Going beyond the PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint is a great tool that saves us from having to construct our presentation materials from cardboard paper and markers. In fact, PP's latest versions do such a good job at that that any presentation still looking less graphically advanced than PowerPoint 2007 is dismissed by the public as not professional. In short, PowerPoint can be a great tool for organizing one's thoughts into a presentable product. With that said, the process of creating that presentable material can take an entire weekend or longer. That sounds like a lot of time. Yet, let's see what there is in the end of all that labor. The presentation makes for a solid visual support to your speech. It can help you stay on track and keep your thoughts organized and convincing in front of an audience. These uses for PowerPoint are the most obvious and they are the reasons why most people open PP in the first place. However, the best news of all is that the life of the presentation that took so long to make does not end after the lecture.

Five ways to recycle your presentation

1. Your presentation can be a good skeleton for a printable brochure or a flyer. We wrote about the general process of creating a flyer, and having a ready presentation on hand only makes that process easier. Just like the presentation is divided into separate slides, the flyer can have sections with according text inside. The slides' content then serves as a guide for the text of the brochure. Since you read an entire lecture on the topic already, you should have no trouble writing down your thoughts into a coherent piece of publicity.
2. Create a package CD. This is a feature that in versions prior to MS PowerPoint 2003 is called Pack and Go. Package CDs allow you to burn a presentation, along with some accompanying files, to a compact disk directly from PowerPoint. We recommend complementing your .ppt file with a narration of your lecture. Spending your time on the sound recording will provide you with some extra promotional material that is easy to duplicate and distribute. Remember: once you are done recording, you will be grateful for making the effort.
3. Produce a promotional DVD. This option is similar to the point above. However, unlike package CDs, DVDs can be played back on the conventional DVD players which enhance your potential audience even more.
4. The Internet, be it through your personal website or through a social network of sort, can be a great place to display your work, and there are multiple ways to accomplish that. Firstly, PowerPoint can save your ppt file in .html format. That way, you can put the entire presentation easily on your website and leave it there without worried. The other way would be to convert the presentation into a video file (.avi, .mov or .wms standard). As a video, your presentation can be displayed on services like YouTube and broadcasted worldwide. This option is especially good if you followed our advice in point #2: to make a sound recording of the presentation because the sound cannot be preserved in the .html version of a presentation.
5. For a reach to a global public and an opportunity to interact with an across-the-seas audience from your home, we recommend carrying out webinars. Skype can be a very good beginning: it's free, accessible, and simple to use. Noetheless, considering its screen sharing capability limitations, one might also consider other, more sophisticated, technological options. For the NVSBS training purposes, Nick uses MS Live Meeting which is just one piece out of an array of similar programs.

We hope that you get inspired by our suggestions and it lets you get more material out in the world for the sake of your business success. Please say tuned for further ideas on professional communication, cutting waste and boosting your overall efficiency. We sincerely look forward to hearing your comments and seeing new subscribers!