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Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition Welcome to the Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance.

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How to Create a Dynamic Presentation in PowerPoint

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Adding a summary slide to the end of a PowerPoint presentation is a good idea. That way, you can review items with your audience at the end of the presentation. The presenter controls what items make it to the summary slide and can even use each item on the slide to quickly return to the previous slide(s).

How to create a summary slide in PowerPoint

How to hyperlink summary items, how to insert a zoom summary slide in microsoft 365.

If you’re using an older version of PowerPoint (pre-Microsoft 365), you can create a summary slide as follows:

1. Select all of the slides you want to summarize in Slide Sorter view. Click the first slide, then press and hold the Ctrl key as you click the remaining slides ( Figure A ).

2. Click Summary Slide on the Outlining toolbar.

3. PowerPoint inserts the summary slide before the slides, so be sure to drag it to the end of the presentation.

When you’re done with the presentation, you can click to the summary slide for a brief period of questions and answers, if appropriate.

SEE: Spice up your presentation by adding multiple flashing stars in a PowerPoint slide .

If that’s the end of things, then the simple summary slide is adequate. However, you might want to display the original slides again as you answer questions from the audience. If that’s a possibility, hyperlink the summary items to their respective slides as follows:

1. Select the item on the summary slide.

2. Choose Hyperlink from the Insert menu.

3. Click Place In This Document in the left pane.

4. Identify the slide ( Figure B ).

5. Click OK.

You don’t have to hyperlink the items on the summary slide, but doing so lets you return to the original slide(s) with a quick click. You’ll probably want to add hyperlinks on each slide for the return trip to the summary slide.

SEE: Here’s how to tone down a busy picture using Merge in Microsoft PowerPoint .

If you’re using Microsoft 365, adding a summary slide is easier. Thanks to the Zoom feature, PowerPoint will generate a summary slide, but how you use it differs a bit from the older summary slide. There are no hyperlinks per se; clicking a thumbnail will zoom in on the original slide.

Let’s create a summary slide that includes the same slides 1, 3 and 5 using the Zoom feature:

1. Click the Insert tab.

2. In the Links group, choose Summary Zoom from the Zoom dropdown ( Figure C ).

3. In the resulting pane, click slides 1, 3 and 5 ( Figure D ). If you select slides before starting this process, they will already be selected.

4. Click Insert.

Figure E shows the resulting summary slide, which includes thumbnails of slides 1, 3 and 5. PowerPoint displays the summary slide at the beginning of the presentation, so remember to drag it to the end.

How to use the Zoom summary slide

To use the summary slide, simply click any thumbnail to zoom in on that slide. You’re not actually moving to that slide. What happens with the next click is where sections matter.

In Figure C , you can see two dimmed options. Section Slide is dimmed because the current presentation has no sections. When you apply the Zoom summary slide, PowerPoint automatically divides your slides into sections. How you intend to use the summary slide will determine whether you keep the new sections. The Zoom feature works well with sections, but they’re not required.

SEE: Create a moving arrow in Microsoft PowerPoint to gently guide the presentation from point to point.

If the presentation has sections, the second click will zoom in on the section slide in that section. Each subsequent click will display the next slide in the section until you reach the end of the section. Once you’ve reached that point, a click will return the presentation to the summary slide.

If the presentation doesn’t use sections or the section has only one slide, the first click zooms in on the appropriate slide. The second click returns you to the summary slide.

How to remove a section

There’s no way to stop PowerPoint from adding sections once you implement the Zoom slide feature. Fortunately, removing the sections is easy:

1. Right-click the section item.

2. Choose Remove Section ( Figure F ).

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Dynamic Presentations – Benefits, Types, and Uses

Shahid shahmiri.

Dynamic presentations are more engaging than traditional presentations and can be used to deliver information, engage audiences and even entertain. Presentations are effective because they allow the presenter to connect with their audience in a way that’s natural and organic. By using video, audio, or animation elements within your slide deck you’re able to create an experience that engages people on an emotional level.

Dynamic presentations captivate, engage, & inspire audiences in today’s fast-paced world. Utilizing rich media & interactive elements, they enhance understanding & leave a lasting impact. Essential in business, education, & public speaking to empower messages & build connections.

Check out the sample presentation to inspire and engage your audience.

Dynamic presentations are becoming more popular among businesses because they help create an atmosphere of interactive activity that is lacking in traditional presentations – but how do they work? What are the benefits of using them? And how can you create and deliver them effectively? In this article, we’ll explore these questions and more as we dive into everything there is to know about creating presentations.

Different Types of Dynamic Presentations

Dynamic presentations are a great way to engage your audience. They can be used for a variety of purposes, from storytelling to persuading and everything in between.

Presentations can be broken down into the following categories:

• Visual Presentations – Utilising multimedia (images, videos ), charts, best fonts , or graphs that help tell your story.
• Interactive Presentations – Encouraging audience participation through activities such as polling, quizzes, and surveys.
• Storytelling Presentations – Crafting narratives that resonate emotionally with listeners.
• Persuasive Presentations – Convincing and influencing listeners to embrace new ideas or products you’re presenting on behalf of others.

Read more on Presentation Tips and Tricks .

Reasons for Reluctance to Deliver Dynamic Presentations

Dynamic presentations have proven to be effective in captivating audiences and leaving a lasting impact, yet some hesitate to embrace this approach due to various reasons. Let’s explore these common reluctances:

• Need for Specialised Skills: Many users believe that creating presentations requires specialized skills in graphics and animations.
• Cost and Time Concerns: Some users are concerned about the cost and time associated with creating dynamic presentations.
• Distribution and Sharing Challenges: Users may find it difficult to distribute dynamic presentations to their sales team or share them with customers.

Read more on What do you Need to Think About Before Designing the Presentation

2 Consequences of Not Using Dynamic Presentations:

• Loss of Audience Engagement: Without using dynamic presentation techniques, audiences may quickly lose interest and disengage during the presentation. The lack of interactive elements and compelling visuals can result in a passive, uninterested audience.
• Reduced Information Retention: Static presentations may lead to decreased information retention among listeners. Without dynamic elements to reinforce key points and engage multiple senses, the audience may struggle to remember and comprehend the presented information effectively.

Read more on When Creating a Presentation Based on Lots of Data, What Principle Should You Bear in Mind

How CustomShow Can Help Creating and Delivering Dynamic Presentations

CustomShow offers a range of powerful features that simplify the process of creating and delivering dynamic presentations, revolutionizing the way businesses engage with their audience. Here’s how CustomShow can elevate your presentation game:

• With CustomShow, creating sales and dynamic presentations becomes effortless. It empowers users to incorporate a wide array of rich media elements, including SVGs, images, videos, and animations, all through a simple drag-and-drop interface. There are no size restrictions, allowing for creative freedom without limitations.
• Seamless Collaboration and Sharing: As a cloud-based platform, CustomShow enables smooth collaboration among team members. Multiple users can work together in real-time, enhancing coordination and ensuring a cohesive final presentation. Moreover, sharing presentations with customers and sales teams becomes a breeze, fostering effective communication and engagement.
• CustomShow comes with a diverse collection of professionally designed presentation samples. Users can easily copy and paste these templates to build dynamic presentations that captivate their audience and drive sales. No specialized skills in graphics or animation are necessary, making it accessible to all team members.

By leveraging CustomShow’s intuitive interface, collaborative capabilities, and rich selection of samples, businesses can craft impactful and compelling presentations that leave a lasting impression on their audience.

Read more on How to Prepare a Sales-Focused Research Presentation

2 Key Benefits of Using CustomShow Dynamic Presentations

Dynamic presentations are engaging and capture the audience’s attention effectively. With CustomShow’s cutting-edge features, these presentations go beyond traditional slides to unlock several key benefits that can elevate your sales and communication strategies:

• Unmatched Memorability and Distinction: Dynamic presentations created with CustomShow stand out in a sea of mundane slides. By integrating captivating visuals, animations, and interactive elements, your content becomes more memorable, leaving a lasting impact on your audience. In a world saturated with generic presentations, CustomShow empowers you to differentiate your brand and outshine competitors in the minds of potential clients.
• Accelerated Sales Cycles and Conversion Rates: The self-explanatory nature of dynamic presentations equips your sales team with a persuasive and engaging tool. Rich media elements, such as videos and animations, effectively convey complex information, making it easier for customers to understand and relate to your offerings. With clarity and impact, your team will be able to close deals faster, reducing sales cycles and boosting conversion rates.

Check out the CustomShow Slide Templates to inspire and engage your audience: https://www.customshow.com/slide-templates/

Dynamic Presentations in Various Settings

The versatility of dynamic presentations makes them applicable and impactful across a wide range of settings. Whether in business, education, public speaking, or creative endeavors, adopting dynamic presentation techniques can elevate communication and leave a lasting impression on the audience.

• Business and Corporate Presentations: Driving sales , pitching ideas, and making impactful business proposals
• Educational Settings: Facilitating effective learning and knowledge dissemination
• Public Speaking and Keynote Addresses: Inspiring and motivating diverse audiences
• Virtual and Online Presentations: Leveraging technology to engage remote participants

Dynamic presentations are also beneficial for creative endeavors such as art exhibitions or performances where they allow you to showcase your work in a new way that engages your audience more effectively than static images alone would do.

Read more on the Best Practices from the Apple Event Presentation

We hope that you now have a better understanding of what a great presentation is, as well as its benefits. Take a look at how CustomShow could help in your sales situations.

Read more on How to Hand Over A Presentation to the Next Person

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How to give a dynamic presentation

• June 11, 2022

In an era of information overload and ever-shortening attention spans, more than the traditional static Presentation design services may be needed to engage and captivate your audience. This is where dynamic presentations come into play. A dynamic slide presentation is a versatile and engaging approach to conveying information beyond static slides’ confines. This article will explore what is dynamic presentation, its pros and cons, how to make it, and tips to improve your dynamic slide presentation skills.

Table of Contents

What is a Dynamic Presentation?

It is a multimedia-rich approach to presenting information, leveraging various media formats such as videos, animations, interactive elements, and real-time data integration. Contrasting traditional presentations with their stagnant slides, prioritize captivating, interactive, and enduring content delivery. Combining different multimedia components, they have the ability to effectively communicate complex ideas and leave a memorable impression on their audience.

Pros and Cons of Dynamic Presentations

Pros of dynamic presentations.

• Enhanced Engagement: Dynamic presentations captivate the audience by offering a multisensory experience that includes visuals, audio, and interactivity. This engagement can lead to better information retention and understanding.
• Compelling Storytelling: Dynamic slide Presentation enables compelling stories to be told. Utilizing animations, transitions, and multimedia elements lets you captivate your audience by narrating a compelling story.
• Data Visualization: Data and statistical intricacies can be cleared through dynamic visualizations, making them easier to understand.
• Interactivity: Incorporating interactive elements like quizzes, surveys, and clickable prototypes can engage your audience and encourage participation.
• Real-Time Updates: Dynamic presentations can be updated in real-time to reflect the latest information, ensuring your content remains relevant.

Cons of Dynamic Presentations

• Technical Challenges: Dynamic presentation can be more technically demanding than traditional slides. You may need to learn new software tools and techniques.
• Time-Consuming: Designing and developing dynamic presentations can be time-consuming, particularly if you want to create custom animations and interactive elements.
• Potential for Distraction: While multimedia elements can enhance engagement, they can also be distracting if overused or poorly implemented.
• Compatibility Issues: Ensuring your dynamic presentation works seamlessly on various devices and platforms may require extra effort.

What are the Key Factors in A Dynamic Presentation?

A dynamic presentation is engaging, interactive, and informative. It is the perfect way to engage your audience and ensure your message is communicated clearly. In order to give a dynamic presentation, there are a few key things they need you to pay attention to:

Keep it interactive

Keep your audience engaged by asking questions and inviting them to participate in discussions. This will help to make your presentation more memorable and enjoyable for everyone involved.

Use multimedia effectively

Use multimedia elements such as videos, images, and PowerPoint slides to enhance your presentation and keep people interested. However, don’t overdo it – too much multimedia can be distracting and overwhelming.

Be aware of your body language

Your body language plays a big role in how effective your presentation is. Make sure to stand up straight, make eye contact, and use your hands to gesture effectively.

Speak with confidence

It’s important to project confidence when giving a presentation. If you appear nervous or uncertain, your audience will be less likely to listen to what you have to say. Take a deep breath and relax – you’ve got this!

Practice, practice, practice!

Practice beforehand is the best way to feel confident and prepared when giving a presentation. Run through your presentation several times so that you know exactly what you’re going to say and do. This will help to ensure that everything goes smoothly on the day of your presentation.

Tips and tricks to enhance dynamic presentation

Pop your content.

A dynamic presentation is engaging, interactive, and informative. When creating content for a presentation, you want to make sure it’s dynamic. That means your presentation should be engaging, interactive, and informative. You don’t want your audience bored or lost in your material.

By showing empathy first, you can gain the trust of your audience, which will make them more receptive to your message. Then, make sure your content is interesting and relevant to your audience. No one wants to sit through a dry, dull, or irrelevant presentation. Keep your audience in mind as you’re developing your material.

It’s better to have numerous slides with one idea each than ten presentation slides with ten ideas on each. That’s too crowded, and your audience will likely be confused, especially if you’re showing charts or tables.​​

Questions are a great way to do this. Ask your audience questions throughout the presentation to ensure they’re following along and to gauge their understanding. You can also use polls or surveys to get your audience’s feedback or gauge their understanding.

And finally, don’t forget to use visuals!

Visual aids can help communicate your message more effectively in an effective presentation. They can also help break up your presentation and keep your audience engaged.

frame your story, empathize with your audience, and make it dynamic!

If you follow these tips, you’ll be well on your way to giving a dynamic presentation that will engage and inform your audience. Good luck!

We all know that humans are wired to listen to stories.

And what’s a dynamic presentation if not a story?

Your presentation should have a beginning, middle, and end. You should also have a clear introduction setting your story’s stage Your presentation should also be empathetic. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Plan your delivery

After you’ve set up an empathetic and authoritative introduction, it’s time to make your presentation interactive. Once you’ve got the framing down, it’s time to focus on your delivery. There are some main ways to deliver a talk: speeches, panels, and dynamic presentations.

After you’ve set up an empathetic and authoritative introduction, it’s time to make your presentation interactive. Once the framing is down, it’s time to focus on your delivery. Some main ways to deliver a talk are speeches, panels, and dynamic presentations. You can read it directly off a script or a teleprompter.

