How to make PowerPoint presentations look good in SlideShare and DimDim

Lately I’ve been working a lot with SlideShare and DimDim to show PowerPoint presentations to customers and prospects. I try avoid “death by bulletpoint“, and instead incorporate a lot of diagrams into my slides in order to complement my speaking points. Unfortunately, a lot what looks great in PowerPoint 2007 (Windows) and 2008 (Mac) look awful in SlideShare and DimDim.

So, here is a checklist of things to avoid so that your slides look fine whether they are rendered in PowerPoint, SlideShare, or DimDim:

• Don’t use slick color gradations that PowerPoint 2008 uses by default. Use basic, solid colors.
• Don’t use shadows on objects.
• Don’t depend on builds within a single slide. Instead, use multiple slides to create a build. Tedious but worth it for complex diagrams.

What else can you think of?

Hopefully someday these kinds of issues will be taken care of as SlideShare and DimDim mature. And, one would hope that, as Microsoft creates more online offerings around Office, they will provide a way to faithfully render PowerPoint slides online.

Four essential online marketing resources

Today, I shared the links below with a friend who’s starting a business. In the spirit of helpfulness, I’m republishing them below.

Granted, these won’t be new to anyone reads the major social marketing / Web 2.0 blogs out there. Nonetheless, these are solid resources for online marketing that might not be known to mainstream business folks.

• Presentation design: http://www.presentationzen.com/
• Inspirational presentations often have minimal words and great pictures. Here’s where to find the latter: http://flickr.com/ (tip: sort pictures by “Most Interesting”)
• Social marketing is a very capital efficient way to market. This guy’s a master: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/
• Screencasts on your web site — of you talking about your service, or better yet, one of your customers talking about it — are very effective. Here’s a very easy way to create them: http://www.jingproject.com/ Then upload to YouTube — lots of traffic there, and thus people who could potentially find your service useful.

Hate Office 2007? Try Search Commands.

If Office 2007 has been as frustrating for me as it has been for me, check out a new feature from Microsoft Office Labs called Search Commands.

The problem that Search Commands solved for me is this: even after using Office 2007 for a few months, I still can’t easily find what I’m looking for, and still get frustrated having to look at many toolbar icons that I’ll never use. The way I solve this problem today is by either digging through the Ribbon and cursing, or using Google. Surprisingly, the latter method is often faster.

Search Commands solves that problem, by letting you "google" your Office 2007 commands, and find the right one. It might seem kind of odd to search for commands rather than use a menu, but consider that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint each have at least several hundred commands. It’s a lot faster to type a few keys than it is to browse and scan through a dozen drop-down menus.

If you like QuickSilver, Firefox search keywords, YubNub, the Unix command line, or other keyboard-oriented ways of working, you’ll probably find Search Commands a welcome addition. It’s not perfect, but it’s a big step forward.

One last thing: Search Commands is still considered by Microsoft to be an experimental feature, meaning that it might not be rolled into the Office 2007 code base. This is surprising given the positive feedback this feature has received, and we’ve known for over a decade that the majority of users like to search, not browse. So, if you like Search Commands, express your support here.