WHEN YOU COMPLETE the Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) Story Template, you have in hand a complete and coherent story that sets the foundation for all your slides. Your story is so clear that even if your technology fails during your presentation, you have the security of knowing that you are able to present using only a printout of the story template as your guide. But of course you’ll want to use graphics in your Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, because research indicates that people learn better when you add graphics to your narration in a multimedia presentation.
Now in this topic you will focus on the two strands of that story thread that represent the two essential elements you have to coordinate in any multimedia presentation—the visual and verbal channels.
You’ll learn how to guide these visual and verbal strands through the rest of this topic. Your challenge in this topic is to set up your PowerPoint presentation in specific ways that don’t split the attention of the audience or create redundancy.
Expect that it will take some time to learn and apply the techniques described in these topics, but as you develop your skills, the process will go faster and BBP will become a handy tool for rapid visual prototyping of creative concepts. As you build presentations over time, you’ll develop a personal library of styles to review for inspiration on future projects.
What Will You Show, Say, and Do During Every Slide?
The prospect of managing everything you show, say, and do during every slide in a presentation can seem daunting at first. Even if you have written a clear and coherent set of headlines, as shown in Figure 6-1, how can you possibly fill all the empty slides you will create from the story template with graphics, narration, and interaction in a quick and efficient way? And at the same time, how can you seamlessly integrate all these complex elements during a live presentation? The answer lies in a different way of looking at PowerPoint—as a visual storytelling tool.
FIGURE 6-1 Your completed story template.
These initial sketches enable everyone on the production team to begin to see how the film will look so that they can start to turn the words from the script into spoken words and projected images. A storyboard is a powerful tool because it lets you see many frames from a story in a single view and consider how those frames relate to one another through a narrative. Without this important perspective, you would find it hard to see how the parts link together to become a coherent whole.
You won’t need to hire a storyboard artist to create your storyboard; instead, you’ll adapt the basic techniques of creating a storyboard to your PowerPoint presentation to help you organize the visual and verbal pieces of your story. This approach will shift your thinking of a PowerPoint presentation from individual slides toward frames in a strip of cinematic film. By setting up a new PowerPoint presentation in this way, you’ll use the storyboard not only to plan your words and visuals but also to present them to the audience using a single media document that works across projector, paper, and browser.
Preparing the storyboard
The concise headlines that communicate each act and scene in the story template are the same concise headlines that will communicate clearly to the audience on your PowerPoint slides. Writing headlines for both the story template and the PowerPoint slides is the powerful fulcrum that allows you to leverage PowerPoint software beyond bullet points into a new world of visual storytelling. This process embeds your script in a storyboard and ensures that everything you say and show maps back to the structure and sequence of a story. It also ensures that you have broken up your ideas into bite-size pieces so that working memory can easily digest them.
Although you’re finished with the story template for now, it’s a good idea to print a copy and keep it handy while you set up and work on your PowerPoint storyboard. The story template gives you the significant benefit of seeing your entire story on a single page or two, but when you import your headlines into PowerPoint, you will break the link between story template and storyboard. If you make changes to the headlines or the presentation structure later in PowerPoint, it’s always a good idea to update your story template so that it continues to serve as an organizing tool.
Note
Once you learn how to reformat your story template manually, the process will take only a couple of minutes. If you want to skip these steps altogether, visit www.beyondbulletpoints.com for third-party tools that can help you format your storyboard faster.
To prepare the headlines in your story template to become the headlines of your PowerPoint slides, you need to do some prep work on the story template. First save the Microsoft Word document, and then on the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Select; then choose Select All to select all of the headlines in the template, and then press Ctrl+C to copy them. Next create a new Word document and save it on your local computer in a familiar folder, adding the word Formatted to the end of the file name. Position the cursor in this new document, and then on the Home tab, in the Clipboard group, click the Paste button, and on the drop-down menu, click Paste Special. In the Paste Special dialog box, select Unformatted Text, and then click OK. The resulting new document should look similar to Figure 6-2.
FIGURE 6-2 Initial view after pasting headlines from the story template into a new Word document.
Delete the line containing the column headings and any extra text so that only your headlines remain. Remove any extra spaces between words and add new line breaks where needed so that you end up with only one headline per line. Last select your Call to Action headline, and click and drag it to the line after your Point B headline—your final document should appear as shown in Figure 6-3. After you save the document, close it.
FIGURE 6-3 Word document with extra spaces between words removed, new line breaks added, and only one headline per line.
Using the BBP Storyboard Formatter
Now that you’ve reformatted your story template, the next step is to import your headlines into PowerPoint. You’ll do that with the BBP Storyboard Formatter—a specially formatted PowerPoint file that takes care of a number of technical steps for you so that you don’t have to take the time to apply them manually.
Note
If you choose not to use the BBP Storyboard Formatter, manually apply the settings as described in the sections "Tip 1: Set Up the Slide Master Manually" and "Tip 2: Set Up the Notes Master Manually" later in this topic.
Download the BBP Storyboard Formatter file from www.beyondbulletpoints.com to a folder on your local computer. Locate the BBP Storyboard Formatter on your local computer, and double-click it. Because the file format is a PowerPoint Design Template, as indicated by the .potx file extension, double-clicking the file will open a new presentation based on the template’s formatting. Your PowerPoint file contains one blank slide and is now shown in Slide Sorter view. Name and save the new PowerPoint file on your local computer.
WORKING IN NEWER VERSIONS OF POWERPOINT
If you’re new to PowerPoint 2007 or 2010, you’ll notice that the interface looks completely different from earlier versions. The Ribbon at the top is probably the most noticeable new feature, but there are many other changes to the way the software works. This topic aims to give you only the basics you need to know to get started with BBP in PowerPoint—to learn more about the technical details of how to use the software, refer to one of the many how-to topics, such as Joyce Cox and Joan Lambert’s Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 Step by Step (Microsoft Press, 2010).
On the Home tab, in the Slides group, click New Slide, and near the bottom of the dropdown menu, select Slides From Outline. Then, in the Insert Outline dialog box, find and select the formatted story template you just created—it should have the word Formatted that you added to the title—and then click Insert. (If you get an error message, you likely have your formatted Word document still open—in that case, return to the document and close it.)
This last click of the mouse produces a result that amazes most people when they see it happen before them on the screen—it creates a PowerPoint storyboard. You have now created a single slide for each of the headlines you wrote in the story template, with each headline now placed at the top of a slide, as shown in Figure 6-4. It’s a storyboard because you literally have a story embedded into your slides—the story you wrote in your story template, which now reads from one slide to the next. You’ll unlock the tremendous power of your storyboard shortly.
But first, take a tour of your new storyboard. If there are any blank slides in the presentation without headlines, delete them. At the lower right of the PowerPoint window on the status bar is a View toolbar with three buttons—when you click them from left to right, you will see the storyboard in Normal, Slide Sorter, and Slide Show views. Click and drag the handle on the Zoom toolbar to the left to decrease magnification of your current view and to the right to increase magnification. The indicator to the left of the Zoom toolbar displays the exact percentage of magnification—click this value to open the Zoom dialog box and make more precise adjustments.
FIGURE 6-4 Slide Sorter view of all your headlines imported into the BBP Storyboard Formatter.
Note
After you master the fundamentals of the BBP approach, customize the settings of the BBP Storyboard Formatter according to your needs. Save the template to your local computer to make it easily accessible when you create a new presentation; for details, see the section "Tip 3: Install the Storyboard Formatter on Your Local Computer" later in this topic.
