PowerPoint search: even more valuable for groups and companies

Centralized PowerPoint search enables collaboration by connecting the people who need slides with those who created them, increases productivity by reducing the time spent looking for slides and possible duplicating the effort of creating the same slide multiple times, and captures intellectual capital by cataloging and making accessible the work of current and past contributors.

Previously I discussed how PowerPoint search tools help individuals be more productive.  The potential productivity gains are exponentially greater for people who are working together creating presentations.  If you spend a lot of time searching for a presentation you authored how much more time would you spend looking for a slide someone else created and decided where to store?  I think the time spent is worse than two times what you spend alone; maybe it’s more like amount of time spent looking for your own slides squared!  Maybe you need to wait until you can find the person who created the slide to ask them, how long will that take in our busy days?

image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/

Here are a couple of recent real world examples of why search tools are critical when two or more people work together.

First case: I was working with some highly skilled, very knowledgeable team members.  We were collecting presentations relevant to the team’s activities into folders.  Given a sane folder structure, I found I was still duplicating the effort of finding and filing presentations that had already been identified and placed in a folder.  The problem was that even with the good folder structure, I would place a given presentation in a different folder than my teammate would.  So I went looking for the presentation where I expected to find it, failed to find it and went looking for the original.  This caused confusion, duplicated effort, and then even more duplication and confusion when we ended up having to hunt down both (or more) copies when the presentation was updated.  A search solution would help in this situation two ways: first, we wouldn’t need to do as much organizing since required slides would be more findable; and second, there would be less duplicate effort of trying to collect slides that had already been collected since search would show we already had them.

Second case: A company was preparing a presentation summarizing the work they had performed over the past five years.  The person compiling the presentation knew of relevant presentations that had been given but could not find them on the network because PowerPoint files were scattered all over and each presentation author had a different way of organizing their slides.  Moreover, some of the original slide authors had left the company.  So there was a lot of intellectual capital lost somewhere on the company’s network.  Fortunately for this company someone had a copy of Slideboxx Prime and had indexed most of the presentations, so once the person who was looking for the slides connected with the person who had indexed the slides all was good.

Both of these real world examples illustrate the need for and productivity gains possible with a central PowerPoint library and they represent the inspiration for server-based, centralized editions of Slideboxx.  Zinali has created two editions of Slideboxx that enable shared PowerPoint libraries: Slideboxx Workgroup and Slideboxx Enterprise.  Slideboxx Workgroup was released in Fall of 2010 and is suitable for groups of up to 20 individuals sharing a common set of slides; more information on and a free trial of Slideboxx Workgroup is available at http://www.slideboxx.com/PowerPoint-Search-Tools/PowerPoint-Management-Products.html.    Slideboxx Enterprise is integrated with IIS and Active Directory to provide a scalable PowerPoint library solution with configurable access boundaries.  Slideboxx Enterprise is currently available in limited release; please contact Zinali at info@zinali.com if you are interested in Slideboxx Enterprise.

Tips for conquering your fear of presenting

photo by http://www.flickr.com/people/lel4nd/

Many people have glossophobia or the fear of public speaking.  In fact some surveys report that people report fearing public speaking as much as they fear rattlesnakes or even death.

So the fear is widespread and it’s too bad that this fear limits many talented people from reaching their potential.  In my previous post, I discussed the importance of presenting your ideas effectively.  Here I want to touch on some constructive ways to address glossophobia.

I was a shy kid and still score as an introvert on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  I used to be afraid of getting up to speak but now I’ve come to enjoy presenting and feedback from my audiences suggests I do a good job presenting.  Here are three things I’ve done to address the fear and to gain more confidence presenting.

• Understand what you fear – why are you afraid to present?  How can you address those fears?  I was afraid of how I sounded and acted while presenting.  To address this I had a friend videotape me presenting.  This accomplished two things: first, I could see that things weren’t as bad as I thought; and second, it showed me things I could fix and as I worked on these things my confidence improved and my presentation anxiety decreased.  I was also afraid I wouldn’t remember what so say, my solution to that is the next tip…
• Prepare and practice your presentation – I get great comfort in front of the audience knowing what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it.  It used to be that you would prepare your presentation at least several days in advance since you needed to leave time for having your presentation transferred to film or whatever media you were using.  Now PowerPoint and ubiquitous projectors enable “just in time” presentation authoring, but if you have presentation anxiety do your best to have your slides set ahead of time.  At the beginning of my “presenting career” I ended up practicing 10-15 times before a big presentation.  One of my favorite sayings is “amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.”  Knowing my talk and how it would flow gave me a lot of confidence when I stood up to speak.  This also gave me the chance to check the timing of the presentation – no one appreciates a speaker who goes over their allotted time!  Naturally, using the Slideboxx PowerPoint Search Engine can save time with authoring your presentation, leaving you more time to practice!
• Get used to speaking in front of an audience.  Many people who fear public speaking shy away from opportunities to speak in front of an audience.  I suggest taking advantage of whatever chances come your way get up and speak, especially if it’s in a comfortable, familiar environment with “low stakes”.  Ideas for such chances are: meetup events, your local Chamber of Commerce, local faith-based communities, public libraries, and colleges or universities.  I find the more often I speak in front of an audience the more comfortable I am doing so.

