After delivering a web conference for the Presentations Council a few weeks ago, I wrote up my experience with some tips on do’s and don’ts for my InformIT web site. For anyone contemplating following in my steps, this might be a useful read.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 3:18 PM .

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Visual Being contributor and fellow Presentations Council steering committee member Todd Dunn has been elected to serve as council chairman starting in January. Most of the Visual Being contributors belong to the council and I strongly suggest that you join InfoComm International (formally the ICIA) and the council if presentations are an important part of what you do. Contact Mary Waldera for more information.

I’d also like to recognize the significant contribution of time, energy and ideas our current chairman, Bob Befus, has devoted to council. He has continued in the tradition begun by our first chairman, Ray Guyot, of working beyond the call of a volunteer’s duty to grow and develop the council into a fantastic resource for presentation professionals.

Posted by Lee Potts at 2:48 PM .

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For the past few years I have been using a tool for creating music tracks unlike any other I have found.
SmartSound’s SonicFire Pro has some unique technology for making custom music tracks for all types of applications.

From movie scores to 10 second bumps, this is the tool I have found no equal to. Most canned music comes in preset times: 10, 15, 30, 45….. With SonicFire Pro you can easily set any length needed and produce a track with an ending.

The music library comes from many of the industry standard houses like Westar Music, Killer Tracks, The Music Bakery, and Narrator Tracks. Their library is constantly growing with thousands of great royalty-free tracks and the music is top quality. The focus is on visual media creators so if you’re in the business I recommend checking it out. I’m looking forward to future versions of this amazing tool.

Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 11:04 AM .

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From the Opinion Page of Telegraph.co.uk
By Amando Iannucci

“Tony Blair is said to be embarking on a “mission to explain” his controversial policies on education and welfare reform to his backbenchers. But before he does so, apparently, he has to explain them to his ministers. There are rumours around at the moment that the likes of Patricia Hewitt and John Prescott are having to sit down to PowerPoint presentations from Blair’s advisory folk like Lords Birt and Adonis. If this is true, then it constitutes one of the great unreported scandals of early 21st-century Britain: namely, that at the core of government, no one really knows what’s going on.” Read more…

Posted by Mary Waldera at 8:19 AM .

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How to Satisfy Your Project Manager
(tags: system:unfiled)

lifehack.org: Over 35 Graphic Templates
“Education Place has a good collections on pdf templates on graphics templates that can help you productively brainstorm and going through ideas.”
(tags: brainstorming meetings whiteboards)

Posted by Lee Potts at 6:51 PM .

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Those of you who missed the webinar can get a summary of many of the points I made about why video doesn’t play at my InformIT column. There is also more info on the PFCMedia tool for avoiding problems with codecs.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 12:48 PM .

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BurningWell.Org – Free Public Domain Images and Photos
“BurningWell is a repository for public domain (free for any use) images. You are free to download, copy and use the photos you find here for any purpose. These free images were donated by photographers from around the world…”
(tags: free photography photos stock)

Lifehacker: How to Eliminate Whiteboard Ghosts
“Got a problem with ghosted marks on your white boards? Mr. Clean Magic Erasers can work magic.”
(tags: brainstorming meetings tips whiteboards)

Posted by Lee Potts at 6:51 PM .

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Warning by Nicole Recchia (published by Mark Batty*) presents a compact collection of those ubiquitous warning signs and labels that are meant to make the world safer for people and, perhaps more importantly, to protect corporations from the dangers of litigation. It is of interest to presentation professional for several reasons.

First of all, it’s a graphically striking book as well as a very entertaining “read”. There’s something about the way the imagination automatically constructs narratives around these sparsely drawn and uncaptioned scenarios that absorbs your attention (even as you are repelled by the thought of just how horrible the events that inspired the need for these warnings must have been). Perhaps this inherent horror contributes to the tendency that makes some of the examples abstract to the point of incomprehensibility. Recchia’s clean, uncluttered layout does a good job of letting the images speak, sometimes incoherently, for themselves. To be fair, it should be pointed out that this lack of context might add to the confusion.

Warning is also a place to start if you are ever faced with the task of developing highly stylized graphics that consistently transmits a message in a non-language dependant way. Actually, it might be as good at pointing out what techniques to avoid as it is at providing inspiration.

The real warning here is, of course, to be careful about assuming how an image is going to be interpreted by an audience. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but in some cases it might be a different thousand words for each person looking at it.

*Who kindly provided a review copy.

Posted by Lee Potts at 11:00 PM .

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Congratulations to Terry Irwin and Julie Terberg whose book ‘Perfect medical presentations: creating effective PowerPoint presentations for the healthcare professional‘ won first prize in the prestigious British Medical Association’s 2005 book competition in the ‘Basis of medicine‘ category.

