Step 1: Open your presentation file in Slide Show mode to setup the exact time duration for each slide. There are two ways of doing this:

a) Use the “Record narration” feature if you want to include audio in your presentations. Record your voice as you move through the slides and click ‘yes’ when you are prompted to save the changes.

b) Use “Rehearse timings”  for silent PowerPoint videos. This option lets you define how long a slide should display on the screen before the presentation move to the next slide.

Enhance your ppt first of all

Step 2: To continue with the process, you will need to register (for free) at www.authorstream.com and upload the PPT file you saved in Step 1. AuthorStream is a hosting service where you can upload PowerPoint files as large as 1GB

Step 3: Once registered, click on the ‘Upload PowerPoint’ tab and follow the instructions:

authorstream upload screen

Step 4: Once uploaded, AuthorStream will convert the PowerPoint file into a MPEG4 video (mp4) that can be uploaded to YouTube or can be watched on an iPod.

This is not an instantaneous process, but depending on the file size, you will get an email notification as soon as your PowerPoint video is ready for download from the web.

Success!

Step 5: Log in to YouTube and upload your newly created MP4 file, ready for broadcasting and sharing with the world!

Keyboard shortcuts are always handy if you use an application regularly. If you’ve ever watched an experienced designer operating Photoshop - you’ll know what I mean - it’s a blur of fingers. If you are a serious Business PowerPoint user, you will appreciate how useful it is to know the right shortcuts.

With PowerPoint 2007, you can learn the shorcuts as you go - just by pressing the “ALT” key. Try it - your screen will look like this:

The power of the ALT key

As an example, if you wanted to insert a text box: Click “ALT” and you will see N under the title ‘Insert’ in the menu bar. Press “N” and you will be taken to the ribbon options for Insert and there you will see again all the keyboard shortcuts for different features. “X” is used to insert a text box.

Some cool shortcuts

Whilst I could give you a huge long list of keyboard shortcuts for you to memorise for PowerPoint 2007 and earlier versions, I thought I’d just give you some ‘cool’ ones… well I think they are anyway.

When editing…

It’s annoying when things ’snap to grid’ when you don’t want them to. Next time that happens when you are dragging or resizing things - press “ALT” at the same time - and you will find you have then got complete control over what you are moving.

To resize an object but retain its proportions, hold down “SHIFT” at the same time as dragging.

Watch a presentation from the slide you are on in slide show mode when editing CTRL F5

Whilst actually presenting…

Go to Slide <number>          <number> ENTER
Black/Unblack Screen            B or .
White/Unwhite Screen           W or ,
Show/Hide Pointer                 A or =
Erase Screen Annotations      E

There’s an easy way to fix this…

From the “view” menu choose “black & white”. This will show you what your hardcopy will look like.

Greyscale toolbar

To alter the way any object will print, simply right click on that object, and then choose the appropriate option. ie. “Black with White Fill”. In PowerPoint 2007 you will also find tone versions in the ribbon toolbar as shown above.

It’s always a good last minute check to make before you distribute your slides. No more saving two versions of a presentation (one for black & white, one for colour). Very handy.

A PPT template is a “pre-made” presentation environment. When a template is applied to a presentation, the Title Master and Slide Master (text slide or secondary slide) are pre-laid-out for you to add text and other objects, but with the typeface, font colour, and size already predetermined. Each of these attributes can still be manipulated on each and every individual slide if required.

To apply a PPT template to your PowerPoint 2007 presentation, follow the following simple steps:

Open PowerPoint, click “New” and then “Installed Templates”. Select “Photo Album” (as an example).

Select a ppt template (.potx)

Note that the presentation now opens with this preapplied template. The file that has been applied is a .potx file… a template file for PowerPoint 2007. Notice this is quite different to the .pptx file - the actual PowerPoint file you would want to save and work on. To illustrate the point, notice that this presentation has still not been saved - it’s still known to the system as Presentation2. You should save it straight away to ensure you don’t lose any data.

A PPT template and theme contains a bunch of pre-formatted elements including the colour scheme:

Theme colours

And slides being the most important. If you select “New Slide” from the menu - you will see the many different templated slides, ready for insertion into the presentation.

New slides

One of the best tips I can offer is to use the “Slide Master” page to design the style of your pages BEFORE you start designing your presentation.

This is the place to put your company logo for example, rather than placing it on every single slide. This will save oodles of filespace and will ensure it’s always in the right position on every slide.

For links to ppt template galleries, click here.

There will be instances where it would be useful to convert a PowerPoint file into Google Docs, or more specifically Google Presentation. This way the presentation would be immediately available to you (or anyone else for that matter) wherever you were in the world - you wouldn’t need a PC with PowerPoint on it to edit or view it.

In order to use Google Docs, you will need a Google account. They are freely available to everyone now and can be accessed here.

Having logged in to Google Docs, select “New” -> “Presentation”.

