PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint Presentation Formula 01

As you can make out from the title of this post, this is just one possible formula to creating a successful presentation. There are literally tons of other formulas, and to be honest not all formulas work for one presenter. Situations change, the audiences may be different, or perhaps the concept of your presentation may require another approach. Having said that, let me share one of my successful presentation formulas with you:

1. Start with a simple idea — Your idea should be so simple that the audience should either wonder if this idea will ever work, or be amazed that this is such an amazing, yet simple concept — and why they never thought about it before! Either way, you haven’t promised them the sky, the moon, and the stars and have managed to hold their attenton. That is good!
2. Be sincere and relate to the audience — don’t approach the audience as if they were a herd of goats. Establish eye contact with each person, and certainly ask each of them to introduce themselves if you are addressing a small group, and do have that sort of time. Tell something about yourself, and don’t boast too much — be humble and show willingness to understand the audience’s problems. Also tell them that you will do your best to help them — don’t promise anything at this point of time!
3. Explore problems with solutions — as I explained earlier, make no big promises and then explore some huge or small problems that this audience has — as long as you have solutions for them. Don’t give them solution at this point of time — that happens after a while. Some suspense is always good.
4. Give a little more about yourself — this is important so that the audience can associate you with credibility. Again, associate your credibility with the desire to help people rather than placing yourself on an ivory tower!
5. Involve the audience further — now that they trust you more, it’s time for them to speak about their problems. Be a good listener!
6. Surprise them with a quick and easy solution — this is a very important part of this presentation formula — and if you don’t have a solution, it’s best not to use this formula at all!
7. Talk about success stories — especially ones that use the solution you just explained. You need to be convincing, yet not appear to be desperate. The audience’s benefit is paramount at this point of time.
8. Provide a call to action — this needs to be spelled out well, even if you think the audience already knows it! There may be some questions from the audience — that’s good, and go for it!
9. End with some contact info — how the audience can get in touch with you. If you charge for more involvement, make that clear at this point of time. Alternatively recommend some books and web resources, including any of your own. This assure that your session is a new beginning, not an end!

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Delivery, PowerPoint

Raptivity Presenter Giveaway: 5 Free Copies for Grabs!

It’s always good to associate a face and a voice with an e-mail address! So, it was great meeting Nachiket Khare of Harbinger Systems in Atlanta last week during the fabulous PowerPoint Live conference. Nachiket is involved with Harbinger’s PowerPoint add-in products such as YawnBuster and Raptivity Presenter, and I have been in touch with him for a while now. I’ll probably want to do a small conversation with Nachiket in a future blog post, but there’s some great news that I can share with you right away!

Harbinger has tied up with Indezine to give away five completely free copies of their Raptivity Presenter product. Yes, there’s nothing here to read between the lines, all you need to do is fill up this form and tell us what you think about Indezine, Raptivity Presenter, or even PowerPoint! And before you know, you might have won yourself a full copy of Raptivity Presenter. Do this quick, we have these five copies that we want to give away soon, and someone else might snap them up if you are not real quick!

I would also like to thank Amitabh Ramani of Harbinger for facilitating this giveaway.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tagged as: Giveaway, PowerPoint, Raptivity Presenter

FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0: Conversation with Nate Anderson

Nate Anderson is Senior Product Manager at balesio AG, a leading provider of file optimization and compression solutions. He is a software industry veteran and was part of the core development team of the company’s new FILEminimizer Pictures software.

In this discussion, Nate discusses the new FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0 product.

Geetesh: Tell us more about FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0, and how everyday computer users can benefit from the program.

Nate: FILEminimizer Pictures is one of the small utilities that makes your everyday computer life a lot easier. The software is able to compress your images, photos and pictures by up to 98 percent making them a lot smaller and ideal for the Internet. Whether you want to send some pictures to your friends or upload your latest photos on facebook, there have always been problems. You can send only one or two pictures via email because email size limitation and if you want to upload your photos to facebook, it takes hours until they are uploaded and processed. FILEminimizer Pictures is great because it saves you a lot of time and frustration. You can batch optimize your photos and images and share them easier via Email and Internet. While there are some freeware tools out there which resize your images and decrease image quality and size, what makes our tool stand out and special is our lossless compression which is greatly appreciated by our users.

Geetesh: What is lossless compression, and why is it an important feature in FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0?

Nate: FILEminimizer Pictures features a unique image optimization technique which works on the single image and optimizes this image based on the image characteristics. We achieve file size reductions of over 80 percent without resizing the image or affecting the quality. Lossless compression means that you have still the same beautiful image after the optimization, in the same size, with the same quality. It is just a lot smaller! I cannot tell you more technical secrets about our lossless compression technique but I want to encourage at this point all users to try it out for their own.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Nate Anderson, Photos

myBrainshark: The Joe Gustafson Interview

Joe Gustafson, CEO of Brainshark, Inc., founded the company in 1999 to help knowledge experts accelerate the flow of information to their audiences in a highly effective format. He is an experienced leader in the technology-based training industry, and prior to Brainshark, was the founder and CEO of Relational Courseware, Inc. (acquired by Gartner). Under Joe’s leadership, Brainshark has become a leader in on-demand business communications and a successful Software-as-a-Service company, with more than 1,000 world-class customers, including a third of the Fortune 100.

In this interview, Joe talks about the new myBrainshark site.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Brainshark, Interviews, Joe Gustafson, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2007 for Windows: Adding New Shapes to Existing SmartArt Graphics

As you work with SmartArt within PowerPoint, you’ll find that you need to add some more components to your SmartArt graphics — maybe there’s a change required in an organization chart, or you need to add a new shape within your diagram to reflect some other change. Fortunately, SmartArt lets you maintain the changes happening in the world around with just a click or two! This is normally achieved by adding extra shapes to your existing SmartArt graphics.

Learn more here.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2007, SmartArt, Tutorials