 All right. Hello everybody and welcome to creating better presentations with the Microsoft PowerPoint. I'm really happy for you to be here with us today. And we're really excited for Microsoft for teaming up with us on this webinar. A little bit about us. My name is Kyla Hunt. I'm going to be your facilitator today. I'm the webinar program manager here at TechSoup. With me today is Doug Thomas from Microsoft. Elliot Harmon also from TechSoup and Meg Krillman also from TechSoup. And you might see his name in the chat pane. William Coonan is going to be helping me out with questions today. So again, thank you all for all the presenters for being here with us. I'm really excited. So a little bit about what we're going to be covering today. Elliot's going to take us through a little bit about presentation design and smart art. And I know that Doug is going to be talking a little bit about the broadcast function, as well as web apps, as well as some other information. Web events made easy. Welcome to the webinar. You have entered in. And finally, Meg Krillman is going to be talking with us a little bit about the Microsoft software donation program. Before we get started, I do want to go ahead and ask a few poll questions. Just to get a sense of who everybody is. The first question is, how many presentations do you conduct per month? One option is none. One is one to two. One is two to five. One is five to ten. And one is over ten. So I'll give you guys a couple of seconds to answer that. I'll give you about five more seconds. So five, four, three, two, one. And it looks like about 48% of you do one to two presentations per month. And then about an even amount of people conduct no presentations per month or conduct two to five presentations per month. Then about 6% of you conduct five to ten and only about 1% of you do over ten presentations per month. So that's really helpful information for both me and for the presenters today. So I do want to do one other poll. And this is how do you conduct your presentations. And with this, the options are in webinars and online meetings, so virtual conferencing, at work meetings in person, so face to face, and at conferences, face to face. So I'll give you all a few seconds to answer that. And then I'll close this in five, four, three, two, one. Now it looks like the vast majority of you usually present face to face at work meetings or a slightly smaller amount of you present at conferences. And then a pretty small amount of you actually present in webinars and an even smaller amount of you present in online meetings. So thank you that actually will help the presenters in determining what to talk about in their presentation. And so with that, what I want to go ahead and do is give the screen over to Elliot so he can take you through the design process and talk a little bit about smart art. So Elliot, you can go ahead and unmute yourself and take it away. Thank you so much, Kylan. Thank you to everybody for attending. I'm excited to talk about this topic and I'm excited to talk with this audience and having talked already with Doug, I think everybody's going to be really interested in what he has to say. Okay. I'm going to be talking first about design basics and then I'm going to be talking specifically about smart art. Now if you're not familiar with smart art, it is a tool that you can use to snazz up your existing presentations very easily and looking at those numbers of the numbers of presentations that most of you do. I'm guessing that many of you kind of have your go-to decks that you reuse again and again for fundraising purposes or for whatever purpose you're presenting. And smart art gives you the opportunity to spice things up in a way that is really malleable so it's really easy to change in the future. And we'll dig into that in a second, but first we're going to talk a little bit about design basics. Now before I get started with this, I want to kind of manage expectations a little bit and say that I am not a professional designer even though I went to art school sort of. And also that we're only going to be talking about this for 5 or 10 minutes so there is not a whole lot that we can cover in the world of design which people devote entire careers to learning about. But my hope is to kind of peak some of your curiosity and maybe give you some new ideas about where you can look for inspiration for your PowerPoint presentations. I wanted to start with this quotation from Bruce Mao, for most of us design is invisible until it fails. And I think it's relatively obvious what that means in terms of industrial design or design of buildings and bridges when those sorts of designs fail is sort of the one time that design and architecture become mainstream subjects in the news. When design fails in your PowerPoint presentation I think most basically that means when the slide deck itself becomes the subject of attention as opposed to the words that you're sharing with your audience. When it distracts people from what you have to say to them because there's too many words for them to read or because there's something on the slide that looks confusing then your design has ultimately failed because it's not doing its primary job of underscoring what you have to say to your audience. Now when thinking of the way in which a lot of people use PowerPoint I found myself thinking of the television show for Asia and those title cards that show up at the beginning of each scene on the show. These titles are really interesting because they're very short, they're often funny, they're usually sort of cryptic. There is just enough information in them to pique the viewer's curiosity about what's going to happen in that scene. Now imagine that you are sitting down to watch a rerun of Frasier on the CW or wherever they play reruns of Frasier nowadays and instead of seeing this you saw a title card like this one. Now not only would it be impossible to read all of this in the 5 or 10 seconds that you have before the scene starts, but more importantly even if you were able to read everything on that card you would no longer be interested in watching the scene because you would have just read what's going to happen. Now thinking about PowerPoint presentations I think that so many of them end up kind of looking like this card. It's the same information on the slide that you're sharing verbally the result being that both messages, both what's on the slide and what you're saying get diminished. So when you're designing your PowerPoint presentation try to think about how you can make a slide like this, one that's just enough to pique the listener's curiosity and not one like this that puts it all on the table so that people ignore what you're actually saying. However this is not to say that a text heavy design is always inherently a bad thing. It got me to thinking of Dave Eggers' novel You Shall Know Our Velocity which infamously starts right on the front cover and does not take a break for things like the title or the Library of Congress information until the very last page of the book. This is obviously a very text heavy design and yet it is also successful at piquing the audience's curiosity. When you see this book on the shelf at the store or at the library you think this is not how a book is supposed to behave. What is going on here? It makes you very curious to explore the book and find out what Eggers is up to. This is the Fibonacci spiral. Most of you probably learned the Fibonacci sequence as children. