PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Google Apps and Microsoft Office

Microsoft’s hugely profitable Office software is about to get a more rounded competitor from nemesis Google.

The search giant, via a series of acquisitions and some internal development, looks like it will soon have the technology to challenge Office’s dominance with its own suite of applications that run over the internet.

Read more on the Guardian site.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Google, Google Slides, Microsoft Office

iFilm’s Best PowerPoint Moment

There’s so much you can do with PowerPoint these days, and showcasing your best PowerPoint moment is the concept behind a new contest at iFilm. Microsoft is sponsoring prizes worth $10,000 for the contest, and results are less than a day away!

There are some amazing entries. We’re surprised that there is so much of a difference in both the quality and concept of the entries. Of all the entries, some of them do juggle the balance between concept and quality so well and showcase the capabilities of the new PowerPoint 2007.

Check them for yourself and vote!

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Contest, PowerPoint 2007, Presentation Samples

Servier Medical Art: Conversation with Olivier Gryson

  Olivier Gryson is the Internet Project Director at Servier International, an independent pharmaceutical company based in France. Their medical art is an offshoot of their existing business which they offer as free downloads for non-commercial use. In this exclusive conversation, Olivier discusses Servier’s medical art and its evolution and usage.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the purpose and evolution of Servier Medical Art.

Olivier: The aim of Servier Medical Art is to provide healthcare professionals with a valuable tool to help them create their PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, when you want to illustrate a specific medical mode of action or an experiment in a lab, it is very difficult to find the image that exactly suits your needs.

Our idea was to propose a construction set made of basic elements that can be combined each other to create more complex scenes. For example, to illustrate a pharmacological mode of action, you can combine an empty cell, with a nucleus, receptors, channels, and any other intracellular component by a simple “copy” and “paste”.

We launched Servier Medical Art at the occasion of the congress of the European Society of Cardiology in September 2005 in Stockholm. More than 30,000 cardiologists were attending the congress.

At this time, we were looking for an innovative service to animate our booth. It met a great success.

We then used Servier Medical Art during other international and national congresses or events in many countries worldwide. (Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Turkey, …)

Geetesh: What’s unique and different about the Servier Medical Art collection? Can you share some trivia about their usage?

Olivier: First of all, our images are available as PowerPoint files. Using them only requires “copy” and “paste”. It was very important for us to propose a service that is easy to use. Indeed, most of our visitors do not have specific skills in computers.

They are true vector images. We work with specialized scientific illustrators who produce Adobe Illustrator files. Images are rescalable without loss of quality.

More than 2500 images are available for download. Furthermore, doctors can submit their suggestions online. We enrich our image bank almost every week.

Servier Medical Art is free of charge. Our objective is to be a source of reference for any healthcare professional who would like to illustrate a PowerPoint presentation. Basically, we precise on the site that images are available for educational purposes only, but we are often contacted by companies, universities, or public organizations who want to use our images in books or training programs. We often grant them permission providing that they add Servier in the credits.

Recently we were amused to discover that our files were also spreading via peer-to-peer networks. We don’t think that it is the best way to get our image bank. Indeed, Servier Medical Art is in permanent evolution. Our site is the only up-to-date source to get the files. Furthermore, we do not ask for a specific registration to get the images. “You enjoy the images, you download them free of charge and that’s all!”.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Clip Media, Interviews, Medicine, PowerPoint

WildPresenter: Conversation with Colby Devitt

  Colby Devitt is the president and co-founder of Wildform, a multimedia software company based out of Los Angeles, USA. In this conversation, Colby discusses WildPresenter, their Flash authoring product that integrates so well with PowerPoint content.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Wildform, and WildPresenter.

Colby: I’m the president and co-founder of Wildform and one of my main responsibilities is to oversee the marketing at Wildform. I have a liberal arts background. I grew up studying ballet very seriously, got a BA in Classics from Barnard, and a masters in religion from Harvard. I’ve spent many years writing and in theatre, exploring the intersection of art and technology. An installation project I was working on led me to learn advanced animation programs (Alias and Wavefront) and from there I immersed myself in technology.

Before starting Wildform in 1999, I worked at the New York Times and before that, I was in charge of marketing for a document imaging company. I have tried to retain my sense of what it is like for someone to use our products who is not enamored with technology and views it as a tool. We have always tried to make our products as easy and fun to use as possible. We have also created products that we ourselves would have wanted to use.

In many ways, WildPresenter is the synthesis of all of the technology we have developed so far. It contains a media importer that converts all images, audio, and video to Flash. The origin of this technology was our original Flash video converter called Flix, which we sold to ON2.

WildPresenter also has a text effects tool, which is basically our standalone product, WildFX. The timeline in WildPresenter and the ability to combine any kind of SWF file together had its origins in a previous product called Linx. WildPresenter though is much more powerful than Linx because it now contains hundreds of built-in shapes, objects, flowcharts, animations, slide transitions, and a whole set of drawing tools so that you can now build entire Flash websites with the program. In addition to being a media converter, a text effects generator, and basic Flash site builder, WildPresenter contains an entire screen recording program, like Camtasia, a quiz creator, and last but not least for your readers, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, which creates very accurate conversions with the smallest possible file size.

