Presentations and other stuff to trip over

Completely off topic for this blog, but something you should do even if, like me, you are certain you will never bother with twittering on Twitter. Read this article on Twitter squatting and get your name (if available) some related twitter urls for yourself and your site. You never know when you might wish you had them. It’s brainstorming time!

Twitter squatting by Steinnon in NetworkWorld

Follow the instructions in the article. The GoogleMail tip is good as, if you register lots, you will soon run out of email addresses (passwords don’t need to be unique, by the way, just email addresses).

All I would add is that when you create an account, after the first screen, press the ’skip’ link top right on the second screen, and then log out at the third. Think up a new name and repeat.

Do you use Opazity just to tease your audiences with things to be revealed? That was my starting point for creating the blurred image effect. But, of course, for movie directors, soft-focus (dissolve) transitions from one scene to another, such as you can create with Opazity, have had other significances.

In the cinema, different types of transitions have long been associated with manipulating audiences’ attention and emotions. Here’s what author Matt Woolman says in his 2004 book ‘Motion design : moving graphics for television, music video, cinema, and digital interfaces’

“Transitions…are critical in establishing narrative sequences and emphasizing content. In early films, radial wipes implied that time had passed from one scene to the next; fades to black signaled the end of a particular moment; and dissolves from one scene to the next functioned as a comfortable formal device…applying a slow fade transition to a word suggests that it is to be contemplated.”

For a scene, a slow dissolve fade had a particular significance, depending on the context. For example, in the classic 1953 film ‘From Here to Eternity’ it wasn’t necessary to actually show Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making love in the waves at the edge of the beach - the fade communicated it all. The slower the fade, the stronger the passion, it seems!

So, the effect of the speed of your transitions are another dimension to think about - and possibly use to your advantage - when constructing a PowerPoint presentation. If you are constructing transitions with Opazity, like the example on the website home page, you may feel constrained even by the standard 5 second ‘very slow’ animation setting. But actually, you can change those settings to any length you wish:

1. Select the PowerPoint shape
2. In Custom Animation mode apply an exit fade animation
3. Select the animation listing in the panel
4. Right-click and choose ‘Timing’. (This opens the animation’s dialog box.)
5. Put your cursor in the Speed box and type in the number of seconds you want the effect to last (see screenshot below)
6. Click ‘OK’

Rick Altman, presentation designer and organiser of the annual PowerPoint Live conference has inspected a PowerPoint ‘deck’ produced by Hillary Clinton’s team and not just found it wanting but has gone as far as redesigning it.

Whatever your view of the lady herself, the result, set out in Rick’s blog, is an interesting lesson in design principles and approach. View ‘Hillary Clinton Commits Death by PowerPoint‘ here.

When I talk to people and mention Opazity, a common reaction is to assume that any day now Microsoft is going to come knocking on my door begging to drop me a couple of millions of their loose change to incorporate it into PowerPoint. Well, it’s not like that! Let me explain…

In 2004 I went to PowerPoint Live! Which has become a key annual user-conference, supported by many Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). Of all the interesting experiences I had there, one which stands out was to listen to Ric Bretschneider, Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint, and other members of his team, talking about how they work. He didn’t say it directly, but I understood how difficult it is for them to introduce even the most minor change in PowerPoint’s functions. The scale of the business case they have to make – how many millions of users the change may affect, and how likely they are to be disrupted by the change – and their negotiations for resources are, by my reckoning, horrendous.

Clearly, they took the opportunity of the large-scale Office 2007 changes to slip in a few improvements, but how do they respond to people and companies that, like I have, produce something that makes a leap in terms of change to the program? After all, it is not for nothing that MVP Geetesh Bajaj said in his review of Opazity:

“The new versions of PowerPoint seem to have everything apart from the kitchen sink – but yet, it’s amazing to see vendors create small add-ins that provide an impressive capability that PowerPoint lacks.”

