The Presentation Summit enjoys a reputation as one of the warmest in-person conferences ever and it took a global pandemic to force the 2020 retooling as a virtual conference. But the bright side of this is obvious: the Summit will be beamed to any device that is connected to the Internet. Our keynotes, roundtables, and live seminars all included the authoritative, practical, and inspiring content that has distinguished the conference since its inception.

Indeed, the Presentation Summit has enjoyed a 17-year heritage as one of the most informative, welcoming, and inclusive conferences you will ever find, whether in person or online. It features live presentations, technical support, third-party technology and services, and lots of networking.

People attend in order to learn how to become better content creators, better presentation designers, better storytellers, better presenters, and better users of PowerPoint and other software. They leave with a much broader and deeper understanding of the principles and best practices for presentation design, creation, and delivery.

We do wish that we could all be together in one place, but we believe we provided the next best thing. This won’t just be a collection of Zoom webinars strung together; as the standard bearers of best practices in the presentation industry, we set out to show you just how engaging, how interactive, and how warm a virtual event can be, when done right. We have been creating community among presentation professionals since 2003 and we’re not going to let some crummy virus keep us from continuing this mission.

It might not be terribly helpful to simply answer that this conference is for everyone involved in business pursuits, although it would be accurate, because if you are in business today, you need to present yourself and your organization in the best possible light. Let’s categorize:

It’s true, PowerPoint is not difficult to pick up and begin creating slides. Our host’s daughters began creating slides when they were each 8, and we all know people who installed it and immediately began creating slides in advance of an upcoming presentation they had to give. It is probably the easiest program in the Office suite to learn.

This is the bad news, not the good news.

This is why the risk is high with PowerPoint. This is why Death by PowerPoint is in everyone’s lexicon. With other creative apps, such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Access, potential users know that it is too difficult to develop proficiency without help. But inexperienced PowerPoint users can already be on their fifth not-so-attractive slide within 15 minutes of breaking the seal. And PowerPoint presentations are rarely created for private use — they are made to be shared with others. That means that an entire company’s reputation goes along for the ride when an inexperienced user begins creating and delivering presentations.

As a virtual conference, the cost to attend will be cut by a factor of about six—expert instruction on presentation and PowerPoint will never be more accessible than it is this year.

When we debuted this conference in 2003, presentation skills were barely on anyone’s radar. Companies were content to invest in traditional advertising and branding initiatives, secure in a belief that PowerPoint was an easy skill to pick up.

Everything has changed.

If you have long wondered about the Summit but didn’t have the funds to attend, this is your year. And if you need help convincing your boss of the value of the Presentation Summit, here you go…

The end users who join us at the Presentation Summit will not have to sit through keynote addresses about sales forecasts, industry trends, or document object models. Instead, you will be watching the true experts in the presentation community. You will be watching the most talented presentation experts showcase their talents and speak on dozens of salient topics:

As we said above, the Presentation Summit is independently owned and operated. The host, Rick Altman, is a computer journalist of over 30 years with a noted lack of shyness for offering opinion and commentary. So while many trade show events have as their primary purpose the selling of goods, services, and technology, our primary purpose is the teaching of them.

Trade shows offer carefully-staged demos in which the software always looks terrific; our presenters are there to show you what to do when the software doesn’t look so terrific. If a feature is awesome, we take delight in showing you. And if a feature doesn’t work properly, we take seriously our responsibility to tell you so, and more importantly, to show you the way around it.

Jamie Garroch on the open and direct dialogue that the conference promotes.

Definitely not. We design the Summit for those who use the software regularly, or expect to do so, but we make no assumptions about your level of expertise. We offer two concurrent seminars and workshops, and there will always be a seminar taking place designed for beginning and/or intermediate users, or else there will be instructors you can ping in the Help Center dedicated to working with new users on fundamentals and basics. While not staffing the Help Center 24 x 7 any longer, our team of experts span about a dozen time zones and are not far away should you want to reach out to them.

So we are by no means a conference just for experts, although you’ll surely meet your share of them there and your career is likely to be enhanced by the relationships you’ll be able to cultivate with them. We think of ourselves as a conference for earnest users, for those who have made a significant commitment to the presentation industry.

Microsoft is represented by its MVP (Most Valued Professionals) team — a robust group of experts whose job it is to help the community better understand the software. They lead many of our seminars, they staff our Help Center, and in most cases, they are life-long friends of the user community.

The Presentation Summit is not a trade show, but it features one. The Summit qualifies up to a dozen third-party vendors to exhibit their goods and services. Normally, the Summit Expo is held on Day Two of the conference; as a virtual event, our partners will be available all four days for you to get product demos and have live keyboard, voice, or video chats. While the conference is over, the platform remains completely intact and you can visit any one of the exhibit booths in our virtual Expo Hall.

This is the question we are asked the most. We think that the Presentation Summit offers the best of all worlds, as we provide both hands-on and hands-off components. The formal seminars are presentation style, with full and interactive Q&A chat available.

The hands-on component features our renowned Help Center, available by appointment throughout the fall. The Help Center has a full complement of modern virtual tools at the ready: chat, video, screen sharing, and file upload.

Got an hour? The list reads like a who’s who of presentation professionals and PowerPoint experts. We combine the following groups of people to form our team:

• The true luminary and transcendent figures in the presentation industry, such as Garr Reynolds and designers from Duarte.
• Members of Microsoft’s Most Valued Professional (MVP) team of volunteers who assist users from around the world.
• Technical specialists who have developed international acclaim for their books, tutorials, training expertise, and perspective on presentation.
• Leaders of firms who create presentations for some of the largest organizations in the world.