Content is presented as a combination of text, images, and verbal communication. Bullet points are one popular text-driven method for sharing content in PowerPoint presentations. In the previous article in this series, I mentioned how there are both tactical and strategic presentations. Bullet points can be useful for both presentation types, but are frequently more common and appropriate with tactical presentations.

For example, my company is going through the process of being acquired by another larger company. As a director, I was invited to a meeting where HR representatives from the acquiring company outlined what was going to happen on the first days of the acquisition.

The presentation I sat through was a good example of a tactical presentation. As a manager, I needed to have specific information and detailed steps on how to handle the various personnel aspects of the acquisition in relation to my consulting team. There were a lot of bullet points across multiple slides, but in this case it was okay because I absolutely needed to see that level of detail.

Appropriate level of content

Presentations should not be bedtime stories. 

Just because a particular slide or the majority of an entire presentation may merit the use of bullet points, you should consider how much text is necessary or appropriate. If your bullet points capture everything you’re going to say about a topic, then you could be tempted to read your bullet points.

Bedtime stories are really the only time when people want to be read to. Reading bullet points will have the same effect - it will put your audience to sleep, which is okay for toddlers but not for executives, co-workers, customers, or students.

Each bullet point should serve as an introduction to a new thought or series of ideas. Like the tip of an iceberg, only a small portion of your idea or ideas is revealed above the surface in the form of a bullet point. You have “hidden” stories, metaphors, statistics, real world examples, etc. that you use to expand upon the text in the bullet point and make the key idea come to life for your audience.

For presentation purposes, your bullet points should only represent a main idea or key point but not all of your content. Like an iceberg, below the surface you should have additional information related to each bullet point that is shared verbally.

Delivery via content staging

You’ve determined that it’s appropriate or necessary to use bullet points on a particular slide. However, as you review the slide created you notice that there’s a fair amount of text on the slide. Whenever you present a slide that is more text heavy, there’s a good chance that your audience will read ahead and not listen to you as you present, which is not desirable.

In these cases when I present a lot of information on one slide, I like to employ an approach I call “content staging”. In an article on this approach, I share how you can apply custom animations to your bullet points and introduce them one at a time as you’re ready to proceed. I prefer to use a subtle animation effect such as a fade and have the bullet points fade in quickly (set to “very fast”). Personally I don’t like the bullet points to come in slowly because then you have to wait for them to appear and it can interrupt your flow and become distracting.

I find this technique helps your audience to focus on what you’re saying and not be distracted by upcoming content. It also helps your audience to not become overwhelmed at the beginning of a slide by a large amount of content hitting them all at once.

Summary

That’s a wrap on my Bullet Point Boot Camp series. I was able to cover a lot of different aspects of bullet points over the course of the past five articles. I’m not an advocate for abandoning bullet points or only using them one specific way. Like it or not bullet points are a big part of millions of presentations each year. Both strategic and tactical presentations leverage bullet points extensively for better or worse — and in different ways.

Hopefully through education and discussion, we can avoid some of the problems people have experienced with bad bullet points. Spread the word — bullet points are only dangerous to audiences when they are used inappropriately. Learn to use them wisely, and they can be a valuable tool in your presentation design toolbox.

Thank you for your attention!

When you’re trying to highlight a key part of a chart or table, you may want to use an arrow. It’s fairly easy to create an arrow in PowerPoint 2007, but it is not as obvious how to create an eye-appealing curved arrow. I find that curved arrows are frequently better than straight arrows because they can bend around other important data points in a chart or table rather blocking them. And let’s face it — straight arrows are very boring.

How can you spot a sexy curved arrow?

Inexperienced PowerPoint users will use straight arrows or ugly curved arrows that look hand drawn. A good curved arrow has a smooth curve - no kinks or abrupt changes in its arc. The more points in an arrow, the more bends you’ll have. The key is to minimize the points or bends (Right click on an arrow and select “Edit Points” to see how many points are in the arrow). The following steps will show you how to add more professional-looking curved arrows to your next set of PowerPoint slides.