Microsoft’s limitations

Interestingly, Microsoft is not neutral on the subject of other people’s developments. I guess that people in the organisation recognise its limitations and are happy for other companies to produce extras that will appeal to, and enhance the experience of, a small proportion of their user-base. In fact Microsoft positively encourages them by providing a venue for the promotion of add-ins, etc. relating to their programs.

That venue is called the Office Marketplace, and it is worth visiting from time to time. There are separate Office Marketplace sites for many countries, which you can find by using the ‘change’ link at the top right of the page once you are on one of them. It then takes a bit of navigating to the right place from the portal page you are taken to, but look out for something like ‘Third Party Downloads’ at the bottom and then head for ‘Presentation Tools’.

When you arrive at the Marketplace (links below) you will find all sorts of interesting things with links to the vendors and an opportunity to rate their listing – the product, in effect – including Opazity. So do go and have a look now; rate Opazity if you wish, but don’t expect to see me stuffing Microsoft’s millions under my bed any day soon!

US Office Marketplace site, and the other sites in English: UK, Australia, Canada. (Canada has a French site too.)

Many thanks to Geetesh Bajaj, PowerPoint MVP, for his review of Opazity in his Indezine blog. He starts it with the sentence:

The new versions of PowerPoint seem to have everything apart from the kitchen sink – but yet, it’s amazing to see vendors create small add-ins that provide an impressive capability that PowerPoint lacks.

I must confess I really like that! Read the rest of the Opazity review, and explore the rest of Geetesh’s Indezine site.

Opazity is a great help in getting audiences involved in your presentation, and therefore more likely to remember you.

Here are some other audience involvement tips and, by ‘involve’ I mean getting them to take a physical action, not just mental one. A hierarchy of actions could be, for example, to ask them to:

• close their eyes and imagine something
• write down an answer
• raise a hand in response to a question (better for larger audiences)
• call out answers to a question
• handle some physical objects that you pass around. (It is best to do this at the beginning, as doing so during the body of the presentation will mean that at any one time there will be people who will be distracted.)
• handle a physical object and to comment on it

If you have other suggestions, do leave a comment.

I’m possibly about to save you some money. This item follows on from the one about optimizing your PowerPoint files and it concerns your computer generally. Your scam-alert senses should start tingling when you read adverts saying things like “…make your slow PC a fast one again. Installing and uninstalling applications, your Windows registry and file system can become unstable, filled with errors, and bogged down. All these things can be cured by using XYZ registry cleaning program.” Sounds good, but beware!

Lately, it has become almost impossible to find a trustworthy source of information about these computer optimization issues. The reason is that selling these programs has become such a profitable business that thousands of ’software review’ sites now litter the search results for terms such as ’slow computer’ but these are simply websites promoting affiliate links. Their aim is just to send you to one of the sites they are promoting.

That’s the problem, what’s the solution?

Well, I have one of these registry cleaning programs I’ve used for the past few years but I’m not going to recommend it! I mention it to put what I’m going to tell you into context. Has it been helping to keep my computer running smoothly? It’s difficult to tell. The best I can say is ‘probably’. However, I did use it after following the advice in the article I’m about to recommend to you, and it did not improve on the results from the free programs whose use are described in it.

The article is called ‘How to fully degunk a PC to get rid of crapware’, written by George Ou and published on a site for ‘techies’. However, you do not have to be a techie to follow the author’s step-by-step instructions. He describes how to use a free Microsoft program called Autoruns to identify and speed up your computer’s start up, and a freeware program called CCleaner that is effective and quick at doing what the paid-for registry cleaners do - and more than some of them. The program developers do ask for donations, but that’s completely up to you.

There are few things I think you should know before sending you to read the article:

1) CREATE A SYSTEM RESTORE POINT BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING (If using version of Windows before XP, I wouldn’t use the registry cleaner function)
2) Download the PDF and print it out so you can follow the instructions.
3) Do pay attention to the author’s comments about Windows recovery in the two notes in shaded boxes. You don’t need to understand the ‘why’, but the ‘what to do’ is important.
4) With Autoruns, do leave your anti-virus stuff checked (see page 3 of the PDF). The author may be expert enough to do without it, but I wouldn’t risk it! In fact you may want to take a cautious approach to unchecking things first, see how they go, and do more later. You can re-check them if you need to.
5) With Autoruns, I wouldn’t uncheck the Disk Detector function.
6) He also refers to, but doesn’t name, the Yahoo search bar checkbox on the CCleaner install options screen. Do feel free to uncheck it. It’s at the bottom of the list of options.
7) Do create a registry backup when given the option by CCleaner (page 4).
It would be wise to let two weeks pass between the three main steps (using Autoruns, using the CCleaner registry cleaner function and using the CCleaner Issues function). That way, you will find by using your computer whether anything has been changed for the worse and you will know which step to restore. The counsel of perfection is to create backups of your computer between the steps, and to defrag your hard disk only when you are happy that everything is OK.

Finally, to be clear about my position: I’m only recommending that you read the article and make up your own mind about whether or not to follow the advice. You will be will making changes to your PC and in the event that the changes you make cause problems I don’t want you blaming me! However, reading some of the article’s many comments it is clear that some people who did run into problems were able to get help from the author by posting their problem there. I’ve gone through this routine twice now on two computers. When I ran it on my principal PC it discovered over 2.3 gigabytes of stuff that could be deleted and it is certainly starting and responding more quickly. To sum up my experience: apart from the minor inconvenience of my Tools Options being reset to default values in Office, the process went without a hitch, had positive results, and now I will not be renewing my subscription to the registry cleaning program I used.

Here’s the link to the article: How to fully degunk a PC to get rid of crapware.
(http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=547)

I’m sure you have seen presenters between presentations fumbling around in Explorer or within PowerPoint itself to find their presentation after the last speaker. Don’t let it happen to you! Apart from looking unprofessional it adds to the pressure of the moment which, of course, makes it much more likely that you will open the wrong one.

Moreover, have you ever seen the look on the faces of an audience when the presenter opens PowerPoint in slide preview mode to reveal just how many slides they will have to sit through?

The solution

The answer is simply to save your presentation as a slide show (.pps or .ppsx) so that the audience never sees it in any work mode, and to save it to the most obvious place you can, which is probably on your desktop. Of course, you may have to think about whether desktop background (wallpaper) image is appropriate!

It’s a bit extreme, but on occasions I have even gone as far as replacing my desktop background with a screenshot of the title slide of my presentation. If you are not sure how to do that, search the internet for ‘XP [or Vista, etc.] change desktop background’.

I then dragged the presentation file icon to the Quick Launch toolbar and hid all the other icons littering my desktop by right-clicking in the desktop area and selecting ‘ Arrange Icons By’ (XP or ‘View’ in Vista) and unchecking ‘Show Desktop Items’, like this:

(Getting your desktop items back is the reverse of hiding them.)

This produces a desktop that looks like your first slide and, clicking on the shortcut launches your presentation for real. At the end of your presentation, closing it returns you to the desktop. This helps keep your stress level down, is a much better experience for your audience, and might even impress them with your professionalism.

If you are in the position of organizing a conference or seminar, you can adapt this method so that each speaker’s presentation is launched from a desktop with your branding. You can also add a countdown timer presentation to the desktop to run in the break. You will find a selection of those here: Microsoft timer presentations

For conference organisers an alternative to the above strategy is to have a presentation set up with a single slide with text hyperlinks to the speakers’ presentations. The point is to have a way of switching smoothly and easily between them. A more sophisticated approach would be to have thumbnail screenshots of their opening slides with the hyperlinks.

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Small is definitely beautiful when it comes to file sizes and, although Office 2007’s new file format produces much smaller files than previous versions, lots of people do not yet use it.

The Problems

Word, Excel and PowerPoint in particular can quickly grow large files, especially when they contain graphics. The problems are:

• Excessive storage space needed on hard disks, especially when multiple copies and drafts are stored
• Greater risk of file corruption
• Longer disk backup times
• Slow opening of files (especially if being scanned by anti-virus software)
• Slow file transfer and lots of bandwidth used unnecessarily

As very large files are not accepted by many email providers, file size is a real issue for many people and, in large organizations, the storage and bandwidth difficulties quickly become major problems.

