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10.15.07
Review: Web-Enable Your PowerPoint Presentations
 By Chris Spiek
In a nutshell, SlideShare lets you to upload a PowerPoint presentation, add audio to it (if you want), and then embed it in your website or blog for visitors to view.
If you're looking to put together a web-enabled PowerPoint presentation with audio, Macromedia Breeze (now the Adobe Presenter portion of Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional), is a pretty sweet product.
But if your needs are minimal and you're not looking for a lot of advanced features, SlideShare.net is absolutely the way to go, and it's free.
We just launched a new website at Awecomm to promote a new service offering. It's a complex service, so we wanted to get as much supporting material as possible onto the site. One of the elements is a PowerPoint slide show that we walk prospective customers through.
Largely inspired by the Google's Adwords Professional learning center (done in Macromedia Breeze), I set off to create a presentation that I could add to the site with an audio track on top of it. I wasn't positive that I'd be happy with the outcome, so springing for Acrobat Connect was my last-resort.
With regards to the entire process, working with the SlideShare interface was definitely the easiest part.
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I started by opening Word and PowerPoint and writing a script for each slide. I then recorded the audio using a hand-held recorder that let me easily transfer the audio to my computer via USB (the files end up in the WMA format). Once I felt comfortable with all of my audio files (they probably took three or four takes a piece to get right), I stitched them together into one big MP3 and got rid of any start/stop noises using Audacity.
Once I had my material set, I uploaded the slide show to SlideShare, and uploaded my audio to one of our webservers. Once SlideShare is done processing the PowerPoint, you simply enter the address of your audio (e.g. http://www.yourcompany.com/audio.mp3), and it merges the two.
Now this is the fun part, and where it all comes together. You use their extremely well-developed interface to tell it when the presentation should move to the next slide. Basically it plays the audio for you, and you tell it when the next slide should start. Kudos to the developers that created this interface; it couldn't be easier to work with.
If you want to see the final product, check out the embedded presentation on our website (we did some cool AJAX stuff to present it), or view it on the SlideShare.net website.
The Good:
* The price is right.
* The embed option makes it easy to add the presentation to your website or blog.
* Adding audio to the presentation is extremely easy.
The Bad:
* They don't yet support PowerPoint 2007, and things can look strange if you convert your PPT 2007 document to a PowerPoint 2003 compatible document.
* Some minor UI hickups. The interface doesn't always provide the greatest feedback, and sometimes after I uploaded a presentation, it would show up on some pages of the site, and not others. Be patient with it.
Comments
About the Author:
Chris is Vice President of Awecomm Technologies and Managing Partner of the Awecomm Web Strategies division. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration/Information Systems from Central Michigan University, and been working in the web development industry for over eight years. In addition to managing AWS, Chris sits on the Marketing Committee of the Web Analytics Association as manager of the WebAnalyticsAssociation.org website.
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