Links
Categories
Archives
Search
Features
Presentation Facts is an on-going series of posts exploring what is known for sure about presentations and presentation visuals. The series is moderated by Robert Befus.
Recent Posts
Meta
My new business book about PowerPoint is now available to read online. “Solving the PowerPoint Predicament: Using Digital Media for Effective Communication” is not a book specifically about PowerPoint, but the use of the program with third party tools to convey a message for business, academia or religious content. You can also buy the book on Amazon.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:00 PM .
Comments Off
If you want to pick up some tips about using PowerPoint with real bullets, read Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks, and/or visit Arms and Influence where the editors highlight the role played in the Iraq conflict by Microsoft’s infamous software. Bloggers at Crooked Timber add to the discussion with a long, lively and fascinating series of posts that are well worth reading. Of course, the core of the issue is more about flawed visual communication styles and techniques than about the warmongering tendencies of presentation software, but it is soberingly apparent from the citations and discussion that visual illiteracy is as rampant in the military as it is in business. The main difference being that in business when a project bombs no one dies (usually).
Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 2:06 PM .
I’ve struggled with the dual-screen (multiple) monitor feature in Windows for the past year. After a coworker showed me this feature on a job I was working, I was anxious to learn how to do it because it looked so cool! Well I found out that it wasn’t such an easy task… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Mary Waldera at 9:40 AM .
Here’s the official link to the official site with official information:
……….TD
Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 8:34 PM .
Comments Off
Cool Presenters University article by TechSmith’s Betsy Weber.
Screencasting Tips for Beginners
Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 11:31 PM .
Comments Off
Heads up:
From BetaNews.com:
“Symantec on Wednesday issued an advisory about a new trojan that takes advantage of an undocumented vulnerability in PowerPoint to infect a victim’s computer with a backdoor. The malware, dubbed Trojan.PPDropper.B, uses a malformed string to execute code and modify EXPLORER.EXE.
“While Symantec only gives PPDropper.B a risk level of “Very Low,” Sunbelt Software CEO Alex Eckelberry notes that the attack looks more intended for corporate espionage than causing widespread damage. The trojan is currently being spread via e-mail, with a subject containing Chinese characters.”
Posted by Lee Potts at 4:01 PM .
Comments Off
Safe spots for an Edward Tufte Vacation
Well, as PPT-free as one can reasonably assume based on Google searches by country domains anyway. It all started like this:
I was doing a little research for the PPT Use Survey that we at Presentation Facts have been working on. I was pondering the question of how many PPT files are out there and wondered what a Google search would reveal. So I searched all PPT files connected with any Web page that had been updated in the last year. 18,200,000 PPT files. An interesting number, but not really all that useful. It did get me thinking though about PPT files connected to different types of domains, so I began limiting the search and came up with:
.edu=4,720,000
.org=2,560,000
.com=1,940,000
.gov=576,000
.net=326,000.
Looking for the other 8,078,000 PPT files, I started searching by country domains. Then I started wondering which countries have absolutely NO PPT files linked to Web pages on their domains.
Having just ordered and read the second edition of Edward Tufte’s PowerPoint article, I figured that any location reasonably free of PPT files would be a safe vacation spot for Professor Tufte. Here is what I found.
Iraq appears to be PPT-free. So is North Korea (but South Korea is infested with 213,000 PPT presentations). Somalia, Yemen, Chad and Liberia could all be Tufte vacation spots without a linked PPT file between them. The Palestinian Territories would be much better with 47 PPT files than Israel with its 99,900. The Sudan would be nice also, but Tufte would have to watch out for that 1 PPT file hanging off a Website somewhere. Haiti and Antarctica appear PPT-safe and therefore good vacation options.
My advice to Professor Tufte and others who have strong negative reactions to PPT presentations… stay away from typical vacation spots in Italy (438,000) except for Vatican City itself which seems to be a PPT-free zone; France (299,000) except for the French Southern Territories which appear safe from PPT; Spain (159,000); Australia (186,000); Norway (163,000), the Netherlands (195,000) or New Zealand (35,000).
Some think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie chose Namibia to have their baby in order to avoid the paparazzi, I think it was because Namibia’s measley 16 PPT files are pretty easy to avoid.
Posted by Robert Befus at 5:01 PM .
Sociable Media’s Cliff Atkinson is featured in an LA Times most emailed story featuring his work on the Vioxx litigation.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 12:00 PM .
Comments Off
One in an occasional series of posts about presentation pros who are up to something.
