PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

SlideShark Broadcasting: Conversation with Andy Zimmerman

  Andy Zimmerman is chief marketing officer for Brainshark, Inc., a leading provider of sales enablement solutions. Thousands of companies use Brainshark to improve the reach and results of their business communications, while dramatically reducing costs.

In this conversation, Andy discusses “SlideShark Broadcasting” – a new capability the company is launching today in its SlideShark app.

Geetesh: SlideShark Broadcasting is a big feature – can you tell us more?

Andy: Thanks, Geetesh. It really is a big feature and an exciting addition to the app. SlideShark has had fantastic traction to date – with more than 1.4 million downloads – and Broadcasting significantly expands the app’s scope and utility.

As you know, today, individuals and businesses use SlideShark to show PowerPoints properly from an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch and manage, distribute and track their content in the cloud. Now, with SlideShark Broadcasting, mobile presenters can “broadcast” their presentations live over the Web, and invite others to view them.

Meeting attendees – whether they’re across the table or across the globe – simply click a link to view the presentation in real time, from any computer, tablet or smartphone. They’ll see the presentation in their Web browser – no downloads required – as the slides and animations are advanced, and even see annotations as made by the presenter. So for anyone who can’t attend a meeting in person, it’s very easy to get looped in. And it’s also a great way to focus the attention of the people in the room who can follow along on their own device!

This new feature is a boon to presenters too. They can broadcast their presentations securely, and maintain control over what content is delivered, when it’s delivered and the overall cadence of the meeting. Presenters receive visual alerts when someone enters or exits a broadcast, and at the meeting’s conclusion, receive reports via email that detail audience attendance and viewing activity. They also receive data on the broadcast meeting itself – including how long it lasted, which presentation(s) and slides were shown, how much time was spent on each slide and more. This is a great help for any follow-up activity.

If your readers would like more info and/or a visual explanation, here’s a quick (two-minute) demo of how SlideShark Broadcasting works:

Geetesh: This broadcast feature is limited to SlideShark PRO and Team Edition account holders – although free and PLUS users can try it out at no cost until May 31, 2013. What happens after that date? Also, can you tell us more about your new SlideShark PRO offering?

Andy: You’re right. So, with Broadcasting being a feature that is attractive to businesses, we’ve incorporated it into SlideShark Team Edition. Team Edition users can broadcast to up to 25 attendees per meeting. We’ve also introduced SlideShark PRO – a new plan that includes the broadcasting and reporting capabilities and provides an additional 1GB of storage to users. SlideShark PRO account holders are able to invite up to 10 attendees to join each broadcast meeting.

Users with free and SlideShark PLUS accounts, as you mentioned, will be able to try out the capabilities at no charge and can include up to three attendees per broadcast, through May 31, 2013. If free and PLUS users would like to continue using the Broadcast feature, they would simply need to upgrade to SlideShark PRO. You can see a comparison of all the SlideShark plans here.

Thanks very much for this opportunity, Geetesh. It was a pleasure to speak with you as always and share our SlideShark news with your readers.

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: Brainshark, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Using Custom Textures as Fill for Text

While choosing texture fills for your text, you need not limit yourself to the default textures that PowerPoint offers. Third party custom textures are always an option, including our own Scribble Custom Textures that provide your text with an organic look, as if someone scribbled lines with a pencil to fill them! You can also try some more custom textures from our Ppted Background Texture Collection. Let us explore how to use these custom textures as fills for your text, in the following steps.

Learn how to use a custom texture as a fill for text in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Text, Tutorials

2013 Presentation Impact Survey Results: Conversation with Jim Endicott

    Jim Endicott is an internationally-recognized consultant, designer, speaker specializing in professional presentation messaging, design and delivery. Jim has been a Jesse H. Neal award-winning columnist for Presentations magazine with his contributions to the magazine’s Creative Techniques column. Jim has also contributed presentation-related content in magazines like Business Week, Consulting and Selling Power as well as a being a paid contributor for a number of industry-related websites.

In this conversation, Jim discusses the results of the 2013 Annual Presentation Impact Survey conducted by his company, Distinction Communication, Inc.

Geetesh: Thank you for doing this survey each year, and then sharing the results. Each year, these results shed light on changes happening in the world of presenting. Wwhat are the biggest changes this year?

