Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [30]
When you use animation in your presentation, avoid the traveling options, such as Fly, Peek, Ascend, and Descend, each of which blurs the words as they enter. Instead, use the Wipe option in both Custom Animation and Slide Transition; it brings on the words the way we are accustomed to reading them in print.
Then think about how your audiences react to your graphics. Make it easy for them, and they will make it easy for you.
38. Computer Animation: Three Simple Rules
We’ve all been in the audiences of far too many presentations that unleash all the bells and the whistles of PowerPoint animation with a frenetic, pyrotechnic display that challenges a Fourth of July celebration or a night at Disneyland.
That such excess happens is no surprise. The many options in the pull-down menus and ribbons of PowerPoint animation are as fascinating as are all the many joystick and button options on the keyboard or controller of a computer action game. Slide Transition alone has 58 effects grouped into 5 categories, with 3 speed options for each. They cry out, “Try me!”
Uncontrolled, they can cause the loss of the game or the presentation.
The obvious solution is to exercise restraint, but that is negative advice. What to do instead? Three simple, overarching rules will bring your presentation to life (after all, that is the definition of animation) and, more important, bring clarity, if not tranquility, to your audiences.
Rule One: Make the default direction of your animation left to right. Text in Western languages is printed from left to right. This simple fact drives how humans perceive visual stimuli. When your audience sees images move from left to right, it will feel natural and pleasing to their eyes—and make them more receptive to you and your message.
Rule Two: Use motion to express the action in your message. If you want to show rising revenues, have your animation move from the bottom up; if you want to show declining costs, have your animation move from the top down. If you want to send a negative message (say, about your competition), reverse direction and move your images right to left.
Rule Three: Allow your audience to absorb your animation. The sensitive optic nerves in your audience’s eyes cause them to react involuntarily to light and motion. Therefore, the instant your animation starts, all their attention suddenly shifts to the screen and away from you. Because they are so focused on the animation, they don’t hear anything you’re saying, nor do they see what you’re doing. Therefore, whenever you introduce animation, stop speaking, turn to the screen, and allow the animation to complete its full course of action.
Think of these three rules as using animation to tell your story just as a Walt Disney movie does, but leave the fireworks to Disneyland.
39. PowerPoint and the Military: Sometimes More Is More
A New York Times article by Elisabeth Bumiller, titled, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” showed a dense, complicated PowerPoint slide that the Pentagon used in a presentation to describe the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan. The slide, a swirl of overlapping lines, arrows, words, and colors, resembling a bowl of spaghetti, proceeded to make its viral way around the Internet as yet another example of the abuses of PowerPoint, particularly by the military.F39.1
Richard Engel, the NBC News chief foreign correspondent, was the first to publish the slide on his blog, where he described two diametrically different reactions to the slide from the military itself:
For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war—from media bias to ethnic/tribal rivalries—are interconnected and must be taken into consideration .... But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security.F39.2
Another reaction came from General Stanley A. McChrystal, the then—and since summarily deposed—leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. According