Back to Best of the Web by L Ritzel

Pls Click for useful Sites in following Categories:

eCollaboration tools (Having talked about the Information Age for some years we now have entered the Collaboration Age. Here some of the Webs most usefull and innovative tools available on the WWW)

Cyberhelpers (some virtual helpers, once you know them you could not live without them anymore)

Innovative Searchtool (or what is beyond Google and Yahoo?)

Finding Multimedia on the Web (Sounds, Images and Animations)

eSwitzerland (Helpful sites about Switzerland)

Travel Helpers (You are planning vacations and need some virtual help)

Information from the World Wide Web

A bit more technical Sites for the Teckies among you

Fun and Leisure

 

eLeader are doing presentations, physical, online; anytime, everywhere. All are using the same tool - Powerpoint. This is why 99% of all presentations look all the same and all the same boring. This is why design and economy gurus like Seth Godin have to write about how BAD Powerpoint actually is. But Seth does not give too much of an advice on what really can make your presentations fly. Here are some of my ideas

SCROLL DOWN FOR MUCH MORE TIPS FOR A CREATIVE POWERPOINT PRESENTATION!

Scenario: You are asked to make the Intro presentation to the yearly company meeting and you want to want to ‘shine’ with a innovative graphical presentation with nice images, fonts and some multimedia features (sound and animations). You need images, visuals for your Presentation. To find pictures, just go to www.google.com/imghp type what ever keyword combination to describe what kind of picture you are looking for and press enter key. It will then search the web and find you the all pictures in thumbnails. Click on the pictures to see the origin of it. If you like the pictures, just rightclick and eitehr copy them or save them into your image folder for later usage. Make sure that what ever image you want to use is in the right resolution (filesize and quality). If you want to use it for eample for a background image to fill the whole slide, around 50-80 kbytes are fine, smaller images might look unsharp and ugly when resized.
You can find nice free photography at Freefoto
There is even quite some free stuff available for download on the multimedia side; sounds, movies and gif- animations on almost every topic. If you need for example gif animations for your next presentation, use the same picture feature from “Google” as mentioned earlier (www.google.com/imghp ) into the search field enter the topic you want to get an animation, for example ‘fire’ together with either the word ‘animation’ or then ‘gif’. In the thumbnail preview you won’t yet be able to find out if you found just a simple flat image or a layered gif animation. First look at the extension of the file, anything else than a *.gif extension cannot be an animation. Once you have found a fit, click the right-mouse button to open the ‘object’ in another window and then you will see if it is a moving picture or not. If it is, just once again use the right-mouse click and save the animation to your disk to embed into your presentation or mail. (Attention only PowerPoint versions 2000/ XP will support the gif animations, the others will show it as simple flat image). If you however want to use the animation within a mail, make sure that the file-size is not too large and your and the receivers mail engine does support gif animation (html and not simple text support). One of the many sites where you can find a huge amount of categorized cliparts for fee is at GoGraph

 

 



 

To find sounds, check various specific sound search engines such as:

Singing Fish is a powerful search tool that only indexes multimedia formats, including Windows Media, Real, QuickTime, and mp3s. According to the blurb, millions of people use it every day, and its is aim to bring a universe of free media to the likes of you and me. You can find movie trailers, sampler tunes, instructional videos, news reports, and so much more. Use the category selector on the left to narrow down your search, and if you're seeking inspiration then have a look at what other people have been searching for in the explore section. A nice touch is that you can save your searches really easily, and without registration, as long as you have cookies enabled.

www.findsounds.com where you can find shorter sound samples and waves (*.wav files are real recordings or natural sounds or voice). To find a sound. Visit the website findsounds and then enter for example the word 'lion' to find the sound of a roaring lion. It will find many different sound samples and you can prelisten to them before download in pressing the icon that looks like a loudspeaker. If you like what you hear, just right click on the sound file itself and choose 'save target'. Make sure that what you download is a 'wav' file. Save the file in your own folder (for example 'my documents' or your student folder) and then you can assign the sound to a slide.
Musicrobot as well as Midisite will help you to find the best free midi files (midi files are digital, sound similar like the mobile phone rings, they are much smaller in size than ‘wave’ or ‘mp3’ files). To find such midi music files, visit musicrobot or midisite website and click on 'band'; enter the name of a band like for example the Eagles. It will then search the whole Internet and find all the websites with at least one song from the Eagles in a midi format (file extension .mid). Once it shows you how many links it found, click these links and it will list each link one by one. Click the song from the Eagles you want (for example 'Hotel California') in clicking on the link (this is not yet the mid file, therefore you cannot yet download the music file). When clicking onto the link it might pop up some advertising that you can 'skip' (at the top right of the advertising page is a button 'skip'). You should then finally end on the webpage where the music file is. Just check on the site of you can find the link to the midi file (just move with the mouse over the file and when it shows down left a path to a file with the extension .mid then you can be sure to be correct. Right mouseclick and save target and save your file into your own folder. Once it is downloaded, you can assign this midi music to any slide.
 

