PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint Cool Stuff: Create a Slide Show That Really Slides!

Ellen Finkelstein is the author of 101 Advanced Techniques Every PowerPoint User Should Know. This book contains several cool PowerPoint tips, and one of them is excerpted on Indezine as an exclusive. Recently, it occurred to Ellen that the words “slide show” came about because early presentations looked like they were sliding as the slides were moved on and off the screen. Here’s a technique that makes your presentation look as if it’s sliding.

Explore a technique that makes your presentation look as if it’s sliding.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: Animation, PowerPoint, Techniques

Dump that Text! Transform Your PowerPoint Slides into a Visual Feast

Oh, no, not again! Don’t tell me I have to sit through another boring meeting staring at line after line of text on a wall, she mumbled.

Why can’t these people learn how to make their PowerPoint presentations more interesting?

We’ve all wondered the same thing, but monotonously bullet-pointed, text-filled slides continue to be the norm in most presentation venues. Be different: Show, don’t tell.

This article by Robert Lane and Dr. Stephen Kosslyn provides you with better options that will allow you to dump so much text!

Robert Lane and Dr. Stephen Kosslyn look at ideas to reduce text content on slides.

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Opinion, PowerPoint, Robert Lane, Stephen Kosslyn

Brainshark Insurance Network: Conversation with Irwin Hipsman

  Irwin Hipsman is the director of customer community at Brainshark, a leader in on-demand presentations. He has more than 20 years of experience in the cable, conferencing, and collaboration industries, and has worked with communications technologies, including with multi-point video conferencing, audio, video, and Web conferencing, and distance learning via satellite. Prior to Brainshark, Irwin was involved in the management of public access cable television stations.

In this conversation, Irwin talks about the Brainshark Insurance Network.

Geetesh: Tell us about the Brainshark Insurance Network, how it is set up, and who it is geared to?

Irwin: Sure. We’re very excited to have recently launched the Brainshark Insurance Network. It’s a central site for life insurance carriers and their distribution partners, such as brokerages, and enables everyone to tap into the benefits of Brainshark on-demand presentations. Using the site, life insurance carriers can equip their distribution channels with pre-approved multimedia presentations, which the distributors then use for internal product education, as well as their own sales and marketing outreach.

As background on Brainshark, our technology enables businesspeople to easily create voice-enhanced presentations that are available online, on demand. You can easily turn content like PowerPoint presentations, marketing collateral, and Web pages into interactive Flash-based presentations, incorporating animation, video, survey and quiz questions, and more. Because your audience can view the presentation at any time and have the full benefit of both seeing and hearing your message, it leads to greater reach and knowledge retention.

Now, with the Brainshark Insurance Network, life insurance carriers have a trusted network for communicating effectively and productively with their distribution channels via Brainshark presentations. From within their own Brainshark application sites, carriers can easily publish selected presentations to the Network and update them anytime, so keeping content fresh is a cinch. In addition, by letting their distributors access and send out content from the Brainshark Insurance Network, life insurance carriers can rest easy that their offerings are being communicated in a consistent and high-impact way.

Now, if you’re a distributor, you can access the Network, view, and send Brainshark presentations for free. No more combing through e-mails, scouring individual portals, and searching back through newsletters for your carriers’ content – everything you need from all the carriers you work with is right here, in this central, secure Network. For a monthly fee, you can also get access to advanced features, including the ability to personalize carrier content – adding in an intro and closing that includes your own voice, as well as a photo or logo to convey the value of your brand. Additional options include using Brainshark’s authoring tools to create your own presentations in a private site, and accessing best practice tutorials from Brainshark.

Life insurance carriers and their distribution partners can also take advantage of Brainshark’s tracking capabilities. Carriers can see, for instance, which of their presentations are being used and which distributors are using them – letting them know how content is resonating. Distributors get even more granular info and receive instant notification of individual viewing activity for free – showing who watched a presentation, how much content was consumed, how many questions were answered, and more – enabling them to prioritize follow-up. Distributors can also provide direct feedback to the carriers in the form of comments and ratings of content.

