August, 2008

Kick Off the Keynote: Brief Launch, Rich Presentation

Okay that a lot of my friends ever complained that their audience were so unprofessional when they addressed something logical and theoretical. The fact is, your presentation is so good, without the best approach to audience’s logic.

Like Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” If we’re not the presentation expert, or need presentations to keep walking, we might ignore the true feelings from potential audience when planning the keynote. long or short is not the important elements in the planning. When the part with complicated theory comes, just enrich the experiences, such as playing relaxing background music, or throwing out the key sentences like thundering.

Your presentation can be as long as it should be, but it can not be poorly developed without brief launching and rich contents. The starting part couldn’t be tedious, as well as the main contents couldn’t be too simple without your professional insight. There’s no requirement to make everyone a presentation expert, so that’s why I usually recommend such improvements on PowerPoint 2007 to level up our efficiency at work.

We don’t blame the logic of audience, because everyone can master presentations like a pro.

My Past Posts about PowerPoint 2007:
Quick Tips to Enhance Your Presentation in PowerPoint 2007
The Presentation Outlook: Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Review with Recommendations

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

YouTube’d Everything, That’s Our Web 2.0 World, Right?

We know, YouTube has been an icon of Web 2.0 community for long time, and making everything YouTube is what we’re doing currently. Actually, we cannot put anything but video clips on YouTube. But we can visit his brothers and sisters. SlideShare and Scribd are the well-known ones among them.

SlideShare - YouTube of Presentations
It’s the most mature community to share our PowerPoint slides from one-time use to slidecasts. As I ever criticized Web presentations, SlideShare community is really popular upon its well-done construction and promotion. Currently it is the standard de facto and the icon as Web presentation in our Web 2.0 world.

Scribd - YouTube of Documents
I introduced it before when it was just launched: Meet Scribd’s iPaper: Flash-based Viewer Platform Built for All Web Documents - PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and More . Certainly we cannot refuse such a great offer to store and share your various documents, from text and image files to PDF and Microsoft Office 2007 files. That’s almost everything in our Web 2.0 world.

We shouldn’t ignore the other parts of Web 2.0, such as social bookmarks; however, YouTube has led us start Web 2.0 in a rich format, which is the everything in our Web world.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

To Make Perfect PowerPoint Presentation for Business Success, You Need a Good Template

Why we need business presentation? Of course for the business success. And now essentially speaking, I recommend the helper for your business presentation, the good resources of PowerPoint templates to build your next success. It’s the sharing of my favorites, not advertising.

PowerPoint Templates from Indezine
Yes, believe this PowerPoint MVP, as I introduced him before (refer to New Presentation Technology in Review: Thank MVP Geetesh on FlashPPT). His free PowerPoint templates won’t let you down in any occasions. It’s so great, and everyone will love this best-ever big treasure.

Presentation Helper’s Resource
A sweet presentation helper from UK. Its selected PowerPoint templates are really elegant for the business uses; you and your audience will rapidly like the presentation made with them. More than that, any essential presentation skills and keynote tips have the same help for everyone.

Are these PowerPoint templates really what I’m looking for? Definitely yes. Whatever any conferences or business tradeshows, the content of presentations is the king to catch any attendances foward to your topic. Good templates make the first step to the success. It’s not killing your creativeness. It creates more on your business.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Experience the Office Enhancements Directly from the Labs, Not Bill’s Shows Any More

Like all Gfans can reach Google’s technology playground at Google Labs, we the guys who’re usually working on Microsoft’s Office suites have the opportunity to explore the productivity horizon as well. Microsoft^® Office Labs is such the community directly from its technical labs for the fans to try, experience, and discuss.

Here I recommend two great artworks from the so-called labs.

pptPlex
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex
An amazing PowerPoint 2007 add-on. It makes your PowerPoint 2007 presentations showing on an Interactive Canvas. You and all audience will be really inspired by the new thinking of presentation performance in PowerPoint 2007. You may check a video guide at YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvsdRFRBxhA.