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 I think. When you represent the Fibonacci sequence geometrically this is what it looks like. It is this successive series of boxes each building on the previous one. This is a really interesting shape from a design perspective and it's one that you see a lot in nature. You see it in seashells, you see it in pine cones and you also see it a lot in design. Look at these classic examples of the old penguin paperback books. These books are striking partially because you see that same arrangement of shapes that you see in the Fibonacci spiral and you don't actually see anything in those book covers that is completely centered. Everything is a little off-center and yet they are balanced into very striking, very visually pleasing covers. Now again, I want to say that just from having shown you a couple of graphics and a couple of book covers we certainly haven't all turned into professional designers in the past five minutes, but I want to make the point that by looking at things like this by looking at the way that elements are laid out on TV or on book covers or on subway posters or in movies you can start to kind of develop your mental collection of what you want to rip off in your own PowerPoint slides. And there are in fact huge communities on the Internet devoted just to this sort of thing. You look at websites like Tumblr and Pinterest and those sites are full of people who love geeking out about design and layout. And through examining what you like about designs that you like you can start to develop your own palette of what you want to rip off in your own presentations. And finally, of course, you can do the same thing when you look at presentations that you like. When you see a talk either in person or on the Internet or on a webinar that really, really works for you, that really communicates the information well then take a second after the fact to look back at the slide deck and say, okay, what are the tools that they were using in that slide deck and how can I try to emulate this in my own presentation? Many of you are probably familiar with TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and I think it's a very famous worldwide series of conventions and you can go online and watch the talks from these conventions. I posted just two examples here, one by Steve Jervitsen and one by Justin Hall Tipping. And I used these two specifically because their approach to slide design are very, very different from each other. Jervitsen's lecture, the slides, there's literally not a word in the entire presentation. It is all photographs and short videos all underscoring his enthusiasm for the subject that he's talking about. Justin Hall Tipping's presentation, on the other hand, uses a lot of language. But the way that he uses the language in the slides helps the viewer understand the points that he's trying to make, the way that he places the text on the slide, the way that he draws attention to certain things in the text using color, using fonts, all of which underscores what he's trying to say as opposed to the deluge of text taking attention away from what he's trying to say. Here are a couple of examples from some friends of ours in the nonprofit community. On the left there is a presentation by DeVon Smith having to do with social media and ticket sales. And look at this slide. The way that there's only five words on it and those five words don't give everything away. There's just enough information to make you curious about what she's going to say. It's similar in that way to the Frasier title card that we talked about earlier. Bobby Newman's presentation. You can also go take a look at having to do with libraries and training. It's a really elegant presentation because it literally just has seven slides, each one with just one or two words about that point that she's trying to make with that slide. And it all adds up to something that's very elegant and very visually beautiful and something that underscores the points that she's trying to make rather than distracting the audience from them. So again, when you see a presentation that you like, look at what was successful about it and then look back at the slides and see, okay, how were the slides helping what the person was saying? How were they underscoring it rather than taking my attention away from it? Now we're going to slightly shift gears over to talking about smart art. Now if you're not familiar with smart art, there's a feature in Microsoft Office that was actually introduced in Office 2007 and it's also available in Office 2010 as well as the Mac versions of both of those products. And the basic idea of smart art is that you can take your existing bulleted list and you can transform it into a more informative, more visually appealing kind of diagram. So this is, again, you have your kind of stock presentation that you do for fundraising for your organization or whatever the case is. You can very, very quickly go through this and experiment and try some different graphical approaches. So we took this simple four bullet slide, four items, and we said, okay, let's try turning this into smart art. There's one example, the sort of four pieces of evidence converging on a single argument. Here's another one, the four steps, each one kind of folding into the next. Or maybe your argument is more of a pyramid with the four successive layers on it. Oh yeah, okay. As I was researching PowerPoint for the purpose of doing this presentation, I realized in the purpose that I should have started using smart art years ago because instead I've spent a lot of time putting visual aids together in Photoshop. Here's an example of one that I put together for a webinar that we did a couple of months ago. I put this together in Photoshop. It worked fine for the purpose of the webinar. Here's the problem with it. Let's say I want to make a slight change in the language. I need to go back into Photoshop, change the text, change the spacing. It becomes this whole ordeal. And