Talk with Tom
Get the dispatches from the new world of work
Peace Returns to PowerPoint Valley
Call it "The Day of the Client." (More accurately: "The Night of the Client.") That is, you. Call me tired! Not only did I give a 2-full-day seminar in Madrid 4 days after I got out of the hospital, but after arriving in Boston yesterday afternoon I confronted the revolt against the new slide format—and ended up pulling a no-bull "all nighter" to re-do every one of the roughly 1,150 slides in the "workingmaster."
I came to loathe the Lucida Handwriting Font that was ubiquitous in my PP presentations. While preparing for my teleconference-seminar for Targeted Learning Corporation last week, their presentation guru, Dave Walzer [from D2 Productions], introduced me to One Stroke Script LED. After vociferous initial resistance, I went ape over the font, and after my TLC presentation I used half my hospital stay to incorporate it in the "workingmaster." And I used it in Madrid. IT IS BEAUTIFUL.
But ...
As you know, thanks to its odd size it creates a godawful mess if you don't have it—and almost nobody does. My first response, "Screw them." [I.e., Screw you!] It is wonderful in a presentation room—and that's what I do first and foremost!! You yelped—appropriately. I fumed. (I after all had just spent 16 hours getting home from Madrid.) But I read the comments—and pondered on the roll of the Posted PPs at the site.
About 8P.M. last night, after soul searching and Font research, I decided to replace the mis-sized One Stroke with Arial Rounded MT Bold. It is a standard Windows Font, and, more important, it is the standard size, so it will default to Arial if you don't have it.
At 8P.M. I walked to Starbucks, ordered 2 Ice-coffee Ventis and got to work. When S'bucks closed at 10P.M. I came home (I was in Boston, Susan was in Vermont) and worked until about 3A.M. I once again made several hundred, or perhaps a thousand, other changes in addition to re-sizing with Arial Rounded MT Bold. I went to sleep at 3A.M., got up at 4:30A.M., and finished about an hour ago, at 9:30A.M. (Whew.) So, attached, you will find the "new and improved" 1,131-slide "workingmaster.0224.06" PP.
(Incidentally, you'll find some other cuckoo Fonts in the presentation, such as Chiller and Jokerman. They, too, are Windows standards, and more important standard size—so their absence should not screw up the presentation if you don't have them.)
Listening to you all is/was important to me for several reasons: (1) I think it's the right thing to do—and I preach it from every podium I can find. (2) It's your site and our community. (3) You were right. (4) I learned something—don't get cute. ["Simplicity," Trevor would say.] (5) In the end I-we have a better product. And (6) sleep is for Wimps.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm going for my 6-mile or so Power Walk (from PP to PW, or some such.)
Cheers ...
ARCHIVES
viagra for sales in india - October 2011
buy brand viagra without prescription - October 2010
how to get viagra canada viagra united kingdomBefore blogging became all the rage, Tom was posting book reviews and Observations (essentially early blog posts) to this site. You can find the archives below.
What Tom's Reading Archives
viagra in the statesOBSERVATIONS ARCHIVES
- January 2001 overnight united states viagra
prescription viagra prices in canadaright now
What we're talking about
on the front page.
Comments
Incrementalism lives!
Posted by Eric Lapp at February 24, 2006 12:23 PM
Brilliant Tom - You are right sleep, is over rated.
But you must take care! One and a half hours sleep is just not on!! It's far too much!! You must work harder:-)
Seriously - what a fabulous way to 'walk the talk'
Tom you are the opposite of my school friend George whose last school report said;
"George must work harder - sets himself a low standard and fails to acheive it!"
Posted by Trevor Gay at February 24, 2006 12:27 PM
Great stuff Tom.
Trevor, quick, "save as Web Archive"!
Happy weekend all.
Posted by Michael from UK at February 24, 2006 12:30 PM
Tom,
THANK YOU! I was getting worried and pondering if there was a gap between preaching and practice. You listened and you are and will remain my hero!
Posted by kp at February 24, 2006 1:44 PM
Tom:
I am concerned reading your post, you worked through the night to get the presentation in some downloadable font?
I guess I "should" feel impressed with your dedication to the "client" but I am not. These slides are just content, they need you to come alive.
