Know When To Move and When To Not Move (Red light!)
This great PowerPoint "stage" tip comes from Scott - "When you move, they look at you. When you stop, they look at the screen." Use this to your advantage. Don’t pace randomly, idly or unconsciously. Don’t rock back and forth on your heels. Also, [...]

Consider this: You are an expert in new technologies and have been invited to deliver a presentation at a conference (say, BarCamp).

You prepare the slides using PowerPoint and then upload them on to SlideShare so that audience has immediate access to the material. The organizers have also put a video camera in the conference room to live-record your presentation which they later upload to YouTube.

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Does this mark the beginning of the end for the Web 2.0 party ? In a short span of three days, at least two web based PowerPoint clones have decided to shut down their businesses completely.

Slideaware.com, a PowerPoint hosting service that let you deliver presentations live, sent an email to all existing clients saying that they are discontinuing the service due to a "shift in business plans."

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This step-by-step guide illustrates how to convert a PowerPoint slide-show into video so you can distribute presentations more easily:

1. You can upload these PowerPoint video files to sites like YouTube or MySpace and some of your creation could go viral.

2. Transfer the PowerPoint slides to an iPod or your mobile phone and enjoy the presentations while on the move.

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If the size of your PowerPoint Presentation is too big to be an email attachment, you can either spend some time compressing the PPT file or a better option is that you upload the presentation on to Slideshare.

Slideshare now lets you to upload PowerPoint and Adobe PDF files upto 50 MB in size.

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Forget the hack, Google Docs now lets you export presentations as PPT files in addition to supporting the PDF format. You can also view your Google Presentations offline in the web browser using the Google Gears extension.

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Microsoft PowerPoint is like Photoshop for clip art images. In just a few clicks, you can modify existing clip art graphics in PowerPoint so that the image appear more relevant to the theme of your Presentation.

For instance, you can easily remove complex backgrounds from clipart, merge two or more clip art images into one, change colors schemes, add perspective, image effects and so much more.

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The SlideShare player has a “Full Screen Mode” that lets you deliver PowerPoint presentations in front of a live audience without requiring PowerPoint program or the PPT viewer. Just upload the PPT file (or PDF) to SlideShare and make the presentation through web browser. 

But since the presentation slides are streamed via web, you could run in a problem if the Internet connection in the conference room is slow or network becomes unavailable at the time of presentation.

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The PowerPoint tips featured here are not about creating better or more effective presentations, instead they help you avoid any last minute surprises that may crop up when an eager audience is waiting to see your slide show.

*They are all based on my personal experiences at a recent BarCamp.

Tip 1: Put the PPT files on a USB Drive

Yes, there’s box.net, slideshare.net and tons of other PowerPoint hosting services where you can upload your PPT files but I still recommend carrying files on a USB drive because there are chances that Internet may be very slow (or unavailable) in the presentation room. With files on the USB stick, you are always in control.

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Google Docs Presentations allows PPT files only upto 10 MB in size while Slideshare imposes a 30 MB limit. What do you when your PPT file(s) exceed that maximum size limit?

Tools like PPTminimizer will quickly compresses your large PowerPoint Presentations into smaller files (without sacrificing quality) so that you easily send them as email attachments or upload to any of those PowerPoint hosting sites.

The software costs ~$30 but you can have it for free as we have ten licenses of PPTminimizer to give away. Just leave a comment below with your name, email address and website, if any. Would be wonderful if you can also share how you plan to use the software.

Here’s how PPTminimizer works - You select one (or multiple) PPT files and drag them onto PPTminimizer. It will automatically optimize the graphics and embedded objects in the presentations which are generally responsible for the large size. It integrates with Microsoft Outlook and will auto-compress the PPT attachments before sending them in email messages.

Other than the standard ppt and pps formats, PPTminimizer 3.0 also support the new PowerPoint 2007 formats (pptx) and is compatible with Windows Vista. Geetesh has a more in-depth review of PPTminimizer.

We will get in touch with you later this week if you are among the lucky winners. Good luck.

Related: Reduce the size of PowerPoint files (manual tricks)