Business   

Presentation tools: fresh exposition

This week NetSpeak profiles a few tools/services meant for drafting/sharing presentations packed with a variety of content. In any educational/academic or business set up, presentations play a significant role. Apart from the popular software PowerPoint, several other presentation tools (off-line and on-line) are in place (like the tools such as Qlipboard, Zoho Show and Google Presentations discussed in the past).

Sliderocket (http://www. sliderocket.com/index.html) is yet another new service that offers the facility to compose presentations on-line and share them with others. In addition to PowerPoint (PPT) file import feature, Sliderocket (now in private beta) provides several tools for creating rich presentations. This service enables you to effortlessly enrich the presentation with video/audio content, live charts and tables. Ability to link/add tables from Google spread sheets is another feature worth a mention.

While making a presentation, one may wish to show different types of content to make it more valuable/effective. For instance, if we can show relevant websites, real-time, inside the presentation window itself (that is, without having to load the browser), the presentation could be made more vivacious. Also, the presentation process becomes more efficient if we can present a document (Word/Excel) and edit it live during the presentation without exiting the presentation window. The latest version of the free software, Freepath, serves all the aforementioned tasks with ease.

Freepath 2.0 helps us combine different types of files (PPT/Excel/PDF documents, flash videos, web sites and images ) and pack them into a playlist that can be displayed within it. All the playlists created thus will be listed in the Freepath’s interface under the ‘Library’ section. One can populate the presentation slides by simply dragging and dropping files to the Freepath’s ‘Playlist’ area. Each of the slides can be arranged according to your choice.

Yet another wonderful feature of this tool is ‘Prep Video’ option that allows you to edit a video slide. Assume you need to integrate a video file with your presentation but wish to show only a specific portion of it. For this, just right-click on the video slide, access the ‘Prep Video’ feature and select the start and end parts of your preferred segment using the appropriate buttons.

Also, if you are showing an Excel sheet and noticed an error, you can edit it live on the presentation screen (no need to load the Excel software).

Education is an area that thrives with a community willing to share/collaborate. In this respect, it is an excellent domain where Web 2.0 model fits quite well. This means any tool meant for the educational domain should have a Web 2.0 feature too. Freepath is a right development in this direction. Freepath’s service ‘Myfreepath’ (https:// www.myfreepath.com/) allows you to upload your playlists on to its server for sharing them with others.

Screencasting is another means to deliver content. In the past, this column featured several screen-casting tools that let us create animated movies from computer screen shots (like Wink, JingProject and CamStudio ). The screencast technology is a valuable aid for the teaching community as it helps them create educational/demo videos with ease. As the video outputs produced by the programs mentioned earlier are in formats such as AVI, SWF and the like, we need appropriate external software to view them. A solution that does not require any extra software to view a screencast would certainly be helpful. The free screencast software screen2exe ( http://www.screen-record.com/screen2exe.htm) could come in handy here. This tool allows you to build animation videos from screen-shots and save it as a self-executable/self-playable ‘EXE’ file. Along with screenshots, the program lets you add audio also into the screencast.

In the history of computing, Linux, the revolutionary OS created by Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s, will certainly be written in golden letters. Most probably, you would be curious to know the stream of events that lead to the creation of this great product. Here is a video lecture, where Linus himself narrates the story of Linux in a simple/unassuming style ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVTWCPoUt8w). You will be surprised to hear that in 1990, one year before he wrote Linux, Linus did not know the programming language ‘C’ and not even heard of UNIX (http://www.computerhope. com/history/unix. htm)!

Many twitter users (like this author) use the gTalk Twitter buddy to send/receive Tweets. Unfortunately gTalk twitter IM bot fails quite often nowadays.

Those who find it difficult to use gTalk twitter buddy may choose the Firefox extension Twitterfox ( http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/Tw itterFox). Once installed, the extension adds a small icon on the right-bottom end of your browser. To send a tweet, just click on the icon and enter the text on the input box.

We open our Gmail account from different locations. Also, we access them via browser, e-mail client and the like.

It is likely that one may forget to log-out after accessing the account from a remote location. Now, as a measure to give the user more control, Gmail has introduced a new feature called ‘Last account activity”.

This feature, which can be accessed from the bottom of the Inbox page, helps one obtain the complete details of her previous sessions (http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/200 8/07/remote-sign-out-and-info-to-help-you.html).

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

High expectations from bank mergers
Private investors looking more at power trading
Stamp value: marginal differences may be ignored
What are non-productive assets liable for wealth tax?
Correction
Micro finance gaining in popularity
Presentation tools: fresh exposition

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu