PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Slideflight: Conversation with Georg Kremer

Georg Kremer is the CEO of the Slideflight GmbH in Munich and is in charge of the sales strategy of the company. Before participating in the creation of the Slideflight GmbH, he collected diverse experiences from national and global leadership positions in sales and marketing, at companies such as Sage, Fujitsu, Global Knowledge, and Hewlett-Packard, among others. In addition, Mr. Kremer has acquired a broad understanding of corporate cultures through various management positions in small and medium-sized enterprises.

In this conversation, Georg talks about Slideflight.

Geetesh: Tell us more about Slideflight, how it evolved, and whom is it intended for?

Georg: Disseminating your message effectively and being able to digest the information properly: these objectives present a two-sided challenge in the field of presentations. A need for a digital solution that replaced handouts, email mailing lists, and taking pictures of slides was required. This is how Slideflight was born, to be an innovative, sustainable, and simple alternative. Slideflight allows the presenter to share his PowerPoint slides with the audience using the additional Ribbon tab in PowerPoint. The presentation can thereafter be followed live via a smartphone, tablet, or computer by inserting the six-digit ID provided by the presenter into the Slideflight app or web page. Moreover, for future use, the presentation can be saved as a PDF, and notes can also be added. The presenter chooses which slides he wants to share with the public and decides if he wants to make the slides available for download after the event. Slideflight targets big events such as conventions, conferences, or university lectures as well as smaller congregations such as web conferences, teleconferences, business meetings, pitch conferences, or training. Thus, it provides a simple and practical solution for both the presenter and the public.

The company was born as a spin-off released by the venture capital firm Senovo, a company funding young B2B technology start-ups. Following the further development of the software, I founded the start-up in November 2015 along with Philip Franta. It was just a matter of days before Slideflight started participating in important congresses around Germany, such as the didacta (the world´s biggest education fair) and negotiating diverse business partnerships.

Picture Courtesy: Slideflight

Georg: The vision of Slideflight is to make the process of presentation sharing as simple as possible. Contrary to other existing tools, we focus ourselves on the live sharing aspects of presentations. We even developed a second tool named Beamium, to also simplify the PDF document sharing. In this manner, not only the document exchange experience, but also the actual real-time following of the presentation is addressed. We have not only perfected, but also simplified this aspect as far as possible. Furthermore, various other tools are tricky and complicated to use, whereas with Slideflight you don’t even need basic instructions. With just a couple of clicks, you are ready to enjoy our solution. Slideflight works everywhere, and there is no need to follow the presentations on site. It can be followed all around the world as long as there is an internet connection. In this manner, information and education can become globally disseminated without any complicated procedures. A straightforward and memorable information exchange, that is what Slideflight is all about.

Picture Courtesy: Slideflight

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

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, PowerPoint, Slideflight

PowerPoint and Presenting News: February 16, 2016

PowerPoint can be used for so much more than just slides. Did you know that you can create a thumbnail for your YouTube videos with nothing other than PowerPoint? We provide you with a formatted template. Renowned author Carmine Gallo has written his new book, The Storyteller’s Secret. We get you an exclusive interview with him. We then show you how you can share your Dubsmash videos.

PowerPoint 2016 for Windows users can learn about comparing slides manually and reusing existing slides. PowerPoint 2016 for Mac users can explore the Ribbon and Tabs. Sway and PowerPoint for iPad users can learn about sharing their presentations. Finally, do not miss the new discussions and templates of this week!

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint

Reuse Slides Through Drag and Drop in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

We explored previously how reusing your existing slides can be a great help, since it saves so much of your time. While bringing up the Reuse Slides Task Pane enables you to add selected slides to the active presentation, there is another easier and more intuitive way to reuse your slides. You can drag selected slides from the source presentation and drop them within the newer presentation. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to reuse slides through this drag and drop process within PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Learn how to reuse slides through drag and drop in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Interface, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Reuse Slides, Tutorials

New Ideas from Zeetings: Conversation with Robert Kawalsky

  
Robert Kawalsky is the CEO and co-founder of Zeetings, a software company changing the way people present their ideas to the world. Robert is also an active investor and advisor to technology and internet-related businesses. He previously held the position of Portfolio Manager at Keybridge Capital where he grew and managed a portfolio of assets across shipping, aviation, renewable energy, and real estate. Robert began his career at Ernst & Young, holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of NSW and is a CFA Charterholder.

