Point, Click and Wow! A Quick Guide to Brilliant Laptop Presentations

Citation

Richardson, R. (2003), "Point, Click and Wow! A Quick Guide to Brilliant Laptop Presentations", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 18 No. 4/5, pp. 470-471. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2003.18.4_5.470.1

Introduction

Many business professionals and virtually all marketing professions make frequent presentations. These presentations are, for the most part, created in and displayed by PowerPoint. For this reason, most presentation books focus on teaching the reader how to create advanced presentations using every feature of PowerPoint. Books like these tend to devote a significant amount of space to advanced topics like animation, builds, transitions, and the like. Point, Click and Wow! does not take this approach. Rather, it concentrates on describing what makes a good presentation and what the presenter needs to do beforehand to insure that the presentation can be delivered successfully. Point, Click and Wow! A Quick Guide to Brilliant Laptop Presentations is a small book. It has 226 pages divided into six chapters plus appendices. Each chapter has instruction, stories, and examples, and ends with one or more handy checklists.

Advantages

Creating and delivering an effective presentation is complex. Not only do you have to have exciting content and perfect organization, you also have to worry about having working equipment, having equipment that matches the location and audience size, and fitting your presentation into the allotted time. This can be much more complex that it first appears. A 20 minute presentation to ten executives in a US conference room requires a very different approach than an hour long presentation to 100 middle managers in a French auditorium.

Business presenters are expected to design and deliver innovative, persuasive presentations. However, in most organizations, they receive minimal training and guidance, if any, and little or no support. Since many companies have an approved presentation template and PowerPoint is a fairly easy program to use, it is not uncommon for companies to assume that, in fact, no training is required. This is a serious mistake and this book is designed to overcome this by providing practical training in the mechanics of making a presentation. The book integrates advice on the hands‐on mechanics of presentations, the design of effective PowerPoint slides, the making of a persuasive presentation, and the art of fitting the presentation to the audience into one overall package. To aid the presenter further, the book includes tips from over 100 experienced presenters. That way, the reader learns from the experience of others rather than making the mistakes themselves.

The focus of the book is on designing a custom presentation just for your specific audience and then taking all the necessary steps to make sure the equipment is in place to deliver that presentation effectively. The reader learns practical presentation tips like not standing in front of the screen and not just reading your slides to the audience. The reader also learns practical mechanical tips like making sure you have your presentation on backup media in case your computer fails and making sure your computer batteries are fully charged before starting your presentation. The result is a book that will familiarize the reader with everything that can go wrong in a presentation as well as presenting practical advice on avoiding each problem.

Regardless of how well you are prepared mechanically, giving a brilliant presentation requires that you have dazzling slides. While dazzling slides are required, it is important to avoid “gee whiz” features like transitions and animation unless they specifically fit into the situation. After all, you do not want the look to overpower the message. The book includes numerous tips for getting the maximum impact from your slides. Included in this discussion is corporate blueprinting where custom slides of varying structures and backgrounds are used to deliver a consistent message for the organization. The book reinforces corporate blueprinting with several compelling examples.

Not only does the CD that comes with the book have color versions of all the figures from the book, but it also includes tools, called PowerPlugs, to help you design better presentations. These include 3D titles, a quotations database, a charting program, and photo animations, among others. Many of these PowerPlug tools are limited, demonstration versions of tools sold by the authors. Also included on the CD are over 60,000 templates and backgrounds.

Drawbacks

The book is printed in black and white while the sample slides for the book were designed for color. As a result, they look muddy when printed in the book. This is partially offset since the book includes a CD that allows you to view the slides in color via PowerPoint. However, most readers will want to read the book without sitting in front of a computer in order to view the slides in color.

Much of the text has frequent subheadings to make it easy to skim the book and find just the material in which you are interested. However, some sections are written as a long series of paragraphs with infrequent subheadings. The net effect is disconcerting; as though different parts of the book were written by different people with little concern for how the various parts fit together. This is a particularly blaring fault given the topic of the book is on presenting information effectively.

Conclusion

Experienced presenters will find little new material in this book; although, it is somewhat useful to have it all collected together in one handy reference. Less experienced presenters will find the book to be extremely helpful, giving them useful and practical hints on creating and delivering presentations, much as an experienced mentor would.

The book is reasonably priced at $19.95. However, be careful if you buy the book online. Some vendors are still selling the less complete first edition. You want to make sure and get the more up‐to‐date second, 2002 edition.