How do I choose the most appropriate presentation tool?

Grant Leboff: Simon, we talked about presentations. What are some of the tools that people can use, because I think everybody always been I think presentation seeks PowerPoint straightaway which obviously is clearly a tool one can use, but what are perhaps some of the other ones that you would advice people to go and have a look at and maybe utilize?

Simon Morton:  We’ve never had it so good as presenters. Honestly, we are in a purple patch in terms of the tools that we’ve got available to us and it’s one of the challenges as well. There’s always a new PowerPoint killer or presentation killer App out there being introduced into the marketplace. To ensure that you don’t become confused and dizzy by all of this new technology being thrown at you, we try and ask people to break their audience engagements; so their presentation types into three different types, the formal presentation, an interactive presentation and an informal presentation.

The formal stuff is what you would expect, so PowerPoint is great when used properly. There’s a tool called Prezi [https://prezi.com]  which is a really interesting technology that kind of flies around a canvas. It’s a very different type of engagement to PowerPoint. It’s great when used properly, but like PowerPoint it’s darn awful when it’s used badly as well, so you have to use that carefully but it’s very good for those formal engagements.

Video is great. These are different presentation engagement types. When you get to the interactive type of presentation, well actually it’s less of a one way broadcast. It’s more of a conversation. We’ve now got tools that allow us to have an interactive presentation so we can be chatting and you’ll ask a question and like I said, it’s a bit like and then a click, and I can go then to a case study that helps me share some relevant information to my audience. You tend to do that to a smaller group of people but PowerPoint can be a great interactive tool.

Anybody presenting on a tablet knows how wonderfully interactive tablet technology can be and whiteboarding as well. We see more and more people wanting to learn how to take their story and then in the absence of any technology, stand with a whiteboard and actually draw out their story using strong visuals, strong diagrammatic explanations of their story but just using nothing but a whiteboard and a bunch of pens and that’s very, very powerful, because what’s remarkable is if you can do that, if you can simplify your story to a visual that you can draw on a whiteboard, your audience certainly feel that they have license to stand up and say, “What if you could do that? That would be wonderful.”

The whole thing becomes very interactive. It’s almost a community working on that. Then you take that all the way through to the informal, where I’ve seen people deliver some fantastic presentations using mobile phones. If you’ve got an iPhone you can either use PDF, you could use Keynote which is an Apple’s version of PowerPoint. They’re all good valid presentation tools for an informal type of presentation. If we’re just having a chat over coffee, it would be kind of weird if you then suddenly whipped out a laptop and started talking at me as if we were at a conference.

But if you can share your ideas on a scrap of paper or say it’s kind of like this and show me on your phone; brilliant. Really wonderful way of engaging. So we call that blended presenting which is actually, equip yourself with the same story and a bunch of tools that will allow you to engage your audience on their terms. You might set up to a meeting thinking it’s going to be very interactive and suddenly you … as has happened to me in the past, you’re then faced with a whole heap of people that are sat in a horseshoe and waiting for you to formally present to them. You’ve got to be able to shift your focus and shift tools that you use in line with your audience’s requirements and that’s really powerful.

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