 hosted by AIC's Emerging Conservation Professionals Network, better known as ECPN. My name is Fran Ritchie and I'm the Network's Professional Education and Training Co-Chair and the Webinar Coordinator. Today, we are very pleased to present ECPN's seventh webinar on Presenting Talks and Posters. ECPN is happy to have with us two conservators who are effective public speakers, Katie Sanderson and Ariel O'Connor. Katie is an Assistant Conservator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ariel is an Objects Conservator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Both have given numerous professional presentations and posters. Before we continue, I would like to familiarize you with the GoToWebinar program that's the program that we're using today to facilitate this webinar. The view window where you see our title slide right now can be resized by clicking and dragging the lower right corner. The control panel is where you as an attendee can take some control on your own screen. You may find that with inactivity, the control panel automatically minimizes. If you'd like to keep it open the entire presentation, then go to View up at the top and there's an auto-hide control panel option that can be turned off by unselecting it. The audio section tells you if you are joined to the audio by phone or internet. All of you listening out there are muted so the way that you will be communicating is through the question or chat box. We have solicited questions for the Q&A today but if you have one, feel free to type it into the chat box. I'll keep an eye on this and we will hopefully answer your questions during the program but if there are questions that do not get answered, we may be able to address them in a post webinar blog post. We won't be using the raise hand option today. I'd also like to take a moment to share information about ECPN and our webinar series. For those who don't know, we are a network within AIC that is dedicated to supporting conservation professionals as they move through the first stages of their careers. We do this by organizing a variety of initiatives and programs. We are developing our own WICI page within the AIC WICI Education and Training section where you can find many of the resources we have been creating over the years. This is very much a work in progress that will continue to be updated but I wanted to go ahead and share this with you so you get used to going to this page. We also have a popular webinar series and provide programs at the AIC annual meetings. For this year's meeting in May, we have planned another lunchtime speed networking session based off of last year's successful event. You can advance, Katie. Join us on Saturday, May 16th from 12 to 2 to gain insight and advice from other conservators. We are also excited to be partnering with the Conservators in Private Practice Group or CIPP for a discussion panel and happy hour beginning at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, May 13th. The panel will include established private practice conservators as well as those who have just started their practice. Both groups will offer advice for beginning private work. The panel is from four to six and our traditional happy hour directly follows from six to eight. By having the happy hour directly after, this will give us the chance to continue the panel discussions but please do feel free to join in the happy hour even if you did not attend the panel. Register for the speed networking event and learn more about both of the programs on AIC's website under the annual meeting. Next slide. To learn more about ECPN, we encourage you to join us for our bi-monthly conference calls which are usually held on the second Tuesday of every other month at 12 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The number to join can be found under the information section of our Facebook page or you can email ECPN share Megan Salazar Walsh for more information. Please also consider subscribing to our periodic e-blast which you can do by logging on to the AIC website, clicking on manage your profile and selecting ECPN. You can also follow us on the AIC blog, Conservators Converse. Visit the link on your screen for more information about all of this. The Emerging Conservatives community is also very active on our ECPN Facebook page where people post questions and advice and they also offer support. We encourage conservators of all levels to join in this conversation. Next slide. Through our webinar series, ECPN strives to provide ongoing programming that responds to the needs of emerging professionals at different stages of their early careers although we believe that the webinar series can be beneficial to all conservators. Recordings of our webinars may be accessed on AIC's YouTube channel and a recording of today's program will also be posted on there soon. Turning then to today's program, the ability to communicate our work effectively is an essential part of being a conservator especially as we advocate for funding and educate non-conservators on the importance of preservation. Today we are focusing on presenting talks and posters or ways to utilize and polish these platforms so that your audience is focused on your work. We have all attended talks when the presenter seems unprepared or seen those posters with too much information and too small to font. Katie and Aria will help us prevent those blunders. As I mentioned, today's program will conclude with a Q&A session and these questions were selected from those submitted by the audience through the emails provided in the registration form. Although you can submit questions through the chat box on your screen. Even if we run out of time, our speakers may be able to address additional questions in the form of a blog post. So please do continue to submit. And now I will turn over the program to our first speaker, Katie Sanderson. Thanks, Fran. Hi, everybody. I'm glad to be here. And I'm going to jump right in and I'm going to divide my comments this morning among four sections covering abstracts, posters, and then writing the actual talk and finally the act of presenting it. And then Ariel will address some of the practical aspects of creating and presenting PowerPoint presentations. So jumping right in with writing your abstract, I'm starting with this obviously because writing your abstract is the beginning of the process. And a well-written abstract can really act as a sort of mission statement you can refer back to as you're preparing for your presentation. So it can be a very useful tool as you're working through. The purpose of an abstract is to give a brief and clear idea of what you'll be talking about in your presentation. It should never be a summary of your entire talk. Abstracts can vary a lot and there's really no single way to write a good one. But generally they should include an introduction describing the question or problem you might be addressing, some background information related to your project, giving it some context, sometimes with the larger body of work in your chosen specialization. The objective of the project you're actually presenting. And then a description of the project and the results you plan to discuss. And if you're unsure of how to start writing an abstract, looking up examples is a really great way to get a sense of how you think it should come into shape. Abstracts are everywhere and the