By Robert Lane

A note to the reader

This article is NOT for the traditional PowerPoint user, someone satisfied with static, linear, sleep-inducing, bullet-point-filled, lecture-style slide shows. Rather, it is written for the growing number of you who are looking for a way of using PowerPoint that is strikingly flexible, interactive, and conversational.

Be forewarned that the concepts here may spark your imagination, causing you to completely rethink your definition of public speaking. We will be exploring a graphically interactive style of communication known as Relational Presentation, which is beginning to make profound changes in presentation paradigms. Along the way, we will be looking at what makes Relational Presentation possible, and at how you can use these concepts to improve your own speaking activities.

In this article

The traditional PowerPoint mindset

How Relational Presentation works

Getting started with creating a presentation network

The traditional PowerPoint mindset

You know the drill. A PowerPoint presentation is announced. You slouch a little lower in your seat, knowing all too well that the next hour will be filled with the usual monotonous barrage of slides, all looking alike and containing a seemingly endless succession of mind-numbing bullet points — if not, indeed, whole paragraphs of text. Doubtless the speaker will be locked into a rigid, canned slide order. There will be no point in attempting to interact or in asking questions. You will just have to endure it. Ten minutes into the presentation, you will no doubt be thinking about where to go for lunch.

Meanwhile, the speaker will advance ploddingly from slide to slide, half the time facing the screen and reading the text verbatim. You will finally be jarred out of your daydreams about forty-five minutes into the show, by the appearance of the familiar scared-rabbit look on the speaker's face when he realizes that he has only a quarter of his time left — with half of his slides still to cover. In the ensuing race against the clock, you will be dragged on a wild and bumpy ride through the remaining content, in a desperate attempt to reach those inevitable conclusion slides (which contain, of course, still more deadly lists of bullet points).

Argh! Yet another one-way, static, boring lecture. When at long last the presenter finishes, clicking forward to the "black slide of death," there will be an overwhelming feeling of relief in the room. Free at last!

Am I being facetious? Some of you aren't laughing. I see heads nodding, and some of you are saying, "I know that presenter." A few of you are saying, "That is my whole department!"

But suprise!

Almost immediately, however, you notice that this speaker is different. Instead of fifty slides, she evidently has hundreds or even thousands at her fingertips; and you slowly begin to realize that she seems able to show any slide at any time, at any point in the order. Her presentation is highly organized and sequential, yet remarkably flexible. If someone asks a question, she can say, "Let me show you something that might help," and instantly navigate to slides that provide the pertinent supporting materials. Sometimes she even invites the audience to help direct the presentation, by telling her what information they most want or need.

Even more surprisingly, her slides contain few if any bullet points. Bullet lists are almost entirely replaced by graphical elements — pictures, video, and helpful animations — that provide visual support for what she is saying, or by slides that contain no more than one or two key words each. And she seems to have no standard conclusion slides, yet she constantly and subtly reviews key ideas by revisiting previous slides from changing perspectives.

Genuinely engaged by her performance, you tend to lose track of the fact she is using PowerPoint at all, even while you are subconsciously absorbing (and retaining) the visuals that illustrate her points. Her conversational, storytelling style is particularly attractive. She clearly has the freedom to carry on a spontaneous conversation with her audience, both verbally and visually, all the while moving forward with the presentation.

If time is running out, she will selectively skip some slides — so smoothly that you won't even notice. Similarly, you never realize how much she is subtly customizing her subtopics along the way (and sometimes her adjustments are considerable ones), because she changes direction among her slides as easily as she changes subjects verbally.

In other words

For this presenter, PowerPoint no longer dictates the order and content of the message. It does not constrain the speaker, but serves her — exactly as it should have, all along.

So what is this presenter's secret?

She is using a visually interactive process known as Relational Presentation.

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How Relational Presentation works

You may be wondering how such a dynamic presentation is possible in PowerPoint. Actually, the process is remarkably straightforward. Rather than limiting yourself to a single large, linear slide show, you create a network of small, reusable shows.

I call these small shows presentation objects. Each presentation object is an entirely independent slide show, containing just a few closely interrelated slides. A presentation object differs importantly from a traditional custom show because it is available from anywhere in your presentation network, and not only from within one larger, linear slide show.

After you create these miniature shows, you use PowerPoint to hyperlink them together, building hierarchically organized structures called presentation networks. Borrowing basic navigation concepts from Web sites and relational databases, presentation networks provide you with the ability to rapidly find and display whatever content you need, whenever you need it.

With Relational Presentation, there is no such thing as "the next slide," because the next slide can be any slide in your presentation network. At each point in your presentation, all of your alternatives are still open. PowerPoint becomes an extension of your thought process, rather than the dictator of a rigidly fixed message. In subtle ways, you tailor the flow of topics to your listeners' needs — creating a dynamic, conversational interaction that is impossible to achieve in any other delivery style.

A Presentation Network may contain at least seven major components:

• Cover show  This entry-point slide show is at the top of your hierarchy. It contains only a single slide, and it serves a purpose similar to that of a book cover, or the splash page of a Web site. A cover show is like the single door that opens onto everything else in the presentation network. You always start and end with this slide, regardless of the target audience or the topic of the presentation. The cover show has several purposes, but primarily it is a link to the main switchboard (discussed next), and it usually features important branding imagery.

