How long will it take to put my presentation
together? 
Many companies spend a great deal of time and money creating
professional sales, marketing and business presentations. We
estimate that up to 50% of that time is spent searching for and
finding information that has been created before, whether it
be an existing Microsoft®PowerPoint® presentation, a Word® document, a Web
page or figures on an Excel® spreadsheet. Further time is then spent cutting, pasting and generally attempting
to form the materials into a new presentation.
All of this detracts
from the very essence of a good talk – one where most of
the time has been spent considering the pure essence and sense
of what you are about to say - the clarity of the message. It
is true that most people, by going through the mechanics of a
fairly tedious process can somehow arrive at a reasonable end
result, but in our experience that time would be better spent
considering the key messages, the reasoning behind them and a
resulting proposal.
This is where QPresenter can help. By showing all the available
assets up-front the choices become more obvious. The user can
see and assemble a new presentation flow within moments, changing
the order at will until pleased, confident about the result.
Suddenly the overall picture becomes more obvious and there should
be ample time to fill in any gaps and refine the logical flow
of the final piece.
What if we keep slides, video clips
and animations all over our network?
We know QPresenter users who do just that. The theory is that
no piece of information is ever duplicated, only one copy of
it exists on a network and everyone shares it. Well, that’s
fine but the minute a PowerPoint file is moved all the links
to external data (video, sound clips, animation etc) are broken
and the assets cannot be found. The result is a presentation
with important bits missing (embarrassing) or else somebody has
to set about finding the missing bits, copying them to a common
place, then fix all the links, which is very time-consuming (expensive).
QPresenter will do all this for you. With one click it can gather
together all linked media files into the same place as your presentation,
perhaps in a folder of your choice ready to burn to a CD or Email
to a colleague. Simple, yet many people use QPresenter for this
facility alone. You can work out the savings for yourself but
we know plenty of people who now have better things to do with
the 2 or 3 days a month this task took.
My presentations use Slide Masters
and they’re all different – now
what?
Yes, this is normal and quite a difficult and time-consuming
thing to manage since you will want to combine slides from several
different presentations, each relying on its own Slide Master.
However, as you may know, a PowerPoint presentation can have
only one Slide Master so you must decide which one is best then
try to apply it to all the other slides. If you’ve tried
this you will know that it’s far from straightforward.
Fortunately QPresenter makes this task simple in a highly visual
way and takes about 5 seconds. You can choose to apply the Slide
Master from an incoming presentation to your Custom Presentation
and see how the slides will look immediately. Again, we know
of Agencies that agonise for hours and days over how
to get this right and they should be able to save plenty of time
now.
‘The Embarassment”
Imagine you are well into your presentation. All is going well
on the big screen, which is showing the same slide as that
on your laptop screen. It was a bit of a rush but you got the
preparation done in time – just, but no time for a rehearsal.
Still, you think you know the material and in a confident manner
launch into the next slide whilst pressing the button. Disaster!
The next slide isn’t the next slide at all but the one
after! How on earth did that happen?
Fortunately, many laptops now come equipped with two graphics
adaptors built in* and QPresenter uses these to send one version
of your presentation to the big screen and a different version
to your laptop screen. The laptop screen can show you PowerPoint
Notes for the current slide plus a picture of the next slide – the
one the audience has not seen yet. So, a crib sheet and a forewarning
all in one. A lifesaver, and what is that worth?
* Depends on make and model of laptop and needs Windows® XP.
What is the competition up to?
Good question. One thing is for sure - they’ll be up to
something and it’s usually to your disadvantage.
A good way to brief on competitor activity is to compare and
contrast key messages from their Websites. However, even if you
are online from the presentation room that means fumbling with
Web addresses and hoping you’ve clicked the right links – it
all takes time and can easily go wrong.
With QPresenter you can quickly capture their Web pages to include
in your presentation beforehand – it takes a few seconds.
Grab a well thought-out sequence and play them back to colleagues
one slide at a time. If they demand more detail - no problem.
If you are online simply click a button on that slide and show
that page ‘live’ on the Web.
Can I see an analysis of those figures,
please?
Er, oops, I’ll have to come back to you with that; or perhaps
I can possibly find the right spreadsheet if you’ll just
wait a few minutes, er… Hmm, not impressive.
Instead, use QPresenter to capture a snapshot of your figures
direct from Excel into a PowerPoint slide. Present it in the
normal way then, come the awkward question – click and
you’re directly into Excel - able to navigate round and
flex the live spreadsheet. Impressive? Yes. When you add up the
time value of people round any meeting table, minutes wasted
come expensive, not to mention the risk of burning a valuable
business opportunity.
I see your point, but I think the report’s
wording says different?
OK. You’ve summarised that important report and have
the key words in your PowerPoint presentation so that everyone
can
agree them. Fine, until some wise guy thinks he knows different
and you’re stuck. No paper copy to fall back on and finding
the original document and loading it up will take ages, even
if you can remember how to press the right buttons! Its fumble
time again – Ouch!
Next time you do this put your presentation together with QPresenter,
go to the ‘Word’ library and click ‘Add’.
Load up the required document then choose the page you want to
include by dragging it into your presentation at the right place.
Now you’ll not be caught out because, come the killer question,
just click the button and Word will fire up complete with the
original report. Ha.
Can you let me have a copy of your
presentation within the hour?
(I suppose so, if I write down your Email address, attach my
laptop to the network, copy the presentation to my desktop system
then Email it to you. I actually planned to have lunch!).
Better still, click the QPresenter button marked ‘Email
to’, type in their Email address and send it there and
then – Bingo. If you are not online QPresenter will put
the presentation (together with any attached files) into an Email
in your Out Box ready to be sent next time you log on.
How much is that worth? We don’t know but in terms of Street
Cred it’s priceless!