Step 1 - Draw the arrow 

In PowerPoint 2007, if you use the default “arrow” drawing option, you can only create a straight arrow. For whatever reason, you can’t edit the arrow shape so we have to use another shape which is editable — the Freeform drawing shape. Because you’re going to edit the shape once it is drawn, you don’t have to be exact on your initial drawing. Hit the “Esc” key to stop drawing the arrow once you have two points or a straight line segment. 

Step 2 - Edit the points of the arrow

Now that you have a line segment drawn, right click on the line and select “Edit Points” to start adding a curve to the line. Using the blue handle that appears when you click on one of the end points, you’ll be able to change the arc of the line. You may need to play with both ends of the line to achieve the curve you’re looking for. Tip: Make sure your line doesn’t become twisted. Watch the angles of the blue handles — think “smooth” and “gradual”.

Step 3 - Add the arrow end type and width

The last step is to add the arrow’s begin/end type and adjust the width of the arrow. Right click on the curved line segment and select “Format Shape” at the bottom of the pop-up menu. In the Format Shape window, go to the Line Style tab where you will be able to add an end type and change the width. Voila! You have a sexy curved arrow that will be the envy of your co-workers.

Thank you for your attention! 

1. Have a theme

I get that this is not a standard business presentation where you would have a key message supported by three points. But nevertheless I think there should be a theme which ties it all together. The presentations that I saw which had a theme were far more effective. One in particular stands out. It was by Meena Kadri and was an exploration of the creativity of what she called “lo-fi” folk in India. We saw a series of stunning photographs but all tied together by the theme of the creativity and artistic flair of poor people.

Those that didn’t have a theme seemed like an unorganized slideshow “Oh here’s this piece I made…[waffle about it for 20 secs] and here’s something else I made”. If you’re an artist presenting at Pecha Kucha think of yourself as the curator of your slides – explain to us the ideas that bind them together or show us how your ideas developed from one piece to the next.

2. Plan your outline before the slides

Pecha Kucha does tend to revolve around the imagery, but that doesn’t mean the images should come first in your planning. Here’s my suggestion as to how to go about planning a Pecha Kucha presentation.

1. Plan your rough outline first focused on your theme
2. Storyboard the slides to fit with the outline
3. Plan and carefully time what you’ll say for each slide.

Because of the tight timing constraints I think you have to plan what you want to say more carefully than other presentations – there is no room for waffle. But avoid a script if you can.
Felix Jung has put together a most amazing and detailed guide How to make a Pecha Kucha presentation. This is a must-read if you’re doing a Pecha Kucha presentation.

3. Spend more than 20 seconds on a point

Garr Reynolds has commented that the format makes it difficult to go deep. I agree. Many of the presenters the night I went felt they could only spend 20 seconds on each “point” or “image”. That meant there was never enough time to fully develop a point. By contrast, Meena Kadri sometimes developed a point over two to threes slides. The set of slides would show different perspectives of the same thing. For example:

First slide – picture of two Indian brothers – she told us about two brothers who had a thriving business as artists. People came from far and wide to buy their art.

Second slide – image of their art – they paint scenes from Bollywood movies – name them a scene and they can paint it.

Third slide – zoom out to show that painting is on a mud flap of a truck!

4. It’s better to finish earlier than later

Many presenters found themselves overrunning the 20 seconds that they had for each slide. That meant they were still talking about a slide after it had left the screen. The classic was a picture of a rather ordinary step ladder that had been used for painting. We learn that it’s in a gallery and that it’s considered a great work of art … that’s when the slide transitioned. She then tells us “Those paint spatters are actually inlaid crystals.” Wow – do we want to see it again!

As you can imagine, once you’ve gone overtime on one slide, the problem compounds itself and you tend to go over on the others. The presentation becomes a confusing out-of-sync race.
A couple of times some presenters did finish talking about a slide a few seconds short of the 20 seconds. They were impatient to move on. But we, the audience were fine – it gave us more time to look without having to process words at the same time.

So prepare your narrative so that you’re a little bit short of 20 seconds rather than a bit over.

5. Rehearse

The value of rehearsal applies to any presentation, but it doubly applies to a Pecha Kucha presentation. It’s a dance with a partner who you have no control over. You need to have your side of the choreography – the narrative – down pat.
If you’ve done a Pecha Kucha presentation do add your tips in the comments.
And if you’ve found this post because you’re preparing for one – go well!

Thank you for your attention!