  

• Main switchboard  The main switchboard also contains only a single slide. It serves the same purpose as the home page of a Web site. From here, you can quickly access any other slide in the presentation network — even if there are thousands of them. You will notice that the Aspire Communications main switchboard (in the following illustration) looks a lot like our cover show (in the previous one). This is done to reinforce branding elements. Main switchboards can be simple, like the one shown here; but they can also be highly complex, with a hundred or more hyperlinks organized into categories for quick reference.

  

  Learn more about hyperlinks in PowerPoint, or get instructions for creating a hyperlink.

• Subswitchboards  Complex networks often contain many levels of nested subswitchboards. This powerful organizational device helps a presenter to locate any slide quickly and confidently. For example, a main switchboard might provide a link to a category named Projects, which is further divided into subcategories such as Past Projects, Current Projects, and Future Projects, each having its own subswitchboard. The following subswitchboard presents the many navigational styles available in Relational Presentation.

  

• Primary shows  Most relational presenters prefer to keep the core sections of their network linear. For example, a university professor might design a network of 40 parallel linear slide shows for a single course — one slide show for each class meeting during the term. This way, he can deliver the day's planned content in standard linear form, and yet still jump rapidly to supporting materials at any time. Such linear units in a presentation network are referred to as primary shows, and they are typically organized according to subject.
• Internal and external navigation elements  At Aspire, we use approximately 30 different styles of navigation — both to link individual slides together, and to link individual slides to entire shows. Most navigation elements are hyperlinks that are displayed either as AutoShapes or as picture thumbnails. In the following illustration, you see an example of what we call animated navigation. The picture thumbnails only become visible when you choose to fade them into view. At that point, you need only click any thumbnail to access its linked content. Notice that in this case the thumbnails are actually tiny screen shots, which provide the presenter with a realistic preview of the linked material. It is this sort of flexible navigation that gives Relational Presentation its real power.

  

• Resources switchboard  A resources switchboard is a slide that lets you access a categorized collection of miscellaneous supporting content: pictures, video clips, quotes, Web links, and anything else that you might find useful during a presentation. Usually, you make the resources switchboard available from every slide in your presentation network — which means that you are never more than a click away from your whole collection of supporting materials.
• Conclusion section  This section, too, is usually available from every slide in the network, allowing you to jump to whichever concluding materials you want, whenever you want them (a handy arrangement when time is running out). Note, though, that a conclusion section in Relational Presentation is not necessarily the same thing as a traditional set of conclusion slides. A conclusion section might contain a wide variety of conclusion options, so that you can always choose the most appropriate option for the actual circumstances in which you find yourself. (For example, sometimes only a serious conclusion will be really effective, but in other circumstances a humorous windup might delight both you and your audience. It is always nice to have the choice.)

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Getting started creating a presentation network

The following suggestions will help you to begin applying Relational Presentation techniques in your own presentations. (There is a much more detailed description of this process in the free Aspire Communciations Guide to Relational Presentation. You'll find instructions for requesting the Guide at the end of this article.)

• Needs analysis  Your ultimate goal is to identify each piece of visual and multimedia content that you might ever want to use in the course of presenting your points, illustrating your concepts, persuading your listeners and assuaging their doubts, and so forth. How many scenarios of interactions with your audiences can you foresee? For each scenario, you want to have an effective slide somewhere in your presentation network.
• Organization  Before you begin to actually build your network, create a map of how you intend to organize it. Use information architecture techniques (such as card sorting and concept mapping) to organize your content into a hierarchical network that makes sense to you, and that is easy for you to remember. (Some people lay out index cards for this task, using one index card to represent each slide.) As your map takes shape, keep double-checking its logic. For each question that someone might ask, for each situation and issue that might arise, will you be able to rapidly locate the appropriate slide, based on its placement in the map? It is much easier to make design changes now, during the planning phase, than it will be after your presentation network is actually built.

  Learn more about information architecture and creating a navigation structure.

• Current content analysis  Once you know the whole body of content that you need, and how you want to organize it, you can begin to identify which of that content already exists and which you must create. Also, take a good hard look at your existing slides. Do any of them represent more than one main idea? It is nearly always best to divide such slides into multiple slides, one slide for each main idea. Similarly, are there bullet points on a slide? Again, divide them up: one bullet per slide. Is there a process illustrated by an animation? Break the process down: one step per slide. Keep in mind that when you use your presentation network, you will often want to access one idea — and one idea only — at a time. So make "one idea per slide" your overall aim.
• Construction  During both the planning process and the actual construction, keep your organization modular and reusable. If a core section of the network requires 60 slides, consider creating several smaller shows, each containing from 1 to 4 of those 60, and then linking the smaller shows together by using navigation elements and switchboards. Dividing a long primary show into smaller modules provides several advantages, allowing you to:
  • Deliver the same content, but vary the order (priority) of individual components at any time.
  • Easily return to any component for review at any point during a presentation. (This is how I avoid those nasty conclusion slides.)
  • Skip any component, or add any desired external content, at will.
  • End gracefully at any time, by moving to any of your conclusion sections.
  • Quickly access any module of your content whenever it would be of use. (Once content is created, a Relational Presentation designer almost never throws any of it away.)

You can learn more about Relational Presentation by watching the Flash movie demonstration at the Aspire Communications Web site. To request our free Guide to Relational Presentation, send e-mail to Aspire Communications, or write to us at:

     Aspire Communications
     902 N 4th Avenue
     Tucson, AZ     85705
     Attn: Margaret

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About the author

Robert Lane is president of Aspire Communications, a company specializing in visually interactive presentation techniques.