So, really WildPresenter is like having six major programs in one. There is nothing like it on the market. It is exactly the program that I fantasized about having when I was producing for the web at the New York Times Digital—an easy-to-use multimedia program that would let me quickly combine video, audio, images, and text so that I could create something original and compelling and post it rapidly to the web, concentrate on producing great content and not get bogged down in struggling with the software.

Geetesh: What are the new PowerPoint-specific features in WildPresenter 3.3 — and can you give us case studies of end-users who create outputs from their PowerPoint presentations with WildPresenter?

Colby: WildPresenter has been a powerful PowerPoint to Flash converter for a while, generating accurate conversions and small file sizes. What’s new in version 3.3 is that we have added a “Combine Your PowerPoint and Video” wizard. We added this because we have many customers who like to combine their PowerPoint files with video and convert their projects to web-friendly Flash. The wizard streamlines the process for them. They can now execute what is technologically a very complex process in three easy steps –- select a PowerPoint, select a video, and click “Next”. Once they have completed the wizard, they can change the layout and design of their project if they like. WildPresenter also comes with other wizards and we will continue to add more based on what our customers tell us they most want. Wildform has a lot of fans and we like to honor them.

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: Colby Devitt, Interviews, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Flash, WildPresenter

Wilder Presentations: Conversation with Claudyne Wilder

  Claudyne Wilder is a guest lecturer at conferences, business shows, and corporate events. She is the creator of three presentation seminars: The Winning Presentations Seminar, The Winning Presentations Sales Seminar, and Creating PowerPoint Presentations That Get Your Point Across. She offers The Winning Presentations Seminar publicly about six times a year. She also licenses this seminar to companies and consultants to teach.

In this conversation, Claudyne talks about her training seminars.

Geetesh: Do you do PowerPoint training classes? What problems do you address in your class?

Claudyne: Well, yes and no. I call my classes Creating PowerPoint Presentations That Get Your Point Across. Showing them PowerPoint hints they don’t know is just one part of the class. This may be only about 2 hours of the whole class. The first exercise has nothing to do with PowerPoint. Participants write up objectives, goals, themes, and key messages for the presentation they brought. Then they analyze that presentation based on the goals and objectives. So many times people realize that the presentation they created will not help them achieve their objectives and goals.

For example, a woman’s department had redone the company website and she had created a presentation to encourage people to use it. But the presentation was all about the work they had done, very boring to listen to, not to mention slides with words no one understood. She had to redo her whole presentation focusing on her objective and the key messages she wanted to get across.

This exercise encourages people to write first their messages and how they want the audience to react. Then they can think about creating slides.

I also show people how to logically organize their content using the formats in my CD Presentations in a Hurry: 26 Formats That Persuade. When people are asked about their experience with most PowerPoint presentations, they will usually say that the presentations are not logically organized. They can’t follow the presenter. They feel the presenter has just written down everything he or she knows on different slides, without considering a structure to organize the content. I teach people that if they are selling, they need to organize information differently than if they are presenting a strategy recommendation.

We lay out all the slides on tables and the floor and people look at their organization. I have checklists we go through. Most often, once a person sees his or her slides on the table, a realization hits that there really is no organization. Maybe the opening, background, results, and next steps organize the talk, but within that, the content is just one sentence after another. There’s no order.

People get very excited when they begin to see that by re-organizing and/or redoing their content, they can be better presenters. They can emphasize certain words. They can slow down and speed up when mentioning key points. They can include stories as they have cut out unnecessary content.

Geetesh: What do typical attendees take back with them, emotionally, learning-wise, and physically?

Claudyne: Many people do not understand how to use the slide master. Once they realize they should not make text boxes all over their slides, they get very excited. They begin to realize they will save hours of time as well as have more professional-looking slides.

Also, very few people know about custom shows. A custom show is one of the best features of PowerPoint. A presenter can have many versions of the same presentation in one file. This works very well for people who have a high-level talk of only 6 slides and then more details with 12 slides. They can have all this in one talk.

I ask everyone to make a one-slide executive summary of his or her talk. I give them slide designs to use. At first, everyone is confused. They just want to keep listing data for slide after slide. I tell them that many executives want a one-slide summary and after that may be more open to listening to details. Sometimes we only make the executive summaries and sometimes people read them out loud. The power of hearing a presentation summarized on one slide is wonderful. People get how impactful it is to really summarize a talk.

And here are some typical comments about the class: “Thank you for the before and after examples of our company presentations. I can use them. I’m going to save hours of time creating my presentations in the future. I may even have time to practice out loud.”

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: Claudyne Wilder, Interviews, PowerPoint, Training