PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Create Slides on a Whiteboard

Life moves on to a full circle, and so does technology. We stumbled on this blog post about 8 Ways to Use a Whiteboard in Your Home Office — and it struck us how often we like to use a whiteboard (or even a piece of white paper) to sketch out ideas for a slide.

We have a large whiteboard in the office here that’s always running out of white space! We add our list of things to do, our workflows, contact info that we may need very often, and then we need to find some white space to create a visual representation of a slide (or a set of slides). Maybe there’s something about whiteboards (or white paper) and a pen that no computer peripheral or software can match. Not even a Tablet PC! And as they say, when some things work so well, let them remain the way they are.

Image: Yay Images

Filed Under: Case Studies
Tagged as: Case Studies, Inspiration, Whiteboard

Never-Ending PowerPoint Blues

The NJBIZ site has a very interesting and inspiring interview with Steve Adubato, author of Speak from the Heart and Make the Connection. In this interview, Steve discusses how PowerPoint can be a huge communication crutch.

We may not agree with him all the time since it is possible to make statistics look interesting in PowerPoint slides as well—but we do agree with him that PowerPoint by itself is no help at all unless it is accompanied by a good speaker (and good slides).

Read the interview here.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, PowerPoint

How To Make Conferences Great

I just read this inspiring article by Max Kalehoff on how conferences can be made better. It doesn’t look like you to need to do much to make attendees happy; and yet many conference organizers won’t even do that much!

And yes, I did observe Max’s comment on halting PowerPoint abuse: I’m shocked at how many conferences will charge thousands of dollars for a ticket and then subject attendees to boring presentations made excruciating by PowerPoint abuse.

Read more on Max’s blog here.

Filed Under: Case Studies
Tagged as: Case Studies, Conferencing, Delivery, PowerPoint

Creating Effective Presentations: A Podcast

It’s true that there are several amazing examples of PowerPoint usage that up the ante on what you can do with slideware — and it is equally true that the slides that most presenters come up with do almost nothing to help their presentations since these slides tend to confuse rather than help an audience.

That’s the reason why Jean-luc Doumont’s podcast on Creating Effective Presentations provides you with several interesting observations. Although Doumont has not come up with something I haven’t heard before, the fact that he explains this so well, and in such a small podcast is something I’ll call awesome.

Hear and download the podcast here.

Filed Under: Case Studies
Tagged as: Case Studies, Podcast, PowerPoint

SmartDraw for Business Graphics

SmartDraw today announced that Virginia Tech has selected SmartDraw software for business graphics. According to Phil Lambert, Technology Business, and Contract Analyst with Virginia Tech, SmartDraw will be available university-wide to help faculty, staff, and students create polished, professional charts and graphics in minutes.

Read more here.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Business, Graphics, SmartDraw