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by Geetesh Bajaj, October 16th 2012
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Presentation Summit 2012
All of last week, I was in Scottsdale, AZ to attend the Presentation Summit -- this year marked this conference's
10 years, and was special in more ways than one -- I remember how
Rick
Altman and a bunch of us PowerPoint MVPs
conceptualized this conference more than a decade ago -- it's awesome to see this event become better each year.
Here are some posts I did to cover this year's conference -- note that when the posts say yesterday or today, those
relate to when the actual post was authored:
Crash Courses at the Presentation Summit 2012
Today, being Sunday was the day for extra sessions (called optional crash courses). These crash courses are more
detailed than the typical conference sessions, and also have fewer attendees -- thus almost anyone who attends
these sessions gets one-on-one attention from the speaker -- these extra sessions are charged over
and above the conference cost, and are certainly worth attending if you can arrive a day earlier.
This year, there were
three extra sessions.
Chris Bliss at the Presentation Summit 2012
 Rick Altman officially opened the Presentation Summit
2012 today. After reminiscing about all the PowerPoint Live and Presentation Summit events over the last decade,
he handed the stage over to Chris Bliss, a well known comedian to present Monday morning's
opening keynote. Chris started by saying he was a little uncomfortable doing a comedy session on Monday morning at
8:30 am -- he stressed on how communication is important, and how story-boarding
and language can be so useful.
Jim Endicott at the Presentation Summit 2012
 Jim Endicott started his keynote with a
video clip shown during the Presentation Summit 2008 -- the video showed the conference host, Rick Altman as
a candidate for the post of the US President. Be
it 2008, 2012, or even all the years that this conference has existed, Jim admitted that one of the important things
of being in this conference for so many years is that you gain perspective.
He then wondered if presenters are communicating better today? They may have these great visuals, but do
they have something substantial to say?
Carmen Taran at the Presentation Summit 2012
 Carmen Taran's session on
attracting attention was the keynote for Tuesday morning. Although she used the term "seduction" a lot during
the session, what Carmen actually meant was seduction of another kind -- to be used in scenarios related to both
personal and business lives. So why did she use the term "seduction" rather than just "attraction"? That's because
Carmen was inspired by a book called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. After
reading the book, Carmen became intrigued by the concept, if only for "research" reasons.
Kristin Thompson at the Presentation Summit 2012
 After a photo session showing the events of the past
three days, Rick handed over to Kristin Thompson, the keynote speaker for Wednesday morning.
Kristin, who is based out of Portland, Oregon did a session that discusses memory power, and how it can help you
get ahead in your life and career. She explained that memory as a skill is not typically something inherited by
your genes, but developed using techniques. Kristin added that it's important that you remember your
talk when you have to do a presentation.
More PowerPoint Concept Slides
These segment graphics are part of our Segment Polygons series -- this week, we bring you
a Heptagon and a
Octagon
divided into seven and eight equal segments respectively.
Each individual segment is a separate shape that can be filled in with a picture, a gradient,
a solid fill, or any of the other PowerPoint fill types.
Office Themes: XML Editing in Visual Studio
All the new Office file formats (post Office 2007) are XML based -- and can easily be opened and edited in an
XML editing program. We already showed you how all these files are a bunch of XML files contained in a ZIP file
container within our Theme XML Files tutorial. Although it is easy to unzip the files and edit some code in a
basic program like Notepad, you will need a better program that does not require you to unzip and edit all the
time, and then zip it up again! Thankfully there are plenty of programs that allow you to edit these Office XML
files -- our favorite is Microsoft's own Visual Studio. On its own, Visual Studio cannot open and edit Office
XML files -- but Microsoft provides a free add-in that plugs into Visual Studio and lets you edit the
Office XML files.
Learn how XML editing is done within Visual Studio.
New SlideShark Features: Conversation with Lisa Johnson
 Lisa Johnson is vice president of
SlideShark marketing for Brainshark, Inc. Brainshark's cloud-based software lets users create online and mobile
video presentations -- using simple business tools like PowerPoint and the phone or computer microphone -- and
share and track their content. Brainshark is also the creator of the free SlideShark app for viewing,
presenting and sharing PowerPoints on the iPad and iPhone. In this conversation, Lisa discusses
new SlideShark features -- including integrations with Box and Dropbox, and the ability for users to turn their
iPhone into a remote control for presentations.
Read the conversation here.
Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Text Fills
Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Text and Fonts
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