Presentations With Adobe Acrobat 9

Adobe just released the latest version of Acrobat, and the Pro Extended version I’m trial-ing incorporates a scaled-down version of Adobe Presenter.  If I remember correctly, Adobe bought a company that did photo-story type presentations, but darn if I can remember what the name of that product was.  In any case, I think it became this new Adobe Presenter feature in Acrobat.

I have used Acrobat Professional 8 before to create PDF slideshows.  You can save PowerPoint slides as a PDF, then add some basic wipe/fade transitions and set the PDF to open in full-screen mode – just like a slideshow.

This time around, I created a special PDF presentation of my “Three Rules for Great Presentations” using the new version of the software, and it’s pretty darn nifty.  Adobe Presenter installs as a toolbar in PowerPoint.  You can then record audio for slides, insert Flash animations and video, and then output the whole thing into a PDF file. Creating these types of PDF presentations would be perfect for posting to a conference (or your own) website to give virtual viewers a more engaging experience.

Unfortunately, viewing these Presenter files requires the latest version of Acrobat Reader (Version 9), which will be a drag until it is widely adopted.  But still, it’s got some “sizzle,” and is an interesting alternative to the the common static slide deck or regular PDF.

Three Rules for Great Presentations (Presenter Format PDF)

If you don’t have Reader 9 yet, you can see what the PDF looks like by visiting the site for Adobe Presenter 7.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Best,

Lee

Breaking the “Rules” of Displaying Tables

In my previous post I gave you some general rules of thumb for tables and spreadsheets, especially those with lots of rows and columns.  In general, put those large tables and spreadsheets into paper handouts that you give to the audience either at the appropriate point in your presentation, or at the end. Every once in a while, though, there are situations when presenting data in table format on a slide can actually work, and work well. 

A few weeks ago, my colleagues and I assembled for a workshop on improving faculty-librarian collaboration.  This workshop was the culmination of extensive data collection and analysis, including an environmental scan, a librarian survey, and focus groups with students and faculty.  My colleague was faced with the same dilemma that many of you face: how do I show and explain this data to my audience?

To solve her problem, she “broke” the rule on tables in slides, and by using only one slide, my colleague walked us through all of the data that their task force had collected in an efficient and thought-provoking thirty-minute discussion.  Below is the slide she used (click for a larger image):

Page after page of survey results and focus group data are neatly and graphically summarized in the table above.  Even without the benefit of my colleague’s spoken words, just by looking at the table you can easily see that while we (as librarians) think blogs and wikis are great communication tools, students don’t like them and faculty don’t even know what they are.  Another conclusion you might draw is that faculty like email messages from the library but students don’t.*

Now, don’t be discouraged and think to yourself: “I could never do that,”  because you can – it just might take some practice.  Below is the original slide my colleague created (click for a larger image):

Compare this image with the one above and notice the evolution of the slide.  She started out with text snippets taken from the focus group data, then set about to transform those into simple graphics (see above). Could you do the same with your own survey or focus-group data?  Sure!

Taking things a bit further, I “tweaked” the final slide and came up with this (click for a larger image):

Some of the changes I made include:

1. Added some shading to the first column to separate it from the others.
2. Centered the images in each cell of the table (and even then, PowerPoint does wonky things to table cells).
3. Adjusted some of the graphics (size, whitespace within the cell, etc.)
4. Added a sentence headline to improve overall comprehension (i.e., “What’s the point of this slide?)

So the next time you have a presentation that involves data, consider this method and see if it might work for you – it certainly did for my colleague!

Peace out,

Lee

*The surveys and focus groups were conducted at the University of Houston Libraries and thus the results can only be generalized (with caution) to the UH community and not university faculty or students in general.

**Thanks to my colleague, Irene Ke, for sharing her slides with me (and with you)!