I first met and interviewed Eric and Liz Glaser in the mid ‘90s when I was editor of Multimedia Producer magazine and they were pioneering the use of interactive CD-ROMs for sales and marketing applications. In 1998, they created a nifty CD-ROM that allowed the owners of Domino’s Pizza stores to mix and match food products to create menu specials and related profit analysis. I was struck by how easy and functional the program was and recall actually having fun building my own pizza menus. I got to wondering what Eric and Liz have been up to lately. I recently reconnected with them at their company, Compass Creative in Roswell, GA.
Both Eric and Liz come from ad agency backgrounds and, even though they’ve been in the presentation space for more than a decade, their agency roots still show in their approach to creating presentations for marketing and sales departments in large corporations. Their presentation work is artistically sound, to be sure, but the key to their business approach is hardcore sales functionality. In other words, they unambiguously help clients make money.
By 2000, the ubiquity of PowerPoint was eroding the demand for high-end CD-ROM presentations. The writing was on the digital wall, recalls Eric. “We knew we had to move away from just presentation. The days of the $80,000 contract to create a brochure on a CD were gone.” Eric and Liz sat down with their clients and asked them what they needed to improve their sales processes. “We wanted to find out where it hurt? What was the need?” says Eric.
They realized that all of their clients were standardized on Microsoft Office and by this time those companies were building their own reports, presentations, sell sheets, mini-catalogs and other sales products. But Office, bless its monopolistic heart, is not smart enough to know a user’s unique needs or how to automate and customize task-specific processes. Eric and Liz realized that Office is a multipurpose vehicle in a world that demands custom transport.
Monster Garage Meets Presentations
When their customers began clamoring for an easier ride on the sometimes bumpy and slow road between raw sales materials and customer-ready visuals, Eric and Liz stuck their heads under the hood of Office and rigged the PowerPoint engine to generate on-the-fly, customized sales reports, presentations and catalogs. The result is a series of modified, street-legal apps that scream like a nitrous-injected Honda CRX running a strait LS/VTEC block and a Turbonetics T-66 with .81 AR @26psi. Sweet!
Glaser’s new spin-off company, DXT Systems, now specializes in performance-enhancing middleware solutions for companies that want their salespeople and managers to be able to trick out their own sales sheets, screen presentations and print catalogs at dragstrip speeds and without a Class 3 license. Eric calls the system DXT to signify it as a dynamic extension of Office functionality…and to make it sound cool.
Current DXT clients include a DXT.Presentation Builder for Eastman Kodak, a similar system for a worldwide soft drink manufacturer that doesn’t like its name used by its vendors, a do-it-yourself DXT.Catalog/Sell Sheet Builder for MeadWestvaco and a DXT.Sales Report Builder for Solutia, a spinoff of Monsanto.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 5:29 PM .
Extending PowerPoint with Freepath by ZDNet‘s Dan Farber — Demo 2006: Grass Roots Software demoed a new presentation application, Freepath (the site is still not live at this writing) that lets you build a playlist by dragging and dropping elements into a composer. The software leverages PowerPoint content and also supports audio, video, PDF, Word and other data types. Freepath is available for $249 ($149 for the next [...]
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:34 PM .
This 
“>thumbnail image provides link to an example of vidoe blog created with the demo version of the new Vlog It! tool from Serious Magic.
I originally created the video in Communicator using the V-screen and teleprompter and then dropped it into Vlog It! Amazingly Vlog It! itself has these same features — the main difference from the Communicator product is that it doesn’t output the same range of professional quality higher res video files.
As a bonus of this product, the FLV file (which normally takes Flash to create and use) along with the thumbnail images from your blog are in My Documents\Vlog It!\My Output.
Perhaps the coolest feature is the way to instantly create a blog thumbnail file and then drag and drop it into your blog’s editor. (Note: there is a slight glitch with the music coming up twice in this version but I think it serves to give you the idea). I see the Video Blog as a great presentation follow up tool to provide professionals with a way to follow up with their clients and audience.
As more and more portable devices play video, the subscription capabilities of text blogs will also be easier to incorporate into video downloads, making this a very cool rich media tool.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:45 PM .
Comments Off
I was contacted by Mark Rosenthal of One World Presentation Mgt about his product the Presenter that enables large scale conferences to organize and present many different presentations. The Presenter™ is an application to manage large numbers of presentations at medical and association meetings. The program loads, sorts, organizes, and launches PowerPoint presentations from outside PowerPoint. It is database driven allowing for management and reporting for hundreds to thousands of presentation files.
