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How to Stregthen Presentation Skills

All right, so let's, go ahead and flip back to the slides if we could. So at this point, what I want to talk a little bit more about is how to prepare emotionally, mentally, and I'm not a psychologist, but how we prepare to creating our slide deck, and and how do we deliver that slide? Dex is more conceptual in nature, so we're going move away from using the application again. I'll refer you to this quote here about how do we design things? We design things on a slide to really accent and support what it is that we're trying to deliver, because the messages me, the message is not this right here. It's, the support behind the message one thing you want to keep in mind is take a graph, for example, there are a couple of ways you can insert a graph into a slide duck so you can insert it in a way that it's functional and you get the information, or you could insert it in a way, that's, a little more appealing to look out. Um, one thing I'd like to tell people is, um, when you're building a...

slide deck, think of yourselves as designers, now I'm not a designer, right? I like to play with photography and with video and some other things that that kind of help with that, but I'm not a designer, but I try and put myself in a position where I like to think of myself as a designer in the sense that how would gen want to see this information presented? So I want to make sure things were clear, concise, and then it really helps to convey the message. Ok? So that's important when it comes to graphs, my rule of thumb with any chart is the audience. Every member of the audience should be ableto read that chart and understand what it's saying in less than five seconds, ideally less than three seconds, right? So if I have a chart up there that's really busy with lots of of of information, lots of siri's and colors and, you know, wild animations and things like that, that might not be the best chart, and it might be time to rethink how you deliver that chart when in our numbers course, when we talked about charts, you could see that we did a lot of really funky things with charts and that's cool and that's great, but in a presentation setting, you know, when people don't have a lot of time to really digest that you want to make it make it easy for the audience to read. One of the things that's most important in the preparation phase that a lot of people overlook and I can tell you this from experience in working with others on their slide decks is they forget to practice ok, there is a difference between practicing in your home office on your laptop in your mind and practicing on the stage in the location in the conference room where you're going to be giving your presentation now clearly you don't want you know, fifty people sitting around watching your practice so it's really hard to get the people aspect of that involved but you can certainly go into the actual space creative life for example, in order to prepare for this we actually came into the studio we hooked everything up technically to make sure everything worked well and we actually ran through a few things to make sure that we were all comfortable with the technology with the gear with the room with the staff with with all of that. And so one of the biggest deals with this right here is you want to make sure that a that the technology is going to work for you and specifically when you're looking at the detail on your slides what may look really, really good on my slide on my laptop, my resolution with my color saturation settings may look totally different than a projector in fact projectors air actually really horrible at color accuracy and saturation so you want to make sure that all of that looks good what may look subtle here may completely be washed out on that screen and it may be completely lost on the audience so you want to make sure to go through that as many times as much and as much time as you can ahead of time with regards to design it is important to use the right funds eso again this kind of goes into that designer mode phase right? So we have fonts lots of funds system fonts that are built in that we can use as well as funds that we can go out and download from third parties like like adobe and another good fun vendors so some of the examples examples here like but tony for example is a great fun to show off elegance and to be subjective and classic yet with a modern feel gil sands for example which is what I've been doing a lot of mining is a sand sara font with a distinct warm, friendly personality sort of like me I guess really that's what I want to portray so that's why I'm using that fund if I wanted to use something a little more classy and clean maybe I'll use optima or rockwell maybe for something a little harder and more industrial s o a lot of thought can go into funds I wouldn't spend too much time on that but it should be something that you should address as you're as you're building your slides this is something that people tend to think what are you trying to say with this, kevin? But when you when you're designing and when you're building your slides the way that I do it, I go somewhere that inspires me to do great things. Now this is a picture of hawaii this is maui specifically I love hawaii love maui you know, we don't get there very often, but when we do I love and it's a great place and if I could go there every time I built a slide deck, I think it would be wonderful, but unfortunately reality sets in and we can't do that, but you know, for me what inspires me to do good work in a slide deck, it may be hawaii or it may be a top of the mountain you know where there's peace and quiet, no noise and no light light noise or it might be in your home office or it might be in