DAVE MARTINEZ, POWERPOINT'S LEADING MAN

David Martinez is the product manager for Microsoft PowerPoint in Redmond, Wash., which means he's responsible for developing and marketing the most widely used presentation software program in the world. Previously Martinez worked as a product manager for Microsoft Excel and in market research and sales at IBM. He delivers roughly 50 presentations per year about how presentation software can be used for business communication.

How do you prepare for a presentation?

Before any presentation I always find out what the audience knows about presenting and what they expectto learn from me during our time together. In my business, it's common for people to deliver a scripted, word-by word presentation, but that approach almost always leaves the audience feeling as though they received too little - or too much - information. That's why I like to talk to a few of the audience members first, just to understand, for example, how deeply they understand my topic. I make sure to get to the event early enough to talk to some people and make last-minute adjustments to my presentation if necessary.

What's in your presentation toolbox besides PowerPoint?

Besides software, my most critical tool is my Compaq laptop computer. It has a CD-ROM drive, so I can include bits of sound and video in my presentations, even when I'm building the presentations while en route to the trade show. It also has good speakers and a large display, so I can present right off the laptop display if I'm talking to just one or two people. I also use an In Focus LCD projector when I'm presenting to a roomful of people and the location isn't ready to support electronic, computer-based presentations. I often bring backup color overheads, as well as audience handout pages, which I create using PowerPoint and a Tektronix color printer. Most recently, I've begun playing with a Kodak digital camera, for adding more personalized graphics to my presentations.

How much do you practice before delivering?

My biggest problem is going over my allotted time, so I practice my timing a lot. To practice, I just deliver the presentation several times right in my office using PowerPoint's Rehearse Timings feature which records the number of seconds I take to deliver each slide in my presentation. This allows me to identify exactly where I need to shorten my talk to finish in time. The new PowerPoint 97 also features a Record Narration tool that will actually record my voice as I deliver each slide, making it easy to review the quality of my delivery after I'm done by simply replaying the presentation.

What's the right balance between speaking and using technology?

It's important to remember that you, not your electronic presentation, are the primary reason people are in the room. Used inappropriately, computer-based presentations can hurt the overall effectiveness of your message, so I constantly ask myself whether a technology element adds to my message or takes away from it. I primarily use computer-based presentation slides to provide an organized outline of my presentation that the audience can follow and to highlight key points I want people to remember and recognize as important. I often use multimedia elements, but only subtly - too many sounds or animated objects flying around your screen quickly become distracting.

How do you create interaction with your audience?

I often ask rhetorical have you ever" questions. The common audience response is to nod in agreement or stare in bewilderment. If they nod, then I know I'm making sense and I'm on the right track. If they stare in bewilderment, I know it's time to change course. With smaller groups, I can actually deliver my presentation in the order in which the audience would like to discuss the topic by using hyperlinks in my slides. These allow me to jump to any portion of my presentation quickly - for example, I could deliver the last two slides first, the first two slides last, etc. This way, the audience decides what to see, so they get exactly the information they need.

What should a presenter avoid at all costs?

Never read the words off a slide. Instead use your slides as an outline for your message. And never deliver a presentation without spell-checking your visuals first - nothing says ^"shoddy" more than bad spelling.

What's your best piece of advice?

My best advice is the same advice I deliver in my presentations - investigate the use of technology in your presentations. Visual aids increase the understanding and retention of your message, while simultaneously helping you look more professional. Digital visual aids allow you to be more audience-focused with your presentations by easily customizing them to fit the specific interests of every group, without sacrificing quality. And try to incorporate multimedia elements in your presentation if you can. They offer a ^"living" element to your presentation that makes it fundamentally more captivating.

Multimedia can be enormously powerful, but only when it makes good business sense and your company is ready to shoulder its associated cost and effort. At Milwaukee-based Sybron International, full multimedia was considered overkill for the CEO's presentation needs - but a simple presentation upgrade opened the door for more advanced projects.

