The result was this:

1. the audience automatically disconnected from the presenter to read ahead the text that appeared on the slide
2. the audience read faster than the presenter talked
3. the audience couldn’t wait for the presenter to move on to the next topic.

A better slide would have had the image at full size, the title, and nothing else. This would have allowed the presenter to get the full attention of the public and the slide would have served its purpose as a “visual” aid to enhance the message.

With no speech on the slide, the presenter needs to rehearse  before the event  But communication improves as the eyes of the audience stay on the presenter (unless he watches the screen).

Could you do with a second opinion on the quality of your slide presentation?  Get in touch with me.

The actual text displayed does not need to be the exact URL, it can be anything you want, even multiple words, and generally the http prefix is taken away for aesthetic reasons. But if the hyperlink is active and functioning in PowerPoint, it will also be active in Slideshare.  Remember that just typing a website address such as lesswire.it in one of your presentation slides will not necessarily  turn it into a hyperlink.  PowerPoint does not know you want a hyperlink unless it sees the http prefix or it can intepret a www prefix.   But you can add the hyperlink yourself to any text by first selecting it and then using the Insert / Hyperlink command.

The same method can be applied to a PowerPoint object, like a rectangle or an image.  Just select the object and use the Insert/Hyperlink command.  This can be useful to place icons with links to your Twitter, Facebook and other social network pages.

Here are a couple of very simple example slides posted to Slideshare.  You can move your mouse pointer to see which pieces of text and which objects have a hyperlink attached, and you can test the links by clicking on them.   The third page has sample social network icons with links, a great idea for the first or last slide of a presentation deck.

Many presentations are prepared using some sort of personal or company template. Some are better than others for sure, but that’s another topic. In any case, templates usually define a font, font size, color, position and alignment for the slide title (not the title slide).  Unfortunately many users don’t pay attention to the template they are using and move, reformat, resize, recolor, etc. the titles on individual slides.
One title is bigger and moved to the left, another is smaller and centered, another has a different color. The result is a presentation that looks unprofessional. Consistency in slide titles results in more professional slides.

You can check this by loading your presentation, going to presentation mode and quickly moving forward through the entire slide set. Watch the titles closely:  do they move or change?  The only thing that should change is the text and the length, everything else should stay the same.  Try it on some Slideshare presentations too and you will see quite a few that do not handle titles consistently.

What can be done?

Use the slide master and define in advance how you want ALL your titles to appear.  Take the longest title you have and decide the font size and positioning for the title in the master slide. Decide if all titles are going to be on one line only or if you will have double line titles as well.  In the case of both, decide the vertical alignment of the title text box to keep them all consistent and move as little as possible.

Do you need assistance?

If you want a hand to bring consistency to your presentation, I offer many services that can help: presentation checkups, remote consulting, and complete presentation construction. Head over to the Services page and take a look.  Or just send me an e-mail and tell me what your needs are.

A few things to note:

• You must have a Windows Live SkyDrive account (free) in order to participate (Sky Drive is a Microsoft site for storing documents and files on-line, offering 25GB of free storage)
• You must upload at least one Office document to the public folder
• You must switch the language to English

The rest seems pretty automatic.

I followed the procedure, but was not very lucky as I started to build my first presentation.  I got source code appearing on the slides, just by entering  some simple text!

This is the result (click on the screenshot to enlarge):

Hopefully the problems will be fixed and I will be able to do further testing.

Once you have installed the component, you will have a new option under “Save as”.

Rumors have it that the next Service Pak for Office 2007, called SP2 that is scheduled for release on April 28, 2009, will have native support for the PDF format.

p.s.
In fact, the service pack released a few days after this post does add this feature, so make sure you upgrade to SP2, using the Windows Update service.