Wednesday 23 November 2011

#cpd23 Thing 17: Slideshare and prezi

Slideshare is useful but not perfect.  A few things I've learnt the hard way that might be of use:
  • Make the text on your title slide good and big.  That way people will be able to read it more clearly on when it's shown as a thumbnail on your homepage and elsewhere.
  • Slideshare proclaims to upload your speaker notes with your slides.  In my experience, this only works for .pptx files (i.e. 2007 and later versions of Powerpoint), and only the first time you upload.  If you make changes and upload your presentation again, the notes won't be updated, and if you've added extra slides your notes will end up out of alignment.
  • Slideshare doesn't reproduced animation effects in your presentations, so if you have one slide on which various things appear one-by-one, they'll be there together in one go on Slideshare.  I get round this by making individual slides for each new appearing thing.
  • EDITED 23/11/11. Lastly, Slideshare only has a fairly limited repertoire of fonts that it supports automatically.  Embedding your fonts in a presentation seems to get round this OK if you save your file as a .pptx file (that's the newer version of Powerpoint, from 2007 onwards). Normally I'd recommend that you save your files as .ppt, as the newer .pptx format cannot be read by people who have the older software (or who are running open source software), but for the purposes of Slideshare it seems that .pptx is the way to go (see also speaker notes, above). If you don't have access to newer Powerpoint, your best bet is to check in advance whether your fonts will work: here are some slides that show a few fonts that do and don't work out of the box, or try uploading a test slide when you're planning your slides.
  • EDITED 23/11/11 I forget to say in the original post that you should never put important, or clickable (yes - add clickable links in your Slideshare slides, that's where they're useful, not in the slides you show in person) links near the edge of your slides.  You never know what will be cut off if the projection is bad, and clicking at the edge of slides on Slideshare makes them advance or go backwards.  So links near the edges are no use.
So, to be honest, I think Slideshare could be better. But it is better than nothing, I suppose.  If I'm giving a talk that I think will be of interest to people who didn't hear it in person, I make two versions of the file: one for use on the day (less text, fewer slides in total) and one to upload to Slideshare (added text, more slides in total).  Trying to make one version that suits both purposes is beyond my skill!

As for Prezi, well, I made a quick Prezi about that:


8 comments:

  1. Thanks for your investigation into uploading speaker notes. I think the lack of them on Slideshare presentations is the major problem with Slideshare, particularly if the slides are low on text. Useful to know how it should be done.

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  2. You're welcome! I agree it's a big downside of Slideshare. I do try to make my Slideshare slides intelligible, but it's a lot of extra work...

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  3. love the prezi on prezi-fab idea!

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  4. Btw, how do you go about putting a Prezi into your blog?? (only just getting to this Thing (4 months later!)

    Becky

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  5. Hi Becky,

    When you're looking at the page for the prezi you want to embed (not the editing screen, but the page before that like this: http://prezi.com/g-ttohyplxw8/some-thoughts-on-prezi/), look for the 'share' button beneath the prezi itself, on the bottom right. Click on that, and then on 'embed' beneath the box with the URL in it. Click the 'copy code to clipboard' button.

    Now go back to Blogger, and look at the post you're writing. Click on 'edit HTML' tab at the top right of the editing box, and then paste (Ctrl+V, or right click and choose 'paste') the copied code into the post at the point you want it in the post.

    Here are the prezi instructions in case they make more sense: http://prezi.com/learn/embedding/.

    Katie

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  6. PS This works quite simply for Blogger. I think it is, or at least used to be, a bit trickier for Wordpress.

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    ReplyDelete