PowerPoint is a strong program with a plethora of useful and special features. It is also almost expected from a presenter — but, unfortunately, often with dread. I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t use PowerPoint. Just remember it is a tool, and only a tool. Used properly, it is your friend. Yes, visuals are important and can add an extra and memorable element to your presentations when used with planning, thought and care.
Start by deciding what purpose your use of PowerPoint serves. Below are some considerations for using and/or not using this slick program:
- You feel you should use the program. My advice is to avoid using PowerPoint for this reason. Many people who travel this route, end up with a program that falls flat, because they are obviously not comfortable presenting this way.
- You love all of the bells and whistles.
- You have so much information to impart, you feel that this is a way to get it all up in front of your audience. This approach doesn’t work well either, because the slides get overloaded with words that many can’t see, and the presenter’s approach often ends up with him or her just reading from the slides.
- By now, you are wondering when and if to ever use PowerPoint. Yes, use it as a powerful visual tool. I suggest creating short, punchy slides with few words, striking (but not distracting) graphics, and large, easy to read fonts. These slides will serve as an outline for your presentation and move you along at a fast and ordered pace. When you show meaningful graphs that explain, and graphics that make your main points memorable, you have succeeded.
Remember, you are the presenter, your PowerPoint program isn’t. It should be your friend and partner — a trusted and useful assistant. The following tips will help you create a PowerPoint presentation that enhances - and doesn’t detract - from you as the speaker:
- Slides with a dark background and light lettering are easier to read in most lighting conditions.
- Sans-serif fonts are easier to read from a distance.
- Use shadows behind the fonts and graphics to make them more prominent.
- KISS! Keep it simple, silly! As you prepare your presentation, repeat this over and over to yourself, so you are not tempted by all of the extras.
- And always have a backup plan in case the projector and/or your program doesn’t work. If you are going to use PowerPoint slides, have the program on a separate disk, just in case, and always try to arrive and set up early to make sure that everything is working the way you want it to. If you know that there will be Internet access, it doesn’t hurt to have your slides up on a site, in case you need to access them that way.
Remember, use PowerPoint for power, not distraction.
Chris King is a professional speaker, storyteller, writer, website creator / designer, free agent, and fitness instructor. You will find her powerful presentations website at http://www.powerfulpresentations.net and her business website at http://www.creativekeys.biz.
HAS ANYONE PUNISHED YOU?
DOWN WITH SISYPHEAN TOIL!
Have All Programs In Your Start Menu Become Enormously Numerous?
You bought a computer and started turning it into a habitable thing by installing various useful programs for work and entertainment. But then you opened the Start menu one day and all of a sudden became confused: ‘Where’s the program I need in this huge list?’
Catalog - True Solution For Arranging Information
The first librarians have encountered the same problem: ‘How to put great amounts of all this information into order?’ Catalogs solved this problem. A catalog allows you to focus on a certain category instead of paying attention to all items. It is possible due to the catalog structure based on the fact that all items have been already sorted by categories. This method turned out to be so good that catalogs continue to serve as a source of trustworthy information even centuries later, in the age of search engines, both for people and for search engines.
The More, The Worse
One huge list makes you look through a lot of unneeded items when you are looking for something. The longer the list is, the more attention and time your search requires. You can observe this oppressive situation on most users’ computers, it is enough just to open the ‘All Programs’ item in the ‘Start’ menu. If it is not the case with you, it is just a matter of time.
What To Do?
So how can you solve the problem of your menu being overfilled with various programs? Restrict your needs? No need to do that! The program Start Menu Tuner will easily solve your problem. Use it to create program categories you need and sort your programs by them. You will do it easily and visually. You will spend minimum effort even if you are new to computers.
Result - Quick Access To Any Program
What will you get as a result? Now you will not fall into a stupor at a mere sight of a large choice when you open the menu. Your choice is easy and visual: you see a category, open it and look at a brief list of programs that does not require a bloodhound’s skills. You have made your everyday life yet more simple and comfortable. It means that the quality of your life has increased and I congratulate you on that!
http://www.styopkin.com/start_menu_tuner.html
http://www.styopkin.com
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have been around for a while now,
and act as a complement to plain old HTML files. Style sheets
allow a developer to separate HTML code from formatting rules
and styles. It seems like many HTML beginners’ under-estimate
the power and flexibility of the style sheet. In this article,
I’m going to describe what cascading style sheets are, their
benefits, and two ways to implement them.
————————————— Cascading whats?
—————————————
Cascading Style Sheets…that’s what! They’re what paint is to
canvas, what topping is to ice cream… they complement HTML and
allow us to define the style (look and feel) for our entire site
in just one file!
Cascading style sheets were introduced to the web development
world way back in 1996. They get their name from the fact that
each different style declaration can be “cascaded” under the one
above it, forming a parent-child relationship between the
styles.