AIC conference abstract books are really the perfect place to look first I think. In many cases you may be writing your abstract before you actually know the outcome of your project you'll present. And I think this becomes more and more common the farther into your career you go. This is fine. Just remember that you'll usually be given an opportunity to edit your abstract before it's printed finally in the conference program, just in case you need to make any changes. Although that's something that's definitely worth double checking for whichever conference you might be presenting at. And I want to make a quick note about brevity here. I'm a firm believer that a good abstract is a short one. And of course not all short abstracts are good ones. But substance, because substance certainly matters as well as does structure. But as the co-chair of the AIC poster session for a couple of years now, I've read a lot of abstracts and I have to say I've come to value those that are well written, clear and concise. The example I showed you earlier was about 300 words and I think it's a common upper limit is about 500 words. And that's something I tend to strive for. I've certainly written longer abstracts than that, than 300, but I usually try to keep it under 500. And this way of thinking, this sort of attempt to write brief and concise prose should really be applied to anything you do, but especially for abstracts and also for posters. I'm going to talk briefly about designing a poster. With poster design, it's like abstracts. Less is really more. They should be visual with lots of pictures and only the most important information in the text. Like writing a good abstract, the most challenging part of course is editing it down to only the most essential information. And especially when you're writing it out in say a word document before you format it as a poster, it will look incredibly short and it will feel like you're including virtually no information. This poster by Emily Hamilton is nicely designed with really clear section headings, good images, and just the right amount of text, not too much. She's also included her contact information and a photo of herself, which I think both of these are a great idea, especially the contact information, which allows a nice easy way for people to follow up with questions later. And if you're putting together a great poster, people really will want to reach out to you. The best way to control the amount of text you add to your poster is by using images that illustrate your point instead. Sometimes this can actually be clearer than writing if you find the right images to do this. This is a poster I presented in 2007 about wheat starch paste, and which is a pretty dry topic. And it turned out to be much easier for me to discuss the stages of clicking paste with images and brief captions rather than writing it out. And I think far more interesting, although I was surprised even that I was able to get reasonably interesting pictures of paste. I've also, I always format posters right in PowerPoint. It's easy and it's familiar for me. You can, of course, use any design program you like, Photoshop or InDesign are popular ones with people that I know. Whatever works best for you. If you're using PowerPoint, I'll just give you a quick piece of advice to be sure that you change the size of your slide to reflect the actual dimensions of your poster. I think AIC's requirements are no bigger than 4 by 4 feet. So if it's a 3 by 4 foot poster like this one was, you just want to actually enter those dimensions in PowerPoint. And do pay attention to the formatting requirements for whatever conference you're attending. Some can be fairly strict and some can be a little bit more lenient. And consider making a handout of some sort, which includes your contact information and any details you think anyone might want to take notes on. It doesn't really need to be fancy. It can be a simple printout or it can be something a little bit more complex like a pamphlet or even a bookmark like this one. People who are interested in your poster will want to take one. Any takeaway, if it's an interesting and useful topic, will be taken. And actually, I have to say once in a while, I do still hear from people that they have this bookmark hanging in their lab next to their paste setup, which is great. In addition to your poster and your handouts, when you arrive at the conference, you always want to bring pins for hanging your poster in case there aren't any available on site. And bring a couple envelopes or transparent sleeves for your handouts in case there's no table. I think this is usually the case these days. I think it used to be more common that there might be a surface. But these days, having some sort of container for your handouts that you can actually pin to the board is a great idea. OK, so that's my brief description of poster design. And I'm happy to answer more questions about that at the end of Ariel's talk today. But writing a talk is really writing and presenting are really what I'm going to focus on the most today. And I'm going to run through some of the most important things to consider when you're pulling your talk together. First and foremost, get organized. And whether you tend to read your talk, use notes, or speak off the cuff, I think an outline is one of the best tools at your disposal to organize your thoughts and to work out the transitions between ideas that you'll be presenting. As you're fleshing out the outline, you may find that an actual script will emerge, which can be a really useful process. Of course, everyone works differently. So maybe you work better by weighing out your PowerPoint first. I know Ariel and I seem to have opposite preparation methods, which is always really interesting. However you do it, though, be mindful that the shape of your presentation needs to be clear in your head before you really get too deep into it. And of course, there are a number of other things to consider as your presentation starts to take shape. And number one should be how to engage your audience. This is really something you should be thinking about in the very early stages of writing your talk, because you first need to identify who your audience is. What you present should be shaped by who's listening to you. So for example, a talk to an audience of conservators within your chosen specialization will be very different from one for the general public, of course. It's important to understand what your audience is likely to know, what they may not know, and also what they may just need a reminder for. Some slightly more technical information, even if you're speaking to an all-conservator group, might just require a little bit of an introduction or a reminder. For any audience, if you have graphs or other technical slides, you'll need to explain them in order to orient the audience to the format that you've chosen. I think it's natural for us to sometimes assume that because we've worked with these formats for a long time, others will pick it up quickly. But it's rare that people can pick up the exact format of a slide in the amount of time that the slide is up. So do be sure that you orient people to the format that you've chosen. This slide shows color data for this photograph by Paul Strand. And the most important detail here is that the print is changing more rapidly on exhibition than while in storage. But with all of these numbers, it's nearly eligible and completely varies to point. So here's another way to look at the same exact data. This is a significant improvement, but it's still a lot of information for one slide. Just because you gathered the data really doesn't mean that it belongs in your talk. And it's important to only include information that's really relevant to your point. So pulled from all of that data, this slide, graphs change over time and a little bit more clearly conveys that the slope is steeper for two exhibition periods if you look at this. And the only method I've come up with for getting to this point of sort of honing in on the format of a graph or some other kind of technical slide is to just spend a ton of time trying out lots of different formats and versions. The good news is that if you're using graphs, you can copy and paste them straight from Excel into PowerPoint. So that part is actually pretty easy. And Ariel is going to talk a little bit more about PowerPoint and some of the practical aspects of building a PowerPoint presentation. But while I'm on the topic, I just wanted to share a few more quick thoughts about this, just especially because I have this slide up. Always be sure to label images of art objects. I've actually seen a lot of presentations where there'll be a beautiful image of a painting or a sculpture. And for some reason, there's no artist information or collection information. It's just nice to know, even if it's not entirely relevant to what you're saying. Always credit photographers other than yourself and if you know who they are. And just a personal pet peeve and I'm throwing this in here because I wasn't sure even where to put it in the rest of the talk. I've actually seen smiley faces next to good data on slides and I do not recommend doing that. OK, to read or not to read, I think, is one of the most common topics of discussion regarding public speaking, particularly among students who are taught differently depending on the graduate program they attend. And I think that most of us would agree that really the ideal talk is one where the speaker presents seamlessly without a script. This is a pretty tall order though, particularly if you're new to public speaking or if you're just very uncomfortable doing it. So I'll say this, comfort level is key. If you need to read, that's absolutely fine. But you should practice out loud so many times that it sounds like you're speaking off the cuff. At all costs, you really want to avoid sounding like you're reading. It detracts from your talk if people are focused on the sort of sing-songy cadence of a sort of story time that many of us take on when we're reading aloud. It's just not a natural speech pattern and it can be very distracting. Instead, think about your talk as a conversation. Write your script in the type of language that you use when you're speaking, not when you're writing. And read it aloud many, many times and change the language each time to most closely resemble how you would normally speak, not how you would write a paper. Because a presentation is decidedly different from a paper. Your writing skills might be great, but reading a well-written paper to your audience puts way too much distance between you and them. Your presentation is also not a treatment report. So use the active voice always. There should really never be the third person in an active presentation. So watch yourself on that one. I think it's a common tendency and I'm not sure everyone is aware that they're doing it. The structure of your talk is also key in keeping your audience engaged and to avoid overly repetitive structure is really what you need to hone in on. You want to avoid telling the audience what you're going to say, then saying it, and then telling them what you said. Which is, I think that's a format that's taught frequently and I think this is overly simplistic and a little bit literal and it can result in a boring talk. So instead design your talk so it evolves from the first slide to the last, avoiding too much repetition. And what you really need to do to accomplish this is to establish an actual narrative. You want to be telling a story rather than a strict chronology. Maybe your findings took you in a different direction or an initial treatment decision didn't go very well. This is the stuff that's interesting. People will not only want to know the information that you're presenting, they'll also want to find out what happens next and that's what keeps people engaged. You also want to make sure that you edit yourself. A 20 minute talk is incredibly short. It's inevitable that you won't be able to cover all the details you'd like to. So do avoid trying to cram it all in and that's really what your publication is for. And also be careful not to overload your slides with too much text. Keep it as minimal as possible and my general rule of thumb is to avoid complete sentences. Polluted lists is really as much text as you should probably have unless it's a very specific and important quote. And of course, make sure you know your topic inside and out. This is the best way to feel confident going into your talk. This means digging deeper than you need to as you're preparing and you really want people to ask questions after your talk as scary as that can sometimes be. And people will line up at the microphone if you've engaged your audience successfully. They'll want to ask you more questions. So I think of this as sort of an iceberg. You're only presenting the absolute tip and you've done all this other work and the audience doesn't know you've done that but you've got that preparation behind you and that should push you into this particular situation feeling confident that you're better prepared than certainly anyone else in the room. So you're gonna be prepared to answer these questions as long as you think about this. Think about possible questions that people might ask you and bounce these ideas off of colleagues and friends also and objective perspective can be very helpful for this. And also remember with questions that it's always okay to say I don't know and if you have a way to reference a possible source for that information, whether it's another person at the conference or an article you're aware of that's an even better way to say I don't know. And practice is really important. I mean I highly recommend practicing as much as possible. Talk to yourself as you're getting ready in the morning. Pretend you're explaining the nuances of a certain point to someone you know or actually do that if they'll let you. Do run-throughs with colleagues, classmates, friends, family, pets. I know that I've definitely become a better speaker over time because of the advice and support of my current and past colleagues. Also try recording yourself at some point. This isn't something I would recommend doing right before you give your talk but I definitely think that this is a very useful tool although honestly there's nothing more humbling than looking at that tape. It will help you improve though as long as you're careful to look at it being self-critical in a constructive way. And then so after all of this practicing the day before your talk, just stop practicing. Take the night off, rest your brain. Athletes tend to taper before a big race and that's really what you should do before a presentation. And then what I recommend