Sybron is a holding company composed of four independent subsidiaries that manufacture dental and laboratory equipment CEO Ken Yontz hits the road as often as 12 times a year to deliver a presentation to analysts and potential investors. In summer 1996, Yontz decided his 35mm slide presentation could use a facelift, but he wasn't interested in converting his tried-and-true pitch to full multimedia. He felt that video and animation would only distract the audience from his message. Plus, he had the presentation memorized and compressed into a perfectly timed 15-minute overview of Sybron and its products.

As opposed to creating a new presentation, Yontz wanted to jazz up his original slides with new graphics, fonts, backgrounds and transitions. He also wanted to transfer the presentation from 35mm slides to a format he could deliver from his laptop and a portable LCD projector.

To do so, Yontz turned to Hardie Interactive (800.556.4412,www.hardieintcom) of Dubuque, Iowa. As a full-service multimedia development company specializing in presentations and training programs, Hardie offered the design expertise and creativity to bring a fresh approach to the project And since Sybron hoped t more sophisticated projects in the future, it was natural to partner with a company that would have the experience and skills to create everything from CD-ROMs to Web sites down the road.

35- Slides to Computer-based Screen Show

Hardie's first step was to meet with Yontz to get a clearer picture of the company and what he wanted out of the presentation upgrade, says project manager Charlie Ellis. After consulting with Yontz and receiving the original PowerPoint 4.0 file from which his 35mm slides were output, Hardie's creative team went to work redesigning the presentation.

An early design decision was to recreate the presentation in Authorware 3.5 as opposed to PowerPoint, Ellis says. "Authorware is much more flexible and powerful than PowerPoint, plus it's the development tool we use for creating full multimedia projects, so it would be easy to repurpose the presentation in the future."

Next, Hardie chose new fonts for the presentation, reworked all existing graphics and added new ones, and created some snappy transitions. Photographs of all Sybron's products were scanned, saved as PICT files, assembled in photo collages in Photoshop 3.0 and placed strategically in the presentation. Finally, left and right arrow buttons were placed at the bottom of each screen for navigation. The look and feet of delivering the presentation was similar to using a slide projector.

CD-ROM Annual Report

Yontz was extremely pleased with the finished product, which allowed him to deliver an almost identical, but rejuvenated, presentation from his laptop instead of a slide projector. A few months after the success of its first multimedia project, Sybron decided to make a more aggressive move into multimedia communication. The company asked Hardie Interactive to convert the company's annual report into a CD-based multimedia program featuring much of the content of Yontz's potential-investor presentation, but also including year-end financial results, future growth plans and video messages from Yontz and the presidents of each of Sybron's four subsidiaries. The CD was distributed at the company's annual stockholders meeting in January and mailed to those who couldn't attend.

Hardie did all creative on the project, including video work, in house. Graphics were created in Photoshop 3.0. Beta SP video was captured against a monochrome blue wall using an Ikegami camera. A Media 100 nonlinear editing system was used to convert and manipulate the video clips, and Adobe After Affects and Ultimatte were used to do color correction and add special affects. Video was output into 240 x 180 QuickTime movies at 15 fps. Shure microphones captured the audio narration onto the Beta SP sound track, which was then output to Macromedia Deck II 2.5 via the Media 100 editing system. There, it was cleaned up and output to 8-bit AIF files. (Hardie was able to use smaller, faster-playing 8-bit audio because original recordings were of such high quality.) Finally, media elements such as buttons and special effects were created, and the project was put together in Authorware and pressed to CD.

Sybron and Hardie Interactive are currently discussing ways to repurpose material from Yontz's presentation and the company CD-ROM to place them on Sybron's Web site.

The lesson here? If you walk before you run with multimedia, you'll still get there, but it'll probably cost you less - in money, time and, most importantly, growing pains.

Scott Heimes