We’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm around the Network and already have an impressive roster of life insurance carriers participating, including American General Life, American National Insurance, Jackson National Life, Lincoln Benefit Life, Liberty National Life, and United American Insurance, with others joining weekly. There’s a lot of traction on the distributor side as well – with more than 100 brokerages participating.

Geetesh: So in effect, this is a subset of the entire Brainshark content selected and geared towards a vertical industry?

Irwin: That’s a good question – the answer is yes, and much more. The Brainshark Insurance Network is an extension of what we’re doing today and what life insurers have been doing with Brainshark for several years now – using Brainshark-delivered presentations to train and educate distributors and to help them sell using multimedia presentations to tell a compelling and consistent story. And now, with some unique capabilities of this new Network, participating carriers are able to increase their reach to distribution partners they haven’t done business with before and better enable distributors by providing them with the technology and content to do their own marketing and selling. In addition, both carriers and their distributors are able to measure the impact of their communications more than ever before.

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: Brainshark, Interviews, Irwin Hipsman, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Office 2010 Beta

The Office 2010 Beta is now available for everyone! You can download the Office 2010 Beta applications and run them on your computer or even try out the online Office Web Apps.

The Office 2010 Beta site has more info, including video clips, lists of new features, etc.

Just in case you do download the Office 2010 Beta, do remember that this is beta software. Don’t run it on a system that’s your main work environment! You can, however, use the wonders of virtualization to run Office 2010 Beta on Virtual PC or VMware.

Virtual PC is a free virtualization software from Microsoft that runs on Microsoft Windows. VMware offers its Workstation and Fusion products that can run a separate, virtual instance of Windows on Windows or Mac.

Getting back to Microsoft Office 2010 Beta, here’s the official press release. And look out for PowerPoint 2010 related info here.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Office 2010, PowerPoint 2010

Photographs and Copyrights: Conversation with Rikk Flohr

A refugee from 18 years in corporate management and marketing, Rikk Flohr turned his attention inward to his 20-year love affair with photography. He founded his design firm Fleeting Glimpse Images in January 2006 and divides his days between various print and screen design projects, presentation consulting, and of course, photography. He lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota.

In this conversation, Rikk talks about photographs and copyrights.

Geetesh: Many people use all sorts of photos in PowerPoint, and most of them assume that any visuals they find from image searches on Google can be used in their PowerPoint presentations. How are they wrong, and what are the easiest alternative options available to them?

Rikk: I think this leads back to an erroneous notion that items found on the internet are either public domain, due to the magnanimous intentions of the creator, or free for the grabbing due to their public posting. It is a little like the mentality of the proponents of unauthorized wireless internet access. If a person leaves their wireless access point unprotected, they are, by default, inviting people to use it. Only people who hide their SSID, for example, do not wish to share their connection. The same could be said of internet images. By posting them, there is an assumption that free use is implied by virtue of their being visible in the first place.

It seems there is a generational effect at work here. The expectation of intellectual property seems to be proportional to the age of both the artist and the consumer of the artist’s fruits. Younger people, especially those growing up with the omnipresence of computers in their lives, have a lower expectation of their work being an item of intellectual value. The perception grows as the audience gets younger that work is no longer fine art, but a commodity, or at worst, a freebie. One only has to look at the recent trends in the music and movie industries to see how this applies. Even my own children do not always understand the rabid defense of my own intellectual property. After all, isn’t information supposed to be free? Is that not the modern battle cry?

“What’s the harm?” they say of someone who is using my image on their website, with or without attribution. The harm for me is that my livelihood, and by extension theirs, is directly related to the marketability of my intellectual properties, including the photographs I have taken. If I don’t defend every instance of improper use, I can’t, in the eyes of US law, defend an egregious and financially substantial theft.

Unless there is express permission by the image’s creator and/or copyright holder, there is generally no acceptable use of that image. A few exceptions exist, but for what we are talking about today, it is the rule. That having been said, there are places where public-domain images exist. There are also places where non-public-domain images are available for use. Creative Commons licensing became popular as a way to grant usage of images to people needing an economical source of quality images. Photo-sharing sites like Flickr offer the ability to couple images displayed to a license that grants usage under conditions for certain considerations, such as attribution, linking, and other considerations.

In addition to a wealth of Creative Commons and similarly “no-cost” image licensing solutions, there is the world of the Stock Image House. Stock image prices have fallen through the floor in the past ten years. An image that cost $200.00 USD five scant years ago can be had for as little as $15.00 USD today. That puts a lot of quality photography and illustration work within the reach of many budgets. Images have become a commodity, and the lower prices have put them in a place where people should seriously consider foregoing the risk of legal action by purchasing a low-cost stock image. As long as there are images that a ‘right-click’ can capture, people will consider them free for the taking. No matter how cheap they might become from legitimate sources, the lure of the free will entice some.

Geetesh: If people started clicking their own images with digital cameras, would everything be OK, or are there still some copyright infringement issues they should be concerned about?

Rikk: The ability to easily capture images via the Digital Camera and to process them via Image Editing Software should have improved the availability of quality, pertinent images. It doesn’t always.

First, there is the problem of competency. The reason photographers and illustrators exist is that they have a skill set which allows them to create an end product superior to the layman’s. The advances in technology in digital cameras have gone a long way toward helping a novice produce a better image. The elaborate concepts of lighting, composition, and attention to detail mean that a professional photograph is, at best, a hit-and-miss proposition for a novice armed with the latest extraordinary technology. Give the pro-photographer and the novice the same camera and ask them to photograph the identical subject, and the difference is obvious.

Quality aside, there are a few issues of which the digital camera user must be aware of. Property and people are somewhat protected by current privacy laws. In general, you are safe to shoot images just about anywhere on public property. This doesn’t mean you are free from hassle, but rather that you are within your constitutional rights. That also doesn’t mean that you won’t be accosted by police, corporate security, and angry individuals. In a world containing the threat of terrorism, you can be viewed as suspicious anywhere you photograph. You must be prepared to be detained by authorities, explain yourself, and understand your rights.

In the corporate world, things are different. Once you leave the domain of public property, you are at the mercy, more or less, of the persons responsible for order and security. Many companies have policies (written and unofficial) regarding people photographing buildings, technologies, or employees. On the recent PowerPoint Live 2009 Digital Photography Field Trip, I, as the tour organizer spent a significant portion of the trip running interference. Four times during the two-hour expedition, I was forced to explain what we were doing to hotel security, bank security guards, Atlanta’s MARTA police, and people who asked what we were up to. Content which might appear in a digital photograph may be sensitive or even protected.

As a photographer, I carry model and property releases for items which I may decide to photograph with the intent of using them later. Without those releases, I open myself to liability should I click a digital image of a person or a property. If recognizable people appear in your image, you will need a release to use the photo. If a trademarked or copyrighted item appears in your photograph, you need a release to use the photo. Think about a Coke™ bottle. The logo is trademarked. The shape of the bottle is even protected. You can get out of paying usage fees to a photographer or a stock house by taking your own image, but you still don’t have the rights to use that image containing the trademarked bottle and logo without Coke’s permission, in most cases.

The same holds true for works of art. Consider the Eiffel Tower. How many millions of photographs exist of the iconic Paris landmark? Did you know that, according to the trade publications I read, that you can use any image taken of the tower for any purpose, but only in daylight! After dark, the company which lights the tower holds the rights to usage of any image captured. In the daylight, anyone can see the tower. At night, only the company lighting the tower can provide you with an image by virtue of their ‘creative’ act of lighting. It doesn’t mean you can’t take an image of the tower at night. Use that image in a work for profit item, and you may be subject to legal action, however.

You can photograph people and places, and in certain instances, use the resulting images. There are many exceptions to image use including, educational use, public good, editorial and many others. The answer to just about every copyright question is ‘It depends.’ Anyone sitting in Alvin Trusty’s PowerPoint Live Copyright session would have heard those two words repeatedly. It Depends!

Bottom line: you are going to have a generally less-expensive path to an image by taking it yourself. Realize that you must have some sort of clearing process for what appears in your image. It may require a model release or a property release to completely clear your image for use. You may be in a situation where usage is considered fair without a release but make certain you are before using that image.

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: Copyrights, Interviews, Photography, PowerPoint, Rikk Flohr