similarly, when I've imported this into PowerPoint, this text is not in the outline. This is just, as far as PowerPoint's concerned, this is just a static image. Now let's say that I were invited to give the same presentation at, I guess it's a harvest festival, but I were invited to give this presentation somewhere with a different PowerPoint template. Now suddenly this visual aid looks really bad. I would need to go back into Photoshop, remove the white background, probably change the colors because then the orange on orange would be very distracting, and suddenly it's a lot of work. I thought it'd be interesting to see how smart art behaves with the different templates. So I just downloaded some templates from Office.com, and I just plopped these smart art graphics into them. And notice how elegantly it matches the color scheme, the fonts. And this is just by default. I didn't change a single thing about any of these, but it looks very professional, and it looks like it belongs in the same world as the template. All of this comes with a big caveat, which is that PowerPoint can't help you decide which smart art graphic to use. Smart art is just a tool. You are the one who needs to think about the points that you're trying to make and which graphic actually represents them accurately. I posted this on the TechSoup blog a couple of weeks ago, and it's kind of a joke. But how many times have you seen somebody use a visual aid like this? What does that arrow mean? What is the relationship that that arrow is trying to communicate among fundraising and communications and marketing? It's not clear. It's pretty, but it ultimately kind of fails as a visual aid. So with that, let's do a little experiment. So I'm exiting out of the slideshow mode here. There we go. And let's just try some different smart art graphics for this sort of standard April fundraising event slide, and let's see what we can find that'll be appealing. So I've clicked in the text box, and I simply click this convert to smart art. And there's an option, the simple list with the headings. There's an option too. And you see how each of these kind of has a different relationship that it's implying among these different bullet points. I go into more layers. This is very interesting, because here I can look at them separated by category, hierarchy, relationship, matrix. And I click any one of these, and I see a description here of what it's good for, used to show hierarchical relationships that build from the bottom up, et cetera. These are really, really useful cues to use. So here, let's try another one. Another thing that's kind of interesting is that you can insert graphics into these. So let's find a good one here. Here, let's try this hexagon cluster. And now for the 55 new clients, we'll get the sign up graphic for the donations. We'll get the tip jar graphic, and for the media coverage, we'll get the reporter. And suddenly, we have a kind of new presentation. And if you wanted to move it into the 3D mode, then the graphics will shift with it. And again, you can play with this, and you can find what will work for your presentation. There are several different options. There are, as I showed you a second ago, here I'll just come back to this. There are dozens of these available just by default within PowerPoint. And then if you click on Office.com here, these are new ones that have since been added on the internet, on the Office.com website, and those are available right from within the interface. There are also various websites online where you can download and experiment with other ones of these just made by individuals out there in the world. You might remember earlier that slide that I used here. I'll go back to it. This is called Word Snake, and this is just an example of a smart art graphic that I downloaded from somebody's website on the internet. Now if you download one of those, this is the folder where you insert those. It's a little bit different if you're on XP or Windows 7. And then after you do that, the new smart art will be available right there where it says Other. So it's very easy to find new ones of these on the internet and download them and play with them and find the right looks for your presentation. Okay, let's go back into the slideshow here. Okay, here are the references. There are the photos that I used. This over here, oh no. What happened to my drawing interface? Sorry about that. But anyway, I wanted to point out this in particular, this low-key three diagrams is a great example of somebody out there on the internet just making these smart art graphics and doing lots of creative and unusual things with them. There are those PowerPoint templates that I downloaded if you wanted to play with those. And finally, I wanted to direct your attention to this community profile on the TechSoup blog of the American Indian Resource Center. You can read the post there for yourself, but it's a really neat example of a nonprofit using PowerPoint in an unusual way that you might not necessarily expect. The woman there put together this PowerPoint presentation as sort of a game show for people she was doing a training program with. And it's an example of a really unusual and creative way to use PowerPoint from the community. So that's actually all I have prepared. Great. Thank you, Elliot. And I'm going to go ahead and... I was taking a look at the questions that had come and I know that somebody had asked if there are any free tutorials out there about smart art. And I know Doug put in a link to a tutorial, a 20-minute tutorial that's on Office.com. So you can go ahead and take a look at that link. Let me take a look at what other questions... There are also... We can put this in the follow-up information as well. But if you go to the blog post that I put on the TechSoup blog a couple of weeks ago about smart art, I linked to various tutorials there, including actually some right from Doug's colleagues on the PowerPoint team. They have a fantastic blog with ideas and templates and lots of interesting things. And there's also, for people who are brave and a little on the techier side, there's also some information about how smart art works on the back end if you wanted to create or customize your own. But I will warn you that that's definitely for people on the techier side of the spectrum. Okay, great. And then one other question. Really quick, that Elliot you might be able to help with. Could you just go over again where to find smart art in PowerPoint? Sure. Sorry about that. I had myself muted. Okay, so the way to do this is... Now let's say... Let's just undo and get back to where we were previously. So here we have just this simple bullet-pointed list. And you can just click in that box. And then if you're on the home tab in the ribbon... Sorry, I forgot what the ribbon was called. You can just click this link here that says convert to smart art. And there you'll be given several options to see all of them. Click on more smart art graphics. And that's where you get this dialogue box with all your different options. And again, you click on any of these and you'll see the description over in the right-hand box there. And then click it and voila. Okay, great. Thank you, Elliot. And for all the other questions that have come in, we will hold those until the end. And again, if we don't get to any of your questions, we will follow up with you afterwards. But I do want to make sure that Doug has enough time to cover his sections. So with that, Doug, I'm going to go ahead and give you control of the screen. And you can go ahead, share your screen, and unmute yourself. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay, great. Hi, my name's Doug. Thank you. My name's Doug Thomas. I'm a Comprint producer at Office.com where you can find trainings and articles about things like smart art or getting started content if you're just starting in PowerPoint. You'll find 150,000 free images, hundreds of templates. I work in the help videos and also on the Office blog. Shameless plug there. And kind of continue what Elliot was talking about is dealing with slides and word, basically, in some of the design. And then I'm going to show you some of the tools that can help you with that. This is a very bad slide that I've made up. But if you're in corporate America, you have probably seen something like this at some point along the lines. Every single word that the person has said will be on the screen. There's some graphics sometimes at the right-hand side that is, it's too hard to see even if you're in a small conference and let alone a lecture hall. And what a lot of the stuff that we've been working on is trying to get words off screens as Elliot talked about. People use pictures and other things like that. But there's also simpler ways to do it. One of the theories that I heard one time and immediately stole from somebody was the fact that think of PowerPoint as your resume. You work really hard on a resume. You want to make sure it's a terrific piece of paper or something online that will help you get into an interview. But once you're in the interview, how many minutes are actually spent on the resume? A minute, maybe two? Because the interview is talking to you and about the job. So think of the PowerPoint the same way. Work really hard. Work on your slides. But once you're doing the presentation, that it's really you presenting that is an important part of what's connecting to the audience. Now this is a little different being online, but if you're in a room with folks, there's a reason why it's not an email. You're the person presenting. So to get powerful slides really help. And so a couple things to think about. I'm going to throw a couple of theories out there and some actually counter other theories, but to find something that works for you is just what we're trying to do here with SmartArt or other things like that, some sort of experience that you can show somebody. Seth Godin, who's a terrific entrepreneur, PowerPoint guru, has said something that there should be no more than six words on the slide, which is kind of funny because that's eight words right there. But what Godin is saying is that you should minimize. You should get the impact. My dad was in advertising for decades and advertising has changed so much over those decades, but the same thing, some rules like one message per advertisement is what you really need to get five or six or seven. No one remembers anything. Here is something clear and crisp and I can talk about Godin for five minutes or three minutes or one minute, but you get the point from just the simple words on the slide. Another rule is a guy Kawasaki who's another entrepreneur and a terrific presenter, and he has what's called the 10-20-30 rule. This is a terrific rule, especially if you have a group presentation where you're having folks talking. It's like, well, how many people do you want? Do you want slides? How long do I talk for? Here's a great rule to give all of them and simply the 10-20-30 rule is they can have no more than 10 slides. They can speak for no longer than 20 minutes and 30-point font size at a minimum on the slides. Now, this slide is 32-point font size, which is the default in PowerPoint. And as you can see, it doesn't allow a lot of words on the screen. You're talking about maybe 300 words for your entire presentation, which for a lot of people is kind of scary to think about. So, how can you get those words on the screen or how can you get those words that you might need or notes that you need? And that's where something comes in called Presenters View in PowerPoint. Now, I can't really show you Presenters View because I'm presenting right now, but this is where you would find it on the ribbon. It's in the slideshow, and I'll get to this here a little later. And there's a checkbox that you would check for Presenters View. Now, Presenters View is really tough because you can't do it right now on your computer. You have to be connected to another monitor or in the conference room. So, it's one of those things that I suggest getting in a few minutes early or coming early that morning and plug in in the conference room or a room that you can plug in your extra monitor if you happen to have one in the office. So, you can see how the tools work. But basically what happens is the slides, like you're seeing right now, go on the main screen. And what you see instead is a page that looks like this. So, just to kind of go over really quickly what's here, the left-hand side is the slides. Everyone else sees them. And you also have arrows that you can use to move your slides around. There's also some other tools that you can actually skip over many slides. You can actually go, if you have a 50-slide deck, you can quickly go to any of one of those slides instead of just going in order. You can also use markers and stuff like that, like we're using tools here today. On the right-hand side is your notes section. And you can have anything in your notes section. If you're creating a presentation that someone else has to give, they can give complete notes there. You can put facts and figures in there if you need them. So, it's a way to keep those notes in front of you, those words in front of you that you need to give your talk, but the audience doesn't need to see necessarily. Another tool we're going to talk about, and I'll do a little demo about this one, is broadcast slideshow. And that was new for Office 2010. And it's also in the slideshow tab. This is a way to