Welcome to the first installment of 7 Questions. It was my privilege to talk recently with Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional) – Geetesh Bajaj.
Geetesh Bajaj (pictured to the left) has been working with PowerPoint for a long time now, and he heads Indezine, a presentation related studio and consultancy firm based out of Hyderabad, India. Geetesh believes that any PowerPoint presentation is a sum of its elements–these elements include abstract elements like concept, color, interactivity, and navigation–and also slide elements like shapes, graphics, charts, text, sound, video, and animation. He explains how these elements work together in his best-selling book Cutting Edge PowerPoint for Dummies — the book has several five-star ratings on Amazon.com. Geetesh has also authored three more books including the newest PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit. His Indezine.com site attracts nearly a million and a half page views each month.
Scott: What role do you think PowerPoint will play in the business community 10 years from now?
Geetesh: Whatever role PowerPoint might play in the next decade, I’m sure that the mind-boggling amount of content that has already been created within PowerPoint will shape the future trends as users will want to be able to reuse that content as the basis for newer content. In this scenario, I think PowerPoint will play a far wider role in the business community as advances in technology place PowerPoint as a repository of content that can be shown, shared, and distributed in any number of ways. And as a larger number of output options get created and evolve further using PowerPoint as their very core — then PowerPoint’s place as the industry standard will get further entrenched.
Scott: You obviously have a passion for PowerPoint. What sparked your interest in the software program?
Geetesh: I do know that while it is easy to create PowerPoint presentations, it is even easier to create terrible PowerPoint presentations. That however is not something I consider a disadvantage — I always like the fact that PowerPoint has provided so much artistic freedom. There are very few binding controls, and users can work with the program in their own unique style.
Although PowerPoint is the only contender in the presentation sphere these days, there used to be many more names earlier: Persuasion, Astound, Action, Freelance Graphics, etc. Most of these programs are no longer around – and I think PowerPoint survived because it worked just like Word and Excel did – and PowerPoint was bundled as part of the Microsoft Office suite. This made so much more sense to business users – and since business users represent a large number of my clients, I ended up using more of PowerPoint than the other programs. This sparked my interest in PowerPoint.
Scott: Everyone is enjoying your new book, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit. What inspired you to write the book?
Geetesh: I wanted to do a book that could teach users create better presentations at the same time that they get aware of new PowerPoint 2007 features. This book is more of an evolution than a moment of inspiration. I have worked with so many PowerPoint users belonging to all sorts of aptitude levels: all the way from beginners to advanced users and if there was a common thread that represented their PowerPoint troubles, it had to be the fact that each of them was on a virtual island, creating presentations of a typical kind, using the same PowerPoint options, and never realizing what they were complete unaware of. These users never learnt more since they don’t want to read tons of pages; they want to learn while they are working on a sample presentation. That’s exactly what this book is about – in addition is so much fun to work with.
I’m glad everything fell into place: I couldn’t have asked for a better publisher, co-author or a team. The publishers made this into a full color book, my co-author and tech-editor were awesome, and we got to use some award winning presentations as makeover samples in the book, including one of yours. The book has been very well received, and we are already being asked to explore working on a sequel.
Scott: Who is your favorite presenter?
Geetesh: That’s a difficult question to answer because presenting is not always about slides. However, I think a great presentation and presenter are a team – put together, the sum is always greater than the parts.
Having said that, I can certainly say that a great presenter is always sincere about his or her work, is involved with the audience, and has a striving need to explain complicated concepts in simple terms.
Scott: How important is story as it relates to the world of presentations?
Geetesh: Story is everything; if you don’t have a story, it really doesn’t matter how well you package your presentation content because it still doesn’t have a soul. The story is thus the soul – it is also the essence, happiness, and the feel-good factor of the presentation.
Scott: Everyone talks about death by PowerPoint. How did we get here?
Geetesh: We got there simply because the world is more attracted to death than life. Front pages of newspapers rarely talk about life, it is death that makes the headlines. And the term “death by PowerPoint” simply reinstates the fact that we are living in a world where PowerPoint has percolated to every aspect of society. In many ways, this death by PowerPoint is a hugely exaggerated concept that has reached the realms of overkill. We now need to talk about life with PowerPoint since one cannot be dead and alive at the same time. Life will prevail.
Scott: What is your definition of Presentation 2.0?
Geetesh: This might not be the answer you expect, but Presentation 2.0 is an abstract concept. It is so much open to evolution, fine-tuning and change that it is difficult to create a framework of what I would define as Presentation 2.0
So, let us talk about how much more Presentation 1.0 can still do for us – and what we can do to make it better now. I think the basic level of presenting holds so many promises in sectors like education, social services, information, etc. And the benefit of the slide as a medium of information and design is yet to be used – even in developed countries. Clearly, there’s so much potential, and so much more to do.
