Absolute PowerPoint Blog

Sharing Your PowerPoints Online

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 05:50:00 +0000

This article originally appeared on the Computor Companion site, but since that link no longer works, we have made the content available here. Do note that this original content is over ten years old, and is provided here only for archival reasons.

Everyone has a folder or many folders full of PowerPoints – be they for business, school, or just the funny or inspiring ones that we receive as email attachments. And although sending PowerPoints as email attachments is so convenient, it can quickly balloon up email sizes and increase mail inbox sizes. And someone can probably edit your PowerPoints as well, and do some nasty things like passing those presentations as their own! So what do you do – there has to be a better solution?

Actually, there are a plethora of solutions – and each of them has specific options that make one more suitable than the other for different people. In this article, I’ll explore some of these solutions.

SlideShare: SlideShare.net is a community of PowerPoint uploaders and sharers – it has been around the longest time, and is also the most featured of the lot. Membership is free; you just sign up with an email ID and start uploading your PowerPoints. These are then converted to Flash and embedded in a page – you provide end users with a link within an email to this page and they can all see your presentation. It’s almost like a YouTube for presentations.

Viewers can then comment on your presentation – and if you have enabled that option, they can also download your original PowerPoint file. As of now, SlideShare only supports the PowerPoint 2003/2004 file format and earlier – the newer PowerPoint 2007, Corel Presentations, or Apple Keynote formats are not supported. These other formats are not supported yet in any of the other presentation sharing sites as well – fortunately, most of these applications allow you to save to the PowerPoint file format. SlideShare also allows you to upload OpenOffice and PDF files.

YouTube and other video uploading sites: If the animations in the slides, or live links are not an issue, you can also upload your presentations to YouTube – follow these steps:

Export your PowerPoint slides to still pictures – choose File | Save As.. and choose one of the image file formats – PNG works great.
Launch Windows Movie Maker (or iMovie on the Mac) and insert this sequence of exported pictures. Time them as required – add a background music track or narration if you want, and save to a movie format that YouTube can import. At the time of writing, YouTube supported WMV, AVI, MOV, and MPG files.
Upload the movie clip to YouTube.

File Share Sites: If you only want a better way to distribute your PowerPoints, and are not too worried about the recipients receiving editable copies of the presentations, you can always upload your files to a file sharing site like YouSendIt.com or the many more similar alternatives available. This is much better than sending a large email attachment.

PPTshare: PPTshare.com is the name of a site that provides several PowerPoint add-ins – they also provide a PowerPoint sharing platform where colleagues in the same company can access the same files. They also include an online PowerPoint slide library where you can access presentations at the slide level, and then search, sort, and create newer presentations.

Indra Nooyi at the Indian Presidential House

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 15:42:00 +0000

There's a lot to learn from Indra Nooyi in this amazing 2-minute speech. She is very emotional all through her speech, and that adds to the sincerity of her delivery.

Larry Smith at TEDxUW

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 09:57:00 +0000

Great TED talk by Larry Smith that talks about passion -- how many people fail even after they discover their passions. And why is that so? Because they don't act on their passion.

Making excuses to fail your passions does not help, and Larry Smith explains this in a voice that modulates all the time -- also notice his distinctly different body language and a subtle sense of humor.

Aspect Ratios, 4:3, 16:9 and Everything Else!

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 03:30:00 +0000

Strolled to this video -- and this has got to be one the most informative and entertaining videos that I have seen. Great introduction to how 4:3 originated and how we moved on to super wide ratios before standardizing (at least to some extent) with 16:9. John Hess from FilmmakerIQ.com has created an amazing video that is a must-see!

The Changing Shape of Cinema: The History of Aspect Ratio from FilmmakerIQ.com on Vimeo.

Guy Kawasaki at TEDx Harker School

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 03:30:00 +0000

Just got to see Guy Kawasaki presenting at TEDx Harker School -- not surprisingly, he has done an amazing job. The best part is how Guy talks -- he uses his voice in a way that does not make him sound arrogant -- rather he sounds so much humble. Yet, the content of his presentation does not seem to be related to humility. He talks about the 12 things he learned from Steve Jobs -- but sounding so approachable, human, and humble may have been the 13th trick he learned from Steve Jobs.