do a remote presentation very quickly. In fact, instead of just looking at slideshow, let's get out of here and go do it. So, here I am in my slideshow. And I'm going to go to broadcast slideshow. Now, what this does is, and this is a free service for Office 2010. The great thing about it is, I need to have PowerPoint 2010, though any of you, this is going to broadcast on the web, so all you would have to be is connected to an updated browser, IE, Firefox, Chrome, doesn't matter, and connected to the Internet. So, when I start broadcast, let's see how fast this works here. You're going to connect to a service, and I'm wireless right now, so this might take a little longer than I'm presenting. So, it builds a URL, and this URL you can send out to anybody. So, this is really good for last-minute thing if you don't have something that you've done in advance with a tool like a go-to-webinar or a link or something like that. And this is a webinar that I can copy and send an email or I am to people. And then I just start the slideshow. Now, the audio is not picked up. You'd have to do that through a conference call. But you can do the images, and then people see them in almost real time. So, if you click a slide, the next person sees them. Now, I have all the links that are in the presentation that will be out about how to view this and how to see it. But I can just show you a still picture here really quick. Let me just stop the slideshow here. So, here's a picture of some guy, me. And basically, we have the slideshow. Here I have a laptop, a monitor, which I think might be connected to a PC or a Mac. I can't remember. We have an iPad, an iPhone, and a Windows phone. And as I present slides in this video, the slides move about the same speed. Some don't get all the animations. Some take a little litter to render than others, but it's a way to do a quick slideshow and broadcast it out to folks. And again, they don't have to have office. They just need to be connected to the Internet. And again, to show you where that is in the slideshow tab, it's under broadcast slideshow. And that was new for PowerPoint 2010. Speaking about sharing and doing it, I want to talk a little bit about SkyDrive and the web apps. And this is kind of shifting gears away from presentations into more storage and how you can use the Internet. Everyone talks about the cloud these days. When I talk about the cloud, the folks, it's the Internet. Think about it. We do our banking online. Most people store pictures online. This is the way to store and share documents online. If you do nothing else with this hour today, go to skydrive.com and sign up. If you have a Hotmail account or an Xbox Live account, you're already signed in. You just need to put your passwords up like that. It gets you 7 gigabytes of storage. And that's for anything. There's nothing for office documents. It can be for images, textiles, PDFs, whatever. But it's 7 gigabytes of storage that you can use and then share documents with. And some of the stuff, and then SkyDrive works on Macs, PCs, iPads, iPhones, androids, Windows phones. I'm sure there's something I'm missing. But because it's connected to the Internet, it's not based on what technology you have besides updated browser and connected to the Internet. So just to show you really quick, this is the homepage of Office.com where I said we have literally thousands and thousands of templates. You can click on a template and we've kind of rearranged this homepage that all these are all shared. So if I double click this template for the solar system, this will open up in an Office web app online. Again, I'm not opening this in PowerPoint. I'm here online. And I can download this template and then use it. Or I could just keep it online. Let me kind of show you. I'm going to click over to my SkyDrive once I sign in. And if you're on Windows Live, I'll just kind of show you that homepage, which that's where you get your email and all that. Up here on the right, there is SkyDrive. And SkyDrive is where you can store and share documents and also work on documents together. This will look like a Windows Explorer paying with folders and documents. You can create documents here for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. And again, these are all online. You don't have to have Office. Colleen, we hope you do have Office. But you don't have to have Office to do this. It's all online. So let me begin here to a folder and open up a document. So this render, and this will be an Excel document. Now the great thing about this, if I want to show this document to you, I can send you the URL. I don't have to send you the document in email, which might be a big document. I don't have to send in a PDF because I don't know what you have on your computer. You may not have Office. I just send the URL to you and then you're able to see this. So the fidelity is wonderful with Office pub apps. In fact, it's so good. All that color stuff you see there, that's all conditional formatting, one of the terrific features in Excel. You can't do that in a web app. But if it's in the document you open, you can use it. I mean, that's the great thing. It doesn't try to hide the stuff that you can't do in a web app. It shows those documents in a really rich format. There's options here, up on the left-hand corner. I can open this in Excel. So if you have Excel Office 2007, Office 2010, Office for Mac 2011, you can just open this and work on these documents seamlessly. So you don't have to think about going online. You can just store the documents there, open them in Excel, and when you're done, store them back online. You can also edit the browser, and that's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to click on that. Now, this doesn't give you all the full features of Excel. It gives you the powerful stuff you need to do. You can see this ribbon here has a lot of things with tables and numbers, formulas, inserting charts and the like. So you can get a lot of work done. Again, the fidelity looks wonderful from the actual chart that you have in Excel. Also, as you can see down here in the bottom right-hand corner, it says who's editing. That's me. I'm Doug TMS. I don't know what the TMS actually stands for. But I can also share this document. We can work on it at the same time. And this is one of the powerful things about online documents that instead of sending some file around several times, you can say, hey, let's move to a phone call, get on the line and work on the document together. The sharing function is up here in the ribbon. I'm going to click on that and show you some of the options here. So security and protection is a huge thing for Microsoft, but also anyone that's dealing in the cloud. You want to make sure this