Almost every company has the need to do it; every Manager has to do it many times, it is important to sell a new product, to express a new business strategy or just to convert some internal information to subordinate. What is it? Business Presentations

The application that is used almost every time in making Business Presentations is PowerPoint. I still remember some years back when I had to ask my students which presentation software they want me to teach them. But it has been a long time since PowerPoint still was challenged by its competitors such as Harvard Graphics Harvardgraphics ) and Freelance (last update was the millennium edition, check IBM / Lotus site for more information). The biggest competitor today probably is Impress 6, part of SUN’s Star Office Suite . Even if all these applications still exist, they probably wouldn’t be used. I honestly have not seen one presentation done in Bangkok, Singapore or Hong Kong that has not been done using PowerPoint (I have even seen some years back a Sun MicroSystems marketing man presentation using PowerPoint instead of their own product). There are also some freeware available through download sites such as: (www.twocows.com Twocows , Downloads , Shareware, Jumbo ) However, in spite of some competitors PowerPoint seems the popular choice of almost everybody who has a message to spread within a meeting, a workshop, an online broadcast or a business presentation.

Once one uses PowerPoint it is not too difficult to understand why it is so popular. The GUI (User Interface) of PowerPoint is straight forward and we even could use the famous slogan from a famous mobile phone company that it is its ‘human technology’. Right now the current version of PowerPoint is ‘2003’ and Microsoft has really done a great job to get some pretty neat features in to replace its own version XP!

I have always been disappointed on how top companies and their managers ‘under-use’ the possibilities of PowerPoint and even more so the features and tools available free on the Internet. These additional features allow one to make much more creative and multimedia supporting presentations. Everybody knows that simple bullet listing cannot be the only way to convey an important message, a new business proposal or survey results to an audience within a timeframe of normally 45-60 minutes.

TIPS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR A BETTER PRESENTATION
Here are some tips and suggestions for your next presentation. They are far from complete and I certainly would love to have a discussion on the topic of ‘doing better presentations’

First let me discuss some of the most obvious features that already existed in earlier versions and seem to be unknown to most of the users:

BLACK AND WHITE VIEW FOR PRINT
Most disturbing for me was always when a nice colorful presentation was ‘supported’ by a lousy printout of the slides. Not only did most presenters not use the notes fields and headers and footers to support their slide message or have some references and sources listed but they use only black & white settings for their printouts. All they show are black text on black images, images that perhaps make sense when they are embedded, but do not make sense for any printout. Additionally, while it is OK for copyright reasons to use some publicly available pictures from the web for a life presentation, these pictures should not appear on the printed and distributed presentation. The black & white view feature in PowerPoint can solve all this very smoothly.

POWERPOINT SHOW
When ever I joined workshops of professional companies with international reputation, I was almost always surprised when they had to open PowerPoint in front of the audience with the screen normally already on and then wait while they opened the file through the menu (File>Open..) and then click the ‘Slide Show’ button to finally get the first slide on the screen. There is a simpler way to do this and it looks much more professional. Just save your presentation at the very end as a ‘save as type’ PowerPoint show file or just rename your file from name.ppt to name.pps. This little change will result in a direct opening of the slide show with the first slide without having to show the audience the whole way through PowerPoint and have them see half of the presentation in the PowerPoint GUI. If this approach is then combined with adding shortcuts of all the presentations onto your desktop, you will see how neat it looks and the audience will appreciate it.

An alternative that can be used for simple shows is a ‘No more clicking’ version of an automated PowerPoint presentation. You can easily automate your PowerPoint presentations by setting timings for each slide with the Rehearse Timings feature. Or you can create an automatic self-running and interactive kiosk in PowerPoint. At certain times self-running kiosks can be useful as they impart information to interested parties when you may not be available to do so yourself or when you want to have an interactive presentation running during an exhibition. I have used these interactive features during live presentations to audiences and have let the audience choose the topics to be discussed which gets them more involved in the presentation.

POWERPOINT ON NAMECARD CD ROM

Such interactive presentations, kiosks and automated slide-shows can easily be burned onto a CD ROM. You might even want to consider buying these very neat looking name-card sized read-write CD’s which are available everywhere. You can then save your last promotion or your Action plan and distribute them to your key clients or to interested visitors to your booth during an exhibition. With a simple trick you can add on some batch file that will have your Slideshow automatically loaded whenever the CD is entered into CD drive (auto load).

