A virtual presentation skills workshop with Rick Altman
Apr 19-20, 2023
8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 5:00pm CET
Give him just a few hours...
…and get a fresh perspective on how to craft and deliver an excellent presentation
Join Rick Altman for his virtual workshop and never look at a presentation project the same way again. Whether you are the presentation designer, the content manager, the PowerPoint user, the presenter, or likely some combination of all, these seminars will open your eyes to entirely new strategies and techniques to help you do your job better, faster, and with more satisfaction. Join us and you will find:
- Practical and relevant advice for day-to-day slide creators
- Cutting-edge PowerPoint techniques to maximize productivity
- Clear, lucid advice on slide design for those who are not professional designers
- Strategies and tactics for crafting better messages and for speaking before audiences, both in-person and virtual
Complete Schedule
Both days begin at 8:00am PT.
Drill down for detailed descriptions of each hour and video previews of each topic covered.
Wed, Apr 19
Hour 1: Survival Skills for the Non-Designer
You do not need to be a professional designer to create clean effective slides. You just need to understand what your audience members want and how they want to receive information. In this hour, we’ll show you how to deliver that.
- Identify the three tenets of good presentations
- Accommodate clean imagery and heavy data
- Articulate your core beliefs about effective presentation strategy
Preview of workshop:
Hour 2: Translating Design into PowerPoint
You know how to create great one-off slides. Now what?? In the first hour, you will have seen our best argument for clean, minimalist design. How can you pursue that and make proper use of your company’s PowerPoint template, which seems to imprison you to a bunch of bullet points? This hour will help you better see how your clean and flexible slide designs can be accommodated within PowerPoint’s templating system.
- The power, and the danger, of Reset
- The right time and the wrong time to use the standard layout
- How to blend flexibility and constraint
Hour 3: Animation Without Embarrassment
When you think of animation, do you think of flying bullets and spiraling headlines? Many people do, unfortunately, and so animation suffers a bad reputation. In fact, one of your best opportunities to shine as a content creator and presenter is through smart, effective, and appropriate use of animation and in this hour, we’ll explore exactly what that means.
- The power of movement, for better or for worse
- When in doubt, use Wipe and Fade
- Sequencing data chunks for better understanding
- Creating trust with your audience
Hour 4: Intelligent Presentations
Most of us create our presentations the way we live our lives: we go from point A to B and to C. That doesn’t really work in the real world and fortunately, there is a collection of under-utilized PowerPoint features that address this. This hour is all about the art and the science of crafting more interactive and flexible presentations.
- Basic hyperlinking
- Actions, Triggers, and Inserted Objects
- Calling other decks from your current one
- Anticipating and accommodating questions and requests
Thu, Apr 20
Office Hours
Drop in the next day with any and all of your questions and challenges. Bring slides with you, bring follow-up from the previous day, or just bring your curiosity.
We’ll devote an entire two hours to topics that you want to have addressed.
Six hours of
expert instruction
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Four robust topics on Day One, professionally paced and delivered by one of the foremost experts in presentation design, content creation, and delivery
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Highly interactive, lots of discussion and Q&A, and two hours of flexible Q&A on Day Two
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Attendance limited to 75
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Access to a private website full of finished work, examples, and practice files
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Complete set of professionally formatted PDF handouts to complement the seminars
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Email follow-up with the seminar leader on any of the topics covered
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Eligibility to win one of three Logitech Spotlight Remotes ($125 value)
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Complimentary electronic copy of Rick Altman's bestselling book Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck.
CANCELLATIONS: 80% refund given if cancellation is received via email more than 14 days before event; 40% refund if between 3 and 14 days before event; no refund within 3 days of event. Substitutions always welcome.
Most PowerPoint users are undertrained and it’s not their fault. The software is so easy, you can start creating slides in about 15 minutes. That’s a bug, not a feature.”
You do not need to be a professional graphic designer to create professional-looking slides. You just need to tune into how your audience wants to receive information. And resist the temptation to vomit text all over your slides.”
It’s one thing to create attractive slides and it’s another thing to train PowerPoint to help you do it. If you have both skills, you’re in 98 percentile territory.”
Wednesday, Apr 19
8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 5:00pm CET
- Professionally crafted
- Meticulously paced
- Passionately delivered
- Aggressively priced
Any industry, any position
Training, sales, administrative, human resources, education, leadership, middle management, executive — if you are creating presentation content, you can probably be doing it better, and we will provide insight into the three main tenets of presentation crafting:
Message and design
Most people handle messaging backward: they focus on their own virtues without showing regard for the audience’s interests and concerns. And few who come to presentation do so from a background in the arts. Yet we are asked to design presentations, often on a daily basis.
PowerPoint technique
Truly advanced PowerPoint users are few and far between, but not because the program is exceptionally difficult; just the opposite. The software is so easy to start using, not many go below the surface to learn the program’s finer points. You will get to do that at this workshop.
Delivery
You do not have to have been born to speak in public in order to become better at it. There are tangible skills and physical behaviors you can employ to help you become more comfortable before an audience.
Should you attend?
This virtual workshop is for those who owe their professional livelihoods to the design, creation, and/or delivery of presentation material, both in person and virtual. These seminars are for you if…
- You struggle with devising the best way to define your message
- You suspect there is a more efficient way to design your slide decks
- You’re not sure how to balance message with the data you need to provide
- The mechanics of PowerPoint frustrate you and its finer points elude you
- The specter of delivering a presentation to any sort of audience sets you on edge
If you are in any of these categories, you will find enormous value in joining us Apr 19-20. This four-hour workshop (plus two-hour QA the following day) is your unique opportunity to become extraordinary in your presentation work. (Attendance limited to 75.)
These seminars are conducted presentation-style — meticulously prepared and professionally paced so users of all levels can follow. While we recognize the limitations of the virtual medium, we will reach deep into our well of experience on virtual audience engagement to make sure you feel acknowledged, included, and heard.
Patrons are encouraged to send files to us ahead of time so that Rick might include them in our curriculum as a makeover or a point of discussion. That type of work is often billed in the high-three and low-four figures, but any slide makeovers performed at this workshop are at no extra charge.
Takeaways
Here is what you will learn and be able to implement right away:
- The simple principles of slide design that all content creators can adopt, even if they have no background in the arts.
- The incredible power of motion and animation and the important responsibility it holds for the presenter.
- How to use PowerPoint’s tools to define, distinguish, and highlight the important points presenters need to make.
- The power of templates and layouts and the clean and simple ways that you can leverage them.
- Why many well-intentioned presenters do not connect with their audience and what they can do to solve this.
- How the way that many companies tell their story in a presentation might be the exact wrong way to do it.
- The commands and program shortcuts that truly do save time and effort.
- The specific tactics and behaviors that all presenters can employ, even if they have no natural affinity for speaking in public.
- How to resist the eye candy and silly toys that are responsible for Death by PowerPoint millions of times each day.
Rick Altman
Rick has been hired by hundreds, listened to by tens of thousands, and read by millions, all of whom seek better results with presentation content and delivery. An early adopter of virtual learning, he has been leading virtual workshops for nearly 10 years. He hosts the internationally acclaimed Presentation Summit, largely responsible for the global community of presentation professionals that thrives today.
An avid sportsman, he was not a good enough tennis player to play on the professional tour. All of this was his Plan B.
Wednesday, Apr 19
8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 5:00pm CET
- Professionally crafted
- Meticulously paced
- Passionately delivered
- Aggressively priced