is waking up early enough the next morning to eat a good breakfast, read through your notes one more time just to get your head in the game and go to the conference. Although after all of this it's a sort of practice what you preach moment. In the spirit of full disclosure, these days I honestly tend to finish my presentations pretty close to the presentation time. I would never recommend waiting until the very last minute for anyone who's new to presenting but as you're getting some more talks under your belt you'll learn where your limits are and how you work best. Also I know it doesn't seem like this at the time but you'll really never have more prep time than you do when you're a student. So take advantage of that as well. Okay finally I'm just gonna talk about the actual act of presenting. The first instruction I ever received in public speaking was from a professional public speaking coach named Barbara Tenenbaum from Brown University. She had been hired by the museum where I worked at the time to provide training for employees and I was incredibly fortunate to participate especially because it was about a month before I interviewed for grad school which was also somewhat humbling when your flaws are sort of pointed out to you but of course it was a net gain and I learned a huge amount from Barbara and continue to draw on her advice every time I prepare a talk. But the most significant thing I think I learned from her was the importance of confidence when giving a presentation because a perceived lack of confidence will erode any authority you have. Even if you have confidence there are certain things that I think we all tend to do that can make it appear as if you don't have as much authority as you do. And so I'm gonna run through a few dos and don'ts for conveying confidence while presenting and I find that really most public speaking advice falls into this category. So rule number one, just speak up. A presentation is not the time to be quiet or meek and if this is outside your normal comfort zone you'll just need to practice a little bit more. You also want to just make sure that you give yourself enough time, pay attention to where you are in your script or your outline. If you need to stop and take a sip of water, do that. Those moments can seem like an eternity when you're at the lectern but they really aren't that way when you're sitting in the audience. So just remember to relax a little bit. Physical appearance matters a lot. You want to have good posture, you wanna be standing up straight with your feet firmly planted shoulder width apart. You really don't want to sort of shrink into yourself like this poor selling bee participant is doing. You want to exude confidence in just in your physical stature. You also want to keep hair out of your face. Just make sure your hair is pulled back and you're not playing with that or trying to keep it out of your face while you're talking. You wanna wear clothes that don't really compete with what's going on on the screen or what you're saying. It's a simple monochromatic, just not too fussy. You also want to take off your name tag. This sort of goes along with keeping sort of a clean, uncluttered appearance. It can, your name tag can actually look a little bit messy but also if it's pinched to your lapel, it can even reflect out into the audience and cause glare. So just remember to take that off as sort of a last thing before you go up to the lectern. You also don't want to be fidgeting. You don't wanna be playing with your jewelry, touching your hair, playing with your name tag if it's around your neck. And you wanna be organized. If you're reading your talk, one tip that I like, if I have a full script and it's on paper, I prefer to slide my pages from one pile to another instead of flipping them and that way your papers aren't visible to the audience and actually for the last couple of years I've been using my iPad more for my notes and that works really well also. So if that's the way you go, just remember to turn off any auto lock or sleep functions. And then one last point in this section. Laser pointers are something that I just do not use and it's because even if I'm walking up to give a talk and I'm feeling confident and prepared, my heart rate will always be faster. There's always a little bit of nervousness and the laser pointer is the first way to betray that. Even if you've seen confident but you feel nervous, if you're holding a laser point, it's likely to shake. So if you can come up with other ways to build in highlighting features in your PowerPoint and Ariel will show you some tips for this, I highly recommend that instead of using a laser pointer. You also wanna speak clearly and avoid as much as possible using space filling words like um, you know, or like. It's really difficult to eradicate these from our speech altogether, but it's very possible to significantly reduce their use. If you use these less frequently in your everyday speech, you'll also rely on them less when you're presenting. And the best advice I ever received about this was to ask close friends or family members to just point out every time you use a space filling word. It takes time to change your habits, but this really works if you stick to it for a while. Also avoid beginning sentences with words like so or okay. They tend to have the same effect as space fillers, and all of these words will really just dilute your message and make you appear a little bit less confident. Rule number four is a big one. You wanna avoid what's called girl talk, and this is something that Barbara Tenenbaum calls it. Many people tend to do this, both men and women, but unfortunately it is more common with women. And this is the tendency to inflect upwards at the end of a sentence, making your statement sound more like a question. And this tends to erode any authority you might have by turning all of your statements into questions. And again, changing this kind of speech pattern is like space filling words. It's something that simply requires a lot of practice and change over time if it's something you tend to do. You also don't want to apologize. If something goes wrong with a slide, try to move on and explain what you can without your illustration. Sometimes this is a little bit unavoidable, but you wanna avoid apologizing at all costs if you possibly can, or come up with even a slightly different way of acknowledging that your very important graph didn't show up rather than actually apologizing. Of course, we all make mistakes sometimes, even seasoned public speakers, but the more mindful you are of how you present yourself, the more polished your presentations will be. Ultimately, how we present ourselves to the world is tremendously important, and speaking clearly and confidently is essential for any good presentation. And if this is done well, your content is what will be more memorable than your presentation style, and that's really the whole point of giving a talk. And this just feeds into a larger point I want to end with today about recognizing and valuing your contribution to the field by giving presentations. Whether you're pre-program, a current student, or a recent graduate, when you're speaking publicly, you're there by invitation, just like anyone else. People wanna hear what you have to say. So don't forget that, and don't ever diminish your presence at the conference by expressing surprise, for example, that the programming committee selected your paper. Of course, it's appropriate to express thanks to the organizing body. It's a pleasure to be here, et cetera, but do be confident in this act that you're there because you have something to say that's worth listening to. And along with thorough preparation, knowing that you belong at that lectern really is the best way to give a great talk. And that's it for me. So I'm going to hand this over to Ariel. Thank you, Katie. Hello, everyone. I'm switching just momentarily to my PowerPoint. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. And as strange as this might sound to some people, I actually really enjoy making PowerPoints. And I enjoy trying to figure out how to get this sometimes cumbersome piece of software to make things look elegant and interesting. And I know everyone listening in today is very tech savvy and could certainly teach this topic alongside both of us. And many of you have already created dozens of PowerPoints. So what I was hoping to do today was focus on a bit of a workflow and some tools that I personally use the most when I'm approaching making a PowerPoint. And I'll start with a few general tips. And then go through the PowerPoint menu tools and highlight the ones that I think are best suited for conservation presentations. Then I have just a few easy tricks to share that I think can make your PowerPoint stand out from some of the other ones. And finally, I'll go over what to bring with you to the venue when you're giving the talk. And hopefully there might be some new tips in here for the seasoned PowerPoint experts who are listening and hopefully some good basics for those of you who are pre-programmed or thinking about your first conservation PowerPoints or even preparing for grad school interviews. So the first general tip is really starting with a color or a theme combination. And I generally pick a few theme colors that match my object or a project. And it kind of allows your object to stand out. My go to sort of easy to see color combinations are often a black background with cream text if my objects are light colored, yellow or an orange on a gray for a darker object. For this talk, I just decided that orange seemed to complement the images on the title slide, but it easily could have been other colors too. But the main thing I think to keep in mind is the more care that you put into the overall aesthetics and the design of your slide, I do think people will pay more attention. And I've actually had a few arguments with some very brilliant conservation scientists about that because they argue that the content of the presentation is much more important. And I certainly don't disagree with that, but I think the visuals will really augment your content and shouldn't be disregarded. And when I sit down to a talk and I see a white background on a title slide, I instantly get worried about the next 20 minutes. I sort of call this the car wash maintenance theory because my mom will always wash her car before taking it to the mechanic. And she says that if people see that you take care of it, they'll pay more attention and they'll be more careful too. So the next tip that I wanted to mention is a fairly obvious one, but screenshots really form the foundation and are the most basic, but I find the most useful tool. And on a PC, I usually use this wonderfully named snipping tool. On a Mac, I use Grab. And both programs have good keyboard shortcuts. You can Google them if you're not sure what they are. They can do full screen. You can do window selection, a smaller selection. On the Mac version, I really like the timed screen, particularly if I need a few seconds to lower a dropdown menu, for example. On the PC version, I like using the freeform snip tool because you can draw a specific area. And I also have Dropbox set up to accept the screenshots, so I don't have to paste them into something each time if I don't want to. And this is an example slide from my third year internship presentation to Buffalo. And I'm showing it to you because it's actually a screenshot because I wanted to use a non-standard font. This one is Garamond, but I wasn't sure if the computer where I was showing the talk would have Garamond. So I simply made the slide and then took a screenshot and pasted that in as my first slide. So I didn't have to worry about it opening properly on the auditorium computer. I also use screenshots for slides like this one. This was from an ANACPIC talk at Delaware in 2011. The slides that have multiple images that perhaps I will animate or do something with the slide as a whole. And I don't want to accidentally move around one of the images on it. So if you're worried about that or perhaps you like drop shadows or something that you don't know if it will transfer between a PC and a Mac or different versions of PowerPoint, screenshot is a really good way to go. Video screenshots I also find really helpful and a great tool to show perhaps a piece of software or a procedure without having to do it live during the talk and risk internet connection not working or risk something not working the way that you want. For a PC, there are two programs that have been recommended to me as good free software, Cam Studio and Fraps. On a Mac, which I use at home, I have QuickTime. Both platforms, you can select an area or you can select the whole screen. And these are just a couple examples to get you started but there's certainly tons of programs out there for you to choose from. This is an example from the Princeton Art Museum website on the left and they have a wonderful interactive website on Chinese piece mold casting. So that short video clip on the right, I just use QuickTime to record a section of the website and record a video for each step so I could use to teach bronze casting without having to do still images. Now to align two things perfectly on different slides can be tricky sometimes. But the easy way to do it is if you make them the same size, you can then determine the position on the slide of one of them by right clicking on your image and checking the position with format picture. You can see under position on the right, there's a horizontal and vertical number from the top left corner. If you copy those numbers from one photo to the next, they'll be in exactly the same spot on both slides. And I use this all the time because I want images to be overlaid perfectly and sometimes you can't get it just right. And so this is a helpful tool for that. It also works well if you are trying to make very minute position changes to a shape such as maybe a rectangle that you've highlighted around something and it won't quite center because your arrow keys right and left move it too much and you can use this position to fix that. And the final general tip that I wanted to mention is something that I called the fake crop. I'm always looking for workarounds to make PowerPoints faster but look nicer. And if you have two images that you can't easily make the same size like I was just mentioning but you need them to overlap perfectly, I fake crop them by adding squares around the borders to match the background. So I'll show you. For example, if you have an important PowerPoint coming up and this image needs to be perfectly cropped and overlaid on this image. It would be difficult to crop them both to the exact same dimensions and size