presentation

My Late Review for Acrobat.com - Adobe’s Silly Trick over Online Presentations

For Adobe’s newborn Online Presentations on Acrobat.com Labs, a lot of details could be read thru Digital Inspiration’s first look: “Adobe Introduces Acrobat.com Presentations - Create Impressive Slides Online“. I’m definitely late for this big mashup from Adobe. But when I found out the truth on the experimental product, “oh my god”, it was not what I expect.

No connection to Microsoft PowerPoint slides just makes it a Flash-based slide designer toy. No sounds, no transitions, but Flash Video embedded? It’s immature. All the competitors from Google Docs, Zoho Show to ThinkFree have their right concept for users. I can’t believe that it’s our brother Adobe’s homework…

Last point, this toolkit just let you export slides as PDF? Oh, okay, it’s all about Acrobat. We know that now. More and more brilliant ideas are coming from our great Adobe Labs, but how about any serious evolution later?

Presentation Veteran
William Peterson

Enrich Your Presentation: Yet Another Note about Video Sharing on PowerPoint

Rolling back to a year ago, right here I alleged that “Why Not Add YouTube Flash Video in Your Next PowerPoint Presentation“, as well as something more about rich media in presentation topics, such as “Best Practices for Playing and Controlling More in PowerPoint Presentations” or “Make Your Live Homepage in PowerPoint Slides. Maybe my old tips of YouTube video on PowerPoint is kinda obsolete now, and luckily Microsoft PowerPoint Team released its own illustrated tutorial on a blog post “How to insert that funny clip you found online“. Yeah, not late to learn more about this, as video sharing is still hot on the air.

Certainly the core technologies on this is simple, if you know Developer tab and Controls in PowerPoint. Something new I got, is now we can embed and play 720p HD (High Definition) YouTube video. It’s still easy to catch up: add “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22” at the end of the URL of the video file, making it look like “http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″. Enjoy our video sharing in every presentation!

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Keynote Remote: Easier iPhone Presentation via Wi-Fi

I talked about “Ideas about Showing PowerPoint Presentations on iPhone” days ago to make our PowerPoint slides over the iPhone. Sadly, as a Mac dummy, I totally forget Apple’s own presentation software, Keynote in iWork ‘09. And the latest Keynote already supports a feature to use iPhone to control the presentations remotely. Here’s the official description:

Keynote Remote lets you use your iPhone or iPod touch to control your presentation from anywhere in the room using Wi-Fi. See your slide with notes or both the current slide and the next slide in the palm of your hand. Just swipe to advance.

All we need is a tiny app for iPhone called Keynote Remote (¢99 on App Store). Now your iPhone can control your Keynote slides by going previous/next slide remotely via Wi-Fi network. It’s really simple to use, and its Note mode is greatly handy to help presenters recall any keynote points when presenting.

Such advanced feature is nice anyway, however, it could be better if the remote control is based on Bluetooth not Wi-Fi, as we know Wi-Fi is not easily available anywhere. Good luck!

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

[REFERRAL] Please, for Your Audience’s Sake, Use PowerPoint Animation Well

Please, for Your Audience’s Sake, Use PowerPoint Animation Well
http://www.managesmarter.com/msg/content_display/presentations/e3i0d287909ecf291eb71ef75c54e03a16b

How many times have you seen terrible PowerPoint presentations that use those horrible fly-in animations along with the unbearable screeching tires sound effect? That’s not a presentation—that’s a disaster….

Highly recommended for any PowerPoint users. The author Aaron Stannard is community outreach manager at SmartDraw, the world’s most popular business graphics software. But this article is not a product promotion for their smart PowerPoint integration with fantastic graphics. He indicated that, the systematic misuse of PowerPoint’s capabilities caused that well-known “Death by PowerPoint” syndrome around the world. And using PowerPoint animation wisely could make presenters out of trouble.

• Animation lets you present your ideas in a logical sequence, when done correctly.

• Animation helps your audience relate to an idea by focusing their attention on one point of order at a time.

• Animation builds up to your punch lines.

We’re making a public show for our business advancement, so we shouldn’t make business presentation boring anyway. That’s my idea.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Valentine’s Day Special: Your Personal Presentation about LOVE

I’m not asking you to prepare a LOVE related presentation as your Valentine’s gift, unless your he/she is a completely geeky baby. But just think over this, the celebration of Valentine’s Day between lovers is kind of showtime of one’s heart, which could be described as a personal presentation about the love, and the relationship. All premium presentation skills could be applied on this project for the specified audience.

This is not a lesson to teach how to improve your skills in love, but your presentations for Valentine’s Day would be one good impression anyway. Here are some ways on presentations for kinda love, although usually I don’t think E-Cards are one great way to express our ardor.

Valentine Card Maker by PresentationHelper
http://www.presentationhelper.co.uk/valentine-card-maker-503.htm

Create and Send Greeting Cards with authorSTREAM!
http://www.authorstream.com/greeting-cards

Valentine’s eCards: Live, Laugh, Love by American Greetings
http://www.americangreetings.com/ecards/valentines-day?Ne=374980

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Know the Audience, No Other Rules on My Presentation

As the golden rule for preparing a presentation, “practice, practice, and practice” is an essential skill to everybody. And I agree that the more I practice, the better I get, because it’s never an easy job to demonstrate and explain something in front of different audience. Making a presentation involves public speaking, which can be seriously scary. Famously, speaking in public has been voted scarier than dying (which says something about its lack of popularity). So if we make enough practices before, the confidence and courage is fearless.