They were quickly standardized, and both Internet Explorer and
Netscape built their latest browser releases to match the CSS
standard (or, to match it as closely as they could).
So, you’re still asking what a style sheet exactly is? A style
sheet is a free-flowing document that can either be referenced
by, or included into a HTML document. Style sheets use blocks of
formatted code to define styles for existing HTML elements, or
new styles, called classes.
Style sheets can be used to change the height of some text, to
change the background color of a page, to set the default border
color of a table…the list goes on and on. Put simply though,
style sheets are used to set the formatting, color scheme and
style of an HTML page.
Style sheets should be used instead of the standard , ,
and tags because:
- One style sheet can be referenced from many pages, meaning
that each file is kept to a minimum size and only requires only
extra line to load the external style sheet file
- If you ever need to change any part of your sites look/feel,
it can be done quickly and only needs to be done in one place:
the style sheet.
- With cascading style sheets, there are many, many page
attributes that simply cannot be set without them: individual
tags can have different background colors, borders, indents,
shadows, etc.
Style sheets can either be inline (included as part of a HTML
document), or, referenced externally (Contained in a separate
file and referenced from the HTML document). Inline style sheets
are contained wholly within a HTML document and will only change
the look and layout of that HTML file.
Open your favorite text editor and enter the following code.
Save the file as stylesheet.html and open it in your browser:
Cascading Style Sheet Example < itle></p>
<style> h1 { color: #636594; font-family: Verdana; size: 18pt; }
</style>
<p> </head> <body><br />
<h1>This is one big H1 tag!</h1>
<p> </body><br />
</html> </p>
<p>When you fire up your browser, you should see the text “This is<br />
one big H1 tag!” in a large, blue Verdana font face.</p>
<p>Let’s step through the style code step by step. Firstly, we have<br />
a pretty standard HTML header. The page starts with the <html><br />
tag followed by the <head> tag. Next, we use a standard <title><br />
tag to set the title of the page we are working with. </p>
<p>Notice, though, that before the <head> tag is closed, we have<br />
our<br />
<style> tag, its contents, and then the closing </style>
<p> tag.</p>
<style> h1 { color: #636594; font-family: Verdana; size: 18pt; }
</style>
<p>When you add the style sheet code inline (as part of the HTML<br />
document), it must be bound by<br />
<style> and </style>
<p> tags<br />
respectively. Our example is working with the<br />
<h1> tag. We are<br />
changing three attributes of the<br />
<h1>’s style: the text color<br />
(color), the font that any<br />
<h1> tags on the page will be<br />
displayed in (font-family), and lastly, the size of the font<br />
(size). </p>
<p>The code between the { and } are known as the attributes. Our<br />
sample code has three. Try changing the hexadecimal value of the<br />
color attribute to #A00808 and then save and refresh the page.<br />
You should see the same text, just coloured red instead of blue.</p>
<p>————————————— An example of an<br />
external style sheet —————————————</p>
<p>External style sheets are similar to internal style sheets,<br />
however, they are stripped of the<br />
<style> and </style>
<p> tags, and<br />
need to be referenced from another HTML file to be used. </p>
<p>Create a new file called “mystyle.css” and enter the following<br />
code into it:</p>
<p>h1 { color: #a00808; font-family: Verdana; size: 18pt } </p>
<p>Next, create a HTML file and name it external.html. Enter the<br />
following code into external.html:</p>
<p><html> <head> <title> External Style Sheet Reference Example <<br />
itle>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css">
</head> <body><br />
<h1>This is one big H1 tag!</h1>
<p> </body> </html> </p>
<p>As mentioned above, you can see that the actual code in<br />
mystyle.css is exactly the same as it was in the inline example.<br />
In our HTML file, we simply place a
<link> tag in the <head><br />
section of our page. The rel=”stylesheet” attribute tells the<br />
browser that the link to the external file is a style sheet. The<br />
type=”text/css” attribute tells the browser that mystyle.css is<br />
a text file containing css (cascading style sheet) declarations.<br />
Lastly, the href=”mystyle.css” attribute tells the browser that<br />
the actual file we want to load is mystyle.css. </p>
<p>————————————— Conclusion<br />
—————————————</p>
<p>Well, there you have it, a quick look at style sheets and how to<br />
implement both an inline and external version. Checkout the<br />
links below if you’ve never worked with cascading style sheets<br />
before. You will be surprised at some of the things you can do<br />
with them! </p>
<p>- <a href="http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/7" rel="nofollow">http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/7</a> -<br />
<a href="http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/15/index0a.html" rel="nofollow">http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/15/index0a.html</a> -<br />
<a href="http://www.webreview.com/style/index.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.webreview.com/style/index.shtml</a> -<br />
<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/" rel="nofollow">http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/</a> </p>
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