stuff can be seen by the right people and not seen by the other folks. So that's why there's several options here. You can send an email or you can send links to folks on IM. And we give you options. So if you just want someone to view this document, you can do that. If you maybe want to send that to a client. With your team, you want them to be able to edit the document so you can send them differently, and then they'll be able to edit the document. There's also a public option, which you've got to be careful because public means public. You can also post this to Facebook and LinkedIn. I don't think you'd want to post an Excel chart to Facebook. Let's say you have some PR announcement or something to deal with some function that you're doing, press release, or a small portfolio. You can post directly from the web apps into Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Again, all this is free. Just go to SkyDrive.com and sign in and use the Office web apps. And then one other thing that I've got time for, but I'll just let you know, another part of sharing is you can actually embed your Excel charts or PowerPoint presentations in a blog. This is terrific because if someone wants a presentation, you can send it out to them. That's a lot of files and all that. This way, they can view the files in your blog. Let's say if you have a library and you have a blog that has a presentation, you could do that. But that way, what I like about it is, when you send out a slide, someone could easily take your slide like that. They copy and paste it and reform that and they take more. If it's embedded in a blog, they can't do that. They have to cheat the old-fashioned way, which I used to do, which I have to write down something. So it's a little more protection. It's not a lot, but it's a little more than just a simple cut and paste that people have to do. So it kind of protects some of your work a little better. So that's part of here and that's an embedding too. We'll have links in the stuff that we send out from this webinar that has that. You can find some information at office.com. Let me just go back into SkyDrive one more time here. And again, it's free. It's a storage. If you want to do that, it's just a terrific way to do things. In fact, in for the PowerPoint, again, it's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. You can even start a slideshow and present right from a web app online. You don't need to even have a PowerPoint to present in PowerPoint. Just a little plug. I do also office 15-minute webinars on Tuesdays, and you can go to office.com and learn about that. The short URL is there, and we do 15-minute webinars every Tuesday on a variety of subjects fall in office. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you, Doug. I really appreciate that. So I do want to go ahead and tackle some questions. I think I'm just going to leave the control with you, Doug, in case that you want to show some examples for some of the answers. We did have a couple of questions about the Windows Live ID that you mentioned that you need to be logged in to use the broadcast feature. First of all, somebody was just wondering about it in general, and then somebody else was wondering if you needed to have a Windows Live ID to view a broadcast PowerPoint as well. Doug, are you there? We might have lost Doug. Let me verify that nobody else is here. I'm back now. Hello. There you are. Hi. Sorry about that. I just used to turn off the mic after that. So on PowerPoint's slideshow is independent of office web apps and Windows Live and SkyDrive. When I do a broadcast slideshow, I just start the broadcast and send it out, and all the people need is they just need to put in the URL like you would for any URL for any website. So that is independent of web apps. For web apps, you need a Windows Live ID, which you sign up for. It takes you maybe 90 seconds. We don't ask for blood or anything like that. And again, if you have a Hotmail account or an Xbox Live account, you already have a Windows Live ID like that. Your Hotmail account or your Xbox Live account will get you signed in to Windows Live, and that gets you into SkyDrive. Okay, great. Thank you. And then we also had a question asking if you could print documents from SkyDrive. You would have to download and then print. Okay. I'm going to double-check that, because one of the cool things about online features is they just update. There's updates. I think this year I've seen at least two or three things. There was a major change in December, which made a, let me see if I can go back to it, that made your home page, this page here. There's lots of options now that weren't there before. As you can see, if I right-click, I get all these different areas. So let's see. I don't want to create. I don't want to open it. Hang on. All right, the print you need to download and then print. I know it's one of the more asked for features. It's interesting to show a print family view, but it's not lighting that up, so it's interesting. So at this time, that's all I've done in the past is downloaded and then print. Okay, great. I also saw just in the general kind of design aspect of this, and either you, Doug, or Elliot, can chime in. They're asking what the recommended font size for a presentation specifically in a webinar would be. In my experience, I think it needs to be at least like 32 so you can actually read it. That's what I just did in the slide deck there, and I can do that. By the way, it looks like from where you can print a document. So again, that's the cool thing about web apps. When I looked this up a few months ago, you couldn't. Now you can. So that option is there. Let me just open up the presentation here really quick. There's 32 point font, which is the default in PowerPoint. Bigger is always better. And clear slides. I mean, if you go with fewer words, you could go with a bigger font size. And then as Elliot showed, the smart art is really nice to have and kind of automatically formatting the words for the shapes and gives you a nice, crisp, clean design. So again, you're trying to be effective that you don't want small stuff. And again, the difference between working on a computer that's 18 inches in front of your face versus a room where it's six feet away or an auditorium feet away is amazingly different. So even though you designed great looking slides, even on some of the stuff with the smart art, if you're using a smart art that has several of those five or six or seven things, parts, that's not going to show well in a big room. That's for sure. Okay, great. Thank you. And then we also had a question on the presentation view. Do you enter your presentation notes while creating the PowerPoint presentation? And they wanted to know again