your car or it might be in an airport maybe you need and an anxiety centric atmosphere to really get your creative juices flowing and to be creative in that way for that specific slide deck so it depends on the slide deck you're working on, but but going to a place that allows you to be creative and inspired can be a big part of doing good work music for me also helps to I put a certain type of music on through my headphones when I want to create slides going back a little bit just kind of reiterate this when in terms of practicing, you want to make sure that you practice, practice, practice, practice your slides um, I know with creative live, you know, I'm sure you see in the structures that don't get enough practicing in, and sometimes I feel like I didn't get enough practicing and practice practice practice because that will help you to understand and reaffirm in your mind what it is you're trying to get across. The other thing now recommend here is to get a new perspective on things you know, and I think this is a very simple slide very simply designed it's literally a text box that I rotated one hundred eighty degrees, but it gives you a whole new perspective on how things look and what it is you're trying to convey. Um, one way to do this is just to simply ask a friend or appear a colleague tio critique your work, you know, here's my slide deck truss, can you help me out? Can you show me what I'm missing here? Um, you know, building the slides that I did for this class I had several people look at and say, you know, you're you're missing this piece, and a lot of times my reaction is, of course, I'm missing now, yeah, let's get that in there, and now I've got a new perspective, so you want to make sure that you practice and and ask others for input as well, when it comes to delivering your priest, your presentation, your slide deck again, I'm going to refer back to the free bonus material that came with this class. Is this card here, which looks a little bit different, but it's the same idea this card again is specific keyboard shortcuts for giving your presentations. This is not what goes into building your presentations, but this is when you're giving your presentation these air, some of my favorite people are short guys were actually navigating through one of the ones that I really like to use is the number pad, and the number pad is great for for jumping around to slide. So let's say, I've got ten slides in my slide deck, and I'm on slide three, and we're talking about something that I know I'm gonna skip through two numbers seven so instead of going from three and then clicking through four five six to get to seven, which can be a little distracting to the audience. I want to jump straight to seven. So an easy way to do that is to use this slide navigator option here and just hit the number seven on your keyboard and then enter and it takes you right to slide seven. Of course, you have to know your slides intimately to be able to do that. But but there's a lot of really good keyboard shortcuts on here that allows you to navigate as you're giving your presentation. Let's, talk about why and how to use presenter notes. Perfect. Yeah, thank you. Ok, so let's been just a second talking about presenter notes. So presenter notes are notes that are available to you as a presenter, not to the audience. So if we look at this display here in fact, let's, um let's, try and think the best way to do this. Okay, perfect. So here we have our slides from this particular class and and we have. So this is our presenter display. This is normally what the presenter will see maybe on a screen on the floor like we have here in the studio, if, if it's a large stage with a big audience, they'll have a serious of screens or presented displays down on the floor of the of the hall that will have a special display on the floor. So with this display here there's a couple of different elements with this one is the current slide that were viewing right now so this is what the audience sees and then this over here is the next slide coming up so when I advance to the next slide this will move over to this section here and we'll see the next light after that just like this right here so you can see that the end of the show is the next slide indicated by the black box the the with the speaker notes this is really useful go ahead and let's have the speaker notes enabled here I don't know if I have any speaker notes here okay, perfect so I don't have any on this one go ahead and let's go back in the show a little bit let's reverse back. Okay, perfect. So yeah this is this is great right here. So again this is what I would see as the presenter. This is not what the audience would see, but I would have my current slide my next slide and I would also have my speaker notes here speaker notes are great when you're building your slides, it allows you to put talking points into your speaker knows so for example, I know that when I get to the slide I want to remind you that this is bonus material and it's a quick keyboard shortcut quick quick reference card say that five times fast I can't say it once um and then also other quick reference cards are available in this class they are in other classes okay so these are the talking points that I have for this slide if we go let's go back one more slide ok, so for this one here specifically on a new perspective this is the point that I was trying to make here if we go back let's just kind of run through a couple of these I just keep going case so that's that's another one keep going and I have to be careful because sometimes I have things down here maybe I don't want you to see um they usually are pretty safe though but okay so that that's a good one right there we'll just stop one now so this is some information here I said it before they could remember who was that was doing this site I actually have the notes down here but I didn't I didn't take the time to read that on my presented display but I have those notes down here so so I have access to that so speaker notes are really, really convenient in that way there are when it comes to present a display, there are other options. Of course you could yeah, let's go ahead and and we'll leave it right there. So here, for example, we can either turn the current slide on or off, so maybe we don't want to see on the presenter display what the current slide is. We just want to see what the next one is because we know it's up on the big screen behind us. We can talk about on and off for the next slide on and off presenter notes um, we can actually turn on the ready to advance indicator, so this one puts a green bar or red bar across the top. If I have a bill that takes five seconds, I can actually see on miami are on my presented displayed on the floor that that build is in motion because the bars red. So this is great for live presentations as the bar changes from red to green that's my visual indicator that that build has finished and I can actually, you know, either advance or continue talking about what it is I'm talking about, but that's a clean visual indicator if we go ahead and turn on the clock and timer, so that gives us our current time uh, perfect, thank you, and as you can see, we can move these around to, um the man behind the curtain is helping me out with this, which is awesome so we can turn on or off the clock or timer the clock is really nice because it gives us the current time and the timer is really good because if we if we have a specific finite amount of time that we have to give this presentation for example, this courses are this part of the class is ninety minutes I'll go ahead and set that time or going click remaining and we'll change that to ninety minutes we'll just double click on that and change it to ninety and we'll hit ok let's not hit ok but we'll hit ok at that point and the ninety minute countdown timer will will show up for us so that's really it's a nice visual reminder so let's let's go back to the speaker knows let's go ahead and switch back to my computer here. Perfect! Thank you so the way that we get to our speaker no, what is we go to view and then show I'm sorry I called speaker knows but presenter knows show presenter notes and then now you'll see that we can add this is a quick overview of the class, okay, so just some some random notes, so add those notes and we could actually see let me zoom in so you can see this but we can see very quickly and very visually that this specific slide has some speaker knows associated with it by this part of the icon right here, this one here, by the way visually indicates that there's some build on that slide so that's what that means. And if there's a blue triangle here which we saw earlier in some of the other ones, that would indicate that there is a transition from slide to slide in that so all these visual cues will help us to design and deliver our our our presentation. So if I go ahead and play this one hi, welcome to my slideshow today way have are recording still in there. So let me clear that out real fast. So we'll go to play and clear recording. And yes, I'm sure and let's see, because this one is being extended it's not necessarily going to work. Um sorry, mirrored. So what? What I see here is what you see on the screen, but typically you have your primary displaying your secondary display and your and you can switch it back and forth. In fact, let's bring up the other, the other computer for a second, the presenter computer perfect and let's go ahead and switch the displays one more time let's, reverse those so if you remember in the keep keyboard shortcut quick reference guide, I talked about one of these buttons allowing us to flip flop the presenter display in the primary display that that letter is the ex keys. We if we had the ex key, will flip flop those the other option is up here on the on the top, right. The next button in. Yeah, if we click that one right there, that will also switch the displays. So now this is our main display, and we've got our presented display on the floor here. So, um, with regards to speaker knows if we switch back over to my laptop one of the options in exporting this out when we looked at the pdf export options, this is also the case with printing the slides. This is all one in the same. At this point, we can choose to print this or export this out in a way that actually includes speaker notes. So if we choose this option here to include presenter notes, this will actually, you can see the preview here that will actually include the presenter knows here is well, so if you have a team of people that it's helping you to try and give a good presentation like we have here, creative, live right now, there's a team of people that's supporting me and doing what I'm doing, if I want them to have in front of them, a cheat sheet of what the slides are and what I'll be talking about. This would be a great way to export these slides out, and they can see what I'm looking at, what I'm talking about as well as the talking points that I should be hitting. So in the event that I do forget something, they can radio into somebody and say, hey, kevin, you forgot to talk about this. Not that that would ever happen with me. Never no, never ever so speaker notes are really, really cool. The presenter display is really is a really nice tool again. That's, great for live presentations. Um, if your end result is to, uh, to work with keynote for exporting, you know it might not be useful for you. But for a lot of people, use it for what it's designed for primarily, then that's, a great, great tool to get to know.