There are plenty of good sources out there on improving your public speaking and increasing your confidence doing so, here are a couple I have come across recently that I like: 3 Effective Cures for the Paralyzing Fear of Public Speaking (Startup Nation) and http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/improve_your_public_speaking_w.html (Harvard Business Review).

Lastly, I want say it’s okay to have presentation anxiety, a little bit of nerves means your presentation matters to you, and that’s important – your audience will appreciate your commitment to your presentation.  But please don’t let the nerves prevent you from reaching your potential.

Presenting is important for everyone and how to present better

“It’s not science until you tell someone about it,” those were the sage words from one of my graduate school professors.  Based on my experience in the professional science world, the statement seems even wiser.  But I think it goes well beyond science, it’s universal.  As an entrepreneur I read and hear plenty of advice that says even if you build a fantastic product if no one knows about it you don’t earn many customers.  If you can’t grab people’s attention your product development efforts are often futile.  The skills required to communicate effectively with your audience are equally universal and fundamental.

The importance of communicating and presenting effectively was one of the driving factors in creating Slideboxx.  We saw people spending a lot of time making slides and dealing with the technical aspects of slide layout and design, sometimes so much time that they weren’t able to devote quality time to think about their message and the best way to organize their presentation.  We felt that if people could have a PowerPoint library where they were able to easily access previously made slides, slides where they had already worked out the technical aspects of PowerPoint they could spend more time on the thought process of creating a coherent, compelling message.

Presenting in the scientific and technical fields is very challenging and people in these fields rarely receive good training on how to present effectively.  A friend recently sent me an article from the journal Nature describing the state of communication skills in the sciences.  It emphasizes the importance of being able to speak about your science and cites examples of a number of excellent scientists who were successful in part because of how they could communicate their work.  This is not to say great presentation skills alone make someone a great scientist; however it does suggest that brilliance alone often isn’t sufficient.  The author suggests a critical skill for the scientist (and really anyone for that matter) is to be able to think about their work (or product) as strangers would and then help the audience understand using familiar language.

There are many excellent blogs out there offering advice on presenting but I thought I’d leave you with one my favorite of the fundamentals:

• tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em
• tell ‘em
• tell ‘em what you told ‘em

I learned this in leadership training for an advocacy group with which I volunteered.  I also heard it very recently during a science slide review session.  Like I said at the beginning, the importance and fundamentals of public speaking are universal.

 

Agile presenting using Slideboxx PowerPoint Search

This will definitely impress your audiences: quickly find the slides you need and build a new presentation while they watch.  You can do it with Slideboxx PowerPoint Search.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/people/mckaysavage/ Used under terms of Creative Commons Attribution License

A little history: back when I was in graduate school there was professor who was a rock star in his field, a full professor at an Ivy League school before he was thirty.  He was also an amazing presenter.  I once sat near him in the back of a lecture hall for a symposium at which he was speaking.  Back then a lot of people still used overheads with their presentations printed (or drawn) on acetate transparencies; the presenters who wanted to have better looking presentations used 35mm slides loaded into carousels.  As I was sitting back there I noticed this professor was pulling slides from his binder sheets and loading them in to a carousel – he was practically building his presentation just in time, as I watched.  He stood up, handed his carousel to the projectionist and gave a fantastic talk; I don’t think he said “uh” or “um” through the entire presentation.  I was deeply impressed and have the image in my mind to this day.

Back when we started creating Slideboxx, I remembered this professor and envisioned him using Slideboxx today: pulling his presentation together faster and traveling with even more slides.  I thought this style of presenting would be a terrific way to use Slideboxx.  Imagine traveling with your slide library on a laptop and deftly pulling together a custom presentation for each client or collaborator you visit.  You could precisely target your message to your audience.  But you can “kick it up a notch”, when they ask a question not addressed in your premade slide deck, you can quickly find the slide that answers their question without fumbling through various folders and PowerPoint files – that would be truly agile presenting.