 

POWERPOINT TO FLASH
A fantastic application that adds on to Powerpoint is Dreamsofts PowerPoint to Flash converter. Within minutes is your whole presentation coverted into a simple flash animated slideshow. It wont keep the effects or the embedded gif animations and sounds but it will load on every browser and support your online webcast or Website, check here for a sample!

MASTERTEMPLATES FOR POWERPOINT
The themes and designs given by PowerPoint are OK for last minute presentations but should not be used for a paying audience expecting a customized slideshow. Everybody who visits a one-day business workshop will recognize that most of the presenters use the same design backgrounds and this becomes over time very boring. Not only are there many more slide templates available from the Microsoft download page, but there are also many sites that have additional templates for free or for sales. Some of the companies have done a lot to spicing up of existing PowerPoint versions are:

Presentationpro , Powerpointtemplatespro as well as Crystalgraphics (on some of them you can download samples for free). In addition there hundreds of free designs available on the internet. For example, Powerpointsolutions (with cool animated design backgrounds) and Brainybetty. Of course there is the possibility of designing your own master templates. To do this you should use your own picture library, your own logos and create easily your very own corporate identity templates.

SUPPORING MULTIMEDIA FOR YOUR PRESENTATION: IMAGES
To find new pictures you can rely on the Web to help you. For almost every visual you might find on any page you can use the right-click of the mouse and choose ‘save picture as’ within the pop-up menu and the pictures is ‘yours’. This might not always work since some clever web programmers will include a protection to avoid any saving to disk, or sometimes what appears as one single picture is actually an arrangement of many pictures but again the Web can help. Just download one of the many free available Screen capture applications. These very useful applications allow you to capture anything you see on the screen and save it as a picture.

But to find more specific pictures on certain topics and themes, either you can use Google (and other search engines) image search engine to find visuals and images that you can then download (right-mouse). Or you buy the property rights to use professional photos and designs from sites like Corbis. I normally get along with images that I find on the web and either I would only use them during live presentation or if necessary first would contact the site where the picture comes from and ask the webmaster for the permission to use it. Normally this works fine and companies either tell me that it is anyhow public property or then that if i would refer to them within the reference I could make use of the visual.

(An interesting anecdote can be told about when I once contacted LEGO for the permission to use LEGO to symbolize a business process. Upon sending them an email, I got an immediate phone call from LEGO headquarter. The person calling said LEGO is very strict in their policy that LEGO should only be used in association with children games and NOT for any business related issues. I of course respected their corporate rule and used something else instead.)

Another possibility lies in cropping parts of the picture and using software like Photoshop to apply different effects and filters. This approach really changes the picture and makes it your own.

There is another strong feature build into PowerPoint that helps when working with pictures. As soon you click / activate a picture the picture toolbar will pop-up and allow you to crop pictures, to make them brighter and to do other important functions.

If ever you have to send your presentation by attachment to somebody, you might want to ensure that the file size does not grow too much. But compressing the finished PowerPoint presentation file won’t help a lot since the save and compress functionality of PowerPoint XP is very impressive. The same presentation saved in PowerPoint 2000 format would need about 30% to 50% more space. But what actually makes your presentation heavy are the images that you use for your slides. To ensure that they look good but do not use much space, just right click on what ever picture you want within your presentation and then choose the ‘format picture’ menu. In there, click the ‘picture’ tab and click on ‘compress’. In the next window you can then change the resolution for Web/Screen or for Print and apply it to all pictures in the document. The pictures might loose a bit on quality, but at then end you might easily reduce your presentation by 80% and still the on-screen presentation will look fine.

Sometimes you want to convert your slides of PowerPoint into pictures that you then can use for Web slides (no effects) or inclusion into documents written in Word. For this just open the Presentation or a particular slide and then in the menu ‘File’ choose ‘Save as’ and under ‘save as type’ you can choose the picture format that you want to have. For high resolution pictures choose ‘bmp’ for smaller resolutions and for the web, choose ‘jpg’ or ‘gif’. You can choose if you only want to convert the actual slide or the whole slideshow (in this case a folder will be created and each slide will be save as one picture file)

SUPPORING MULTIMEDIA FOR YOUR PRESENTATION: SOUNDS
The same applies to audio and other multimedia files that are available for free download. Samples would be findsounds (all kind of sounds and formats) wavesearch (recorded audio), musicrobot for midi files (digital audio) or then more high-tech at sound-effects-library

SUPPORING MULTIMEDIA FOR YOUR PRESENTATION: ANIMATIONS
For gif animations you can again find hundreds of free libraries on the web such as webdeveloper , animationer.dk , gifanimations and animationfactory

SUPPORING MULTIMEDIA FOR YOUR PRESENTATION: VIDEO
For video files you might want to try out Altavista.com/video or the multimedia search engine provided by Multimedia.lycos or Singing Fish

Some new features of PowerPoint 2003 are its much more advanced ways to assign not only simple effects to objects and slides but to create real scenarios. Very similar to multimedia software packages such as ‘Director’ or even ‘Flash’, the new PowerPoint can handle timeline, entrance, emphasize, exit and even more complex motion paths. This combined with, for example, transparent gif animations can lead to stunning; almost movie like slides.