You can develop a set of key point’s that map out what you’re going to say in each section rather than scripting the whole thing word for word. Or you can memorize your talk, which entails rehearsing it to the point where you internalize every word—verbatim. Our best and most popular TED or TEDx talks are delivered as dynamic presentations. This is because dynamic presentations are engaging, interactive, and informative.

One of our most memorable speakers was Barack Obama, who gave a dynamic presentation at our TEDx event. He was able to engage with the audience, tell stories, and dynamically make his key point. he talked about his work as a community organizer in Chicago and how that experience shaped his views on politics. He also told stories about his daughters and his wife, which humanized him and made him relatable to the audience.

Dynamic presentation, you want to focus on your delivery and ensure you’re engaging with your audience. You can do this by using facial expressions and hand gestures, making eye contact, and speaking with conviction. You also want to vary your tone and pitch to keep your audience engaged.

And finally, you want to make sure you’re prepared. This means knowing your material inside and out so you can answer any questions.

Show them the solution in your presentation.

Many great presentations have a narrative structure that loosely follows a detective story. The speaker starts by presenting a problem and then describes the search for a solution. There’s an “aha” moment, and the audience’s perspective shifts meaningfully.

If a talk fails, it’s almost always because the speaker didn’t frame it correctly, misjudged the audience’s level of interest, or neglected to tell a story. Random pontification without narrative is always deeply unsatisfying, even if the topic is important. There’s no progression, and you don’t feel you’re learning.

By following these tips, you’ll be well on your way to giving a dynamic presentation that will engage and inform your audience. Good luck!

How to Make a Dynamic Presentation?

Define Your Message: Start by clearly defining the critical message or information you want to convey in your presentation.

Choose the Right Tools: Select presentation software that supports dynamic features, such as PowerPoint, Google Slides, Prezi, or specialized tools like Adobe After Effects.

Plan Multimedia Elements: Identify which multimedia elements (videos, animations, interactive elements) will enhance your message and plan their placement in your presentation.

Design with Consistency: Maintain a consistent design theme throughout your presentation to create a polished and professional look.

Practice: Rehearse your dynamic presentation to ensure smooth transitions and flawless execution.

How to Improve Your Dynamic Slide Presentation

• Balance Multimedia: Use multimedia elements sparingly and strategically to avoid overwhelming your audience.
• Audience Interaction: Incorporate interactive elements like polls or Q&A sessions to engage your audience in your dynamic slide presentation.
• Visual Storytelling: Craft a compelling narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end, using multimedia to support your storyline.
• Accessibility: Ensure your presentation is accessible by providing alternative formats and considering those with disabilities.
• Continuous Learning: Stay updated on the latest dynamic slide presentation software and design trends to keep your dynamic presentations fresh and engaging.

Dynamic presentations can transform your communication and captivate your audience in ways that traditional static slides cannot. While they come with their challenges, their engagement, storytelling, and data visualization benefits make them a valuable tool in the modern world of presentations. By mastering the art of dynamic presentations and following the tips provided, you can effectively convey your message and leave a lasting impact on your audience.

Why is dynamic presentation important?

Delivering Dynamic Presentations employs a method that makes learning both easy and enjoyable. It is a no-frills run-down on how to tolerate a speaking situation. It is a program of strategies that shows what to do, when, and how to do it.

What is the difference between static and dynamic presentation?

In the static presentation method, the incentives were placed before a trial began and not used by the experimenter during the trial. On the other hand, in the dynamic presentation procedure, the individual watched the experimenter manipulate the relevant dimension of the stimuli during a series of trials.

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How to Create a Dynamic Presentation in PowerPoint

Creating an effective and dynamic PowerPoint presentation takes time and effort. However, with some key tips and best practices, you can develop memorable and impactful slide decks. This comprehensive guide covers how to format, design, and deliver a polished presentation in PowerPoint.

Format the Presentation Structure

Structure your presentation logically with an introduction, body, and conclusion. Use headings (H2 and H3 in markdown) to separate key sections and talking points within the body.

Limit text on each slide. Include only key phrases, statistics, quotes, or questions – not full sentences. Let your verbal presentation provide further details and explanation.

Use consistent slide formats. Avoid switching between layouts frequently. Use the same template for most information slides with a title and bulleted content.

Add visual interest with relevant photos, charts, diagrams, and illustrations. Ensure all visuals are high-quality with concise labels.

Design Visually Appealing Slides

Choose an appropriate theme. Select one that aligns with your brand or content. Avoid overly bright, distracting, or unreadable color schemes.

Use animations and transitions sparingly. Subtle entrance and exit effects can work well, but avoid excessive or distracting movements.

Align objects to the slide grid for a clean, structured layout. Use guides to evenly space out headlines, text boxes, and other elements.

Make text easy to read. Use fonts between 24-32 pt for headlines and 18-24 pt for body text. Sans serif fonts tend to work best for presentations.

Deliver a Polished Presentation

Practice your presentation several times. Refine the flow, confirm timing, and polish your verbal delivery.

Engage the audience with questions, stories, humor, and pauses. Make eye contact and gauge reactions.

Use slide notes and presenter view for an outline, talking points, and slide previews. Avoid reading full sentences from slides.

Invite participation by asking for feedback, ideas, or reactions. Pause for responses and discussions.

Provide handouts so the audience can review detailed information from your slides after the presentation.

Advanced Tips and Tricks

• Add interactivity with hyperlinks, click to reveal elements, and embedded media like videos.
• Include dynamic elements that update automatically like dates, charts linked to data, and rotating images.
• Animate builds to reveal bullet points, graphics, and other slide components piece by piece.
• Use PowerPoint’s Design Ideas feature to automatically improve the layouts of certain slides.
• Add presenter notes to provide more context and details for each slide.
• Save presentations as videos to share more easily online or enable self-running displays.
• Use the morph transition between slides containing similar elements to create dynamic movement.
• Embed fonts used in the presentation to ensure proper text display on any device.

With the right mix of structure, design, delivery, and interactivity, you can develop memorable PowerPoint presentations that effectively communicate your ideas. Pay special attention to formatting consistency, visual appeal, presentation skills, and audience engagement. Take advantage of PowerPoint’s many features to showcase your content in a polished, professional manner.

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Home Blog Presentation Ideas How to Automate your Presentations with Dynamic Values and Interactive Charts

How to Automate your Presentations with Dynamic Values and Interactive Charts

One of the most important reasons we create presentations is to analyze data, get some insights, and share those findings. In some cases, when we are analyzing the same data numerous times, it helps a lot to automate the process.

It would be great if we can take this week’s data, plug it in somewhere, click a button, and have the same presentation updated with the new values and charts.

Here are some situations in which this might be interesting: 

• Every morning, in order to start your day, you want to explore the latest bunch of datasets in a customized way that is specific to your needs.
• You have tens of thousands of subscribers, and for each one you want to send a customized presentation, summarizing their account’s data.
• On a weekly basis, you want to analyze and share the same data for your weekly meeting/presentation.
• When you start a new project or work with a new client, you usually start by analyzing a stable dataset, and you have pretty much the same starting analysis.

In this tutorial, we will be working toward building an interactive presentation with dynamic values, analyzing tweets data. You can also plug in a different dataset (with the same format), and update the charts with your data’s values. The presentation will look like this:

We will be using Jupyter Lab (the latest iteration of Jupyter Notebook) as our development environment, and Python as the programming language.

You can get an interactive version of the code in the article here if you would like to follow along with the coding. [ Project’s source code at GitHub ]

If you are not familiar with the Jupyter Notebook environment, it is a browser-based tool that contains code cells. You write code and run each cell. It evaluates the code and displays the result(s) right underneath the code. This is ideal for all kinds of data analysis tasks:

Let’s now see how programmable presentations are created.

Creating your first programmable presentation

Let’s start by seeing how you can create the simplest presentation in a Jupyter notebook.

We first create two code cells that instruct Python to print very simple text:

We now have two cells that print simple text as you can see above. Now we need to specify that these code cells should become slides in our presentation. We can do this using the property inspector on the right side of the screen. Once we select a cell (which should now be highlighted with a blue strip on the left), we choose the option from the “Slide type” dropdown:

As you can see, there are several options for slides:

• Slide : The highlighted cell should be rendered as an independent slide.
• Sub-slide : This cell should also be rendered as a normal independent slide, but it would belong to the previous slide. This allows readers to navigate down (if they want to see sub-slides), or navigate to the right if they want to skip the sub-slides.
• Fragment : Cells would be rendered as consecutive elements on the same slide. This is similar to rendering each consecutive bullet point in a presentation. If you don’t want to distract the audience with six points at once, you only show the first, then the second, and so on.
• Skip : As the name suggests, this says that we don’t want to include this slide in the presentation. This is really useful for having code that is required to create some data, but should not be presented for example. It’s also good for creating notes for you, or any collaborators working with you on the project.
• Notes : Speaker notes that are visible to you, but not the audience. This requires some additional setup.

Now that we have specified that those two cells should be slides, we can now go on to generate the presentation. We can do this with a command line tool called nbconvert . The command is fairly simple:

$ jupyter nbconvert name_of_file.ipynb --to slides

The --to option allows us to convert to various other formats like html and pdf for example.

Instead of leaving the notebook and running this from the terminal, we can utilize Jupyter’s ability to run command line commands through the code cells. All we have to do is start the cell with the exclamation mark, which causes Jupyter to run this line as a command line command. To do this, we can create a third code cell and simply add the exclamation mark to the beginning:

! jupyter nbconvert name_of_file.ipynb --to slides

As you can see, it’s also good to assign the type “Skip” to this code cell, because we don’t want the readers to see this command. We also added the open command so we can immediately open it in a new browser window. This is not required and we can simply double click the file’s icon to open it. I just use this while creating presentations because it’s convenient and allows me to immediately generate and open new presentations and check the progress.

As a result of running the last cell, we get our presentation slides in a browser window:

Congratulations on programming your first slideshow!

An important thing now is to remove the code cells (the inputs), because we only want the audience to see the outputs, and not how they were generated.

Actually, in many cases, especially if your audience is technical, they might actually want to see the code, in which case you may want to keep them. But generally if it’s a presentation you can share the notebook later if anyone is interested in the code.

Removing the inputs is very easy, and all we have to do is run the same command with the –no-input option:

!jupyter nbconvert 01_input_output_raw.ipynb --to slides --no-input

Running this code and opening the new presentation would look like this:

Now we have a presentation that was programmed, and with a cleaner interface, and now we know how to generate them easily.

It still doesn’t look that good, and we don’t have dynamic values that would change when our data changes. We will do this now.

Adding HTML and Markdown with dynamic styling to slides

The previous presentation generated plain text, and now we want to use the full richness of HTML in our slides. HTML is what is used to instruct your browser to generate the page you are reading, and we have full access to HTML, in order to render whatever we want in terms of coor, sizes, styling, and so on.

Writing full HTML code is a little tedious however, and might be error prone.

This is why we can also use Markdown, which is a very easy way to write (and read) code that would eventually be rendered as HTML.

For example, if I wanted to list three bullet points with HTML, I’d have to do it like this:

With Markdown:

It’s clear how much easier Markdown is to write and to read as well. I mostly use Markdown, but in some cases, when you want some more customization, it’s good to use full HTML as we will do in the following example.

The main module for creating and rendering rich objects in the Juypter notebook is going to be the display module in the IPython package. “Interactive Python” was (and still is) an alternative Python REPL (read-evaluate-print-loop) that was easier to use than the traditional Python REPL. It is still available, and also evolved into the Jupyter notebook, which we still use under the hood.

We first import it, and start using it right away:

from IPython import display

The display module has various functions and classes, and we start by using the display_markdown function as follows:

You can see here how easy it was to generate <h1> content. We simply add a # to the beginning of the string that we want to wrap in <h1> tags. Other headings work similarly, ## for <h2>, ### for <h3> and so on. Note that we need to pass raw=True to these functions.

We get the two lines that we wanted to display right underneath the code in the output area.

Let’s now see why we might want to use HTML to write the same text.

We want to give a certain color to the first line, and in the second line we want to only color the word “HTML”. Not only that, the color would be randomly generated from a set of two colors based on a certain probability, so you might see it as blue, or red.

After importing the random module, we ask it to generate a random number, which would be a decimal number varying between zero and one.

Then we create the variable color , which takes the value “blue” if rand_number is less than 0.3, and “red” otherwise. This means that we get blue with a 30% probability and red with 70%.

In the first call to display_html we use full HTML code, and we include the style attribute to color that text in green.

In the second call we also use HTML, and we give the style attribute of the span around the string “HTML” the value “color”, which in this case turned out to be red.

There is more detail involved in writing HTML, and it’s not as easy to read, but it’s definitely worth it when you want those customizations.

Our presentation is a little more complicated now, and it’s a very good thing that everything can exist in one document. The text, the charts (more on this later), and more importantly, the code that generated those outputs. Compare this to the traditional process of dancing between some data file, Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and within Excel having to do many side calculations, small tables that have no name, and manually integrating everything in a slideshow that not even you can properly remember how things were created. Also, a good practice is to have a folder where this presentation is created. You would also have a sub-folder for data files, and maybe some images, as well as your Jupyter notebooks.

This is how the slides look like after rendering them in a browser using the code above:

A very important thing to note is that the Jupyter notebook has two main types of cells. It’s important to note some points about that.

Types of cells in the Jupyter Notebook

There is an easier way of writing Markdown, and that is by changing the type of the cell from code cell to Markdown cell. Once you select a cell, you can change its type using the dropdown menu showing Code, Markdown, and Raw:

Once you select Markdown, the cell no longer interprets the code as Python code (or any other language), but as Markdown. In this case you don’t need to use the display.display_markdown function, you just start typing Markdown in that cell. Once you run the code it renders it as HTML, and you can’t see the inputs anymore, until you click and start editing again. This is slightly more convenient, but you can’t display dynamic values of variables, and can’t programmatically change the rendered text, at least not yet .

So, my recommendation is that if you don’t have dynamic values, and it’s a one-off presentation, you can use the different types of cells, but if you want the full programmatic presentation, the display_<object_type> functions are your best friends.

Let’s now see how this might be taken a step further with more customization, and a potential real-life use case.

Generating dynamic HTML values for a sales report

Assume we have a target, together with sales figures for our sales department:

We want to loop through the names and figures, and generate a phrase with dynamic values. The name of the sales representative, the amount they generated, a word that takes the value of “exceeded” or “missed” depending on the difference between their sales figure and the target.

We want to dynamically color the phrase based on hitting/missing the target, and also hyperlink each phrase to the respective sales representative’s page.

