That’s where Pointofix comes into play. The portable software program provides access to onscreen tools that can aid during presentations. It will display a small always on top window with a start button. A click on that button will display the controls of the presentation software that can be used to paint various forms, symbols and colors on the screen.

The program should work with every software program as long as it is not been started in full screen (games for example are not working but a maximized Internet Explorer window is). Available onscreen presentation tools include drawing arrows, lines, rectangles and other objects on the screen. It is furthermore possible to add checkmarks and text, change the color of the onscreen items and magnify or zoom to highlight key areas further.

Pointofix is a German software. International users need to download the language pack that is offered on the website of the developers. This language pack will change the interface language from German to other languages such as English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Hungarian or Swedish. All that needs to be done is to rename the desired language file to pointofix_translation.ini and move it into the directory of the presentation software.

Pointofix is compatible with most Windows operating system. The software is also provided with an installer for users who prefer to install their software programs.

The 280 Slides website offers direct access to the presentation editor. All functions are free to use and require not registration except for saving presentations. Downloads are possible without registration and the service offers to create presentations in Microsoft Power Point 2003, Microsoft Power Point 2007, Open Office or Adobe PDF format.

Presentations can be easily created. A wizard will be displayed at the beginning with the option to take a tour of the service or create a new presentation right away. Various templates are available including black and white backgrounds but also others that include gradients or a sky like template.

Text can be added and edited using the normal text editing controls that can change the font, sizes and various other aspects of the text. Pictures and videos can be added either from online sources or from the local computer system.

Notes can be added to the presentations and a preview option is available to preview the presentation online. Another interesting option is the ability to import local presentations from Microsoft Power Point or Open Office which can be very useful for working on presentations on the Internet or fixing something just before a presentation if no other means of accessing the presentation is available.

With the upgrade to OpenOffice 3 a new feature was added – Extensions. Extension enable you to extend the functionality of OpenOffice. Fortunately it is possible to find plenty of templates that are rolled into an extension. Let’s take a look at how this is done.

Before you do anything with the Extension Manager you need to locate some templates. The official OpenOffice Template site doesn’t really have a large selection of templates. Your best bet is to do a search for the type of template you are looking for (Writer, Impress, Calc, etc). Once you find them if the extension is .oxt it is an extension file. If that’s the case, you’re in luck, you can install this with the Extension Manager. I found probably the best collection of Impress Templates, called Modern Impress Templates.

If you open up the main OpenOffice window (this is done by issuing the command openoffice.org or opening the OpenOffice.org menu entry from your desktop. When this window opens you will notice a Tools menu. Within the Tools menu there is an entry called Extension Manager. Click on that to open up this tool.

Figure 1

From within the Extension Manager (see Figure 1) click on the Add button to open the Add Window. Navigate to where you saved the extension file, select the file, and click Open.

In some cases you might have to agree to a license. If that’s the case, read the EULA and then click Accept. Once you have done this the extension is installed. You will see the new extension listed in the Extension Manager.

You can also add templates by clicking the Templates button in the main OpenOffice window. When you click that a template chooser opens where you can click a “Get more templates online” link. Click that to open a new Firefox window on the official OpenOffice templates page. Here you can search and download specific templates. These templates will open up in their respective tool. Once that template is open click on the File menu where you will see a Templates submenu. From within the Templates submenu click on Save to open up the Tempates organizer. Give this template a name and click Save. Now when you want to use this template again go back to that Templates submenu, and click on the Organize entry. When the organizer opens double click on the My Templates folder to reveal the template you saved.

Using your templates

Figure 2

After your templates are installed go back to the main OpenOffice window and click on the Impress button and the New wizard will start (see Figure 2). Now you should see far more templates to choose from than the default.

Final thoughts

Although OpenOffice 3 ships with a poor selection of templates to choose from, extending this selection is as simple as adding an extension.  And don’t forget, you can also create your own templates in Openoffice.

The main focus of Presentations is work collaboration as it makes it possible to work with multiple contributors on the same presentation. The usual workflow in many companies is that one person works on a presentation at a time and saves that presentation on a shared folder or sends it to the next person as an email attachment so that the next contributor can start working on it.

Multiple users can work on the same document simultaneously. It is for example possible that one user works on the text of a slide while a designer works on the layout and graphics.

Several build in themes and layouts are available with the option to create new themes to incorporate corporate design for example.

Editing features offer the usual assortment of text and list controls, shapes and images that can be used to create the presentation. It is possible to preview the presentation as a slideshow directly on the site or export it as a pdf document.

There is unfortunately no support for importing or exporting Microsoft PowerPoint documents yet which is probably the number one feature that would make the Presentations service more attractive to users and businesses.

Acrobat.com Presentations is an interesting service for users who want to create presentations with colleagues or friends who do not mind that the presentations can only be exported as pdf documents.

The plugin will remove unnecessary data from the Open Office presentation and compress images automatically. This can be for instance useful before transferring a presentation for print so that it can be presented on screen which usually does not require the same quality of the images and can reduce the size of the presentation a lot. The Presentation Minimizer can also replace OLE objects with images.

