Even a Nerd Can Be Heard

Wow, there are a ton of things that I could write about under that headline.

But today's subject is about the good things. 

They should tell you about the really cool little stuff they do to make your life better. And as a former "software person" I spent a lot of time trying to find these little individual wows in different software products.

It is hard to get the people who write the software to remember how cool a particular feature or approach is. They spend a lot of time on the boring stuff like how to post an invoice, yawn, or how to post a batch of journal entries, double yawn, or how to reconcile your bank account, triple yawn, (unless your product is written by the Danes, who used to believe that bank reconciliations were not necessary).

But this is the kind of thing that gets me excited.

 Yesterday, I was working at a CPA firm using  Sage Software's fixed asset product, FAS. Granted, the product has some areas that could be vastly improved, but here's the one thing that I just loved. Customizing their reports.

I wish I could take this feature and get other software products to use it. 

Here's how it worked :

I was trying to run a report on my fixed assets. These were winery asssets, so I needed them grouped by location, winery, cooperage (barrels), farm, and other. 

1. Sorting, Grouping, Subtotals. The report let me group by location with a simple modification from a menu, including the option to add page breaks for each group total.  ( this is pretty standard in most report writing solutions.)

2. When you click a button to "customize report", you get a list of available fields in a table on the left, and a table showing current report fields on the right. There is an arrow that allows you to move fields from the left to the right and vice versa (no big deal here either, lots of products do this.) By using this arrow, you can modify the report columns.

3. Here's the big, little feature that I loved. When you add fields (which become their own column on the report), the report writer tells you how much horizontal space on the page you have used. It shows the total amount that you have, the space used by each field in a column, and how much you have exceeded the printable page width. And then it lets you adjust the column width for each field by changing their width.


What a simple, brilliant idea.

I can't tell you how many times I have had to mess for days with reports to try to get all of the info on a single page width. And I don't want the information to be compressed to a smaller font to do it. Give me the info to decide which column can be narrower, and tell me how much space I have.

Brilliant! 


I've added a series of screen shots if you really want to see what I'm talking about here...

Today I had the amazing good fortune to attend an event called Premiere Napa Valley at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) at Greystone in St. Helena. The event is a fundraiser for the Napa Valley Vintners Association and includes a wine auction.

I had a number of firsts today : 

1.) I had access to more than 200 different wines in the barrel room at CIA. Now, I'm a light-weight when it comes to alcohol. But I'm also a southerner. You have to be polite. There are 200 crafts people displaying their wares. How can you possibly not sample them all?

2.) They served us food in the actual CIA training kitchen. What an experience that was!  And desserts like you have never seen everywhere!

3.) They had venison and boar on the menu and I tried both - they taste kinda like possum, if you're interested.

4.) I saw a live auction.

Now, I have been told that I talk too fast on occassion, but these auctioneers are something else. How in the world do they talk and figure out who is bidding, their number and keep track of the amount that is being bid, all at the same time. It's really amazing to watch. 

I bet you're wondering if there is a lesson in here - aren't you?

Well there is. Even though those auctioneers were speaking a mile a minute, the secret to their success was their ability to make a connection with their audience. They did it at warp speed, but they did it. They were connected, they kept people entertained, and they made people want to spend their money on fine wine- to the tune of a million and a half dollars. 

When I get tired of presenting webinars, I'm going to become an auctioneer. I may not be able to pronounce all of those fancy french words, but I have the fast-talking down.

Corporations create standard PowerPoint templates that are applied to every presentation. Templates help these
corporations convey a consistent brand image. I understand the concept. I'm all for consistency.

Trouble is - I like to do things differently.

Sometimes, I like to create all black and white slides with pictures and very few words. I think they have more impact. If you have ever seen the Brand Gap  slides you can see how powerful black and white can be.

I like quotes, white space, and impact. It's hard to do on that with templates. And I hate templates that have so much going on you can't read the words. You've seen them. The top image goes half way down the slide and there is a graphic on the bottom too. You're left with one centimeter of space for your valuable content.

And sometimes I just use a big picture on a page. I try to do this often. But those blasted template backgrounds get in the way - so I have to suppress the background.

And I don't like agendas and objectives listed on my intro slides. These seem to be standard fare. I don't want to be a standard presenter.

And don't even get me started on "housekeeping".  I hate it when someone gets up to the podium and mentions that word. I did not come to your conference/session/event to do housekeeping. And I am not going to use part of my valuable presentation time to talk about your housekeeping issues (and I beg you not to look in my messy hall closet, while we're on the housekeeping subject.)

I guess you'd call me a slideshow maverick.

I think I would rather be the presenter of change who hopes to get around those boring template requirements. 

Think of the stock market as Timothy's Giethner's presentation evaluation. Based on yesterday's decline, I think we can assume that Mr. Geithner's speech fell short of his audience's expectations.

So what was the problem? According to analysts he failed to answer these 5 questions:  

    What is he trying to do?
    How is he going to do it?
    Why is it going to work?
    How much is it going to cost?
    Where is he going to get the money?

Those are pretty obvious questions that he probably should have addressed - but when you're dealing with today's situation I think the list could be even shorter.

This is what individuals in today's world want to know:

    What is your plan? (or is there a plan?)
    When will it take effect?
    How will it affect me personally?

It's pretty simple really.  But then, so is Turbo Tax. 

I just got back from a trip to Toronto to record voice overs for 9 training classes I created for a client. Imagine - "redneck on tape" will soon be available. 

I have done lots of speaking and recorded presentations and even web demonstrations using Wink software but this was a whole new ballgame.

This was the real deal. I would speak into one of the mega microphones in my padded room (yes, I finally made it to a padded room) while the producer and sound expert listened to my words on the other side of the glass. They kept making me edit out the 'y'alls' and "golliiiiiiies" and tried to make me say "PROcess" instead of "Pracess" since we were in Canada but I held firm. 

They were able to make adjustments to my words, one sentence at a time and kept going until I got the hang of it. It was an incredible experience.

And those producers who win all the awards?  Now I get it.

They figure out what sounds best with a given image, when you need to use more energy in your voice, when a concept is clear or not, and generally make the whole process easy on the "talent"-or talking redneck, whatever the case may be.

Thank you Kellie Steele and Steve Hurej at Producers' Choice for an amazing experience.