but instead what you can do is you can overlay both photos and add squares around the borders that match the background. Here I just made them tan so you could see where the squares are but if I switch them to black it looks like I've cropped both images. And then you can just overlay them and it's a quick workaround. So what I'm going to do now is I've taken some screenshots of the PowerPoint toolbar menus and I'm going to highlight across the top some of the tools that I use the most often when creating presentations and I'll just go tab by tab across the top. So if we start here on the home tab. The tool that I absolutely use the most is this free form drawing tool. It's great. You can draw any shape you need with transparent fills. I use it often to highlight or emphasize edges of an object such as drawing lines on the edges of this one. You can draw many different lines or shapes with it and then group them all together as one object. The arrange tool is useful if you're managing slides that have many images or text boxes on them. In the selection pane on the right-hand side we'll show you the layering structure and you can rearrange the order. This is how it looks on a PC. On a Mac it's different. It's called Reorder Objects. I actually find it to work a lot better on a Mac and what it looks like is it shows you each item almost in a plane and you can drag them forward and backwards to rearrange and I use this all the time. So those are the ones I use mostly on the home tab. On the insert tab, insert picture is fairly obvious though I'm sure most of us just drag and drop into the slide. But I want to mention a few things about image size while we're talking about photos. When you're searching for useful and important images on Google, you can click on the search tools and you can click on show sizes and you'll get to see the pixel dimensions on each photo and I find this quite helpful and you can actually select whether you want large or perhaps medium images and you'll get the highest resolution images and you don't have to search through the lower ones. When you've selected your important image, you can compress it directly in PowerPoint and you should select the best quality, the 220 PPI. If you want the cropped borders removed, say you've cropped it or edited it, you can check the box but you can't undo that action so it's important to make sure that you're confident and you don't want to change your mind about the size and it's also important to note that you should not compress your photos before they're the final size you want them on your screen because once you've compressed them, if you decided you want it bigger for example, you can't do that because it will be too pixelated. So I often don't do this until the very end of my presentation and then I will compress it for all of the pictures in the file. This feature under the Insert tab for Photo Album is one of my favorites in PowerPoint and I only discovered it fairly recently and you can use this to create a 15 second PowerPoint and I'm actually not kidding about this at all. So the way it works is you haven't used the Insert Photo Album. You can insert a picture from the file and disk. You can see that on the top left of the screen and it just opens in a browser window and you can select a group of images, which I've done here and then it populates these pictures into an album. You can see the file names and you have the ability to remove them, to reorder. You can change the brightness, the contrast. You can rotate them and you instantly, when you say okay, they populate into an album for you and here I've selected a fit to size so the longest side of the photo is automatically scaled to that slide. And you can go back, you can add, you can change anything you want. Here under Album Layout, instead of Picture Layout, here I've selected four pictures with title and what that allows you to do is it will give you a title bar across the top and it shows you the image file name. So it's a really great tool if you don't have a lot of time and a curator comes up to you and says I need you to give a presentation to this group of donors and they're here in 10 minutes. If you have a folder of photos, it's not a problem, you can do it. So the last thing that I use most often on the Insert tab is Insert Video from File and you can link directly to a file you have on your computer like this one here. This is a treatment video of a Hexdill fill on a glass object from the Met inserting a small magnet and chasing bubbles out of the fill. And sometimes you really can't describe something in text or photos, you really need to have a video. So it's quite useful. If you don't have a video yourself and you want to link to something on YouTube, that's absolutely okay too. I seem to always have trouble embedding an embed code in so I often don't do that. What I prefer to do to get a video like this from YouTube is go to a file conversion website such as ZAMSAR or there are many others and you can paste in the URL address and it will send you a link to download the video and then you can link it to your PowerPoint. And I also just want to emphasize that when you are linking a video you have to transfer this video file with you. I'm sure this is obvious to most people but it's really worth repeating because I have seen presentations where the presenter puts the PowerPoint on there and they didn't transfer the video file and they thought it was embedded. It never actually gets embedded, it's just a link. So what I tend to do is make a folder like this example folder and I put my movie and my PowerPoint there together so when I transfer the folder over to the computer where I'll give the presentation the link doesn't break between the two of them. Under the design tab I often use this just to change the slide orientation or the page setup size and I often change it to 8.5 by 11 making diagrams for condition reports and I'm mentioning that here just because it's something I do a lot in PowerPoint for example I'll make it this 8.5 by 11 and paste a photo for an object that I'm doing a condition report on and then I will outline areas using the freeform tool and I can easily and fairly quickly make a diagram. This was an object where I was mapping areas of different bronze alloy using different colors but what is great about this method is it's a Microsoft program so I can copy this diagram and paste it into a Word document or I can paste it into my PowerPoint slide that's formatted for presentations and so if you put an adjacent photograph and text of your object you have a really useful presentation tool to emphasize something perhaps as I'm talking about the different parts of the alloy I have the different colors that are already to go and it looks fairly fancy but it was something I had already created for a condition report and I was able to repurpose it for my presentation. The transitions tab, I don't use this very much sometimes I'll use fade which is just a soft transition between slides sometimes I have none, it depends but what is nice to know is that over here on the right you can actually set the amount of time between slides and you can set automatic slide advancing and that's what I just used on that bronze diagram with the colors so you can minimize the amount of times you have to click the mouse to advance the slide in your PowerPoint by just having it advance automatically if you can make sure the timing works out in your script. None of the animation tabs I feel like I need to say something about animations because it has a bad connotation in PowerPoint you often think of business board rooms with blue stardust background spiraling in and out or people who use flashy movements on their PowerPoint to try and keep you awake instead of the content but I do use a few animations and I think the subtle use of animations can make a big difference and can make things seamless and for my animations I almost exclusively use these two just click to fade in, click to fade out soft quick transition and I think a good animation is one that you don't realize is animated and the fact that it's moving shouldn't take up more of your attention than the object that you're showing and usually when I animate and fade in and out things I choose the shortest possible option which is a half a second and you have tools also to animate something with the previous thing that you did or after the previous thing that you did so you can click fewer times if you set this up and that can be helpful and the last thing I want to note with animation says if you are grouping items if they already have an animation if you create a group that old animation will go away so you'll have to reanimate the whole group so just something to keep in mind that you should group it first before making your animation and under the picture tools the final thing I want to mention is removing a background on the left hand side you can see the removed background I used to do this manually by hand in Photoshop before the removed background tool came into PowerPoint so this is such a huge time saver and I find that about 90% of the time it actually works very well in PowerPoint if the object has a really irregular border or it's very close in color to the background you may have to go ahead and do it in Photoshop but it makes it quite easy it will highlight what it thinks is the background you can drag the border around to give it a better idea of the edges you can also add little areas here and there to add or subtract and then it will remove the background for you and I like this often because I put soft drop shadows under things and I feel like that emphasizes the object well and you can even change the background color and you don't have to worry about it so those were mostly the PowerPoint menu tools that I use when I'm making a PowerPoint now is the fun part now I want to show you a few tricks that I've developed both in PowerPoint and in Photoshop that I think are pretty easy and they can make your presentation unique and it can make and stand out from some of the others and the three that I'll tell you about are the ones that I use a lot and I've given them these impossibly complicated names but they'll make sense momentarily I promise the transparent highlight, the emphasis fade and the cutout fade and the last one does need to be done in Photoshop if you have access to that which many of us do and really the reason I use all of these is just to avoid using a laser pointer as Katie mentioned so the first one I'll show you is the transparent highlight and this is a slide from talk for OSG in Philadelphia in 2001 and it was a reassembly of a small glass inlay so I took a photograph of the working procedure on my bench and what I wanted to show in the slide was the printout, the photograph that's on the back of my bench and so to mention that rather than pointing it out I just highlighted around the outside using that freeform tool in a very transparent color and to mention the two brushes the brush on the right was a pointed wet brush that I used to pick up the flakes and the brush on the left was dry and I used to tamp it down and so I prefer actually showing people in that way what I want them to see rather than sort of pointing at it with a laser pointer or just using an arrow which may not be as clear and this is just to give you a sense of the number of shapes on the slide, that's not too many and I have one just animate in and then animate out automatically so I only have to click once per object and this is another way to use that method if you want to outline something so this is the inlay when it was reassembled and I would use the same tool just to show the number of pieces and then filled in some of the areas with a transparent fill to show the areas that were filled with Japanese tissue and that would be something that I don't think would be possible to show with a laser pointer or any other way other than to use that transparency and here's a breakdown of the layering on that slide and the last example is a slide from a Jade Toolmark project that I worked on at the Harvard Art Museums and this is a Chinese Jade disk that I wanted to show parallel toolmarks on and I just used that transparency just to briefly highlight the areas that I wanted people to see and had it automatically fade away afterwards so that your eye could return to the object as opposed to looking at the transparency and that's the example of that slide so the next trick is called emphasis fade and what I mean by that is if you have everything around what you want to show darken it will emphasize and sort of highlight a particular area that you want people to see and you can do a lot of that in PowerPoint directly and one example is for people that maybe have archival material and they want to show or read a short quote from it rather than typing the text you could do something like this where a portion of the text zooms up but the emphasis fade part is just darkening the space behind it and the way you do that is by simply putting a black square between the two areas of text and making it transparent and then when you animate up your small quote it animates at the same time as your transparent square and it's a simple easy thing you can do it in two seconds but it just darkens everything around and emphasizes what you want to show and this slide I'll show you has the last two techniques together and this is the slide that I used for a third year internship talk from the Met and I wanted to show a few objects that I'd worked on from the Greek and Roman department so the beginning of the slide used the freeform tool just to outline the area on a map from the curatorial department and then this was the fade so it was just a dark transparent black square that animated up with these objects that the backgrounds cut out on top of them and one of the things that you can do is reorder the dark square so if I wanted to just mention the marble statue on the left you can still see the other objects to the right but not very much they're not really distracting and then you can switch the order of the square so that you can highlight the objects to the right where you can highlight the ceramic in the center and when you look at the animation pane it's just objects layered on the background but that dark square shifts around and that's the only thing that changes to give you that effect and the final one is my favorite cut out fade but you have to have Photoshop for this one and this is an example of a slide that uses this this is from Anacpic from 2011 and these are objects from the Harvard Art Museum as part of a study looking at composite Chinese ceremonial weapons so these are made of different materials they have turquoise and bronze and jade and what I wanted to