I see your efforts (in this instance) as a futile pursuit of satisifying a client who never had that expectation from you. I would have been willing to wait for a couple more days for the reworked content.
Posted by Meera at February 24, 2006 6:09 PM
Meers ... for about 55+ of the last 63 years, for worse as well as for better, my approach is not to wait "a couple more days." My Client is the visitors to this site. I provided a screwed up mess of a PP. Just won't do. Never has. Never will.
Posted by tom peters at February 24, 2006 7:01 PM
wonderful!
had a couple things I was about to put off for 'a couple of days'
starting them now!
thanks
Posted by mikey at February 24, 2006 8:42 PM
Dear Tom,
Thanx a bunch for the revised slides…It’s SUBSTANCE SUBSTANCE SUBSTANCE AND MORE SUBSTANCE (as usual!)
I really draw a lot of inspiration from you & your work (your power packed PowerPoint slides!) though I haven’t had the opportunity of meeting you. (I WILL ONE DAY FOR SURE!). I believe you are truly an embodiment of EXCELLENCE! You live, breathe, preach & practice EXCELLENCE, not to mention…you also SEARCH FOR EXCELLENCE in/from others. Kudos!
Thanx once again for sharing so much with us…It really means a lot to us. I always tell ‘Knowledge is the ultimate competitive advantage and is to be shared unconditionally’ and you have been doing just that. Appreciate it!
Posted by K.Sriram at February 24, 2006 9:17 PM
Thanks Tom for "walking the talk". You inspire me.
On a side note:
For a long time, every morning when I went to work, I would ask myself "What is my purpose of going to work?"
One day, I came up with an answer: "The ONLY purpose for me going to work should be to help the client realize his dreams"
Things have become much simpler for me ever since...I believe it's your example & lessons that inspires me to think the way I do. Thank you.
Posted by Nithin at February 24, 2006 9:28 PM
Slides look much better.
Posted by Marianne Powers at February 24, 2006 11:37 PM
Tom, on some of the charts...the text goes beyond the chart limits...see pages 43, 50, etc. Is this by design? or formatting errors?
Posted by kp at February 25, 2006 12:15 AM
It's handy to right-click the PPT and click on "Edit Slides". Then the full text is always displayed to the left of the slide.
Posted by Mike L at February 25, 2006 12:37 AM
This is like a MSM quail hunt overkill kind of a deal.
Posted by Sean at February 25, 2006 11:01 AM
Good on you for following the path of usability.
Just for future reference, you can embed non-standard fonts into a PowerPoint slideshow so that everyone can see the slides as you intended. It's under Tools - Options - Save tab. Mind you, it increases the file size a bit.
Another killer timesaver that's not well known is the Format - Replace Fonts command. (Of course you'd still need to do all the page resetting given the funny-sized font).
But I don't mean to detract from the moral of the lesson here.
Posted by John Salt at February 25, 2006 1:21 PM
Hi Tom,
I guess there are many lessons to learn from your experience.
One is the importance of keeping files we work on backed up in an archive. I guess in an organisational sense that we should keep our history in mind. Sometimes we can't go back, but history helps us to remember. Two is the importance of knowing our tools. Powerpoint has a number of features that help if you're using it on different presentation platforms - embedding fonts in the file. My favorite is "Package for CD" where the movies, the fonts and pictures can be put onto a CD or into a folder with a powerpoint viewer so you don't need a PC with Powerpoint on the platform, just Windows and a CD player.
Another great tool is the Adobe Portable Document Format. That way you could place the document you create on the web with the fonts you think make it presentable and people can view it online in their browser. You can use PDFCreator which is an opensource tool and create the PDF from within Powerpoint. PDF allows many people without Powerpoint on their PC's to view the content as you intended. (You need to embed the fonts on that as well.)
Another great tool is the opensource OpenOffice. It has a presentation package that saves the presentation as a Shockwave Flash File, which can be viewed with many browsers. It can read Powerpoint files.
I guess the most frustrating experience people have with tools is trying to get them to work the way you need them to work. We invest so much time into our tools that it can take away from their purpose, which is to save time and effort.