how to enter those notes. Can I augment the notes while I'm presenting? Is that the question? It was asking when you would enter those notes. Sure. Actually, let me do this then. And I forgot to show that. So here I am in just a regular PowerPoint view when I'm creating my slides. And this area down here, let me get a blank slide here. There. You often see this a lot. This panel here at the bottom is actually the notes section. It's on on default, and most of the time all we see there is something that says click add notes. So that's where you can add notes. And as you see here, I've put in, here's a table of figures if I needed to talk about it. Here's just some talking points or if you wanted to put in a full, if you had to put paragraphs and paragraphs or something. And this is what I tell people if they have to, what I say, hand in their homework, I have to do a PowerPoint deck. I have to hand it in. But they need the proof that I did the work, right? Well, you could put it in the notes section. It's a very simple section. There's not a lot of things you can do with it. It's more of a text field than anything else. You can make the text bigger or smaller. And once you're in the broadcast in the presenter's view, all of these elements can be shrunk or more. So you can make the note elements bigger or smaller. The pane for the slides bigger or smaller, it's up to you. So all those, all those panes are movable in it. And you could edit the slides as you speak. Could you do that? I don't think so because this gives you control of the deck with these tools where the arrows are here in the red pen. You have tools that you can use turning the screen on and off from here using markers and highlighters to point out certain things on the slides. Great. And we did have a couple questions on where to find that marker. Sure. The marker, again, you have to be in presenter's view. And to be in presenter's view, you have to be connected to a secondary monitor. So if people are trying to do it right now at their desk, that's not going to work because they will say, hey, wait, I'm looking for a second monitor. So once you do that, this is the default of what it looks like once you open the presenter view from the slideshow. So that marker is just that red marker that's by the arrows. If you clicked, and unfortunately, again, this I can't try to do this right now. I don't think you can do this because of the webinar part. This white card next to the red highlighter, if you right-click back, you use several options of skipping slides. Go to slide 41. Go to slide 21. You can go forwards and backwards, and it gives you other options there. But again, presenter view only works when you're connected to a secondary monitor. OK. Great. Thank you. And we did have a couple of other questions about smart art. So either Elliot or Doug could probably answer either of these. The first is, is there any way to add smart art to PowerPoint 2003? No. And then the other question is, can I use smart art to create posters for my library? Sure. I can't think of a reason why you... Yeah. I mean, again, it's just a PowerPoint slide. I should also say that smart art is available in Word also. They don't want to make sure that's true. I'm pretty sure. So it's another available program. It was one of the things they did for the suite in 2007. So you certainly could do it. And it's, again, it's a nice clean way of doing some interesting designs. What I like about it, when Elliot showed you the gallery of all the different types, and you just kind of scan over and you see what it looks like. So even if you don't have an idea against a great idea generator of how to use space for the things that you're looking on to put the slide or a poster. Okay. Great. And then I do want to make sure, because we do have our presenter, Maggie, who's going to talk a little bit about the Microsoft software donation program. But I do want to ask you one more question before we get to that. And this is, and I think both Elliot and Doug could probably chime into this. It's how can I make a slide presentation that is, one, interesting for the audience. And two, at the same time, helps guide the facilitator through their presentation, almost like a script. And this person is referring to a classroom situation for teaching communication skills to couples. Earlier during my presentation, I accidentally showed how bad I am at that because I skipped to the next slide because I couldn't remember what I was supposed to talk about next. Ideally, the ideal would be to either use the features that Doug was demonstrating or literally a paper script to remind yourself of the things to talk about. Again, thinking about using the slides themselves as advertisements for the talk as opposed to transcripts for the talk. That's my suggestion. Great. Thank you, Elliot. Yeah. I mean, again, if you can get into the presenter's view, you can put the notes in there. The problem with putting on the slides, there's ways to do it with right-hand side and putting bullet points in and you go through each bullet point, which I think kind of is you can keep some attention. But the thing is, if you put too much of the information on slides, if the person's presenting from a laptop, their tendency is to turn the neck around and talk to the slides in that classroom. That's the main thing about having this notes page. I mean, I've done a whole webinar about if you're in a conference room, you want to talk near the monitor, not in the middle of the room, but at the end where the monitor is. So you're facing your audience and they're seeing you in the slides at the same time. And with presenter view, you've got everything in front of you, so you don't have to crane your neck and give really bad presentations because everyone sees the back of your head, which for me includes the large ball spot. OK. Great. Thanks, Doug. But that, I think I'm going to go ahead and give control over to Meg in just a moment so she can take about five minutes and just talk a little bit about the Microsoft software donation program in case you're interested in trying to get Microsoft products including PowerPoint through that program. But first, I do want to thank both Doug and Elliot for their really great presentations today. And if anybody, if we did not get to your question, just know that we will follow up with you within a week or so after the webinar. So never fear. We will attempt to get your question answered. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and give Meg control and unmute her. OK. Hopefully everybody can hear me now. All right. So what I'm going to cover very briefly is you've discussed how PowerPoint can help presentations. Now the question is how do you request specifically through TechSoup? So I'm going to go ahead and start my little slide show from here. There you go. All right. I don't know if this is a way or not. Apologies if my citrus thing is still showing here. Anyway, so what we have here is this is the basic TechSoup home page. And you notice it has all the lovely links at the top including how to log in. And if you notice, there is a column on the right-hand side including find solutions and the two drop-down menus. The second one is browse by partner. And what this does is that it will take you to the screen where it will allow you to go ahead and it will drop-down menu with all of our partners available. Specifically what we've been looking at is Microsoft. So I'm going to show you what the Microsoft page is. So this is the Microsoft donation page. It has our standard greeting. Microsoft is pleased to partner with TechSoup. And you notice it has a very long list of items that you can request. And these are general product groups. They're not specifically the title groups which I will get into in just a moment. And in fact, I'm going to break out of my presentation and show you the actual website. Hopefully everybody can now see this. And you notice that right now only one of them is in fact shown as before. This one is Microsoft desktop application software because this is where you find both the office suite and the office individual applications. PowerPoint is an individual application. So you can request PowerPoint without needing to request all of Office. You notice that I've opened up Office individual applications. I am now going to scroll down and show you here is PowerPoint 2008. And if I go on to next, you can see there is PowerPoint 2010. I'm going to go back and show you where to find. Okay, here is office suite. And you notice we have Office 2007 standard, Office for Mac, Office 2007 professional, and 2010 both professional and standard. I'm only going to open up Office 2007. But you see this is what the partner screen, this is what the product screen actually looks like. And if you scroll down, you can see that it includes PowerPoint. So now going back to our PowerPoint presentation here. Okay, so you now know at least a little bit about how to navigate through. Now the delivery for the software. When you request Microsoft, you will add the item to the cart. I don't have a screen here with the cart, but you add it to the cart. And at that point, it will allow you the option to request DDT if on the product page. It specifies that that is available by the format. And in some cases, that is the only way that you will receive the item. You will not be able to download the software. And this is not the license of, it's the actual software. But on items like Office Professional 2010, and this includes Office standard, and both the versions of 2007 and the version from Mac. The DDT ROM is available by request. And you must select that during the checkout process, which hopefully everyone is currently familiar. Now, you will receive the confirmation that your donation has been placed once you go through the donation request. And your, if you request the media, DDT, it will be delivered. Usually we give a 7 to 10 day window, but the critical thing, that you will receive another email with this information. This is some of the fulfillment email information that is sent out standard, because all the license keys are actually delivered from the Volume License Service Center, which if you notice is listed up here. So you will be given information on how to log into the Volume License Service Center. If you already have a hotmail or a Windows Live email address, you use that to log into the Volume License Service Center. If you do not have an email address as either Windows Live or Hotmail, we do include the link on how to create one from the Windows Live site. Use your existing email to log into the Volume License Service Center. And these are the basic instructions on how to retrieve the license keys. Again, this site will be available. And this information is also included in the fulfillment email that is sent with every Microsoft request. But the basics of this is that you will actually need to retrieve the product keys from the product key link that is on the Volume License Service Center. And in essence, by submitting information to the Volume License Center, you have requested that your licenses for your software to be sent to you. It will be sent via email directly from Microsoft. And the reason we are telling you this is there is a lot of confusion regarding Microsoft donations. Most of the time, with our donors, we send the email with the license keys to Microsoft. They are released directly from Microsoft. It's actually a good thing because then there is less likelihood that the license keys will be corrupted and the information will be lost. So this is basic rundown. And again, if you have any questions of my own, please call TechSoup and we will be happy to answer every question for you regarding the Microsoft donation program. And I am now going to go ahead and here and give it back over to our lovely Kyla. And I'm getting out of here now. Thank you, Meg. And again, thank you to all the presenters that helped out with us today. Thank you to Elliott. Thank you to Meg. Thank you especially to Doug. And everybody from the Microsoft N. Just a little bit about who TechSoup is. Again, we are in that 501C3 nonprofit organization just like so many of you out there. And we do try to help you fulfill your organization's mission by providing technology and technology resources that you need to do that. And again, thank you all for being here with us today. Thank you to Microsoft. And thank you to everybody on my end. If you want to find out more about TechSoup, you can go ahead and go to our website, techsoup.org. Check out our Learning Center articles. Check out our blog. You can go ahead and find solutions and products through our donation programs. And go ahead and subscribe to our TechSoup newsletters by the cup and new product donation alert while you all find all kinds of information on the various resources that TechSoup offers. So again, thank you everybody. And thank you to our webinar sponsor, Citrix Online, who does provide this photo webinar account for us. And again, I hope everybody has a wonderful day. We will be sending out a recap of this webinar along with any resources, a recording of the webinar, et cetera within at least a week of the presentation. So thank you everybody. I hope you have a great day. And if you could take just a couple of minutes to go ahead and fill out our survey that should pop up after you exit the webinar. This does help us to improve and to create additions to our future webinar holdings. Have a great day everybody.