February, 2008

Right, We Need A Powerful Engine for Corporate Presentations

When I reviewed some tools in that article Forget PowerPoint: 13 Online Presentation Apps as many other gadget reviews, certainly most of these Internet applications are based on Flash or Ajax like what I said before, I found a description “Focused more on larger corporate customers with a monthly budget for little bit higher-end needs. Provides templates for speedy creation” and Presentation Engine. Enterprise high-end needs? Wasn’t this what we always thought of? So I viewed samples and made its free test drive. Its step-by-step creation with templates was really easy, and the output was exquisite. But I finally got its so-called “Presentation Engine” idea: just stunning multimedia presentation in Flash for rich-media advertising.

Despite rich presentations are used for kind of promotion, they aren’t just ads. More than general slideshows, corporate presentations have such function of e-learning, with efficient knowledge management. So we really need interactive and intuitive features in online presentation applications for better support of corporate learning and training. That’s the powerful engine for corporate presentations. The best solution I think could be integration of corporate LMS development and stable online presentation platform.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

How Do You Pick the Right Internet Technology for Management of Enterprise Presentations?

To know some technologies for further activities on Internet as it’s worth the effort.

We are entering an era of online business, and many enterprise managers are facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true applications or experiment with such newcomers as Google Apps. While the Internet brings a lot of noise where “it’s cool” is the most popular definition for Ajax or Flash widgets, we need to make an overview of what’s out there on the rich Internet applications for enterprises. Various techniques and technologies are used for the development of the front end for complex distributed systems in enterprise. Regarding tons of business presentation to share and manage, managers need integrated Internet applications built on existing system.

From the development end, Web application industry is still in the early stages with benefits and shortcomings. However, those titans have started building the framework and market up. Adobe constructs the base using its cross-platform Flash technology, with the advanced support from Adobe Flex and AIR. This solution is really powerful on the root of Flash popularity. Google, the leading Internet competitor, makes the JavaScript way from open source Ajax Frameworks. This combination of JavaScript and DHTML techniques and has recently been used most prominently by Google for its successful projects such as Gmail and Google Maps. But creating a large application in this framework is very difficult to work in developing. Google released the Google Web Toolkit to capture the industry. Recently, Microsoft Silverlight by Microsoft, which can be considered a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), likes to attract the developers with previous development experiences in the field of .NET Framework 3.0 and XAML. Besides, there’re other weaker technologies such as Java applets, ActiveX controls, etc. in the RIA market.

Maybe you’ve heard of these technologies, but for presentations management. Flash development still is the king currently as it could be optimized for general Internet access without too many hassles. As a Flash developer, I clearly know the defects such as loss of visibility to search engines, or Internet connection failure. I cannot tell who will win finally; however, Flash technology seems more friendly for most Internet users.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Meet Scribd’s iPaper: Flash-based Viewer Platform Built for All Web Documents - PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and More

Scribd, one of the best Web-based document sharing communities, has launch its exclusive online document viewer platform: iPaper. As iPaper is just an easy Flash widget online like YouTube video, everyone can embed in existing Web pages cross platform, and it is claiming to be the killer of Adobe Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Office Viewer. I don’t agree with that actually, but this Flash-based platform is really great for showing miscellaneous documents online as business presentations. Besides it just displays static documents without any effects, iPaper could be the best practice of Web document viewer platform.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Best Practices for Playing and Controlling More in PowerPoint Presentations

You ever want to insert, control and play Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash movies, PDF documents or anything in PowerPoint to enhance your excellent presentations. Here you get the chance.

As we’ve already known, Microsoft PowerPoint is an incredibly powerful and popular tool for helping anyone create and conduct rich presentations. PowerPoint even allows you to integrate rich media, video and documents into the slides.

To insert Word, Excel and PDF files, you must have Microsoft Word, Excel and Adobe Acrobat Reader installed in your computer, and go to PowerPoint menus: Insert -> Object, then you can insert these files as objects into your presentation.

If you use ActiveX controls in PowerPoint, which can be as simple as a text box, as complex as an entire dialog, and in some cases as complex as a small application, you can insert and control more such as Flash movies as you want. Click the More Controls tool in the toolbox (you need to Show Developer tab in the Ribbon at PowerPoint Options -> Popular -> Top options for working with PowerPoint), and then click the control you want in the list (e.g. Shockwave Flash Object). Just place and resize the control in the slide as you like.

To make full use of the control, you have to set the properties. Make sure the control is selected, and then click Properties on the toolbar. Complete the source path to link your Flash movie or other files to the controls, and now you get ready to play it as well.

Certainly a good presentation cannot depend on text and pictures only, try to grab more items to power up your presentations in PowerPoint.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

On The Road: Microsoft Office Has To Bet Its Future On The Web

After retired, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was showed publicly for the first time, and talked about the next big Office release, code-named Office 14, in a speech at the Microsoft Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, California, which he said it would offer limited capabilities to view and edit the data other than full functionality of Office online. It was still unclear how the Office 14 applications would be packaged and delivered. Gates did say that SharePoint Server, which is becoming more closely aligned with Office, “will be able to render a greater set of Office documents in an HTML environment.”