The only thing I can compare it to from a look at the web site is Slide Manager and other similar server driven technologies, but my sense is that this product may be more performance based in real time and integrate well with high end conferences. The list of testimonials is also impressive.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 2:22 PM .
Comments Off
From the Presentation Council listserv:
“Julie Irvin, President of Keystone Resources, is presenting the upcoming InfoComm International Presentations Council webinar, “How to Effectively Communicate Data Charts & Graphs,” on Wednesday, December 7, 2005 beginning at 4:00pm EST. If you are able to join the webinar, please send a RSVP to Shana Rieger, srieger@infocomm.org. The meeting link and call-in instructions will be emailed to you December 2nd.
*******************************************************
When you and your clients are tired of regular bar & column charts, what do you do and how do you make sure you are communicate your point(s). Julie will walk you through real client scenarios on how they went “out side of the box” to communicate the client’s data effectively.
* Pie of Pie Charts
* Use of Small Multiples
* Using PowerPoint & Illustrator to enhance basic charts
* The importance of chart labeling, titles and colors
* Other Software & Tools that help you illustrate points”
Posted by Lee Potts at 9:09 PM .
Comments Off
To: All News and Wire Services
For Immediate Release:
Professor PowerPoint™ Loses Tenure
By Tom Bunzel
As an active member of the Visual Being web log, the Presentations Council of InfoComm International and the presentations community at large, I need to inform you all of a change in my circumstances necessitated by my recent correspondence with Microsoft’s law firm, Katten Muchin Rosenman.
I was contacted by a member of that firm a short while ago and informed that my use of the phrase “Professor PowerPoint™” was an improper use of its trademark and among other matters, potentially created confusion as to my relationship with Microsoft.
As many of you know, I have spent a fair amount of time and effort writing articles and books, educating users and in many ways promoting the use of PowerPoint™ in creating and enhancing presentations. However, when I explained these circumstances in some detail, I was informed that while Microsoft certainly appreciated my endeavors, my continued use of the trademarked name PowerPoint™ in my business and web site was inappropriate.
After consulting Microsoft’s web site pertaining to the proper use of its trademarks, I realized that there was no way I could continue as Professor PowerPoint™ without violating the clearly set forth canon of: “Do Not Use Microsoft Names or Trademarks as Part of Your Name”. There was very little wiggle room in that sentence.
To my relief the attorney added that Microsoft was not taking an aggressive posture in this issue. Since I had no great interest in retaining a law firm with the names of three partners on its letterhead, I appreciate that position immensely and sincerely.
So it is with some regret that this week I am publicly and irrevocably renouncing my position as Professor PowerPoint™, and now also admit that I got most of my diplomas through self study. (My B.A. in English from Tufts University is, alas, legitimate).
Obviously I had hoped to complete my career as a fully tenured Professor PowerPoint™ basking in the glory of a position in an albeit virtual and wholly nonexistent campus, but that is not to be. As of today the ProfessorPowerPoint™ web site is no more, and I have assumed a new position…
Henceforth my web site will be www.professorppt.com, and I hope that those of you who have linked to me in the past or referenced me in your own work will make the necessary adjustment.
The title of this web site has now been changed to “The Presentation Professor” (even though I shall remain, in reality, a humble untenured teaching assistant).
Let me make it perfectly clear that this entirely new web site has no relationship with either Presenters University or Presentations Magazine (even though I am an intermittent Contributing Editor at Presentations). Let me state for the record that I am also in no way connected to the “Ask the Professor” professor at Presenters University, the Video Professor on national television, nor any other real or virtual institution of higher education in the presentations industry. If in fact there are any other professors, real or virtual, teaching in the presentations community, I simply ask, can we all just get along?
It is indeed with a sad and heavy heart that I leave this entirely nonexistent campus, and set forth in search of new vistas in the presentations (and not just PowerPoint™) universe. I hope you will not forsake me for my past transgressions and continue to count me as a valued colleague as I carve out what I hope will be a new area of specialization and expertise beyond PowerPoint™ and into the virtually infinite realm of communicating more effectively using technology. (Oops, not to be confused with David Paradi’s http://www.communicateusingtechnology.com).
I will post my new office hours shortly but drop in any time. With fondest memories of a great ride, I remain sincerely,
Tom Bunzel
The Presentation Professor
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 4:10 PM .