Let’s first generate the plain text dynamic phrases:

<IMAGE>

We now have the dynamic text generated, taking on dynamic values for each sales representative. Let’s now use HTML, to dynamically color the lines based on hit/miss and to generate (fake) hyperlinks for each one https://example.com/salesrep/ {salesrep_name} :

The two additions to the code were simply the color variable, which depends on whether or not the difference between the revenue and target is less than zero, as well as the dynamically generated URL. The text is displayed with the display_html function to give us the full power of HTML.

So far, we have created slides and presentations that take on dynamic values based on the data, we now see how we can have interactive slides, allowing users to explore the data on their own.

We first show a very simple example, and then go on to generate interactive tools for a real-life dataset.

Creating interactive slides and presentations

With static presentations, readers typically consume them in a passive way. They simply read what we wrote. But presentations can be much more engaging, containing massively more information, and allow for discovery and unexpected results.

The next presentation will have a single slide that is interactive. It doesn’t do much, but it shows the concept in its simplest form:

Of course the other major value of having interactive presentations is with recurring presentations using the same data with different values every day, week, or month.

I’m using Dash for creating the interactivity in this mini app. Dash is one of several options for creating interactive apps, and a discussion of how it works is beyond the scope of this article, but I’ll give an overview of the code that was used. First the packages and imports:

Plotly is the data visualization package. It is also the name of the company that produces Dash. Plotly Express is another package they have for high-level intuitive visualization.

JupyterDash is basically Dash but tailored for work within a Jupyter environment.

From Dash itself we import several modules and functions:

• Input: The interactive component, a dropdown in this case, will serve as an input to our app. It’s value will depend on the selected day. This value will determine what will happen underneath it, in the output area.
• Output: Once we take the value of the Input, we now know what to do with it. In this case we have a simple template “My favorite day is {day}”. The value of the input is inserted here to produce the output.
• dcc: Dash Core Components is the module that contains the interactive components. In this case we used one of them, which is the Dropdown component.
• html: This is the module that contains all the HTML tags, and allows us to generate them using Python only. We use it to format the Output part of the app.

The following code creates the interactive favorite day app that we just saw:

We first created the app variable, which we did using JupyterDash.

Then we created the variable days , which is a list of the seven days of the week.

We also created the layout attribute of the app, which consists of an HTML div, which in turn contains two elements:

• dcc.Dropdown : The dropdown component containing the seven days as options, and having the ID of “dropdown”, with a default value of “Tuesday.”
• html.Div : This is a simple container that has no content, and has the ID “ddown_selection”. The value and format of what ends up showing in the div is determined by the Input, and is created using the callback function in the lower part of the code.

The callback function is where interactivity happens. It takes the Output and Input, and based on the decorated function does something with the Input to produce the Output.

The final line invokes the run_server method to start the app.

I know this description is not complete if you don’t know how Dash works, but that would require a separate discussion. I wrote a book on Dash if you are interested in learning more.

We covered how dynamic content can be generated and formatted, we saw some examples, and we also saw how slides can be made interactive. Let’s now see how you might actually create and use an interactive presentation with real data.

Creating interactive presentations with real data

We now come to the practical use of our topic. We want to end up actually using such presentations in our day to day life.

We will go through the process of creating the presentation that we saw at the beginning, with a very brief description of the code used.

We start with the required imports:

Once we have imported the required packages and functions, we create the main variables, tweets and topic .

These are the only non-automated objects that we create manually.

• tweets : A simple string showing the location of the data file. In this case it is under our data/ folder and it is called “bitcoin_tweets.csv”.
• topic : The topic of the tweets that we are analyzing. Those tweets were obtained from the Twitter API , by searching for tweets containing the word “bitcoin”.

We then use the display_markdown function to say that this is an overview of the dataset. After that we run tweets.head() which displays the first five rows of the dataset.

Once those values are manually entered, we can now run the whole code and explore the presentation.

Let’s now see how the first summary slide is created:

Creating a summary of the dataset

Before diving deep into charts and trends, you probably want to get some metadata about the dataset. As you can see, we have the topic, the date range, the number of tweets, users, and tweets per user.

This gives us a quick indication about some general attributes of our dataset.

Let’s quickly take a look at the code that generated it:

• tweet_count : We get this by asking for the “shape” of the DataFrame that we are using, which gives us the number of rows and columns, from which we extract the first element (the rows)
• user_count : We take the user_screen_name column and get the number of unique values in it using the nunique method.
• tweets_per_user : This is a simple division of tweets ÷ users
• start_date and end_date : From the tweet_created_at column we take the minimum and maximum values, which give us an idea on the date range in which those tweets were published. We then have to convert them to Python datetime objects by parsing them.

Now that we have created the variables, we can easily use the display_markdown function to create text that dynamically inserts those variables where they belong and give us an overview of our dataset:

Creating an interactive chart

The next slide shows a dropdown menu, and under it a chart that is generated based on the user’s selection. We give the user three options to choose from: most followed accounts, most retweeted tweets, and most liked tweets. The charts are similar to one another, they display a horizontal bar chart of the top fifteen items based on the selection.

The layout attribute of this app is the same as the one we previously discussed. It has a dropdown menu as well as an empty HTML div underneath it.

Then we have a callback function that generates a chart based on the selection. What it does is it takes the relevant columns and sorts them based on the requested value (number of followers, number of retweets, and number of likes). Some notes on what it does based on each of the selections:

• Most followed accounts: This is straightforward. It simply takes the columns “user_screen_name”, and “user_followers_count”, removes duplicates in screen names, and sorts based on the number of followers. It then displays the top fifteen.
• Most retweeted/liked tweets: These are also straightforward, using a similar logic to the most followed option. There is one difference though. Since we are dealing with tweets, which are long strings of text, it is difficult to display the full tweet text on the Y axis. So after filtering and sorting, we take the first forty characters of each tweet and display them on the Y axis. We then set the hover text to the full tweet. If the user is interested in reading the most retweeted tweet, they can simply mouse over it and do so.

Now that we saw who the most followed users are, and the most popular tweets, we move to see what specific topics were discussed. We do this by counting words in two ways.

Word counting: absolute and weighted frequency

When we count the most used words we get an idea about the topics that were discussed. This view is important to know what content was produced in that time period. But what about what content was most likely consumed?

If one person tweets “bitcoin is going up”, and another tweets, “bitcoin is going down”, we can say that the split between bullish and bearish tweeters is 50:50. But what if you knew that the bullish user had a thousand followers, while the bearish user had three million? The split is now 1,000:3,000,000.

Things are typically split that way on social media. Actually, in our dataset, as you can see below, we have an average number of followers of 5.3k, a minimum of zero, and maximum of 1.37M. The average is of course misleading because of the few extreme values that we have. Looking at the quartiles, we see that 25% of users have less than 36 followers, 50% of users are below 200, and 75% of users have at most 1,186 followers. One tweet from that top account could sway the whole discussion, and would have a much bigger impact than many others combined. Here are some summary statistics about the followers’ counts:

In order to get a perspective on the word counts, we user the word_frequency function from advertools to get this overview, and then visualize the data:

The words and hashtags “bitcoin” and “crypto” are in the top three on both charts. This is normal because by definition, we requested tweets about bitcoin. What is interesting is that dogecoin is the top keyword after bitcoin on a weighted basis, even though it appeared only 139 times. But on a weighted basis (the total number of followers of people tweeting anything containing “#dogecoin” is 2.86 million). That might give us a hint as to where to look for further analysis, and see why this topic is used by some of the most influential users in this dataset. We keep in mind that those tweets were tweeted in a 43 minute period, and the topic is extremely popular, so make your conclusions carefully.

This was a quick overview of how you can automate your presentations and scale the process and make it more efficient. There are many other options to explore like different types of charts, or adding various data sources. The most important skill is understanding your data, and being able to manipulate and visualize it the way you want. Grouping the slides together is straightforward in comparison. You can also add some machine learning techniques for getting other perspectives on your data.

Elias Dabbas

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Automation, Dashboard, Data Science, Presentations, Python, Scripts Filed under Presentation Ideas

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Presentation Dynamics

Grabbing your audience's attention and putting it on your message

Making the right charts and graphs.

by R. L. Howser on August 16, 2014 · 4 comments

That’s how I feel about charts, graphs and spreadsheets.

This is an Analytical Spreadsheet

So many speakers fill their presentation PowerPoint slides with charts, graphs and spreadsheets, they surround themselves with them, and they’re the wrong charts, graphs and spreadsheets.

Charts, graphs and spreadsheets are a wonderful way to visualize data. Organizing the raw data in a structured matrix, like an Excel spreadsheet, or charting or graphing it, allows us to see things that we might not have otherwise noticed.

This is an Analytical Graph

Anomalies jump out at us. Subtle trends are made apparent. We can play with parameters of a graph to focus on the macro or the micro. We can process the spreadsheet data to tease out previously unseen correlations. We can mine the data to our hearts content.

But when we are giving a presentation, that’s not what we are doing, at least I hope not, and it’s certainly not what we want our audience to be doing.

This is a Presentation Chart

When we speak, we want the audience to be paying attention to our argument, proposal, procedure or scenario, not analyzing the data. The purpose of a PowerPoint slide is to reinforce our words visually. Each needs to make the same single, clear and unambiguous point we are making, at that moment, with our words.

That’s the purpose of presentation charts, graphs and spreadsheets, not to visualize the data, but to visually reinforce, support and validate our words.

If you feel the need to supply your audience with the full range of data, by all means, provide them with all the analytical charts, graphs and spreadsheets they can carry…….., after your presentation. Let them wallow in the data to their heart’s content, just as you did.

But build your presentation slides to make one clear point.

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• Steve Jobs was no LeBron James

by R. L. Howser on August 1, 2014 · 0 comments

I have a similar feeling when I watch Steve Jobs speak. I have seen every presentation of his that I can find on YouTube. As a business communicator, I know I’m watching an all-time great.

I often show my students video clips of Jobs to demonstrate his masterful stage presence, his deceptively simple style and his use of narrative structure to deliver his message, but sometimes I think it is counter-productive. Watching Jobs seems to almost discourage my students.

LeBron James is an inspiration to many, without ever making them think they can do what he does. Few are blessed with the size, grace or athletic skills necessary to play in the NBA, let alone to be a superstar.

My students seem to think the same of Jobs. They can’t imagine that they could ever command an audience with such assurance or speak with so much skill or authority. They see him as inspirational, but not instructional.

There is, however, an important difference between James and Jobs. As incredibly skilled as Steve Jobs was as a speaker, he was not doing anything that you and I can’t learn to do.

I can’t learn to be 6 feet 8 inches tall. I can’t develop the speed, especially at my age, to run a fast break or build the athleticism to leap and slam the ball through the hoop. Physically, I simply cannot do it.

But all Steve Jobs did was stand on a stage and talk. I can do that,…….  and so can you.

You can learn to refine your thoughts down to a single, crystal-clear message.  You can learn to structure your presentation to deliver that message with impact. You can learn to stand and move with at least the appearance of calm assurance. You can learn to use pause and pace to build anticipation.

Steve Jobs wasn’t a great speaker because of any innate talent or freakish physical advantage. He was a great speaker because he trained himself to speak well, because he thought deeply about what he wanted to communicate and how he needed to say it and because he prepared tirelessly for his presentations. Anyone, at any age, with any type of body, can do that.

I can do that, ……….  and so can you.

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Your Message Dictates the Architecture

by R. L. Howser on July 15, 2014 · 0 comments

Drawing by CSondi

I talk a lot about the importance of your message. If you don’t know what you want your audience to remember – if you can’t sum it up in one clear, memorable sentence  –  they won’t be able to remember it either. You might as well not even have bothered them.

But if you have created that crisp, catchy, memorable statement that perfectly encapsulates your strongest pitch or argument, you are more than half way home. You do, however, still have work to do.

Your message might be the most important part of the speech, but if you want your audience to buy in, you still have to build the supporting structure of logic and evidence they need to justify your claims in their minds. They need that, if they are going to accept the validity of your message and to act on it.

Sammy Cahn was a Broadway lyricist, four-time Academy Award winner and the writer of such classic songs as “Three Coins in a Fountain” and “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow”. In an interview on NPR, he made the comment that “The title dictates the architecture of the song.” What he meant, I think, is that the title sets the theme, the tone and, to a certain extent, the structural scheme of rhythm and rhyme.

I’m no songwriter, and I may be the worst singer in the world, but I feel the same way, not about the title of a speech or presentation, but about the message.

Your message dictates the architecture of your speech or presentation.

Your message tells you the tone you need to set in the opening of your speech. If your message to a group of breast cancer survivors is, “You are still strong and beautiful”, you wouldn’t open with a joke about bald women. The tone doesn’t suit the message.

Your message tells you how to structure the body of the speech. If your message is that “Most aid to foreign countries is wasted,” then you need to marshal the evidence to justify that claim. You need you need to tell us how much money goes to foreign aid, how much is wasted and what the results of the aid are.

Your message tells you which stories are likely to further your point, and which will just confuse it. If your message is “Our training can boost your sales conversions”, you wouldn’t tell a story about the time you forgot to send in a sales order and nearly got fired, no matter how funny it is. You would tell a story about a client who went from nearly being fired to being named Salesman of the Year, after taking your training course.

Your message dictates the title of your presentation, your call to action and even how you write the introduction the Master of Ceremonies reads. It dictates everything you do.

Your entire speech or presentation is designed to deliver the one simple, memorable message that you think gives you the best chance accomplish your purpose.

Of course that’s assuming you know what the purpose of your speech is. You’ve already figured that out, haven’t you?

The Hardest Part of Teaching ……… and Speaking

by R. L. Howser on April 9, 2014 · 0 comments

Someone asked me the other day, “What is the hardest part of teaching?”

My initial reaction was that it’s managing, grading and recording the students’ assignments and tests. It’s not my strongest suit, but I do try to be careful, because a trivial error can cause major problems for both student and teacher. It’s not really hard though. It just takes an obnoxious amount of time and attention.

Care and feeding of the administration is certainly one of the most annoying parts of the job. But as long as I show up for class every day, turn in my paperwork on time and cause no more trouble than necessary, the university administrators generally leave me alone.

Maybe it’s curriculum design, I thought. The selection, sequencing and depth of the material taught can have a huge impact on the students’ understanding and retention. After 23 years in the classroom, I think I do a good job of it, but it is something I will never master. There is always some new wrinkle or approach to consider. In fact, it is one of the more interesting and enjoyable parts of the job.

Classroom management can be a challenge. Dealing with a difficult student can drain the life out of the teacher and the class and, in some teaching situations, it can be a major issue. And yet, I’m lucky enough to teach in several of Tokyo’s top universities. Almost all of my students are good students and nice people.