Not long ago a Slideboxx customer described exactly that experience: he was presenting to a company and someone asked a question; he knew he had a relevant slide but it wasn’t in his prepared slide deck.  He opened Slideboxx, searched, and boom: there was the slide.  His audience was mighty impressed.  Are you ready to win over your audiences with agile presenting? Slideboxx can help.

Discover lost treasure in a PowerPoint library

Imagine spending an afternoon building the perfect slide deck: looking for the right images to tell your story, finding just the right words, formatting things so they communicate without distracting. Then not being able to find and use those slides again… that is not my idea of fun or being productive.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/people/bluefootedbooby used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license

There has to be a better way than remembering “I made a slide like that…where did I put it?”  Previously I proposed using search as a powerful time-saving alternative to maintaining complicated organizational schemes.   Today’s idea extends that benefit: not only does a searchable PowerPoint library save you time, it also keeps track of your important work.

Many people I know spend a lot of time building PowerPoint presentations.  Whether for marketing, sales, training, or research talks, we spend valuable time developing ideas, researching information, generating data, and considering the best way to present our thoughts.  But what happens to the product of all that work?  Are we able to take advantage of it for future presentations?  For many of us much of this work is lost among all the PowerPoint slides we develop for any number of presentations.  Among those slides are our most valuable assets, things in which we invested substantial intellectual capital.

Maybe you keep track of your best slides by putting PowerPoint files in folders that are logical locations, or maybe you keep a PowerPoint file containing your favorite slides – your greatest hits.  But what if that logical location doesn’t make sense six months later? Or a slide that didn’t rate “greatest hit” status actually is critical?  Wouldn’t it be great if someone or something kept track of all your slides and was able to pull them together as you needed them?

You can address these problems, or at least make them less painful by maintaining a slide library.  That sounds like a lot of work, but there are tools that do most of the work for you.  For example, the Slideboxx PowerPoint library software (developed by the publisher of this blog) automatically makes your slides searchable and findable.  So your former B-side can become a greatest hit and you’ll find it when you need it.  That way you can focus your energy on creating new greatest hits rather than remaking the oldies but goodies!  That’s what I call discovering lost treasure in your PowerPoint library.

Don’t work too hard organizing your presentation files! Search PowerPoint instead

Here’s an idea to save a lot of time and effort. If you’re like me and many people I know you have a boatload of PowerPoint files that are associated with many different projects or clients – we’re talking information overload! It’s natural to organize these files into some sort of folder hierarchy and use a file naming system; however I’ve found that no matter how many ways I rearrange folders and rename files no arrangement works perfectly. I continually find presentations (or any type of document for that matter) that do not fit cleanly into a given organizational structure. When you find such a document what do you do? I think it’s pretty easy to reach the point of diminishing returns with folder and name-based organization.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/people/rexroof/ used under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license

My approach, and one of the key motivations behind my Slideboxx PowerPoint search tool, is to let the computer help: I use folders for fairly broad categories of documents and then use desktop search to find my documents. I don’t even bother renaming documents I download from the internet such as PDFs of journal articles – renaming takes valuable time and after time passes the names often are no longer helpful. For text-oriented documents such as Word documents or the PDFs of journal articles traditional search tools such as Microsoft Desktop Search or Google Desktop work well enough; however, it can still take some rooting through the results to find the right document. PowerPoint files are inherently visual so a search tool such as Slideboxx that shows thumbnails of the specific slides makes finding the right slide a lot easier.

This is not a particularly new idea, but I think it bears repeating periodically especially around the New Year when every store has organizational aids for sale! I think the idea reflects the Google approach to the web: could you imagine trying to categorize and organize all the web content?!? Well that’s how Yahoo started, Yahoo is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. The Google approach of indexing everything and letting people search it all was very disruptive to say the least, well that and the way they figured out how to monetize search with ads.

So that’s the idea to save some time and effort: use a broader folder structure along with a search tool to find your documents. We often end up spending too much time and effort maintaining our “systems” rather than making our systems work for us or seeking out new tools or methods to make our systems work better. What do you think? is it worth trying? Slideboxx Prime has a free thirty day trial and can work with whatever folder structure you already have.

Happy New Year! PowerPoint Search in 2011

Happy New Year!  This is a new blog about the Slideboxx PowerPoint Search Engine.

image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/daverugby83/ used under terms of Creative Commons Attribution license

In this blog I’ll explore aspects of why Slideboxx exists and how our customers use Slideboxx to improve their productivity and presentation quality.  I’ll also discuss ideas for features and solicit your feedback.

Every New Year it seems we want to get things organized. In my next post, I’ll examine using search as an alternative to organizing PowerPoint files.

Cheers!