Linguistic Underpinnings

I recently took on the task of refining a power point presentation of an organization I am helping out.

The amount of time it took to complete the task really surprised me and I thought I’d create a bit of a timeline for the work for myself, to understand the real-time commitment of things like this when I need to present under a deadline, and for others, because I know I’m not the first person who’s felt themselves running against a deadline.

To begin with, I was unfamiliar with the content of the power point.  The Powerpoint was a visual and textual account of a historic district in Mumbai. It was important to retain a majority of the information as the presentation was meant to serve as proof of precise elements of the area that needed work: traffic crossings, railings and street furniture, and signage.

The power point began at about 140 slides: I know, it’s huge!

In the end I worked it down to 95 slides, some of which were sequential presentations of material which was meant to be flipped through quickly int he presentation of layered data visualizations.

First Day: I spent about 3 hours making minor changes and speaking with the person who created the original to make sure I understood the material. I made little tweaks here and there, correcting typos and in some cases rearranging slides so that the data flowed more easily between one subject and another.

Second Day: I spent 5 1/2 hours making images in slides the same size and formatting text. I picked regular scalings for title and body text and changed  font to Helvetica (font historically associated with signage and wayfinding plus it was clean and clear). I went through and removed random features of italics and bold. I aligned text boxes within the slide. I created new charts for data visualization where needed and added a few original images were copyrighted images had been placed as an example of the graphic needed.

I really thought I’d be finished with this by now… but no! At this point I’d put in about 8 1/2 hours.

I realized :

A good graphic takes at least 30 min. often 45min. at least.

Formatting is very timely, though there may be shortcuts out there I don’t know! Formatting took at least 4 hours. I went through and did tasks in waves.

Day 3: I took 4 more hours to go through and pare unnecessary slides. This was slow because as I said I was trying to keep all the info but fit it in more efficiently.

I realized:

Thinking of scaling it was worth while to remember that multiple images can be fit into a page small because the projector will blow them up 200-300%.

Dark text on dark background was walking on thin ice: the projector bulbs are often not as bright as the computer screen and one of my graphics ended up being hard to read.

Text should be created in Powerpoint  (when possible) not added in as an image because it can become distorted and fuzzy when an image s scaled.

Day 4: Yes there was a day 4!  On the day I brought the powerpoint in I found myself needing to do one last cleanup and polish. It took 1 1/2 hours.

All Total: 14 hours!

Following the presentation I found a few things that need tweaking. In short… give yourself a decent amount of time as you create a formal, professional Powerpoint. As I mentioned this was a particularly complex case as I could not trim any of the data and the original document was 140 slides. The final 90 slides is still a excessive presentation, although I’m a firm believer that for each subject you present via Powerpoint you will need a different number of slides to get your message across!