Since we know the importance of practice, we should know more about our audience. I usually ask myself some questions in hehearsing, such as what’s the instant reaction from audience to my words. It’s easy to do a piece of research of those potential audience. Once I know some information about them, like genders, ages, or interests, I may add the considerations into my practice.

Practice is an essential, not a rule on presentation skills. Knowing a little about audience is the tip of such a game in which audience and me are players. Then no scary anymore. Like what’s quoted in the book The Art of War on 6 century BC: “If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles“.

William Peterson

Let’s Talk about Presentation Skills from Our President Obama

President Obama’s “HOT” is the result of our economy’s “COLD”. For me, his charisma is more than those inspired stimulus plan. I watched Obama’s first presidential show on CNN days ago, and considered the inaugural speech an excellent public presentation model for everyone, who wants to be another president or not.

Dr. Rich Kirschner mentioned about Obama’s presentation skill was kind of “Powerful Use of Persuasive Speech for Positive Change“, and I agreed with that.

All in all, Obama uses persuasive speech to take a potentially damaging set of revelations, and turn it to his advantage. Such talk actually has the potential to play an important role in bringing about positive change in this fundamental area of our civic discourse.

Such skills could be useful in most business negotiations, although many techies don’t like this way as I know. Actually not everyone can create its own presentation style like Steve Jobs, and sometimes it’s better to do business with old technologies.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Besides Presentation Skills, More about Those PowerPoint Professionals…

As I introduced before about Microsoft Certified PowerPoint Most Valuable Professionals (refer to my previous post Know Those PowerPoint MVPs to Help Yourself), who are really great PowerPoint professors and active contributors on presentation skills, the official Microsoft PowerPoint Team finally wrote something more (more than I knew at least) about those PowerPoint MVPs on its PowerPoint Team Blog.

PowerPoint’s Most Valued Professionals…

So how about PowerPoint’s MVPs?

PowerPoint’s MVPs are a great group, excellent folks who represent a diverse set of specialties and talents with the PowerPoint product. We have world-class designers, design consultants, writers, programmers, and some amazing feature hackers. A terrific, talented, and generous group of folks you really should get to know better.

Where Do Most Valuable Professionals Hang Out?

Sadly I’m not a PowerPoint MVP like them, because I’m not an active community member, and am totally a businessman. However, I appreciate Microsoft’s MVP program to reward these real helpers, for everyone.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

We Must Read More for Making Good Design

I realize that sort of information browsing online is not enough to learn any subjects throughoutly. So I move to reading more professional books like returning the college. Everyone likes better design in its presentation, so we must learn some elementary skills from books at first. And I was recommended to read Timothy Samara’s guidance to enhance my abilities of instructional design.

Here’re two recent books about tips and rules for design starter to make good to better design. Keep these ideas in mind when designing your next presentation or website, poster, and you’ll get excellent design achievement soon.

Timothy Samara is a graphic designer and educator based in New York City, where he divides his time between consulting, writing, and teaching at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, NYU, and Purchase College. He is the author of several books for Rockport Publishers, including Making and Breaking the Grid, Typography Workbook, Publication Design Workbook, Type Style Finder and Design Elements.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Ideas about Showing PowerPoint Presentations on iPhone

These days I was totally hooked with Apple iPhone from a friend. Certainly it’s not that fancy touch screen abuse, but those more and more interesting iPhone Applications from various innovative developers. Then I became wondering, how could I make my PowerPoint presentations displayed on iPhone, since it doesn’t like Windows Mobile to install such applications. After a little research, I got these ideas as below:

1. Export as a Series of Pictures to iPhoto on Mac
As Microsoft announced Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for Mac last year, getting presentations from Mac to iPhone is relatively easy. PowerPoint exports your presentation as a series of pictures directly to iPhoto, or saves those same slide images as pictures to your Pictures folder. From there, sync pictures to your iPhone through iTunes as usual, then use the built-in Photos or slide show program on your iPhone to show your presentation.

It’s really easy to go and try this way. However, the presentation on iPhone becomes kinda picture slideshow, not with all animations along.

2. Convert as Supported MPEG-4 Video Formats
Since iPhone support MPEG-4 video in .mp4, .m4v, .mov formats, some software vendor offers the idea of presentation to video conversion. You can just convert your PowerPoint presentations to MPEG-4 video first, then import or sync the video to iPhone with iTunes.

This method sounds reasonable, and all animations are here. But please see, video presentation is not slideshow anymore, because you can’t control them easily slide by slide. Right?

3. Remote Control PowerPoint from Computers
So some iPhone application developers find this way to connect PowerPoint with computer via Wi-Fi network. Then you can remote control your PowerPoint presentations wirelessly from your iPhone, with a realtime view of your slides. Show your slides on your PC and use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a clicker.

I haven’t tried this app yet, but the idea seems not bad. If everything goes fine in presentation, that’s the best way so far, if you have a reliable Wi-Fi connection on your iPhone.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran