http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog Presentations and other stuff to trip over Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:00:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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. ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2008/10/31/twitter-squatting/ 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 ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2008/06/12/opazity-the-emotional-impact/ 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 ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2008/05/14/hillary-clintons-powerpoint-slides-redesigned/ 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 ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2008/02/02/opazity-and-microsoft/ 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 ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2008/01/15/opazity-review-in-indezine/ 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 ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2007/12/26/remember/ 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 ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2007/12/13/sluggish/ 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 ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2007/12/01/startup/ 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 ... http://www.stevehardsoft.com/blog/2007/12/01/reducefilesizes/