10+ things to check when your presentation runs into technical problems

Oops. Everyone is waiting but you can’t get the show on the big screen….

TechRepublic has 10+ things to check when your presentation runs into technical problems.

Posterous – The place to post everything

Posterous bills itself as “The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.”

Recommended by Techbite, this is “a handy site for displaying practically any type of file: PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, Flash games, images, MP3s, documents, and videos in a variety of formats. The beauty of Posterous is that PowerPoint files display as they would if you had a PowerPoint viewer and image collections are automatically available as slide shows.”

Free.

PowerPoint Heaven – The Power to Animate

PowerPoint Heaven – The Power to Animate is a portal for those who like to use animation in PowerPoint presentations.

“PowerPoint Heaven is a PowerPoint entertainment portal for PowerPoint animations, games, artworks, showcases, animation templates and tutorials. The focus of this site is to maximize the use of Microsoft PowerPoint and go beyond its capability. Our goal is to show users that PowerPoint is not simply a presentation tool, but is also capable on leveraging into other areas such as creating games, artworks and animations.”

PowerPoint Tips from A Bit Better

PowerPoint Tips from A Bit Better Corporation is free advice on how to use PowerPoint better.

TemplatesWise has Free PowerPoint Templates

TemplatesWise.com has Free PowerPoint Templates and Backgrounds.

280Slides : Powerpoint Viewer and Builder

MakeUseOf has a post on 280Slides, the Powerpoint Viewer and Builder.

“280Slides is a dead-simple online Powerpoint viewer and builder tool. Using 280Slides you can create Powerpoint presentations online, download presentations to your PC, upload and view existing presentations online, and share them with friends. The cool thing about it, the presentations that you create with 280Slides can be easily downloaded and edited using Microsoft Powerpoint. No download required, the only thing you need is a web browser and an internet connection. The app has pretty much all the features necessary to create simple presentations online.”

So create a presentation (on your computer and upload, or directly at 280Slides) and have it available anyplace you have an Internet connection, no matter whose computer you’re using or what software they do or don’t have (as long as they have a standard web browser).

PresentationsETC: Free Presentation Templates

MakeUseOf has a post about PresentationsETC where you can Download Free Presentation Templates.

“PresentationsETC is a free presentations resource where you can select and download free presentation templates, backgrounds, and themes from over 20,000 slides. Most of the background images available in different sizes, variety of designs with transparent cutouts.

You can either download slides one by one or download them as ready made PowerPoint Templates and Keynote themes.”

This is intended for faculty and students.  Free!

More MRU (Most Recently Used) magic

Office Watch has a post on More MRU magic.

The Most Recently Used list in Microsoft Office can be handy, but it can also have a lot of stuff you don’t need or want again.  This post tells you where to find the lists and remove the unwanted items.

Impressive: display PDF’s & images as PowerPoint-style presentations

Freeware Genius has a post about Impressive which allows you to display PDF’s and images as (stylish) PowerPoint-style presentations.

Impressive “is a free multi-platform app that can display any PDF file or folder containing image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF and BMP) as a slideshow presentation. It can be used to present PDFs or images as full-screen PowerPoint-style presentations or it can function as a full-screen reader. “Impressive” also offers a combination of sophisticated slide transition effects and a number of practical presentation tools, including spotlight effects, box highlighting, zooming in, and an overview screen that displays slides as thumbnails and allows for quick navigation.”

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website is a Digital Inspiration post with practical instructions on how to handle RSS feeds, videos, audio, photos and slideshows, web albums, events from Google Calendar, very large photos, charts and graphs, animated gifs and screencasts, chat functions, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheet data, PDF files, Flash (SWF or FLV files), LinkedIn profile, Google Maps, another webpage, Windows Media or QuickTime movies, other fonts, and FriendFeed lifestreams.

Whew!

How to convert PowerPoint to DVD for free

Freewaregenius has a post on How to convert PowerPoint to DVD for free.

There is not a single free application that will accomplish this; however there are three “routes” illustrated below that you could take to achieve PowerPoint to DVD conversion using all free apps.

10 Tips for More Effective PowerPoints

Stepcase Lifehack has a post on 10 Tips for More Effective PowerPoint Presentations

“Here are ten tips to help you add a little zing! to your next presentation. They are, of course, far from comprehensive, but they’re a start.”

Some of the comments have good tips as well — scroll down the page to them.

Keep Office 2007 Documents Readily Available

Mysticgeek has a post on how toKeep Your Office 2007 Documents Readily Available the Easy Way .

“How many times have you been looking or a Word of Excel document and what should be an quick retrieval takes several minutes? Sure, you can always search, but for frequently used documents that’s not the best solution.

Today we will look at an easy way to keep your most important documents readily available within Office 2007. This trick works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint just the same… there’s a push pin icon next to each item in the recent documents list.”

PowerPoint to YouTube with Windows Movie Maker

AbsolutePPT has a post on how to convertPowerPoint to YouTube with Windows Movie Maker.

This is a step by step tutorial with screen shots.

Make Beautiful Online Presentations With SlideRocket

MakeUseOf.com has a review of SlideRocket, an online service for presentations.

You can start from scratch or base it on an existing PowerPoint presentation.

“SlideRocket allows you to track your presentations and gives you access to some extensive metrics. These metrics allow you to see who is viewing your presentation, where they viewed it, who they’ve shared it with, which slides they looked at and for how long.”

Free online service.

PowerPoint keystrokes to remember

TechRepublic blog has some help for PowerPoint:

You don’t need to get distracted by the mechanics of presenting a slide show. Learn just a few shortcuts and you can focus on your audience and your message instead.

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Remembering keyboard shortcuts is tough enough when you’re working on some no-pressure project at your desk. Get in front of an audience, and your mind may go totally blank. Your focus needs to be on the material you’re presenting and how you’re connecting with your audience — not on ” How do I back up to the previous slide?” That’s why it’s a good idea to pick a handful of the most useful shortcuts and make them second nature. When you find yourself delivering a presentation via the keyboard, these shortcuts will see you through.

Action	Shortcut
Start a presentation from the first slide	F5
Run the next animation or advance to the next slide	Enter or Spacebar
Return to the previous slide	Backspace
End a slide show	Esc or – (hyphen)
Jump to the first (or last) slide	Home (or End)
Jump to a particular slide	Type the slide number and press Enter
Go to a black (or white) screen or resume the slide show from a black (or white) screen	B (or W)

Microsoft Office student discount

While this site normally doesn’t promote commercial software (companies have budgets of their own for that!), the Microsoft Office Suite is the campus standard software and many students would like to get it at a discount.

Try the student discount for the ultimate package here.

DocSyncer for Google docs

Somebody had to come up with a way to synchronize the documents you edit in Microsoft Office so they are available in Google Docs.

Try the free service at DocSyncer to migrate files to Google.

Here’s looking at you, Office

Microsoft Office viewers are available if you don’t have Microsoft Office programs. Click here for the download page for viewers for all MS Office products, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook, Access, and Visio.

Remember: you can see the files with these viewers, but you cannot edit them in any way.

You can also use OpenOffice (freeware compatible with MS Office Suite before 2007) to view Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Access files (before 2007) as well as edit and save them to MS Office formats such as 97-2003 formats.

Remember: you must not use 2007 formats (ending in “x” such as “.docx“) if you want to use other programs such as OpenOffice, WordPerfect, etc. to view or edit them reliably.

Step by step YouTube video into Powerpoint

Jake Ludington’s MediaBlab blog has actual text-and-picture instructions for embedding a YouTube video so it is called and plays over a live Internet connection in PowerPoint 2007.