Tutorial Blog 2: Tips for Effective Presentations

Hello everybody,

Here I am again with another topic that I found very interesting in the course Computing in the Business Environment: Presentations. It is easy to make a presentation but making an interesting one that really catches the attention of the listener, isn't that easy. In week 7 we got some interesting tips on how to improve your presentations. I will talk about some today in my second tutorial blog.

First of all we learned that you have only 30-60 seconds to grab the attention of your audience. This is why you will need a catchy intro, not a dramatically crazy intro but something maybe unexpected and interesting. The course website showed a video of an interview with Chip and Dan Heath who have written a book, "Made to Stick", in which they explain why you will remember some ideas you hear about and why you will just forget others. Picture 1 shows their book.

 

Picture 1:  Book: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath (Source: http://heathbrothers.com)

They talked about four points that can help making the idea of your presentation stick:

1. Try to establish an emotional connection with your audience. This is a good tip for a catchy intro.
2. Tell a story. A story is much easier to remember for your audience than just telling them some facts.
3. Talk about unexpected things. Don't be predictable in what you do. This will just bore your audience.
4. Be concrete. Your story should be easy to understand and draw a concrete image of what you want to convey.

Their conclusion is that you should decide on the core message that you want to convey and then build your story as support around that core.

Here you can see the interview:

Video 1: "Made to Stick" (Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zlld9TA-Vg) 

Moreover, we were taught some general rules for good presentations. Some of the most valuable, next to the ones I mentioned before and that I will mention in the next paragraph, will be mentioned subsequently. Firstly, try to counterbalance your natural tendency to include all the information. You don't want to have every single thing you want to talk about on your slides. Concentrate on those points that are most important to bring your message across and omit those things that are unnecessary to understand your message.

Secondly, don't talk about complicated issues using technical jargon. Adopt a beginner's mind. Tell your message in a way that is easy to understand for your audience even if they are inexperienced in the topic.

Finally, don't make presentations for your ego but for your audience. It is about them and if you don't put yourself in their shoes and reflect on how they will think about what you're saying, you are more likely to bore or annoy them with your presentation.

Furthermore, we were provided with a link to a very interesting website:

http://www.duarte.com/training/tools/

This website by the company Duarte offers some very nice and exceptionally well-made videos with tips on how to make your presentations more effective. One interesting topic they talk about is the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). The key takeaways from that topic are the following. Your audience should be able to process the information on any of your slides in a presentation in about three seconds. This is important because you want them to concentrate on your message, your story. If you present them a very strong visual signal in your slides, while saying something very strong which would then be a strong verbal signal, you create "noise". This "noise" is created by the conflict of the two strong signals. What you want to do instead is sending one pure signal. So, make your slides easily processable for the audience to be able to send an unambiguous message with the story you are telling. An unambiguous message is created by having only one visual signal on the slides that is easily understood. Don't put lots of graphics, charts and text on your slides. Avoid the noise.

So, I hope you liked the points that I talked about today and that you feel inspired to search for more information on how you can improve your presentations. Please leave comments and I hope you will visit my blog again for my next post!

Sources:

• Course website
• http://heathbrothers.com
• http://www.duarte.com/training/tools/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zlld9TA-Vg

Excel Project

Exercise study

Hello everybody,

Today I will tell you something about an interesting Excel project that I worked on. I analyzed data that I received from a large fitness center containing the heart rates of 500 individuals doing a particular workout. The fitness center was interested in how well the workout is designed and how many of the subjects achieved their individually determined target heart rate. My job now was to analyze the raw data.

The raw data contained the age and gender of each subject as well as the individual starting heart rates, the heart rates of each minute in a 15 minute workout, and the heart rates of each minute in a five minute cooldown period after the workout. Afterwards I added a column and calculated the maximum heart rate for each subject which is defined as being 220 minus a subject’s age. Further, I added a column calculating the target heart rate which was in this case 80 per cent of the maximum heart rate. Subsequently I added several columns calculating the highest heart rate achieved for each subject, whether or not the subject reached the target heart rate and the percentage increase of the heart rate during the workout. In addition to that I also formatted the worksheet according to the specifications of the fitness center.

Finally I did some data analysis using two pivot tables. These tables made it very easy for me to display on a separate worksheet some statistics about the raw data. The first one shows how many subjects reached their target heart rate and also divides them by gender. The second pivot table shows the average increase of the heart rate of subjects divided by gender and by age. The especially useful aspect of pivot tables is that I could easily configure the division by age to show age-decade groups, firstly from 20-29, secondly from 30-39 and finally from 40-49 in just one simple step using the “Group…” function. Picture 1 shows a screenshot of my average increase pivot table in Excel 2010.

 Picture 1: Screenshot pivot table 2 (Source: screenshot of my laptop's screen)

In conclusion I can say that this project combined with the video lectures of this were really practical and useful. I already considered my level of knowledge in Excel to be advanced so most of the things that were taught were not new to me but the pivot table section deepened my knowledge of this subject and I feel more secure about using them now.