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So you've been toiling for a week over your latest and greatest Powerpoint presentation, and you're sure it's going to get you booted right into that corner office you've been drooling over. Just to make sure you haven't misspelled the new CEOs name, you decide to e-mail your creation to a trusted co-worker for proofreading. That's when you discover it: You've created a 50 mb monster! The last thing you want to do is to delete that cherry graph showing your main competitor's tanking stock market valuation. But you need to get it under your company's 2 mb e-mail attachment limit, and you don't have time to burn it to a CD and FedEx it. What's a wannabe-executive to do?

So I happen to be looking around over at eLearningSource (another great learning resource on the web) the other day and come across a little article with information about a plug-in for PowerPoint 2003 called Producer, which allows you to add multi-media (video and audio) to your Powerpoint presentations, then post that information on the web. I have to confess I got very excited when I first looked at this, it is certainly something for which we have a tremendous need at my real job. We have hundreds, if not thousands of presentations locked away in our internal servers, containing a wealth of technical, sales and corporate information, information that we should be sharing with our customers, partners and even ourselves. What we really need is a simple way to get that information into something that is easily viewed in a web browser.

Unfortunately, after downloading and looking at this package I can see that we're not going to be doing it using Microsoft Producer.

I've just come back from a gruelling week of corporate meetings, a 5 day marathon of seemingly never ending PowerPoint presentations. As the person in charge of marketing and IT, part of my job is to be the contact point for all of the attendees, folks ranging from 1st year sales reps to divisional presidents, COO's and CEO's. Everyone is required to send me their presentations in advance, so that they can all be put on a single computer. If I get them in time, I usually go through them quickly and fix any of the obvious problems. Human nature being what it is though, most people actually gave me their presentation the morning they were presenting, usually on a memory stick with the words 'I made some last-minute changes, just put this one in instead...'. Sometimes this doesn't work quite as well as they would like:

A little thought before you start creating your presentation can go a long way in keeping your frustration level low and will end up saving you a ton of time. You need to ask yourself a few key questions before you put 'pen to paper'.

This is one of the most frequent questions I've been asked over the years. Whether you are using one of the templates that come packaged with PowerPoint, or you're creating your own layout design, this is one of the first decisions you will need to make. And as is true with most things that involve your computer, the answer is: It depends. The best place to start is by asking yourself where and how your presentation is going to be used.