Google Docs

A new presentation will appear.

In order to convert your PowerPoint into this online format, select “File” and “Upload a file”.

Uploading

Select the file you would like to convert from your hard drive and then click “Upload a file”.

Types of files that you can upload:

Documents (up to 500KB)

HTML files and plain text (.txt). Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw).

Presentations (up to 10MB from your computer, 2MB from the web, 500KB via email)

Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps).

Spreadsheets (up to 1MB)

Comma Separated Value (.csv). Microsoft Excel (.xls) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).

PDF Files (up to 10MB from your computer, 2MB from the web)

Assuming the file’s on your hard drive, browse to it, give it a name and then Click “Upload File”

Uploading

Be patient with large presentations and don’t close down the screen or it will not import. It’s not entirely obvious anything is happening at this moment - but it is - your status bar at the bottom of the browser probably says “Waiting for ….” This is a good sign!

Once it’s loaded, the screen will refresh and the slides will appear (possibly slowly as they render out) and you should see an almost perfect PowerPoint presentation within Google Docs. There will almost certainly be some formatting differences that you should live with and amend manually.

The file’s now available to edit / share / publish - but that’s a whole nutha lesson!

What about converting the other way?

The issue that concerns some users the most when adopting trends of cloud computing is the compatibility of web applications with desktop software. Google Docs recently added a new feature to Google Presentations that will allow users to save Google Presentations as PowerPoint Files meaning you could start working on a presentation on the beach on holiday… get back to the office and export it onto your desktop.

To convert a Google Presentation as PowerPoint file, open the “File” menu in Google Docs and click on the new option “Save as PPT”.

I know - holiday’s are not for working but you get my drift.

You’ve just created a presentation masterpiece and presented it at a seminar. It really was quite good and many people in the audience came up to you afterwards and wanted a copy - which you could have sent them, however something in the back of your mind stopped you - why should you released your hard work to all in sundry to copy and claim as their own? That said - you would like it to be available for reference, and also, wouldn’t it be nice if you could control who sees it - with a login perhaps?

There are a number of ways of doing this - however being part of the ‘Being Smarter‘ network - we don’t like spending money - so how about we do this for free?!

“iSpring Solutions, Inc. is innovative software company focused on high end rich media software development for global markets” according to their site - and they do good stuff.

Firstly - visit the site - www.ispringsolutions.com/download.html.

Download the iSpring Free 3.5 package and follow the simple wizard to install it.

Open PowerPoint and the first thing you will see is the “iSpring Free” toolbar. Open the PowerPoint file you wish to convert.

iSpring in action

Step 1: PPT to Flash Conversion

The free PowerPoint to Flash converter creates web friendly Flash movies from your PowerPoint content keeping its visual parameters and animation effects.

The first time you use the software, I suggest that you use the “Publish” button to ensure the settings are correct. For subsequent conversions - you will be able to hit the “Quick Publish” button.

Select “Publish”.

iSpring main screen

Enter the title of the Flash movie you would like to create in the “Presentation Title” box.

Select the folder you would like it to be saved in and choose whether it’s a single slide or all slides.

I suggest that you leave the “Generate HTML” box ticked. This will ensure that you have a web page (.html) to display the Flash movie file (.swf) (NOTE It will also generate a tiny javascript file (.js) to control the presentation.)

Choose the remainder of the options and press “Publish”.

Depending on the number of slides, the software will then render each one into the Flash format and export the final two files.

It really doesn’t get much simpler than that - or “free-er” for that mattter. Great software.

Now - the Powerpoint convert zone has shown you how to do the conversion. What are the options for getting it online?

Step 2: Display online

There are a number of options for doing this. I’ll go through a couple:

i) FTP it to your web server

The files that iSpring has generated look like this.

Files saved

Simply upload those files to your webserver using your FTP program and provide people with the link to the index.html file which will then embed the Flash movie.

ii) Use a hosted service

If you don’t have access to a web server, and no tech friends who you can beg, borrow or steal from - then there are more and more hosted services coming online. iSpring offer their own service called Slideboom. The site looks like this:

Slideboom.com

You will need to join online - it’s free of course. You can then either upload your file via their website…

Uploader screen

Or - more conveniently, now you’ve signed up - you can use the iSpring application you’ve already installed by going back to the “Publish to Flash” dialogue box and then “edit account”. Type in your login and password.

iSpring Uploader

Next time you export the presentation, select Sideboom (rather than a local directory) and then press “publish”.

This dialogue box will appear:

Upload settings

Edit the various fields to reflect your presentation and assuming you would like this to be private access only, untick the “Allow public access” box.

Once it’s been uploaded to the Sideboom server, your browser will take you to that page. To share it with others - fill in the share via email box.

You can look at the example I’ve just created here.

Simple, quick, free and massively useful. I suspect you will impress your colleagues too!