Create A Chart With Fonts

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:46:00 +0000

FF Chartwell is a different font type -- rather than show alphabets or numbers, or even dingbats, it creates simple charts. What's more -- FF Chartwell is an intelligent font that can create calculations based on your numbers and automatically create pie charts based on percentage values. It also creates other chart types, as explained in this video.

The Golden Circle: TED Talk by Simon Sinek

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:41:00 +0000

One of the most interesting talks I have heard in a long time comes from TED, one of my favorite sources of inspiring content.

In this talk, Simon Sinek explains why most mundane presentations (or almost anything) are geared towards answering the "what" questions. And then he goes on to explain that we must ask ourselves the "how" and "why" questions -- only them will we be convinced enough to spread the enthusiasm to others!

Learn more about Simon at this Start With Why site. Simon has also authored the best-selling book of the same name, Start With Why.

Selling Stockholm with iPads

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:15:00 +0000

Love this video of how the Stockholm folks used iPads to create a novel presentation. Don't know how they made the bulb and the flower appear! :)

PowerPoint MVP Glenna Shaw found this excellent resource that explains how this "magic" was performed -- thank you, Glenna!

Here's a video of how the artists developed this presentation.

Mazes Presentation at PechaKucha

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:10:00 +0000

This is one of the presentations delivered during a Pecha Kucha event I attended in Hyderabad -- love the way the time was so well divided among the slides.

Don McMillan's PowerPoint Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 09:45:00 +0000

Don McMillan is a well known "corporate comedian" who has created and posted a few video clips on sites like YouTube. His videos bring out the lighter side of concepts such as the use of too many bulleted lists in PowerPoint, or even speakers who speak every single word from their slides. You can find out more about Don at his Technically Funny site.

One of Don's most popular video clips on YouTube is called Life After Death by PowerPoint. This one had over 800,000 views!

How to Ignite: by Yancey Unequivocally

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 02:48:00 +0000

Cory Jim of Empowered Presentations, Hawaii posted this video about Yancey Unequivocally's Ignite presentation on Indezine's LinkedIn group. Yancey delivered the presentation so well -- she certainly must have practiced many times to be so much in sync with all her slides -- thanks for putting this up, Cory and Yancey.

Related Links:
Ignite: Conversation with Sara Winge
Master a Five Minute Talk: My Road to Ignite Chicago by Bess Gallanis

Flypaper, a desktop program that creates online presentations

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:14:00 +0000

Flypaper is a cool, new presentation creation program that lets you create Flash presentations that you can instantly upload to sites like YouTube, MySpace,a nd Facebook. In its present beta incarnation, it has some rough edges and any comparison with PowerPoint would be probably like comparing apples and oranges since Flypaper seems to provide a very different concept altogether.

Flypaper is a free application that runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista only (no Mac yet) -- it's a large download at 89 mb whereabouts, but it's fun to play with and may evolve into something very useful. The screenshot above shows the interface -- click on the screenshot to see a larger preview.

Flypaper does get into new terminology though: slide layouts/designs are called 'models'! Here's a quick one slide pres that I created in Flypaper, and then uploaded to Youtube.

Mix and Mash Online Video Clips with Omnisio

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:11:00 +0000

Omnisio, a new startup allows you to mix and mash videos from several online video sites like YouTube, Google, and Blip.tv to create new videos. You can choose start and end points to trim the existing video clips, combine them in a sequence you want, and create a new online video clip that you can share.

These shared clips are entirely embeddable -- and you can have comments that actually hover over the video on these shared clips (see screenshot above). Many users find this distracting, so it's nice that you can turn them off.

More importantly Omnisio is about to introduce new features soon that will allow you to synchronize PowerPoint slides with video -- this will take Omnisio to the professional league.

Membership is free and very quick -- and you don't even need to be a member to view some sample clips. The clips are great -- and can allow you to get hours of fun.

Learn more at the Omnisio site...

Every Makeover is Different

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:04:00 +0000

Doing makeovers of slides is such a satisfying task – maybe that is because removing the ugly and replacing it with near perfection is a reward in itself. Over the years, I have understood that the approach required to do any actual makeover is never the same – in the same way as the fingerprints of two humans don’t match, the approaches required to do various makeovers are dissimilar.

Suggesting makeover approaches is a large part of my work – that’s why I find it amusing to hear new schools of thought in the presentation sphere that promise to be a solution to all slide problems. These beliefs range from the no-bullet approach for slides to the total denouncement of slideware. Then there are opinions about keeping things simple and clean – and of providing more visual content. And there’s another school of thought that looks at creating diagrams, charts, and other info-graphic content in a way that’s more effective as is the debate between linear and linked presentations. Each of these approaches is unique and very useful in their own way – and properly applied, each of them may make a difference. But in the same way that a physician will not prescribe a drug for common cold to a patient suffering from body pain, the makeover artist will first examine the slides and then suggest an approach that may use, discard, or combine these approaches.

Read more of this post on the SlideShare blog...

authorSTREAM Provides YouTube Output

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:57:00 +0000

authorSTREAM, a site that lets you upload and share your PowerPoint presentations upped the ante today by offering a slew of new options:

Download original presentations: You can now download the original PowerPoint presentation (or other file) if the author of the content enables the relevant option (see figure below).

For your existing presentations uploaded to authorSTREAM, this option is turned off by default. You can however edit your presentation properties and check the option (see figure below).

Share on YouTube: You can also share your presentations on YouTube. This option is now available for presentations that include narration or rehearsed timings -- these presentations would automatically be available in a video format (MP4) that you can upload and share on YouTube.

Share on iPods: Again this option is only available for presentations that include narration or rehearsed timings.

Improve Video Quality with a YouTube Hack!

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:25:00 +0000

Laura Bergells who runs Maniactive linked to this tip on Lifehacker.

This quick hack allows you to quickly view a higher quality video on YouTube.

All you need to do is suffix "&fmt=18" witout the quotes at the end of your YouTube URL.

Laura has put up some samples in her post along with more details, thanks Laura.

Download YouTube Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 12:57:00 +0000

In this section we will look at ways in which you can download source FLV videos from the YouTube site. Remember, do respect copyright and do not download FLV source videos that do not belong to you. In these tutorials, we will only show the video clips we ourselves uploaded to YouTube as examples. You may be breaking copyright rules if you download content that belongs to someone else.

Download YouTube Videos with KissYouTube

Download YouTube Videos with YouTube Downloader

Related Links:

How does YouTube work? And should you download the videos?

Download YouTube Videos with YouTube Downloader

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 12:42:00 +0000

YouTube Downloader is a program that lets you download FLV source videos for any of the movies you see on the YouTube site. It is a free program that you can download from here...

Once you install the program, follow these steps to download YouTube videos with YouTube Downloader:

Launch YouTube Downloader, and enter the URL of the YouTube page that contains the video you want to download (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Add the URL of the YouTube page that contains the video
Make sure that the Download video from YouTube radio button is selected, and then click OK.
YouTube Downloader will show you a File Download dialog box (see Figure 2), and ask you to choose a name and location for the downloaded FLV movie.

Figure 2: Save the YouTube movie
Once the download is done, you'll find a FLV file in the location you saved it to. If you find that the downloaded movie has no file extension, rename it to add a dot and the extension "flv" -- so that get_movie reads as get_movie.flv

Remember: YouTube Downloader is a constantly updated product -- sometimes YouTube might change a few things on their site, and YouTube Downloader may no longer work. If that happens, check the YouTube Downloader site for a newer version.

Related Links:

Download YouTube Videos

Download YouTube Videos with KissYouTube

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 12:20:00 +0000

KissYouTube.com is a site that makes it super simple for you to download the FLV videos on the YouTube site.

Using KissYouTube.com is easy -- just change the URL of the page on which you are watching the YouTube video, so that you add the alphabets "kiss" before the domain name youtube.com.

For example, if you wanted to download the FLV movie for this page:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF0yCZ8PWco

You would go to the address bar at the top of your browser, and add the alphabets "kiss" without the quote marks before the youtube.com domain, so that it now reads like this:

http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=dF0yCZ8PWco

Scroll down the page and click the download link provided to save the FLV video to your computer.