Why Microsoft Office has to do this? We know, the online office applications grew up and became more and more popular last year. The next generation of office suites is destined to be built on the open community over Web technology in the near future. Certainly Microsoft loves the Web 2.0 sphere, but it carefully moves the office from desktop to the Web as the market is not easy to take up. Think about Google Docs or ThinkFree Office for individuals, while Microsoft targets all the business. Better Web compliance on traditional and professional applications would be more lovely for most enterprises. That’s what Microsoft Office wants in the coming decades.

By the way, Web presentation is already the developed field since its nature of shared shows. To head on next business trend, the deployment of Web office can be trial with Web presentation integration from now on.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Not Just Type Well: Build Up Your Good Business With Text

Definitely the words in a PowerPoint presentation should be concise to help audiences understand your statement, and appealing to catch viewers’ eyes at least. It’s not the time showing your typing skills except some stupid typo. And the full page of mission statement or notes is redundant on the screen for everyone. For good and better business opportunities, now it’s great to review the creating process of your PowerPoint presentation.

You must know you don’t want to be verbose and the audiences don’t need, either. While times you are faced with this dilemma whether your presentation includes lots of text on a slide, you can try to rescue the show from text floods. The first thing to do is highlights on most important text. Once you’ve nailed that down, you have a couple options. The simplest way is to change the font and color of these really imperative text that you want people to take note of. PowerPoint already provides some text effects or WordArt to make them special. To have the eyes drawn to the words instantly, you may need some advanced treatments. You might want to try animating those words to stand out them, select the words and click on Custom Animation from the Slide Show menu (or Custom Animation from Animations in 2007). Pick any animation you want to apply, especially Entrance and Emphasis. If you don’t like the customized text effects, set a good text background to stick out words by contrast. Just draw, format and animate a rectangle, then send it to back under the words you concentrated. That way it will provide a stand-out background for your text that your audience will be sure to notice as well.

Text usually gets leading role for readers unless you have persuasive or exclusive pictures in a presentation. What I think about text presentation is that you cannot ignore the detailed job in PowerPoint to try. Sometimes they actually make sense, and your opportunities depend on these points.

Live Workshop Rivalry: Build Your Presentation Mind On the Road

Not a great presentation can be just made by an impulse on an office desktop. You probably catch an excellent idea to strengthen your presentation on the road home or far far away from your workspace. Turn your car back in the highway long queue? Internet is born to help people build the virtual bridge anywhere anytime. Microsoft Office Live revealed its Workspace Beta months ago to response the challengers, especially Google Docs.

As a part of Office Live, the Workspace is just an online companion to Microsoft Office or a free SharePoint Lite for everyone. Besides its only 250 MB storage, the Workspace doesn’t offer an online presentation editor within a Web page like Google Docs but launching your installed Microsoft PowerPoint to do the editing. I really don’t prefer this idea. Actually the only flashpoint of the Workspace to me, is the official support of PowerPoint 2007 documents, while Google Docs cannot make that. Despite ThinkFree Office also supports Office 2007 X files, its Java Applet application seems unfriendly to explore.

Referring to the article Five Reasons Google Docs Beats Office Live Workspace (believe me, it’s not Google’s promotion essay), we can know that, Google really helps, while Microsoft just takes the popular Web 2.0 to promote Microsoft Office:

1. Office Live Workspace Does Not Allow You To Create And Edit Documents Within A Web Page. Google Docs Does;
2. Microsoft Office Live Workspace Has A 250 MB 1,000 Average Office Documents Limitation. Google Docs Does Not;
3. Microsoft’s Office Live WorkSpace Is VaporWare. Google Docs is Real;
4. You’re Better Off Trusting Google Than Microsoft When It Comes To Web 2.0 Security Issues;
5. Office Live Workspace Is Optimized For Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint Data. Google Is Optimized For Web 2.0.

I have to state that I use and like Microsoft Office as well as Google Docs. Google Docs also has drawback, such as its online async due to Internet delay. And Live Workspace is not a white elephant because of its official development support. Everyone can benefit from the rivalry to keep your continuous inspiration efficiently over Internet.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Recording and Combining: Your Better Presentation With Voice Narration

As I usually provide support on public presentations at some conferences and seminars, I find that most presenters’ voice narration in the speech would be recorded live for further references. Actually I recommend that the presenters should record narration by themselves with the microphone and PowerPoint’s internal recorder. In this way, your speech will be perfectly matched with every slides of the presentation, and the narrated presentation could be better materials for more absent audiences. Read Virginia Tech’s comprenhesive instructions for how to record narration during presentation.

If the voice narration has been recorded independently, or some content needs modification, you can also manage and split audio into segments related to each PowerPoint slide. Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) is the recommended audio editor for everyone. Please notice that all sounds need to be embedded in presentation for integration, refer to Office PowerPoint Help “Embedded and linked sound files in a presentation” at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA012303071033.aspx

Someone may ask me, why not record live speech with presentation as video directly? Video can record everything in the conference, but your final presentation don’t need all the things definitely. In most business occasions, visual slides and voice narration are the most important parts in the presentation, so narrated presentation is enough, besides video files usually face the encoding problems. How do you think about this?

Introduce an experiment presentation by Bill Conerly at Wichita State University’s annual Economic Outlook Conference:
http://businomics.typepad.com/businomics_blog/2007/10/economic-outloo.html

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran