Once we dig out from this pandemic, we will be able to get back to normal presenting and normal PowerPoint practices, right?

Um, no.

Our profession will never be the same again, and whether you consider that to be a Covid curse or a Covid silver lining depends entirely upon your point of view. Presenting remotely requires the acceptance that you will not enjoy the same level of engagement that you will have with an in-person audience. Meanwhile, presenting in person involves an implicit concession that the only ones who will hear you are those who are able to travel. And you can have your cake and eat it too – speak before a hybrid audience – if you are willing to work harder than you ever have before.

One way or the other, your reality as a public communicator is changed forever as you are likely to have a virtual component to every one of your presentations. This is likely to have a profound impact on how you craft your messages, how you design your slides, and how you wield PowerPoint.

This hour illuminates the redefined fundamentals and the new best practices in the era of permanent virtual presenting.

• Crafting messages when virtual audiences have perennial ADD
• Designing slides for multi-tasking listeners
• Making eye contact with a camera
• Using PowerPoint to create slides and handouts
• Looking past conventional (and boring) Zoom

Rick Altman has been hired by hundreds of companies, listened to by tens of thousands of professionals, and read by millions of people, all of whom seek better results with their presentation content and delivery. He covers the whole of the industry, from message crafting, through presentation design, slide creation, software technique, and delivery. He is the host of the Presentation Summit, now in its 16th season as the most prominent learning event for the presentation community.

Away from the conference, he regularly leads private presentation skills development workshops within organizations and is working on the fourth edition of the popular and provocatively-titled Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck, and how you can make them better.

Altman came to presentations through publishing and graphic design. He claims to have invented desktop publishing back in 1982 and can show a galley sheet of type that was produced by connecting his Osborne 1 computer to a typesetter across town with a 300-baud modem (that cost $800). An avid sportsman, he was not a good enough tennis player to make it onto the professional tour. All the rest of this has been his Plan B…