Dealing with the diversity of learning styles in the classroom? As long as I provide a good mix of methods and modes of engaging with and understanding the material, I think the issue is overblown.

In the end, I find myself left with only one possible conclusion. The most difficult part of teaching is simply being more interesting than whatever else is rattling around my teenage students’ brains.

It’s being able to grab and hold the students’ attention, engage their interest and motivate their study efforts – to make a 60-90 minute lesson fly by – while planting concepts, relationships and structures in their heads that will frame their thoughts and shape their actions, both now and in the future. That is what separates great teachers from average ones.

In the end, it turns out, being a great teacher is a lot like being a great speaker.

by R. L. Howser on March 21, 2014 · 0 comments

It’s that time of year again and as I get ready for my annual assault on the Toastmasters International Speech Contest, I find myself thinking a lot about last year’s winner.

A Toastmasters speech is far too often, in Shakespeare’s words, “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Though the “idiot” part may be debatable, the tale tends to be an entertaining, emotional and histrionic performance, full of sound and fury.

In fact, so skilled are some of the speakers at delivering that performance, that the content sometimes gets short shrift. The same tired truisms of “Be yourself”, “Don’t give up” and “Appreciate your loved ones” are recycled, ad nauseam, through the lens of each speaker’s unique experiences.

They are truisms because they are true, but the result is that watching a Toastmasters’ speech contest can be like judging an angel food cake baking contest. There may be subtle differences in the skill of the baker and the quality of the product, but after a while the cakes all start to taste the same.

That’s why Toastmaster Tamura’s speech stood out so clearly. His journey as a young executive – from being a follower who asks permission, to becoming a leader who makes decisions – was something I had never heard anyone else speak of.

It was his story, but it was about more than his own narrow experience. His story mirrored one of the most fundamental and profound transitions that we pass through in life; the coming of age, when a dependent child becomes an independent adult. It is a transition that we all pass through, in many forms and to different degrees of success in our lives.

Whether it’s an artist learning to have faith in her unique vision, a new father discovering that he can trust his parenting instincts or a businesswoman finding her own particular management style, the transformation from follower to leader, from novice to master or from subordinate to boss is a fundamental change that forever alters how others see us and how we see ourselves.

Tamura took this rich, complex and universal experience of transformation and boiled it all down to two simple words; “You decide.”

With those two words to guide him, he wrote a lean, tight script packed with humor, vivid language and subtle emotion and he delivered it with his usual confidence and style. His skill as a speaker would have meant nothing though, if he hadn’t been using it to deliver a profound, powerful and original message.

It’s a formula for effective speaking in almost any context. Take a new idea, boil it down to its absolute essence and deliver that with clarity, concision and conviction.

Of course, that’s easy to say, not so easy to do.

Toss out the baby AND the bathwater

by R. L. Howser on February 17, 2014 · 0 comments

There’s a problem that bedevils every writer that I know and it is particularly true of speech writers. We have a tendency to fall in love with our words.

We’ll go back and tinker with them; polish the grammar, toy with the punctuation or agonize over word choices, but what we rarely do is question whether the approach we took was the best one.

Much as a mother falls in love with her child, and can’t even imagine having any child but this one, once our words are born in front of us, the major choices of tone, structure and style become, in our minds, the only possible choices.

Sometimes that’s good. It’s far too easy to outsmart ourselves with pointless embellishment or complication. Very often our first instincts are our best ones.

But not always.

Sometimes, it’s just not working and the best thing you can do is toss the whole thing out and start over. Try a radically different tone or a completely different analogy. Strip it down or tart it up. Flip your structure upside down.

Sometimes it’s not enough to just change the bathwater. You’ve got to toss out the baby, or at least set it to the side, and make a new one.

That’s the most enjoyable part of the process anyway.

Find the Perfect Phrase

by R. L. Howser on January 2, 2014 · 0 comments

There are always many different ways to put your thoughts into words. You can make different word choices, use different grammatical structures or change the order in which you present your ideas.

Other than the obvious grammatical errors in the latter version, the two quotes above both make the same basic point. But I suspect you would agree that Neil Young phrased the point much more clearly, succinctly and powerfully than did the maker of the T-shirt.

Quite often, our words come out of us in a jumble. We may think we know what we think, but somehow what comes out of our mouths is not as clear as it seemed in our minds.

Too late, we spot the inconsistencies, ambiguities and unnecessary complications that have everyone around us scratching their heads in puzzlement, or worse, misunderstanding our intentions.

Of course, we can always double back and explain what we meant to say, clear up the confusion and correct the misinterpretations, but that’s never as good as saying it well in the first place.

I’m not a proponent of writing and memorizing you speech, unless it is less than a minute or two. I’ve successfully memorized speeches of up to ten minutes, but I’ve paid a price for such precision. I might have delivered my speech exactly as I intended, but always at the cost of the spontaneity and authenticity that would have forged a stronger rapport with my audience.

It’s not worth it.

I do, however, strongly recommend that you write out your speech, especially the key points and phrases that you want your audience to remember and act on. Play with the grammar. Toy with the vocabulary. Switch up the order or twist the structure around.

Find that perfect phrase that says exactly what you want them to hear and tuck it away in your mental pocket, so when the time is right you know exactly what to say for maximum effect.

Burning out are much better than it fades away gradually, but who’s going to remember that?

Bad Public Speaking Books

by R. L. Howser on December 21, 2013 · 2 comments

“If you want to be a successful speaker”, the experts say, “you’ve got to write a book.” As with most questionable advice, this pernicious bit of conventional wisdom is based in the truth.

It’s true that successful celebrity writers are always in demand as speakers and that they command high fees. Some best-selling writers even make more money from their speaking than they do from their writing.

It’s also true that, with the advent of ebook readers and print on demand (POD) presses, it has never been easier to write, publish and market a book. Social media platforms have made it possible for anyone to build a virtual tribe of followers. Amazon and Apple will handle your fulfillment and billing for you.

It’s a golden age of self-publishing………, and there are a lot of bad public speaking books out there.

Honestly, it’s not so much that they are bad, as that they are pointless. The majority of the speakers writing books are new to the field. They might have some natural talent as a speaker, but most of what they know they learned from other speakers.

As I read their books, all I can think of is, “That’s a Craig Valentine phrase”, “They stole that from Brian Tracy” or “That’s a Zig Ziglar story”. The rest is usually generic advice that we could get from any airline in-flight magazine, such as “be yourself”, “make eye contact” and “speak clearly”.

As marketing pieces, such books might seem impressive, if we overlook the often spotty editing and poor book and cover design, but it would be nice if the author had offered some original insights or ideas.

Otherwise, they’re just big business cards.

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The Difficulty of Public Speaking

by R. L. Howser on November 30, 2013 · 0 comments

That’s the difficulty of public speaking too.

It’s easy, with a bit of practice, to stand up in front of a crowd and yammer on for an hour. I’ve done it many times. For people born with the gift, it’s not even that difficult to be witty, entertaining and interesting, while they are up there.

What’s hard is to walk off the stage, or sit back in your chair at the conference table, feeling that you not only said what you wanted to say, but that you said what needed to be said to get the job done.

It takes planning to think through how to best make your case; to sort through the different approaches you could take and the effect each will have on your audience.

It takes preparation to create visuals or handouts that will effectively support the words you are saying, without distracting the audience or undercutting your message.

It takes foresight to anticipate any objections or troubling questions they might have and keep the information you will need on hand to address them.