Jim: Over the years we’ve established a baseline response on a few topics and we revisit those each year to spot any trends. One of the most relevant questions is this one… How would you rank the importance of personal presentation skills on your career and income? This year 89% of respondents, nearly 9 in 10, are saying that presentation skills directly impact their careers and income — up 3% from last year. As much as information has gone virtual, the human conduit for delivering information and ideas (in person or via the web) has become even more essential for most of us. ‘How’ we deliver it matters a lot. And those who struggle in this critical personal skill area will most likely find themselves at a disadvantage.

Since these skills seem to be so important to everyone year after year, we wanted to understand the challenges presenters are experiencing in getting better. This year 61% indicated they receive ‘little or no feedback’ and only 31% said their companies support the ongoing development of good presentation skills. This points out a unmistakable irony that exists today. Companies place a very high value (as do individuals) in being a good communicator yet when it comes to making that investment in time or money, it’s not happening very often.

It’s probably the one skill we all share that can make the most significant impact on our professional lives.

Geetesh: While so much changes, some things remain the same. Not much has changed as far as irritating presenter behaviors are concerned. Can you share some thoughts?

Jim: We added a few new questions this year around that area. I suspect we all have our pet peeves but we wanted to be able to give our respondents a chance to rack and stack their own. No matter where we come from, the categories seem to be universal.

Rank these presenter behaviors from most to least irritating or distracting, 1 being the worst (listed below from most irritating average score to least)

Here was the collective feedback.

1. Reading directly from notes or off the screen
2. The use of umm’s and uhhh’s (filler words)
3. Pacing or nervous movement
4. Eyes wander and won’t make eye contact with the audience
5. Presenter wants to stay behind a podium or lectern

Another irritation we all have is how people approach their visuals. After all, as audience members, we have to stare at them for an hour or so we all have an opinion. This year we wanted to see how presenters assessed their own visuals.

What best describes the PowerPoint (or equivalent) presentations you or your team deliver? (Be as objective as you can)?

• 12% — Very simple, sometimes bordering on too elementary
• 16% — Overly complicated, way too much information on a slide
• 50% — Average visuals, no better or worse than others I see
• 22% — Awesome, high caliber and well-designed presentation visual

What should probably disturb us most is not the high and low responses, rather the big chunk of people in the middle who think their visuals are “average”. As most of us suspect, the bar seems to be set fairly low in most companies today so being “average” is probably not a very good thing — mediocrity rarely is. Next year we will ask survey respondents to reflect on the presentation visuals of others and I doubt they will be as gracious as the presenter’s self evaluation was this year.

One thing is for sure, there aren’t many natural born presenters, most of us have to work at it and we need more practical resources to do that.

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.

See Also: Making the Complex Simple: by Jim Endicott

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, PowerPoint, Survey

Joining SlideBoom

In a previous tutorial of the SlideBoom series, we explained you about the SlideBoom online presentation site. While you need not be a member of this site to view presentations, you must join as a member to do practically anything else such as posting presentations, downloading files, commenting, etc. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how you can become a member at SlideBoom. Remember — SlideBoom in its present form is a free service — and the basic membership level is also free.

Learn how you can join SlideBoom, a PowerPoint sharing site.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: Online Presentations, PowerPoint, SlideBoom

PowerPoint Concept Slides: Organic Rectangles

You could easily drag and draw a rectangle in PowerPoint but everyone in your audience has seen thousands of such rectangles – and they do not stand apart any more. So how can you create a different type of rectangle that has no straight lines or perfect, geometrical shapes? You can easily achieve this hand drawn look with our Organic Shapes series. Rectangles are just one of the common shapes that we doodled on paper – and then reproduced as native PowerPoint shapes for you to use. Including rectangles, our Organic Shapes collection contains 8 shape types – each type has 10 variants – so you end up with 80 hand-drawn shape options! These shapes will help break the monotony of text heavy slides, and assist you in explaining difficult concepts better to your audiences. Using these organic shapes also convinces your audiences that you care enough about them to make the slides look appealing and comprehensible. What’s more, these shapes are also so much fun to use!

Buy and download these slides now.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Design, Graphics, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples