Shortcut World has a nice compilation of keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, Word, Excel, WindowsXP and our old favorite PowerPoint. As a presenter, consultant and teacher I have to admit that I have some favorites.
I love the B key and W keys for displaying a black or white screen when I'm presenting. I tell people when using PowerPoint these are among the most powerful keys because they move the attention where it should be - on you and what you're saying not on the PowerPoint slides. For some keyboard shortcuts, I find the alternative navigation to these commands to be almost as fast and easier for me to remember or see in the open window.
I also like the alt tab key combination in windows to move forward between the windows that I have open with Windows XP.
In today's multi-media era, audiences expect to not only to hear from presenters but to see the "moving pictures" that help tell their story. With the explosive growth of YouTube, users can often find clips there that can help meet this objective. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency on how to download YouTube video files and format incompatibilities between YouTube .flv files and Microsoft acceptable video files don't make this the easiest task. In addition to YouTube videos, many presenters are recording their own videos that are created in QuickTime and struggling to convert these for use in PowerPoint presentations.
So how can you solve these problems? Here are a few recent suggestions that are worth exploring:
The Star Bulletin Tech Writer John Aksalud has written an article "How to Use YouTube Effectively" that delineates the two steps in the process to saving and converting a YouTube video for offline use in your presentations. He provides links to 3 video download services (Keepvid.com, Savevideodownload.com and Savetube.com) and 3 conversion services ( Pazera-Software.com, Flv-to-mp3 and Prism Video Converter)to help you with this task.
San Francisco Chronicle author David Einstein has another technique for downloading YouTube videos in a recent Q& A column where he references typing in the word "kiss" in the YouTube video URL right after the www. and before youtube in the address. This takes you to the Kiss YouTube site where with one click and the word kiss you can download your YouTube video in .flv format. This video can format can in turn be converted using a tool like Videopiggy. Interestingly the Videopiggy site says that their software will do this in one step, so it appears that the "kiss" aspect of the assignment might be avoided.
I watched a couple of YouTube video in their How To series that provides examples of server based video download and conversion services like MediaConverter.org, Vixy.net, Convertyoube.com, Modifyvideo.com, vconvert.net and flvix.com along with examples and benefits of downloading and converting at your desktop using the services like those referenced elsewhere in this posting. Here's one of the videos that I watched.
Meanwhile, The New York Times Personal Tech columnist J.D. Bierdorfer offers tips on how to convert QuickTime videos to a format like .avi that are supported by PowerPoint by using either QuickTime Pro or services like RAD Video Tools or MediaCoder.
Look elsewhere on this blog for other references for how best to accomplish this task.
I'll be attending Rick Altman'sPPT Live Conference starting this Sunday in New Orleans. I'm looking forward to picking up some good tips, ideas and to networking with other PPT and presentation professionals. As I learn new things that are worth sharing, I'll be sure to post them here on PPT.
In addition, I've given myself a couple of reading assignments while I'm planebound this weekend and next week to read and comment on two new PPT books I just received from Amazon - "CLEAR and to THE POINT" by Stephen Kosslyn and "Why Most PowerPoint Presentations SUCK" by Rick Altman of above mentioned PPT Live fame. My initial scan of both tells me that I'll be able to pick up some good tips and techniques to add to my repertoire.
Tech Buzz announced that Microsoft will be launching Microsoft Office Live Workspace a free online tool that will let users of Microsoft Office share Office documents in an online workspace. The Microsoft pre-release site claims that you'll be able to store 1,000+ Office Documents where you can give others permission to view, edit, comment, etc. The concept could be a big help in document version control and could help reduce e-mailing of large size files back and forth between team members. According to Cybernet, you won't be able to author documents from your browser like you can with other online tools like the Google Suite, but will need to use your desktop Office tools to handle this.
I've pretty much eliminated the creation of paper copies of photographs. I have multiple albums and boxes of photos(not to mention all of the 35 mm slides from my childhood), that just sit around gathering dust. Every once in awhile a photo is accessed or pulled for some reason or other. I've substituted digital photos for the printed photos and make them accessible digitally.
One of the ways I like to show friends my digital photos is to import them into a PowerPoint presentation and add narrative, call-outs, music, maps and other effects to the presentation. The presentation can then be set-up to run with a limited amount of time for each slide for viewing by friends either on the laptop or else projecting the results using my LCD projector for a larger group display.
A short cut for importing multiple photos into a PowerPoint presentation that can be quite useful is to follow these steps:
Create a new presentation
Select insert, Picture, New Photo Album from the drop down menu
Select Insert picture from file disk (assuming your pictures are in a folder on your hard drive)
Select the file where your photos are located
Select all the photos
Select the page format (fit picture to page, title, etc.)
PowerPoint allows you to insert multiple slide masters in a given presentation. This can be useful for creating hierarchies of information in your presentation with signals through the visual cues of alternative slide masters. To add another slide master to your presentation, do the following:
Select View Master
Select Insert New Master
Select Slide Design from your Task Pane if you want to follow an existing Template
Click on the design you want for the new master
In the slide design task pane, Select the arrow on the side and click on Add Design
To apply that design to a given slide, go into slide sorter view
Select the slide(s) that you want and use the drop down arrow in the slide design view to select "Apply to selected slides"
This process is really easier then the steps indicated above would make it appear.
In addition to signalling hierarchy of information, I have found this useful for creating subsections of a presentation with a visual cue indicating that I'm moving on to a new module of content.