ADD ONS AND DOWNLOADS FOR POWERPOINT
Now let me discuss some of the neat features and tools that are available for download – freeware, shareware or trial versions of hundreds of fantastic tools that help you to add on to your PowerPoint presentation. As I mentioned before, Gif animations can make a great impression and can spice a business presentation to make it more interesting. There are virtually hundreds of gif animation software available on the Internet. It is not the scope of this article to investigate which ones are the bests because they all work about the same way. Pictures are merged in sequences and can be played like movies. They can help to visualize a morphing process, a simple working of a machine or engine or simply show different pictures one after the other with different transition effects. Some of the better ones can use different plug-in available from Adobe and Macromedia. Some can handle transparent gifs and some others can add on with embedded sounds and even video and interactivity. This sounds already like high-tech but I normally train top managers in 2-4 hours on the usage of such gif animation software and this is sufficient. The rest is a matter of good ideas, creativity and some imagination!

I normally advise people to create their tables and charts in Excel and then copy – paste special (as pictures) into their PowerPoint presentations. The reason for this lies in the rather not so user-friendly and limited features of the Charting function within PowerPoint. You also can spice up your charts with animation effects. Adding animation effects to your charts can help you get your point across. Instead of having a chart simply appear on a slide, you can have it construct itself by category or by element. More impressive Chart features are available on the Web at Powerpointcharts A great new software available on the market is PowerCONVERTER from PresentationPro. This application will allow to convert your powerpoint presentation within one minute into a flash animated FLASH animation that can be used on or offline and presented just using any internet browser or the Flash player. - Check here for a sample

Another question would then as well be on how to insert a Flash animation file into your Powerpoint presentation. Without additional software it wont work, But The company Globfx can help and all for free. Just go and download the Swiff Point Player that will allow you then with an additional menupoint build into your powerpoint to insert and play Flashmovies

SPECIAL ARTISTIC FONTS FOR YOUR PRESENTATION
Another cool tool for powerful looking Presentations is playing with Fonts and 3D text. There are millions of free fonts available on the Internet. For example there is one from the original Star Wars (erikstormtrooper ) or a Pink Floyd font (floydianslip ). Just search the Web and you will find the ones available for free download. (Don’t forget to change your saving options for your presentation for embedding all fonts, if ever you want to distribute your presentation. If you don’t do this the fonts won’t be the correct ones when opened from another computer). If you want to use symbolic signs rather than fonts, try for example iconian where you can choose over a thousand very innovative font libraries and icons.

To find more free fonts to give the special touch to your presentations, your flyers or eventually menus, check out these three sites. They are certainly not the only ones, but a good start with many 1000 of free fonts for download:
1001freefonts ; Highfonts ; Fonts.katgyrl ; Getfonts

Innovative alternative: Look out for some ‘famous’ fonts from movies(such as ‘Star Wars- Episode 1’), branded products (such as ‘CNN’) or famous rock bands (such as ‘Led Zeppelin’), either just enter the search criteria : ‘download star wars font’ or ‘pink floyd font free download’ into “Google” or any other search engine and check out on the various sites found. You won’t get always a ‘first hit’, but normally after some dead links of some commercial sites, you will find what you are looking for.
Simplythebest gives you one category for famous fonts. When I was checking on them the last time, the famous ‘Walt Disney’ font as well as a ‘Led Zeppelin’ font was freely available for download
Fontaholic has some nice famous movie fonts for free downloading

Finally, for the ones who consider the WordArt as too limited I would suggest having a look at the many available 3D text applications on the Web. With these applications you can transform a simple Arial font into a word of art and even apply some very cool and professional looking filters within a minute.

 

***Lukas Ritzel, is a Swiss citizen and a CoFounder of an international consulting firm called Prasena which has the following web address: www.prasena.com.
Over the years he has done some 1000 presentations, workshops and lectures - many of them you can see at Prasena's Virtual University many managers in over 40 countries. He right now works with Dreams Come True, a Hotel and Business Management School in Switzerland and is as well involved as Swiss chapter president of the Digital Workforce Education Society.

Lukas Ritzel and his colleagues from Prasena have received THE 2004 Prestigious award from Seth Godin and the FastCompany:

! Prasena is a Purple Cow! Fast Company magazine and Seth Godin, author of the New York Times bestseller Purple Cow and contributing editor of Fast Company, have picked Prasena to appear in their sourcebook of the top 500 companies that can help YOU to make things happen. Click here to know more and get the book