What you can do to reduce file sizes

I’m going to focus on PowerPoint because, now that many people are (rightly) moving from text-based presentations to ones using more pictures and other graphic elements, the problem of file size is particularly acute for them.

If you are using a version of PowerPoint older than 2003 with the Office Service Pack 3 (the last pack before Office 2007), than the first thing you need to do is to make sure that ‘Allow Fast Saves’ is unchecked in the Tools Menu Options…Save setting. With it checked, when you save a file, Office keeps a history of the changes you have made, rather than creating a ‘fresh’ file. These history-rich files become large very quickly and can cause file corruption. Because of these problems, Microsoft dropped the ‘Allow Fast Saves’ option with SP3 and Office 2007.

The next thing to do is to import resolution-optimised photos into your presentation slides. PowerPoint only displays quite low resolution images, similar to web browsers. There is no point, therefore, in importing a high-res image that will be much bigger than PowerPoint needs. It will just increase the file size.

The one bit of good news is that if you use the same picture several times in a presentation, PowerPoint only counts it as one image.

What is the optimal resolution? Let’s not get into the debate about how resolution should be expressed, but let’s stick with the resolution that PowerPoint outputs in the way Microsoft expresses it: 97 dots per inch (dpi). Whichever way you calculate it, this is quite low, and higher resolution pictures in your slides do not display any more sharply than that. They simply take up file space.

Now, almost no one is going to take the time in a photo-editing program to resize and reduce resolution of photos before putting them into PowerPoint, it would take too long! However, it is possible to get PowerPoint to reduce the size. When you have placed, sized and cropped all the pictures in your presentation, open the ‘Picture’ toolbar and click on the ‘Compress Pictures’ icon. Choose the ‘All Pictures in Document’ and ‘Web/Screen’ options.

The two measures above will help, but this will still leave the underlying files themselves unoptimized.

The best solution

By far the best solution is to optimize your Office files using software dedicated to that purpose. There are several ‘out there’ but the one I have experience of, and can wholeheartedly recommend, is called NXPowerLite. I first met the guys who developed this program at the PowerPoint Live conference in San Diego in 2004. I was impressed with it then, and have continued to be impressed by the improvements they have made since.*

As it says ‘on the tin’, NXPowerLite works quickly, efficiently and unobtrusively to reduce the file sizes by intelligently compressing the graphics and embedded documents stored within them.

Using it you really can’t tell the difference between the original and the optimized file and I have seen some incredible file size reductions: 75Mb to 15Mb, and 3Mb to 450Kb, for example!

You can optimize files from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint, or by right-clicking them in Windows Explorer. NXPowerLite also integrates with Microsoft Outlook and you can set it to ask if you want to optimize your email attachments before sending them.

There are also batch processing options which mean that you can optimize a number of files in one go, immediately freeing up large amounts of hard drive or network server storage.

Best of all, a single user license is roughly the cost of Opazity, so it is extremely affordable and it can soon pay for itself in saved storage space costs.

I could go on about this for a long time, but the best thing is for you to take up the NXPowerLite free trial offer for yourself.

Below I’m giving you a choice of links to the NXPowerLite website. Following the first of these will help support me via a small commission should you decide to buy the program. (You pay no more for the program, the commission is from the company.) The second is a plain link via which I receive nothing. I include this because otherwise you would rightly suspect that I only made the recommendation because of the commission, which is not the case. It is software that I use regularly and recommend everywhere I go.

Link 1: Go to NXPowerLite website for a free trial.

Link 2: Go to NXPowerLite website for a free trial.

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* A week after first publishing this, a reader took up the suggestion to try NXPowerLite. She had problems with her card company in making the payment go through and got in touch with NeuxPower, the company that produces NXPowerLite. I’m pleased to report that they went well beyond the call of duty to help her until the payment was successfully made.

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