Nov 22 2008 11:00AM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
IT professional,
Office,
Technology,
PowerPoint,
Keynote,
Business,
PowerPoint 2007,
Tips,
Solutions,
Tutorials,
Business presentations,
presentation
Well, every Friday I’ll attend some weekly meetings in the company. I think most office people get the same as me. Have you ever found yourself decompressing in true leisure one minute and scrambling to meet any deadline the next? So I teach people to survive with making conference presentations effortlessly.
VideoJug’s “How to Write A PowerPoint Presentation In 5 Minutes” is a great tutorial for most staffs. However, there’s kinda funny elements in it. And I think an real enough briefing-like PowerPoint presentation could be made perfectly in 10 minutes. Besides these tips in that video, I have something else to recommend:
1. To make excellent presentation with professional-looking slides, you need some good PowerPoint template resources on your pocket. See one of my previous post about this here.
2. Getting used to these intuitive features in PowerPoint 2007 will make your creation better and faster. Just learn something like SmartArt, shortcuts, etc. Quick Tips for PowerPoint 2007 on my previous post | PowerPoint 2007 - Get up to speed from Microsoft
3. Attach more. When you’re too busy to summary something in the slides, why not just attach and show the original files within your presentation? Check out some previous posts from me about “attaching documents or objects“, “recording narrations“, “Adding YouTube video clips“, or “embedding real-time Web pages“.
Assuming you’ve got the 10-minute-presentation talent, you got enough breathing space in office, aren’t you?
William Peterson
Presentation Veteran
Nov 9 2008 12:25PM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
Web,
Office,
Technology,
Learning,
Google Docs,
Review,
Business,
Online Apps,
Web Presentation,
Google Presentation
Honestly I’m not promoting Google Docs for Google as an affiliate, the “Google Docs” in this article could be any kinds of online office applications, such as Zoho, ThinkFree, etc. Google Docs is just the might-be popular one as I know. And here I’m expressing my personal experiences about that.
Google Docs Make Office More Productive
I usually open those attached Word or Excel documents in my Gmail with Google Docs. That’s the best convenient and safe method I think to review these documents at the first impression. And then recently, more and more co-workers of mine like to share some documents via Google Docs to complete them with collaboration. It’s really save time and energy to do so. And the best part is, we can resume the work anytime anywhere if we get Internet to access Google Docs.
Google Docs Makes Classroom More Interesting
As not a teacher, I’m not sure more uses of Google Docs in classroom, but some teachers ever told me the Google Docs way to enrich the class is so friendly and it can be accepted by more students easily than the ways with LMS (Learning Management System). Certainly Google Docs cannot replace LMS, but for most documents, presentations sharing, it’s easy to get a class closer. There’s an good example presentation by Tom Barrett:
Eleven Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dhn2vcv5_8323t58h3ft
William Peterson
Presentation Veteran
Nov 9 2008 12:15PM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
RIA,
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Silverlight,
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Online Apps,
Office 14,
Office Live,
Google Presentation
According to Anita Hamilton’s “Late to the Game: Microsoft Office Online” on TIME, the rivalry of paperless office technologies like word processor, spreadsheets or presentations, etc. has been not the old style ”Microsoft Office or IBM Lotus” for more and more companies. Giving Google Docs or Zoho a try is the recent popular choice for us.
Although Microsoft Office is still the dominant in the area of business applications for office, it can’t ignore what’s going in the current markets. It has been quite a few months after I introduced Microsoft’s project “Office Live Workspace Beta” (refer to Live Workshop Rivalry: Build Your Presentation Mind On the Road), and I cited that we really need better Web capabilities on the coming office suite (refer to On The Road: Microsoft Office Has To Bet Its Future On The Web). But why Microsoft decide not catch up the way until 2010?
Microsoft Wants to Make the Best Web Office
I have to thank for all the efforts on those gorgeous ribbons and SmartArts in Office 2007, which really help me a lot on presentations. However, online compatibility is the biggest weakness in the Internet times. The coming Office 14 would be really late for the online office market, but I guess Microsoft won’t make that launch another miss. Heard from Workspace Team Blog, the Sliverlight technology has been added into the new Office Live Workspace. Based on the great rich media technologies from Microsoft Silverlight, maybe the expected Office 14 could move all rich features in Office 2007 to the Web. Isn’t that the best idea to conquer the online land for Microsoft? We’re waiting.
William Peterson
Presentation Veteran
Nov 2 2008 11:19AM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
Office,
Technology,
Google Docs,
Microsoft,
Online Apps,
Office 14,
Office Live,
OpenOffice
Microsoft has announced that the Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 would be out next spring, but I can’t find more surprises like the ribbon in first 2007. When I was interested in the recent frenzy of gorgeous Open Office 3.0, Microsoft PDC 2008 (Professional Developers Conference) showed us something new: Office 14 for Web.
I can’t tell this new Web friendly Office will catch the future or not. We see, it’s really cool, with the immigration to online office trends like Google Docs. Definitely Microsoft wants to capture the newly Web market as Google does, and it’s not a bad idea to start up testing the future software as service. Does this work? We’ll see how Google makes and wait for the answer.
William Peterson
Presentation Veteran
Aug 21 2008 2:47PM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
Google,
YouTube,
IT professional,
Office,
SharePoint,
Technology,
PowerPoint,
Microsoft,
Review,
Business,
PowerPoint 2007,
Office 14,
Solutions,
Business presentations
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
Aug 11 2008 3:38AM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
CIO,
Office,
Technology,
Learning,
Microsoft,
Business,
Tips,
Office Live,
Business presentations
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
Aug 5 2008 3:07AM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
Development,
IT professional,
Office,
Technology,
PowerPoint,
Learning,
Microsoft,
Flash,
Review,
Business,
PowerPoint 2007,
Tips,
Live,
Business presentations
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
Jul 20 2008 9:02AM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
IT professional,
Enterprise,
Office,
Technology,
Learning,
Google Docs,
Microsoft,
Review,
Business,
Corporate,
Online Apps,
OpenOffice,
Solutions,
Business presentations
Yesterday I read the an article “Do I Need to Buy Microsoft Office?” at Ask a Geek of latest Popular Science. As the its result of “Our geek weighs the options and finds Office might not be the best bet”, I agree that Microsoft Office’s rivals are really powerful and nice, such as Google Docs, OpenOffice or Corel’s WordPerfect Office suite. On my personal side, I would rather choose Google Docs, whether Google would charge me some fees or not in the future. But most businesses nowadays must have the Microsoft Office suite installed, while IBM extremely loves his Lotus Notes software as exception.
In the future, desktop software will be completely replaced with Web applications without doubts. So Microsoft Office is certainly the product for current days. But we can not rush to the future without it because of its popularity in the past. Because a lot of people are working with it now, and will work with it in the future for a long time. In order to avoid any bad incompatibility, our business must have and manage it. Just think about, you partner sent you a document in DOCX format, but you cannot read the contents properly with your OpenOffice, and you will ask for another PDF copy? That’s also why a huge enterprise IBM can not abandon its ever popurlar used Lotus Notes easily.
William Peterson
Presentation Veteran
Jun 1 2008 7:39AM GMT
Posted by: William Peterson
IT professional,
Office,
Technology,
PowerPoint,
Microsoft,
PowerPoint 2007,
Tips,
Business presentations
After your meticulously constructed the contents of next-day presentation, enrichment is great for your confidence. Applying some quick enhancements to your presentation is really easy, because you’ll find PowerPoint 2007 has made them ready for you.
1. Themes offer you more thoughts
Access the Design tab of the Ribbon in PowerPoint 2007, the Themes gallery provides several themes here with thumbnail previews, and you can just hove your mouse cursor over and get live preview with new theme in current presentation.
Furthermore, the built-in theme colors are very friendly feature to help you make professional design. Fonts, Effects are also already selected by designers, and what you need is just a few clicks.
2. Quick Styles is what you want
In Drawing section of Home tab, you can decorate the selected contents with this fascinating idea: just live preview and apply preset style in mouse hover and clicks. That’s why it called “Quick”.
Like theme feature, the preset style or layout is well designed. Everyone can easily access it and make a professional-like presentation.
3. Use SmartArt in smart
SmartArt is so cool that everyone will like it. Actually it just provides the quick way to make designer-quality graphics from preset templates, as better graphics can essential promote your presentation.
You may create one from SmartArt icon of Insert tab, and simply all the boring listing, process, cycle, relationship contents into a smart and bright view. That’s SmartArt simply did for you.
William Peterson
Presentation Veteran