In this conversation, Robert talks about new features and ideas at Zeetings.

Geetesh: Rob, can you tell us more about the new features and improvements that Zeetings now provides?

Robert: Absolutely, I’d love to share ideas about new things you can do with Zeetings this year.

There are now more ways than ever to get your participants to interact. It is now very easy to add a web link slide to your Zeeting — these allow you to take your participants to a web page mid-presentation. With one click participants can jump to your website, a survey, your Twitter page, or anywhere else on the web. You can now add quick forms to your presentations; unlike polls, the info people submit in forms is just for you. Embedding content that you find online directly into your Zeetings has never been easier — we’re seeing users’ imaginations run wild putting live maps, GIFs, images, and videos between their slides. Polls continue to be one of our most popular features — there are four question formats already with more coming online over the next few weeks.

Next, we wanted to help people collect better information about their participants. It is now possible to request participants’ names and emails before they join your presentations. To help presenters access the information they collect, we have added a new tab to our Insights Reports called “Participants” which keeps track of everyone interacting with your presentations. These features are a great way of better understanding your participants and following up with them after each presentation.

Finally, in addition to adding new functionality, we have made existing functionality better. We have made the Activity feed much more powerful. You can now use hashtags to reference particular slides (and automatically connect that post to the slide) and use the @ symbol to mention particular people. Just type @ or # and a pre-filled list will pop up so it’s very easy to use. You can now also sort the Activity feed by most likes — this is a great way of seeing which questions and comments are most popular. Another great example is the ability to use your phone as a clicker. If you open the same Zeeting on your phone and laptop and start broadcasting from either device, they will automatically keep in sync. This means you can attach your laptop to the main screen and then use your phone to progress through the presentation.

Geetesh: Can you tell us about your favorite Zeetings feature, and why is it your favorite?

Robert: It’s always impossible to choose (!) but a feature I am really excited about at the moment is the Q & A Session. Zeetings has always empowered participants to post questions and comments during a presentation. Q&A Sessions allows the presenter or moderator to select a particular post and display it on the main screen to be answered. All this happens with just one click.

The reason I’m so excited about this feature is that it really makes participants part of the presentation — no longer are they just spectators. Now their thoughts, ideas, comments, and questions can be right up there on the main screen. Also, because the entire audience can upvote individual posts, everyone actually has the opportunity to influence what the presenter or panel addresses next. Also, by highlighting a particular post, everyone in the room and those tuning in remotely, know exactly what topic is being addressed at that moment.

We recently had a large bank use a Q&A Session for a town hall meeting with over 500 staff. During the meeting, hundreds of questions were posted to Activity, and there were thousands of upvotes. The moderator ordered the posts by popularity and pushed the top questions, one at a time, for the executives to answer. It was an extremely democratic way of giving everyone a voice and, importantly, established a high level of trust and transparency between the staff and executives because the questions the staff most wanted to be answered were addressed.

You May Also Like: Zeetings: Conversation with Robert Kawalsky

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

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Delivery, Interviews, Presentation Skills, Robert Kawalsky, Zeetings

YouTube Custom Thumbnail Templates for PowerPoint

Do you want to add cover thumbnails to your YouTube videos? Moreover, what exactly does a YouTube cover thumbnail mean? Let’s first answer the second question! A YouTube thumbnail is what you see before you play the video. More often than not, this thumbnail content is automatically sourced by YouTube from the video, but you can create a high-quality thumbnail yourself using PowerPoint!

Download and use PowerPoint templates for YouTube custom thumbnails.

Filed Under: Templates
Tagged as: Downloads, PowerPoint, Templates, YouTube