iPad | Presentation Xpert

Creating and Delivering Powerful Presentations Using an iPad (with Geetesh Bajaj, Microsoft PowerPoint MVP)

With the growing popularity of iPads and other mobile devices as presentation platforms, you need to learn more than just the basics of iPresenting. Learn how to select the right app as your presentation partner and then how to use them to deliver impressive presentations the way they should be seen with full animation, the right fonts, and brilliant colors and graphics. Learn also what you need to do before you begin! This engaging and interactive webinar recording with Microsoft PowerPoint MVP, Geetesh Bajaj offers you insights into how to maximize the power of presenting on an iPad.

Presenter: Geetesh Bajaj

Geetesh Bajaj is an awarded Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for over a decade now. He has been designing and training with PowerPoint for 15 years and heads Indezine, a presentation design studio and content development organization based out of Hyderabad, India. Geetesh believes that any PowerPoint presentation is a sum of its elements–these elements include abstract elements like concept, color, interactivity, and navigation–and also slide elements like shapes, graphics, charts, text, sound, video, and animation. He has authored six books on PowerPoint and trains corporate clients on how to plan, create, and deliver presentations. For more information on Indezine and Geetesh, click here.

The New iPad 3: Pass…Sigh

By Rick Altman

I have read all about the new iPad, watched the videos, read the white papers, held one in my hands, and test-drove it.

And I am disappointed beyond belief.

While I’m a Windows guy to the core, I own seven iPods and two iPads. I think it’s marvelous the way the user community invents uses for the iPad, and I credit Apple with this. The big gamble with the iPad was that its developers didn’t really know how consumers would use it. In many ways, they left it up to us to figure out what its purpose and applications would be. That gamble paid off, as restaurant servers now take our orders with it, hotel sales managers show rooms and suites to meeting planners with it, shoppers can dress up virtual manikins with it.

We users have largely determined how the iPad is to be used, and that’s the actual definition of “application.” In a sense, we are the killer apps for the iPad.

Presentations Community Left Out

But through this wonderful epiphany, the presentation community has been left out in the cold, and it is with sadness that I must conclude that the third iteration of iPad does nothing to address this.

I have written about this before. I was dumbfounded to discover that the original iPad offered no support for remote advancing of slides. Here’s an excerpt from that February 2011 piece:

“I got so close — I transferred all of my slides, converted them accurately, and successfully projected them on screen. And now when it comes time to actually deliver the presentation, I am required to stand behind a lectern so I can stay close to the device? I have spent the last five years advocating against the use of lecterns. This little gadget was about to turn me into a hypocrite.

Here is where the irony becomes almost too much to bear. Can you imagine if Steve Jobs were tasked with presenting from his iPad? The master of modern-day presentation, having to stand behind a lectern?? Apple’s decision to not include a USB port with the first generation iPad has effectively prevented me from using it in my profession.”

The iPad 2 was a much better device than the original and I have enjoyed using mine. I am confident that I got a job the other day because I showed my portfolio on it — I looked cool doing it. I love leading small meetings with it, where we can all gather around it. And we all heard the rumors of Microsoft’s imminent support for Office on the iPad. This, coupled with the announcement of the third iteration, buoyed my hopes that this most significant of omissions would be addressed.

Instead, the iPad 3 has given us a nicer-looking screen, a faster processor, and a better camera. I’m still trying to find a single user who thought that the screen resolution was deficient, the processor slow, or the camera weak. Apple improved three areas that nobody felt were lacking in the first place.

And still no USB port.

To the legions of presentation professionals who watch technology with rapt interest, the iPad remains a curiosity and a toy. To the community of writers like me, who offer comment on the state of our art, the iPad remains on our can’t-recommend list. That’s a shame, because it could be so much more.

Sigh.

About the Author:

Rick Altman has been hired by hundreds of companies, listened to by tens of thousands of professionals, and read by millions of people, all of whom seek better results with their presentation content and delivery. He runs the acclaimed Presentation Summit conference, formerly known as PowerPoint Live, and is author of the book, Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck & How You Can Make Them Better. For more information, visit his website at www.betterppt.com

How to Adapt Your Slides for iPad Presenting

By Geetesh Bajaj

One of the many ways in which you can adapt your PowerPoint slides to an iPad friendly format is by converting all your slides to pictures. This approach will work well for slides that have no animation or multimedia -– and the good news is that great presentation slides can be created without animation or multimedia of any sort.

The bad news is that this is a one-way street -– and if you want to make any changes to your slides, you will have to edit your original presentation and convert the slides again to individual pictures.

Figure 1 shows the 16 slide presentation I started with — these are all slides from a Photo Album presentation, and each slide has a photograph and caption. Your slides may be like more conventional PowerPoint slides, and it does not matter because the process for all types of slides is the same.

Figure 1: All slides ready to be exported from PowerPoint

To convert your individual slides to pictures in PowerPoint, you summon the Save As dialog box and choose JPG or another graphic format as the file type. We have instructions on exporting your slides as PNGs in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows, and the process works the same way to export JPGs in any PowerPoint version on both Windows and Mac. You will ultimately end up with plenty of pictures that are suffixed with their original slide numbers –- the first slide in your 16 slide presentation will be named Slide1.JPG, and the last slide will be named Slide16.JPG.

Of course you may not have 16 slides — that’s just the number of slides that I started with, as shown in Figure 1 above.

At this time, it is a good idea to rename your first 9 slides so that Slide1.JPG now reads Slide01.JPG (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 2: JPGs exported from PowerPoint

Thereafter place these slides in a folder that is indexed by iTunes. To learn more about how iTunes indexes picture folders, search the term add photos to iTunes library on Google. Depending upon which version of iTunes you are using, or if you use Windows or a Mac, the process may differ. Apple also has a great tutorial called Syncing photos using iTunes.

The next time you sync your iPad (both iPad 1 and 2) with your iTunes, the slide pictures will be copied, and available within your iPad’s Photos app.

Once you have synced your iPad, launch the Photos app on the device to see if all your slides have been imported as pictures –- also make sure that they are sequenced in the order you want to show them as slides, as shown in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3: Your slides on the iPad

Thereafter you can show these picture slides off your iPad -– moving on to the next slide is as easy as moving on to the next picture. And since the Photos app is AirPlay aware even on iPad 1, you can use it with an Apple TV or even a VGA cable connected to a projector. This may not be the most elegant way to transport your PowerPoint slides to an iPad, but it does work.

Note: Even though Apple’s documentation says PNGs are supported by the Photos app on iPad, and by iTunes to sync, I found that iTunes ignored all PNGs — that may be just a coincidence but JPGS do work the best.

About the Author:

Geetesh Bajaj has been designing and training with PowerPoint for 15 years and is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional.) He heads Indezine (www.indezine.com) a presentation design studio and content development organization based in Hyderabad, India. The site attracts more than a million page views each month and has thousands of free PowerPoint templates and other goodies for visitors to download. He also runs another PowerPoint- related site (http://www.ppted.com) that provides designer PowerPoint templates.

Geetesh also is the author of the best-selling book Cutting Edge PowerPoint for Dummies and three subsequent books on PowerPoint 2007 for Windows and one on PowerPoint 2008 for Mac.