Windows with Office 2007 only: pptPlex, a free Office add-on, makes PowerPoint presentations less of a one-way street and more of a neighbourhood exploration. After installing the add-on, you'll be able to put slides together in groups, slide around the canvas during a presentation, easily zoom in on charts or stats you want to highlight, and generally make the presentation more open to give-and-take and audience questions. Check out the video above for an overview. pptPlex is a free download for Windows systems with Microsoft Office 2007.

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If I had my way, all PowerPoint presentations would be banned as a crime against humanity, but that's not going to happen any time soon. When you are obliged to sit through one, there's nothing worse than an endless sequence of bullet points which the speaker then repeats without elaborating or developing. Microsoft's Office Hours columnist Shellie Tucker offers up a guide to designing presentations that don't rely on an endless sequence of bullet points, making better use of PowerPoint's other design features. Much of it is obvious (keep to a single point on each slide so you have to explain to the audience rather than dictate, for instance), but it's worth referring to next time you have to build a deck. For more PowerPoint strategies, check out our guide to avoiding PowerPoint snags. [Office Hours: PowerPoint without bullets via Inside Office Online]

By default, PowerPoint uses its 'snap to grid' feature to make sure objects line up neatly. That's great for beginners, but irritating if you want to move items more precisely for a particular effect. It seems obvious that you should be able to turn this behaviour off, but in the allegedly more intuitive Ribbon interface, you could waste a lot of time looking.
A post on the official PowerPoint blog admits as much: "It's never been really easy to find, but it only got harder in Office 2007." More practically, it also details how to temporarily move items independently of the grid, as well as how to switch it off snap-to-grid permanently in both Office 2003 and 2007. Microsoft has promised to make this more obvious in a future release, but at least this helps fix the problem if you encounter it.
Quick Try This: Smooth sailing [The PowerPoint Team Blog]

Windows only: Freeware PowerPoint plug-in iSpring converts your PowerPoint presentation to an interactive Flash video with the click of a button. Not only is iSpring a great way to make your PowerPoint presentation more portable (not everyone has PowerPoint, after all), but as Digital Inspiration points out, an exported movie even preserves all of your slide transitions, animations, and hyperlinks. iSpring is freeware, Windows only, works with PowerPoint 2000 through 2007. Alternately, you can upload any presentation directly to the SlideBoom web site (which appears to convert and host Flash movies made with iSpring) if you don't want to host the presentation yourself.

All platforms: The IT designers at iPresentee offer a package of 100 attractive icons and objects for download and use in your slideshows and documents. The iPresentee Keynote objects are resizable TIF images with transparent backgrounds for use in your Keynote or PowerPoint slideshow, Word document, brochure, or any creative project. The package is a free download and includes common icons like flags, stars, speech bubbles, road signs, and computer symbols like folders and hard drives.

The Wired How-To Wiki asks Nancy Duarte from Duarte Design—the company that put together Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth slide show—to share her tips and tricks for creating a successful slideshow. For example:

Presentations work best when the presenter uses it as a mnemonic device to help the audience remember a message. The message suffers when its used as a crutch for the presenter. Nobody wants to see the back of a presenter and nobody wants to watch someone read a list of bullet points from a slide. When they do, it makes the presenter look lazy and distills the emotional message.

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Windows/Mac/Linux: Free, open source application KeyJnote transforms any simple PDF into a powerful interactive presentation similar to PowerPoint or Keynote. After you plug your PDF into KeyJnote, you get a slate of powerful presentation tools, with everything from simple forward and back navigation with your left and right mouse buttons, mouse highlighting, rectangle highlighting, slide zooming, and more. KeyJnote doesn't yet have a graphical interface for starting a PDF presentation, but using it is simple.

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Next time you need to give a presentation from afar, fire up Zoho Show, invite a few attendees, and give the presentation in real-time with Zoho Show's Remote feature. You invite participants, and as soon as everyone shows up and you start the remote presentation, what they see matches exactly what you're doing. You advance a slide, their browser advances a slide. Even if you don't plan on using Zoho Show to deliver the final product, it could still come in handy to review and collaborate remotely on PowerPoint presentations (which Zoho Show imports seamlessly).

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If you've stored your slide deck online in Google Docs, you don't have to worry about the internet connection going out when it's time to get onstage. The big G completed its rollout of offline access to spreadsheets and presentations using the Google Gears Firefox extension/Windows application. You can't edit the sheets or slides you open offline with Gears, just view them. If you haven't given it a try yet, here's a video demo of how Gears works. Now if they'd only Gears-enable Gmail for offline browser access to your email... even with IMAP, that would still be useful.

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For YouTube videos, presentations, or even just system sounds, having the right sound effect file can make all the difference. FindSounds, a search engine focused on audio files, is a heck of a lot more convenient than typing ".wav" into Google and wading through inconsistent results. Type in what you're looking for and specify parameters, and the results are offered in playable previews and waveform diagrams. I almost always found relevant results in the 10 or so test searches I performed, and being able to see how long the sound helps winnow down results when you're hunting just the right sound to fit into a project. Got your own sound clip search methods? Share 'em in the comments.

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