show was the parts that were made of a specific material so when you click it will darken the jade areas and I just emphasize the bronze half and then when I spoke about the jade blades it just emphasized the jade and then everything went back to normal so I'll show you how to do that and it's not really any different than the one from PowerPoint before but since it has to be a specific shape and it can't be a square that's the only reason you have to do it in Photoshop so it's pretty easy to do in Photoshop I started with a screenshot of those six objects and then if you look here in the layering section of Photoshop you create a new layer on top of your image and use the paint bucket tool to make it completely black just solid and then you can change the opacity of that layer and here I've changed the opacity down to 60% so I can still see the image behind and use the polygonal lasso to start selecting the area that I want to reveal and then I simply delete the part of that black square in the area and you can continue along and then you'll make a mask that shows what you want to see and you can save a JPEG and the number of slides that you have or the number of layers that you have visible will also be visible in your JPEG so you can keep working on the same Photoshop document and here I've created a second layer where I've started to delete the bronze half so in the end I'll have one Photoshop document that contains many different layers and then I only save JPEGs as the ones that are visible and that's what gets layered on the slide so the slide that we saw only had three images on it the top one shows all of the objects the bottom left reveals just the bronze half and the bottom right reveals the blade and when you layer them back to back it gives a pretty nice effect and it's a lot more efficient I think than trying to hold a laser pointer and here's one other example of doing that on a paper object for people who may be paper this is simply a PDF of an old article and I wanted to show a drawing of an object that I was treating and I wanted to show the line drawing in comparison to the object and so I used the same fading technique on the PDF just by simply deleting the area that I wanted to show on the object and leaving the space around it in this case I left it black and didn't make it transparent but you can use this technique and you can play around with it a lot and it's not very hard and it makes it look pretty fancy and I think it can be really useful and quite fun for the audience because it's not always expected so the final thing that I wanted to mention quickly is once you have your PowerPoint and you've prepared and you're ready to go what do you bring with you to the venue? Really the two most important things to bring with you a thumb drive that has your presentation on it and your presentation somewhere in cloud storage I use Dropbox but there are many other devices that you can use and one of the great things about Dropbox is that it's also on mobile devices and so I found this helpful when I was asked questions after a talk or maybe later at a conference dinner I could pull up my presentation because I have them all in a presentation folder in Dropbox and actually the talk we're looking at right now is brought to you by folder number 21 but it's just an easy place to group everything and have access in the event that my thumb drive failed or something didn't load properly and you'll probably be bringing a script this is an example of one of my scripts I do make them a little bit differently than Katie does because I want to try to stick to time but it's really whatever you're comfortable with but if you're bringing a text script you do want to make sure that the podium has a light that works or maybe has a backup headlamp or if you have a tablet or an iPad that's a great way to read a script because it's backlit just make sure you have your charger with you and this is just sort of my checklist that I think about the first three we mentioned they're most essential the thumb drive, a cloud based backup and your script either on the tablet or on paper but I do also like to bring my laptop with me definitely with the power cord and anything you might need to connect it to the projector because if something fails with opening your talk on the venue's computer you could probably always connect your laptop and it's a good third back I do also like to have a pen or a pencil with me because sometimes in the question and answer sessions people may ask me something that I want to follow up with later or perhaps they have a good suggestion and so I usually bring one up with me to take notes and you'll want to bring a water bottle and maybe some mints or something in case you have a dry throat and other than that once you get to the venue if you've loaded your PowerPoint onto the presentation two things to check just make sure any slides that have animations do work and make sure that any videos or media that you've inserted are functioning and if you have a moment to just quickly run through your slides I find that really helpful because if you see a font change or you see something that didn't work you can just change it right there on the copy that's on the desktop and you know it'll be okay so I finally just wanted to conclude by saying that really everything that I showed you about PowerPoint came from two places it came from Dan Cushel in his class at Buffalo and it just came from Googling things so I've never taken a class I just knew sort of what I wanted something to look like but I didn't know how to do it so I watched online tutorials and you can build up an arsenal of tools that way so don't be constrained when you sit down to PowerPoint by what you know how to do it doesn't really matter just approach your talk by saying what's the best way to show this to people what do I think would be an effective way to show this to people and then just Google it and you'll learn how to do it and I'm sure that someone somewhere out there will have an online video to teach you so thank you very much to everyone who contributed ideas and thoughts to the PowerPoint and Katie and I would love to hear from you if you want to get in touch with either of us in the future about any of these ideas thank you very much Excellent thank you so much Katie and Ariel you guys covered a lot of ground in this short amount of time since it is after one o'clock I'm going to go ahead and cut out the Q&A session but you did answer a lot of the questions in fact almost all of them so I'm just going to consult with you and see if we could maybe get a blog post up with some of the remaining ones and then of course everyone if you didn't get a chance to write down all those notes or you want to see some of this again we will let you know when the recording of the webinar is available on AISU's YouTube channel by creating a blog post and posting about it and then also announcing on Facebook so hopefully we'll get that out to you soon while you're working on your PowerPoints and your posters and also yeah, feel free to email Katie or Ariel or if you have some more questions email ECPN chair, Megan Salazar Walsh and email me Fran Richie our emails were included in the registration for this webinar so thank you both so much again and thank you to AIC for organizing this for us thank you to Ryan and Ruth any final things? Excellent, thank you