Posted by Peter Bostock at February 25, 2006 4:19 PM
Why are we getting into complexity here? The point being made is that Tom stayed up overnight with just 90 minutes sleep and completely re-wrote over a thousand slides because one or two people made comments. That’s what I call customer service second to none!
Regardless of the technical stuff the point is surely that he worked all night to complete a job for his customers. I don’t want to take part in some technical or philosophical debate about this.
We should all just celebrate it... end of story. We are all getting - free of charge -stuff that is worth a fortune!
Or am I missing a point here somewhere?
Posted by Trevor Gay at February 25, 2006 4:48 PM
Trevor as usual the point is at the top of your head :>} ... I think Tom was up all night so he could sip Diet Snapple - point that point for 26.2 miles in under 4 hours by 12/1/07 perhaps?
Posted by Sean at February 25, 2006 5:29 PM
Sean - The marathon is an ambition for April 2007 - need plenty of taining for that - pointed head may help I guess :-)
Posted by Trevor Gay at February 26, 2006 6:01 PM quick delivery on viagra
A lot of site visitors are far, far more sophisticated than I am. And there are a lot of great ideas in these comments. I will incorporate them in my actual presentations. However (yo, Trevor) my goal is usability for the less sophisticated visitor. I want no problems or awkwardness when someone downloads, and ease of use when someone wants to take one or several of these slides to use in their work. (I love the thought of people "stealing" slides and using them in their work!!!) Some of the suggestions such as imbedding the odd font and effectively locking it down, alas, inhibit the user (you) from manipulating the presentation if you download it and then edit it for use.
(Of course the other issue re the "all nighter" is part "customer responsiveness" and part pathological. For whatever genetic or behavioral reasons I go "batshit"--an official American Psychiatric Association diagnostic category--over self-generated errors, especially "small" ones. Years ago, when I was writing a weekly syndicated column, I said to a colleague over a glass of wine, or a second truth-serum glass, that I would rather lose a million-dollar sale than have a single typographical error appear on Monday in my column in the local paper, the San Jose Mercury News. I think that's pretty weird ... but it is what it is.)
Posted by tom peters at February 27, 2006 6:19 AM
Snap Tom!!
I have been known to 'throw a wobbly' (This is a classifed UK Mental Health Condition) if one character is wrong in a report I have typed for a cutomer!!
I admit this is a mild ... no sorry ... it is a severe obsession of mine!!
However I can relax really ... you must have seen this ....
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Thsi is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
amzanig huh?
Posted by Trevor Gay at February 27, 2006 6:30 AM
Very cool post Trevor!
Posted by Dave Holland at February 27, 2006 9:27 AM
Tom,
I join Trevor & others in taking my hat off to you for brilliant customer responsiveness and fanatical attention to detail, from a fellow-traveller!
I do, however, worry about you doing that so soon after being in hospital - I'm sure everyone would agree that your being around to inspire us for at least the first half of the current millennium is far more important than the font in a presentation... my other thought is, don't you have someone to do that kind of thing for you?? I know it's a thankless task and one you felt compelled to do yourself, but in the circumstances I'd have thought it was more than justified to 'delegate' it on this occasion.
That doesn't diminish the height I am raising my hat, tho'!
Posted by Stephen Spencer at February 27, 2006 9:59 AM
Damn, one more example of why not to slack off on the small stuff, because it's usually not small stuff.
As an aside... how I wish you and everyone else in the civilized world would stop using that silly "venti" word. Please don't encourage that nonsense!
Posted by Rich Westerfield at February 28, 2006 6:47 PM
Tom - have been a close follower since I first attended your seminar in Boston ca. 2000. Always great stuff, very inspirational, motivating, but also aggravating - because management doesn't get it, but thinks they are providing thought leadership.
I downloaded your presentation, and looked through some of the slides. I noticed that the text on some slides is actually of the slide - maybe just a MAC phenomenon? I am using PPT on OS X, maybe that's what's causing it (yet it shouldn't). Here are the slides that don't look quite right: 132, 146, 149,150, 185.
Again, looked only through some of them, but thought I mentioned it.
"Stay hungry, stay foolish"
online drug store viagraThomas
Posted by Thomas Teger at March 3, 2006 2:44 PM