It can also remove notes or hidden and blank slides (slides that are not used in the presentation) to further minimize the size of the presentation and prevent that confidential information are distributed with the presentation. This feature alone might make it useful even without reducing the size by compressing images.

The user can pick between jpeg and lossless compression. The former allowing to select the quality level of the images. A wizard will display the size reduction in the end with the option to open the resized presentation afterwards. It is also interesting to note that the Presentation Minimizer will work with both Open Office presentations and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

Both functions can be triggered by pressing hotkeys, namely the combination [CTRL SHIFT 1] for zooming ing and [CTRL SHIFT 2] for drawing on the screen. It has to be noted that it is possible to draw on the screen after zooming in at least once without having to press the drawing hotkey first.

Both hotkeys can be changed in the program’s options. The only other parameters that can be changed in the options are to define a time in seconds after which drawings on the screen will disappear automatically and if the mouse cursor should be captured.

The software program uses less than 3 Megabytes while running on the computer system which together with its tiny size of just 76 Kilobytes makes it an ideal companion for a portable device or presentation disk. It is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and will probably also run on Windows Server and Windows 7.

DemoHelper is definitely not the first software program review of a software that helps spice up presentations. Other applications that offer similar features are Computer Whiteboard or Zoom It.

The site makes creating a video presentation easily: to create one, all you must do is simply upload some pictures, or import them from a website, upload a song, or choose one from their, and finalise it. The presentation can then be shared or downloaded.

Whilst you may think you can do all of this in a desktop video editor such as Windows Movie Maker, animoto does it much quicker, has good production and analyses the sound and pictures and mixes them together to ensure they flow well. Humans have an input too; deciding the order in which to put the pictures, the ability to add text and ability to put more emphasis on particular images.

Slideshows speak better than words, so view mine of my holiday in Poland in 2007.

Unfortunately, animoto has some limitations.

In order to have higher-definition presentations or to make them last longer than 30 seconds, the user must pay. To remove the time limit, it’s either $3/video or $30/year and to allow them to be at DVD quality, you must pay $5/video. This may sound expensive, but in my opinion it’s worth it if you need to put on a good presentation. Only full-length videos (ie those you’ve paid $3 for) can be downloaded.

An application is also available for iPhones so you can view animoto presentations on them.

animoto allows presentations to be shared straight into most social networking sites like MySpace, Orkut and Facebook and images can be imported from Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, Photobucket or Picasa.

(Thanks to Azhar Chougle for introducing me to animoto.)

The webcasts are all free to watch, the only thing that a user needs to do is to fill out a quick form like his name, email, company and position in that company before the presentation is loaded into the selected media player.

The emphasize currently lies on security and technology related webcasts. Some examples are Hitting Network Vulnerabilities with a One-Two Punch, Doing a Website Redesign with an Internet Marketing Strategy in Mind or Make Customers the Center of Attention with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The target audience is made up of system administrators, decision makers, business owners and pretty much everyone who is working in the industry. It could be interesting to technical inclined individuals as well.

Just check them out if webcasts are of interest to you. As I said they change regularly and you can find some interesting technical presentations and videos in there. And yes, it would help Ghacks as well. Let me know if you would like to see different areas or topics addresses in the webcasts.

Most of the time, you’re limited to basic slides with bullet points and a couple of images or tables thrown in. At least those were the standards of all the presentations I’ve witnessed. At times, someone would throw in a sound clip of two to spice it up. But I’ve rarely seen presentations with video clips in them. It’s a shame because a picture really is worth a thousand words.

A simple reason for the lack of video is that unless you had the clip on your computer, you could not really do anything. Nowadays though, all you need to do is hunt around in any online video-sharing site and 9 times out of 10 you will find a clip that meets your requirements. I’ll use Youtube as an example since it’s one of the most popular sites.

The major part is getting your clip onto your machine, in a format you can use. This is important because the ‘flv’ format is not particularly media player friendly. I usually use MediaCoder when I convert files but a good online alternative is Vixy. Just copy the url of your video file, select your desired file format and click ‘Start’. The most common file format is ‘avi’ so it’s a good idea to select that one. Vixy will do all the work for you and at the end will give you a link to the converted file. You can download this file to your computer.

Adding the video to your presentation is easy. Save the video in the same folder as your presentation since you’ll need to take it along with you if you’re transferring the presentation to a portable device. To place the video in a slide, navigate to the slide you want. Then, go to the menu and select Insert > Movies & Sounds > Movie from file. Choose the movie you saved and click OK. All that’s left is to choose whether you want the video to start automatically or only when you click on it.

How often do you add videos to your presentations? Can you do this with any of the online presentation applications?

Via [DigitalAlchemy.tv]

The more flashy update is the ability to embed your GoogleDocs presentations into any webpage. It works much like the YouTube videos, where you can embed your own video, or even someone else’s if you copy-paste the embed link.

The technology looks and feels much the same, you can click on menu and you’ll find the embed link, along with a link to view the presentation in full glory on the Google Docs page. I think it still needs a bit of polishing, especially on the looks side, but at least they’re listening to their users. This may not be the most beautiful update, but it’s usable and works.