Search Commands
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands
Totally handy tools for Office users. Search Commands helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Not Bad to Live, Easy to Show Your Web Pages Real-Time in PowerPoint Presentations

Yes, I think we’ll prefer this way of living Web pages real-time in PowerPoint presentations, not pause the slide show and open the Web pages in Internet Explorer. I’ve introduced the step-by-step guide to use ActiveX control to do the live Web page in PowerPoint slides (refer to my previous post Make Your Live Homepage in PowerPoint Slides. Now I just find the right PowerPoint add-in to simplify that complicated PowerPoint macro way from one of these nice PowerPoint MVPs (what’s MVP? refer to the post Know Those PowerPoint MVPs to Help Yourself). And the VBA tool is totally free for everyone, and compatible with PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 97-2003. That’s maybe why a 5 stars editor’s rating in PC Magazine (refer to LiveWeb review by PC Magazine).

LiveWeb - insert and view web pages real-time. - by Shyam Pillai

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Stick to Omnisio: Imagining the Next Generation YouTube Presentation Service

There’s nothing exciting for presenters after the events that YouTube video embedded in Google Presentation service (refer to my previous post YouTube Video in Google Presentation, As Expected ). Perhaps we can imagine the future from the collaboration of YouTube and Omnisio. The better interactive features (such as Video Annotations) will enahce the experience and free the creation. But how about the next generation service we can do presentations in YouTube like what we know in Omnisio?

We believe that Google will not ignore the best part in Omnisio to add the presentation slides with online video synchronized (refer to my previous post Perfect Presentation Online - Your SlideShare PowerPoint Slides with YouTube Video Narration Together on Omnisio ). So the empowerment of collaborative online video could that better video presentation collaboration experience for users. Maybe the presentation service by next generation YouTube will be integrated with Google Presentation, and boost the multimedia enhancement of next generation Webcasting.

William Peterson
Presentation Verteran

Your Office at Work: Fresh Resource Center inside Microsoft Office

Not only you, I’m engaged to Microsoft’s Office at Work, which is far more than some hints and tips for those office applications. Because the contents there are really helpful in our daily office life. We can not miss those great ideas to stuff:

• A popular article from Office Hours on ninja tricks you can perform
• An introduction to readability stats
• A review of phishing and other email warnings
• Updated Excel tips (the most popular program folks are looking for hints on this page)
• Most e-mailed templates (based on email this link data)
• A link to our own comic, Office OFFline
• Plus keeping last month’s most popular article, PowerPoint without bullets

The best part here is, you’ll find the resources you want to see on different prospects, such as Office at Home, Office at School, Office at a Small Business.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

New Presentation Technology in Review: Thank MVP Geetesh on FlashPPT

In early twenty-first century, I devoted myself into the presentation innovations, shaking up a business practice were settled to the future. Quite a few of my thoughts may come out as I also like to dig more on Microsoft PowerPoint. Yet Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) in PowerPoint have their own opinions on the experienced presentation skills. I really appreciate their works in practice. Here I recommend MVP Geetesh’s latest professional reviewing and ranking for the Flash/PowerPoint mixed tools on his FlashPPT site. You’ll find the technical details about the PowerPoint to Flash presentation (http://www.flashppt.com/blog/).

Also, you may like the presentation guru Geetesh Bajaj’s another presentation site Indezine (http://www.indezine.com/) and his PowerPoint Blog (http://www.indezine.com/blog/), which contain more nice PowerPoint templates and a lot of presentation resources for everyone.

One thing I need to claim, I’m not Microsoft MVPs only the IT presentation concerned businessman. So I just think that improving presentation skills is important for modern guys with new presentation technologies to make the business world easier. We don’t need to be the PowerPoint MVP, but we appreciate all efforts of the MVPs to help us become the MVP in our own field with better presentation skills. Thank all MVPs.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran