Election 2004: Choose your presentation direction
By Kevin Lerner, Exec. Director of The Presentation Team

As we Americans freely choose the future direction of our country, presenters around the world are prisoners of the future direction of their PowerPoint presentation. Without the freedom to control their presentation on the fly, they are missing out on the digital world's great tool of democracy: Interactivity. With a few clicks, it's easy to create an interactive presentation that can put you more in command, helping you to better connect with your audience.

There are two types of interactive presentations. One that you control, and the other that your audience controls.

SELF-CONTROLLED
Most people simply create their presentation and run through it start to finish. And in most cases, this is perfectly adequate. But there may be times when you want to jump to various slides in your presentation, or skip past certain sections. That's where PowerPoint's hyperlinks come in handy.

Like a main menu on a DVD, you can create a list/menu of slides (like a high-level outline) that you can select at random. To do this in PowerPoint, simply draw a clear (no fill/no border) box on top of each item on the list and select "Insert...Hyperlink...to an existing place in the document". Or simply, Control-K.

Another great use for a hyperlinked slide is to show a "detail slide". For example, suppose you're showing a high-level organizational chart on screen, and somebody in the audience asks about the background or qualifications of the new top level executive. You can simply point with your mouse to that executive's specific box on screen, and click (the on-screen pointer will turn to a finger indicating it's a hyperlink) and then you'll jump to that specific detail slide. When you're done with the detail, the next click will bring you back to the original org chart.

In PowerPoint, you can either select the option of "show and return" to bring it back to the original slide, or create another clear box to hyperlink back to that previous slide.

Obviously, presentations with hyperlinks take more time and preparation to develop. But it's a good way to have all your bases covered for a big presentation, where you're not sure what topics will be discussed. As long as you're material is included and hyperlinked, you'll come out looking like a well-prepared hero.

It's best to put all your hyperlinked detail slides at the end of your presentation so they don't appear in the main presentation, sort of like an appendix of a book.

Hyperlinks can even be added to the master slide. In many presentations I create, I like to have our client's logo at the corner of the slide master double as a hyperlink to the main menu or intro/agenda/overview slide.

Another great feature of PowerPoint is the ability to randomly jump to any slide in screen-show mode simply by entering that slide's page number on the keyboard (followed by enter).

AUDIENCE CONTROLLED

New technology allows audiences to get more involved in presentations, creating a more involved experience. The benefits of an audience controlled interactive presentation include:

• Adds Excitement & Fun
• Improves Retention & Attentiveness
• Offers Real-time Feedback for Immediate Action
• Involves All Participants
• Speeds-Up Decision-Making

Option Technologies is one company who has created compact "remote controls." These remotes are lightweight, fun to use, and often make a presentation more effective. Consider buying or renting a set of these remotes for your next group presentation...and watch your interest level skyrocket.

So the next time you're called on to present, don't be a prisoner of linear presentations. Put the power of digital democracy to work, and use interactivity to chart a direction that you and your audience can control!

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