Office Professional 10 tips for great storytelling

do astonishing issues with PowerPoint,Office Enterprise 2007 Key, but author Jennifer Egan has introduced PowerPoint right into a complete new stage: literature. She's written a chapter of her most current novel, "A Explore From your Goon Squad," (Knopf) totally in PowerPoint. that correctly. What she's achieved is frankly fantastic. SmartArt charts demonstrate the relationships from the characters. Graphs present their conflict and also the enthusiasm that equally binds and divides them. A rich,Office Professional, multilayered tale unfolds. spoke with her just lately, I used to be so inspired by her enthusiasm for your plan that I asked her to come up with 10 tips for storytelling in PowerPoint. You don't ought to be a novelist: Her guidelines apply to anyone using PowerPoint to convey complicated ideas. Here's her list: as many PowerPoint presentations as possible, ideally on an array of different topics. Copy and save individual slides that jump out as graphically interesting. Look at them outside the context in the presentations they came from and think about how and why they're successful at storytelling. directly into PowerPoint, rather than sketching out ideas and trying to import them into PowerPoint later on. in black and white initially; structure is what matters most, and color can be distracting early on. by jotting down elements of a dramatic moment as bullet points on an individual slide. Add or subtract elements until you have a collection on one slide that feels organically connected. this collection of bullet points and ask yourself HOW they're connected. What relationship do they describe -- a cycle? A chain of events? A hierarchy? Think also about which elements are primary. Are there two main ideas and three smaller ideas that are subsets of those main ideas? through the SmartArt graphics. Select several whose structure resonates with the bullet points in front of you, and copy the bullet points into each of them. Keep as many versions as seem intriguing and move on. moments that won't conform to pre-existing Smart Art Graphics, try copying and arranging individual shapes onto slides. If a fictional moment has a strong architectural feature -- a table,Windows 7 Professional, a wall -- think about ways to suggest that graphically and possibly organize the information around it. more complex moments,Office Ultimate 2007 Key, consider graphics that allow for several different readings: vertically, horizontally, even diagonally. you begin to collect slide moments, think about natural ways to divide those moments into groups. Time and space are the obvious categories: does the tale unfold in a series of locations, or at a few designated times? Think about ways to transition from one slide-group to the next. your slides in succession, using the Slideshow format, so that the shapes and text fill your total screen. When the flow seems off, or the graphics not quite right, jump immediately back into individual slides and make changes. ALWAYS duplicate a slide before you begin to tinker with it; sometimes it can be hard to recapture your original effect. that may be even more remarkable than the chapter, titled "Great Rock and Roll Pauses": Egan said she knew virtually nothing about PowerPoint until she decided to write it this way. She just plunged into it with reckless abandon. "It was like a mad obsession. It was a enthusiasm," Egan said. "We were on vacation on the beach and I was sitting in the house doing PowerPoint... I was like a woman possessed." the chapter/deck/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, it's obvious she has an extraordinary command for the language of PowerPoint. The chapter is told from your viewpoint of a 12-year-old girl, and as the title implies, hinges greatly on factors left unsaid and therefore the pauses between issues that are said. As it turned out, PowerPoint was ideal for conveying that concept. (PowerPoint) ended up being the format in which I could lay bare the deep, underlying ideas of your entire book," Egan said. "I think it breaks down a narrative right into a sequence of moments that basically hang in the air,Office 2007 Key, and then give up their place to the next moment. Conventional fiction is all about giving this impression of continuity. In PowerPoint, the connective stuff falls away, and that was really different from what I normally do. The only way to write fiction in PowerPoint successfully is to work without that continuity; you're picking these particular moments to connect the complete." critical reaction has been very positive. Check out these reviews through the New York Times, the Washington Post and Time Magazine. "I'm amazed at how open people were to reading fiction in PowerPoint. The fear is that it's just a gimmick...but I wouldn't have included the chapter if it felt like that. In the end, it was the opposite of a gimmick: It allowed me to write fiction in a way I hadn't before." see the chapter embedded on her website, www.jenniferegan.com/books, and you can buy the book here from Amazon.com. Egan is a fantastic evangelist for PowerPoint, so we're hoping to feature her on upcoming episodes of "The Office Indicate." Stay tuned... Kim