Related Links:

Download YouTube Videos

What is FLV?

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 07:40:00 +0000

FLV stands for FLash Video, and is a proprietary streaming video format from Adobe. This format is used to store and share the video clips on sites like YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, and many other sites.

Normally you cannot download the actual FLVs, but there are applications and hacks that let you do so. There are also several FLV players and converters (that convert FLVs to other movie/video formats) available.

How does YouTube work? And should you download the videos?

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 03:42:00 +0000

Although the title says YouTube videos, this post discusses any other similar video sharing sites. The technology that YouTube and other sites use may be something like this:

You upload your videos in any of the formats that YouTube accepts.
YouTube then converts your video to the FLV format -- this Flash based format is more suitable for viewing the content online.
You are provided a URL where this FLV content is embedded.
You can then share this URL with anyone, or use some embedding code to place the video on your site. The code that you embed sources the FLV from the YouTube site. At any point of time, you are not provided a direct download URL for the FLV file itself.

Although it is possible to do so, sites like YouTube don't really want visitors to be able to download the actual FLVs. However many programs and hacks have been developed that get over this limitation.

There's also another aspect to this download issue: plainly, you may be breaking copyright rules if you download content that belongs to someone else.

And there's yet another thought, that of the video quality. Most of the content on YouTube is compressed so that the videos can play well over all types of Internet connections. Sometimes, you can request the original owner of the video for a higher quality copy. This approach also allows you to request their permission to use the video clip.

PowerPoint to DVD Software

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:37:00 +0000

I discussed whether and why you should create a DVD from your PowerPoint presentation a while ago...

And now let's take this to the next logical level: do you need a separate PowerPoint to DVD conversion software? The answer is not yes or no, it depends on your expertise level.

For starters, I haven't found a foolproof program that does it very well. And if you search for a PowerPoint to DVD program, it looks like the results are engineered by people who just want to sell their products! (they seem to be outsmarting Google for now). So I'm not going to recommend any of those programs. But to be fair -- most of them have trial versions, do check them out for yourself, and they might even work for you.

Essentially, creating a DVD from PowerPoint is a two step process:

Creating a movie from your PowerPoint
Creating a DVD from that movie

There are many good programs for the second process, and one of them may have been bundled with your DVD writer. As for converting your PowerPoint to a movie is concerned, you can follow my PowerPoint to YouTube tutorial (just skip the step where I ask you to upload the movie to YouTube).

This is not my last post on this subject -- expect to hear much more!

Why Should You Create a DVD from PowerPoint?

noreply@blogger.com (Geetesh) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:19:00 +0000

Yes, it's the next big thing, and hordes of people want to do this. And since we live in a world with the mentality of a herd, everyone else wants to do this. But why? Ask them and many are confused. They might answer that there must be advantages using this approach since so many others want to do it!

So am I asking you to abandon the very idea of creating a shining DVD disc from your PowerPoint presentation that you can play on your TV via the DVD player? Not really. So why I am putting up such a layer of skepticism right at the beginning of this article? Well, actually this is not skepticism for the idea, it's more related to not being aware of how to do it, and of learning if better solutions exist for you.

I'll certainly go into the finer details of this issue, but for now let us look at the advantages and disadvantages of this approach:

Advantages:

Since I don't want you feeling gloomy, let's first list the advantages of creating these DVDs:

DVDs are easily played by anyone -- even by great grandmothers who don't know how they can use a computer. Did you notice I did not say grandmothers? That's because today's grandmothers are smarter!
DVDs containing PowerPoint presentations don't contain the actual presentation, just a movie of the presentation -- that means no one can copy your slides and pass them as their own, or even edit them to change a spelling (even if you made a typo).
Creating your own DVD sounds much more impressive than creating a mere PowerPoint presentation.

Disadvantages:

It's not too easy an task -- and you need the right software and hardware (and that's not always cheap).
It's not easy to email a DVD! It's so much simpler to send a PowerPoint presentation by email.
Editing DVDs can be time-consuming and expensive.

That's for now -- I'll discuss more PowerPoint-DVD nuances sometime soon.