PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint Live: Conversation with Rick Altman

    Rick Altman is a presentation consultant based out of Pleasanton, CA. Rick is well known as the host of the annual PowerPoint Live User Conference and has a strong sense of the needs of the presentation community.

In this conversation, Rick discusses the PowerPoint Live in New Orleans that was held in October 2007.

Geetesh: Rick, having held five PowerPoint Live events in as many years, can you share some retrospective thoughts?

Rick: I can speak on behalf of the entire team that we had a simply terrific time in New Orleans, and judging by the feedback that most patrons shared with us, so did they. The keynote addresses were perhaps the strongest we have had in our five-year history. Breakout seminars represented high-water marks, as well.

The Birds of a Feather discussion groups were well received, as was the Expo, which saw almost 20 vendors set up for an entire day. Even the fluff stuff, like the PPTLive Trivia Contest and the Killer Slides competition, were popular.

I was especially gratified to see how well the patrons mixed. Sometimes, conferences that have several years of history can spawn cliques of attendees, and that is their right. We can’t legislate how they choose to interact. So it was particularly pleasing to see how well they met, mingled, bonded, and became friends.

And Bourbon Street was just downright insane…

Geetesh: You announced that the next PowerPoint Live will be held in San Diego in 2008. Tell us more, and do you want to share some secrets?

Rick: September 21-24, and the secret stuff is so deeply classified and sensitive, that even I don’t know what it is yet…

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: Events
Tagged as: Events, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit, Rick Altman

PowerPoint and Photography: 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.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, your work, and how you got started with photography.

Rikk: My first serious camera arrived in the form of a wedding present. I still remember it-Minolta XGM. I still have it. It still works. Within months, I was burning through a dozen rolls of film a month and spending my free time packing my burgeoning gear around they Wyoming countryside. I ran the gamut, shooting weddings, graduations, fine art, landscape and anything I could think of. It gave me a good grounding in the basics. Soon I graduated to Medium Format and things got really expensive.

At the same time, my career with a diesel engine distribution company took off and I found myself having little time for photography any longer. My degree was in Computer Science back in the day in which personal computers were a dream and mainframes the reality. But, as the PC revolution hit the corporate world, I found I could leverage myself into the graphics end, eventually taking over marketing, print and web development and presentations for my company. I still remember my first presentation program, Applause II from Ashton Tate. I did a lot of amazing things with that on that lowly 286.

In 2005, I dusted off my photography passion and invested in the new-fangled digital gear. Eight months later I relapsed and spent all my spare time in the field shooting. My company received a letter of resignation and I founded my design firm to leverage my hard-won marketing and design skills and pursue my twin passions of writing and photography. My firm now works in capture, high-end digital stills or high definition video; design, for prepress, web or other media; and present, building presentations and coordinating events. Photography is where I like to be and when I am not shooting, I am conniving ways to teach photographic skills or teach image editing. Recently, I had the good fortune of serving as Artist In Residence for the National Park Service spending 35 days in the field perfecting my craft.

Geetesh: How can PowerPoint users benefit from using their cameras?

Rikk: PowerPoint users have a unique opportunity to leverage digital photography. Presentations, visually at least, consist of essentially three elements: Words, Illustrations (Including Charts) and Photographic Images.

For content creators, the immediacy and ease of digital capture is a great benefit. An image of a person for the next slide deck is just a digital photograph away. Whether that person needing photographed is in the office next to you or across the country, today’s digital imaging, coupled with email, puts that image into your next slide in the next ten minutes. That was something film could never deliver. The low resolution nature of presentations means that any camera is capable of creating acceptable content for PowerPoint. With a little imagination, modest amount of technique and some basic understanding of image editing software, you can create a photo of your company’s latest product and have it into a slide before the film could be taken to the developer. No longer are slide jockeys limited to the canned clipart or the antiquated photos gathering electronic dust in lost folders on the corporate servers-fresh content is always just a click away. Why use a cheesy clipart image of two hands shaking when you can take a picture of your company president shaking hands with a real live customer? Why settle for predesigned slide backgrounds when you can set your point-n-shoot on close-up (the little flower on most digital cameras) and find a real, contextually accurate image to use?

I feel one of the greatest ways a slide wrangler can enhance their capital at a company is to embrace digital photography and image editing as a way to enhance and distinguish their company’s presentations. Pictures are worth a thousand words-none of them bulleted.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Photos, PowerPoint, Rikk Flohr

PowerPlugs Ultimate Combo 2007

Presentations with pizzazz require a lot more than slides with text content. To make the slides look relevant, interesting, and coordinated is almost as important as the content these days — but probably something that’s even more important is that your presentations need to look different and stand out in the crowd. The addition of visual content and rich media can help, and PowerPlugs: Ultimate Combo 2007, the product, we are reviewing is a one stop solution to resolving that problem.

Read the Indezine review of PowerPlugs: Ultimate Combo 2007.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, CrystalGraphics, PowerPoint

Perspector 4 Released

Visual Exemplars announced the release of Perspector 4.0, a major new version of their 3D add-in for PowerPoint.

Look here to view all the new features in Perspector 4.0.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Perspector

Step Forward

  No one is born a great speaker. Period. Granted, people are blessed with certain strengths in the area of public speaking, but every great speaker has worked hard to become the influential person or legacy that we see.

Scott Schwertly explores how to overcome fear.

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Delivery, Guest Post, Scott Schwertly, Techniques