Compressing PowerPoint Presentations
PowerPoint presentations get bloated when you add some pictures to them. This slows down transfer, hampers emailing, and quickly clogs your hard disk if you are a frequent presenter. There is an easy way to quickly reduce the file size. The video is less than two minutes long and thoroughly explains the tip.
If you prefer a printable set of instructions to lay beside your keyboard as you try this out on one of your files, then try Shailesh N. Humbad’s tutorial: Optimize Shrink Compress Powerpoint Presentations.
Don McMillan: All those PowerPoint Mistakes
There is no better way of learning than from your mistakes. No, actually, there’s no better way of learning than from someone else’s mistakes. And maybe, actually, the best way of learning is from someone else’s parody of all the mistakes everyone ever made in PowerPoint presentations.
Don McMillan pulls together all the common errors in a four-minute sketch. It’s easy to laugh with and at his mistakes. Why? Because I am sure you never make any of them yourself, of course!
Presenting in Seven Dimensions
Hans Rosling is a wizard presenter. He is the founder of Gapminder and a Professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. His new presentation, a so-called Gapcast, is a perfect illustration of his flawless presentation technique. He manages to integrate six, maybe even seven, dimensions of data in one series of animations. He builds them up in perfect rhythm, describing 300 years of health and development in six minutes. His data dimensions? Watch the short video first.
Here are the six dimensions of data, or rather six plus one:
- Time
- Geographic region
- Life expectancy
- Gross Domestic Product
- Population size
- Historical milestones
- And there’s one more…
His fundamental technique is to review the historical development of public health in Sweden in the context of today’s data from developing countries. He tracks Sweden’s progress over the last 300 years in the context of a scatter diagram that summarises the current state of development in all countries of the world. He makes the experience of a developed country like Sweden relevant to our understanding of the state of health and development in Sierra Leone. His observations suggest a way of tempering our expectations, implying that we should not expect quick fixes in the poorest countries.
His one flaw: he overplays the sexual health element towards the end of the Gapcast. I am not sure why he does this. The logic seems to fail at that point. Is he implying that sex education in schools and condom availability are related to the most recent improvements in life expectancy? It is interesting that in this last phase, in Sweden, he fails to mention heart diseases, smoking, or alcohol at all, or any of the major developments in public health in that country, however recent they might be.
And what was that seventh dimension of data in his presentation? I would think that Rosling’s own presence inside the presentation, his gestures, his emphasis, his interaction with the data, all imbue the screencast with an extra layer of meaning.
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