Thanks to Perspector’s Steve Hards for the heads up on this one.

Posted by Lee Potts at 10:22 PM .

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During my webinar yesterday I covered the MediaPlayer object as a way of using DVD in PowerPoint, but it has limitations. About an hour after I finished, it occurred to me that there is a much better way to do it–put an empty button on the Slide Master and give it an Action Setting with a Hyperlink to your default DVD Player: Intervideo WinDVD or even Media Player. With your DVD player launched during the presentation, and a DVD disc in your drive, you can move from Title to Title whenever you want to play your content, and then close the player and continue whenever you want. This beats the MediaPlayer object which does not have the navigational capability to go through a DVD.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 12:19 PM .

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Tradeshows are like Halloween without the costumes. You go from one booth to another and people give you treats (candy, t-shirts, key rings) to make you like them.

At the VNU Training Fall Conference and Expo last week in Long Beach, CA, I came away with a lousy box of mints, a blinking lapel pin and a couple of rubber earth balls. No matter, I was more interested in seeing which business presentation vendors were exhibiting at the event. What I found was a sparsely attended regional show dominated by e-learning vendors, most of them offering enterprise-level software and services. Only a six-pack of companies were clear crossovers to business presentation: Articulate, PointeCast, Serious Magic, SMART Technologies, TechSmith and Turning Technologies. As close as presentation and training are in spirit and practice, the two worlds are still mostly segregated. Why do you suppose that is?

Still it was worth the trip. I ran across a few products that might be of interest to the blog goblins who haunt Visual Being. See what you think.

One is ReadyGo. The company offers a Web Course Builder that boasts ease of use. But its real attraction is price. Most similar products run in the thousands of dollars. This one retails for less than $500. The thinking behind the product is that people who are not e-learning specialists can now create courses without a high cost of entry or a steep learning curve. Courseware for the masses. I suppose this means that soon everyone will publish their own online school. “I got my degree at the University of Fred.”

Qwizdom is an audience response system that focuses on the training market, but is fully applicable to business presentation. It competes with ARS products such as Turning Point and Fleetwood. The two keypad styles have digital readouts that give them extra flexibility for audience interaction. Unlike Turning Point, which works as a PowerPoint plug-in, Quizdom Interact software is a stand-alone application that imports PowerPoint slides and other media types.

The last product, which you should look at just for laughs, is called FastTrack, from Apixel in Australia. The company sells a training course package (Metamorphosis) that uses a “smart” search engine to quickly parse Word documents into training modules, complete with layouts and auto-selected artwork. For reasons the sales rep could not explain, the company took the same software engine and packaged it for presentations. FastTrack divides paragraphs in a Word doc into individual slides then searches its built-in stock photo database for images that correspond to the words on the page. Sound nutty? See for yourself. There is very little info on the site, but you can download the trial version and user guide. (Beware: If you are doing a presentation about “boxers,” the system might paste in a dog, or a factory worker, or an athlete, or a pair of men’s underwear. Talk about trick or treat.)

Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 6:06 PM .

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The PowerPoint Universe session at PPTlive last month was well attended and appreciated by attendees and technology providers alike.

See this release from Turning Technologies who provided their TurningPoint audience response system (ARS) for the session.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051020/flth017.html?.v=33

Todd Dunn and Mary Waldera are quoted.

Posted by Ray Guyot at 7:40 AM .

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I spend 80% of my time on the road, my finance will attest to that, and I am always making color copies of our graphics and color books. Take with me to create interesting & compelling color schemes for our clients.

There are some great online resources, such as bamag.com but a wi-fi is not always available.

The color wheel pro helps you quickly create color schemes based on color theory. www.color-wheel-pro.com

The real world examples are awesome, especially since they are illustrated in various forms such as logos and charts. When you click on the examples they give you an RGB Dialog box appears and you can type your values right into PowerPoint.

The cost is minimal, only $39.95.

Wheel away!!!!

Posted by Julie Marie Irvin at 4:11 PM .

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I just found another program for converting PowerPoint files to DVD. PresenterSoft has released PowerVideoMaker.

Key features from the website:

Convert existing PowerPoint presentations to smooth video of the highest quality
With PowerVideoMaker Professional , you can convert PowerPoint to videos of crystal clear resolution in AVI , MPEG or WMV format.

Supports Three Timing modes
Currently, PowerVideoMaker supports “Automatic Timing”, “Rehearse Timing Now” and “Use existing Timings”.

This is promising and some competition for Wondershare’s PPT2DVD.

Some solid solutions should be here soon now that the competition has started.
I still don’t see features that handle videos in a presentation yet but that can be done in the DVD authoring.
I’ll give them both a try and see what happens.

………………TD

Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 9:53 AM .

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