It takes presence of mind to pay attention to the reactions of the audience and adjust on the fly to what you read in their expressions and body language.

Many speakers seem to be satisfied with just having finished speaking with no major gaffes, but I hope that’s not enough for you.

The difficulty of public speaking is not to say something, but to say what you mean.

• Let Your Message Guide You

by R. L. Howser on November 24, 2013 · 0 comments

But when storm clouds blanketed the sky, and those guides were most needed, the sailors were at the mercy of the winds and the waves, with no point of reference beyond their own dead reckoning. It’s not surprising that many lost their way.

Speechwriters can lose their way too. It’s easy enough to be blown off course by a long-winded story, a joke that falls flat or a confusing example, but at least it’s clear what the problem is. You can see what you need to fix.

It’s all the more insidious, when it’s an exciting story, a hilarious joke or a fascinating example that leads you astray. For all too often, the story is in there because it’s exciting. The joke is in there because it’s hilarious. The example is in there because it is fascinating. And none of them are there because they advance, illuminate or reinforce the point you are trying to make.

You may have the audience leaning forward in their seats, or clutching their sides in laughter, but you’re left with a vague sense that you are off course and not really getting your message across.

When that happens, go back to your compass; the simple, clear, one-sentence statement that sums up your entire speech or presentation.

Some call it a “foundational phrase”, a “statement of purpose” or an “axiom of assignation”, …………… OK, I made that last one up.

I simply call it your message. It’s the one point that you most want your audience to hear. It’s the one idea you want to plant in their minds. When they’ve forgotten everything else you said, it’s the one thing you want them to remember,

And it’s the only compass you’ll ever need to determine what you should put in your speech and what you need to cut out.

If that exciting story doesn’t demonstrate the validity of your message, cut it out. If that hilarious joke doesn’t also make the point you are trying to convey, cut it out. If that fascinating example doesn’t reinforce your purpose, cut it out.

The ancient mariners had to rely on intuition and hope to sail in stormy seas, but you have a compass – your message – to guide you.

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Concise and clear speaking is an essential communication skill that employers value. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers , approximately 96 percent of businesses view oral and written communication as an essential competency but only 42 percent of employees are proficient at these skills. In classrooms there is always someone presenting information. Whether students are engaging in discussion or giving reports, or educators are presenting new material or conferencing with students, presentation skills are critical.

Speaker Coach , a Microsoft Learning Accelerator , enhances both foundational and workplace skills. With a focus on public speaking, Speaker Coach uses innovative technology that automatically analyzes a speaker’s communication style and helps them present information more effectively. Whether they are a native speaker or an English Language Learner, any student will benefit from the practical feedback and custom reports that highlight areas of strength and ways to improve delivery. Speaker Coach helps students not only build critical skills, but they also develop confidence in their speaking abilities while practicing.

Designed for student-driven learning and educator freedom

Intelligent, automatic help is one of many reasons why educators choose to use Speaker Coach with their students. Like other Learning Accelerators, Speaker Coach offers:

• Real-time coaching: Immediate personalized coaching and practice for students
• Inclusive design: Students can practice where they feel most comfortable and use built-in accessibility tools that increase access
• Time-saving efficiency: Learning Accelerators are built into Microsoft 365 and offer technology-assisted learning instead of teacher-directed instruction
• Actionable insights: Help track progress, display where students are challenged and excelling, and provide a more holistic view of student progress

More importantly, Speaker Coach incorporates good pedagogy. Students oversee their own learning by following detailed, pragmatic feedback that can be applied to the task at hand: improving communication clarity and enhancing public speaking skills. The analysis also enables students to learn whenever and wherever it is most convenient without needing someone else to participate.

From individual support to following a curriculum pacing guide, educators have more teaching commitments than time to complete all that is required of them. That makes Speaker Coach a valuable tool for educators; it frees time for other tasks because students can use Speaker Coach’s automatic feedback instead of direct teacher intervention. Mike Thomas, Senior Digital Learning Analyst for Springfield Public Schools, believes that Speaker Coach and other Learning Accelerators positively impact teaching in his district:

School is 180 days at six hours a day, and we must prioritize what is being taught. By having these tools available, it puts less focus trying to always deliver. It gives students the ability to learn for themselves. With tools like Reading Progress, Immersive Reader, and now Speaker Coach, I think we can take that student empowerment to the next level.” Mike Thomas, Senior Digital Learning Analyst for Springfield Public Schools

Perfect your next PowerPoint presentation

Get feedback on your presentation

Speaker Coach in PowerPoint provides suggestions while a student speaks, and it delivers a tailored, final report that is packed with ways to improve their delivery. Using a computer’s camera and microphone, Speaker Coach analyzes key qualities of effective communication:

• Pace: Monitor speed and receive pacing suggestions that increase audience recall and comprehension
• Filler Words: Highlight frequently used filler words like “um” and “you know”
• Pitch: Listen for monotone pitch that can negatively affect messaging
• Pronunciation: Isolate indistinct pronunciation or mispronunciation
• Originality: Call out instances when reading directly from a slide
• Inclusiveness: Discover when language is not inclusive in areas like disability, gender, and race
• Speech Refinements: Spot speech problems like wordiness and euphemisms
• Repetitive Words: Count words and phrases that are repeatedly spoken
• Body Language: Analyze physical mannerisms, posture, and eye contact

In addition to automatic, real-time suggestions while practicing, Speaker Coach generates a personalized report that can be used as a learning tool. Each report is customized to the speaking session, contains interactive feedback and analysis, and is privately shared so that students can securely review suggestions without the pressure of having another person listen and critique.

Rehearsal report summarizes your performance and provides actionable feedback

Because Speaker Coach automatically listens and analyzes multiple aspects of a presentation, students can use it at school or at home without someone else participating. Speaker Coach is like a teaching assistant who is always available and willing to offer constructive feedback in a judgement-free environment.

Students in Spring Public Schools in Springfield, MA have been using Speaker Coach to practice and prepare for classroom presentations. Educators are already seeing improvements in how ideas are communicated. 

Speaker Coach is giving the students the confidence to be able to present in front of others and share their voice.” Melissa Zeitz, Digital Literacy and Computer Science Teacher for Springfield Public Schools 

Rehearse with Speaker Coach

To start using Speaker Coach in PowerPoint:

• Open PowerPoint
• Add information to the slide show
• Go to Slide Show in the ribbon
• Select Rehearse with Coach
• Allow PowerPoint to use the camera and microphone

Coaching suggestions during live meetings

Students and educators can also use Speaker Coach during scheduled Teams meetings and live events. The Teams integration delivers private speaking suggestions and guidance during roundtable discussions or while sharing content from a PowerPoint or Word Document. Unobtrusive tips appear at the top of the Teams window and are only visible to the speaker. When you leave the meeting, Speaker Coach generates a timestamped report with actionable insights for improving speaking clarity, word choice, inclusiveness, and information. This report lives inside of Teams and is available to review and compare over time or throughout the year.

Follow a few simple steps to use Speaker Coach in Teams for Education:

• Schedule a Teams Meeting with a peer or colleague. Speaker Coach is unavailable in Meet Now meetings.
• Select  More .
• Select  Turn on Speaker Coach and follow any additional prompts. Contact your IT Administrator if you do not see this option as some clients need preview features enabled .

What are you waiting for? Say goodbye to standing in front of a mirror and talking to yourself. Instead, let Speaker Coach analyze your communication skills and reduce anxiety associated with public speaking.

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