This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass.
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It's amazing how dependent we've become on Microsoft Office software. Today "Microsoft Word" is almost synonymous with "word processor." Excel is almost synonymous with "spread sheet." And if you need to put together a presentation, everybody thinks "PowerPoint."
I, for one, am tired of seeing the same old PointPoint clipart again and again. I'm tired of presentations that proceed linearly -- starting at slide number one and going through slide after slide to the last one. I'm tired of presentations that take up megabytes and sometimes tens of megabytes of disk space, that clog my email inbox, and that are too big to fit on a floppy, so I wind up carting my entire laptop.
Well, there is a simple alternative to PowerPoint, and ironically, Microsoft Word makes it easy for anyone to do. The alternative is Internet-style presentations.
I've been doing this since 1994, when I was evangelizing about Internet opportunities inside Digital Equipment. Back then, making a Web page -- even one that consisted of just plain text -- was a challenge. There were no WYSIWYG Web authoring tools. Every line, every carriage return had to be marked up by hand in HTML. And you needed to find someone with a server on the Web and beg for permission to put your stuff there -- Web hosting as a regular service simply didn't exist.
Today, though few folks realize it, the latest versions of Word (for Office 98 and 2000) come with HTML authoring built in. You can create a document the way you normally do and then save it as an HTML document with .htm as the file extension. Then you get a new toolbar that makes it easy for you to add hyperlinks, and other Internet-style features to your page.
A presentation is nothing more than a sequence of short HTML pages -- with the text of each page visible on a single screen and all the pages linked together. Give the top line a consistent headline style, and have the text another, smaller headline style -- so it's plenty big enough to read. And keep your text short and crisp -- single lines, if possible, separated with carriage returns. Throw in some horizontal lines for effect.
If you have illustrations that actually convey useful information (not just clip art), then link from the text to the image file; and if when delivering the presentation, you decide to show a picture, just click on that link.
If at various points in your talk, you might want to branch off and go into greater detail on one or more points, then make a link from the related text to that other sequence of slides, and from the last one, link back to that starting point.
At the bottom of each page, have a link for the next page, and also a link to an index page that has brief description of and links to every page in the presentation. That way, based on audience reaction, you can change directions -- go straight to a side sequence, or skip ahead quickly.
If your talk deals with Internet-related matters and if you are going to have a live Internet connection when you make the presentation, then link directly from your text to the examples on the Web you'd like to show. If you know you will not have a live connection, then do screen captures of the example pages, using a program like PaintShop Pro, and link to those images.
Save all the slides and images for a given presentation alone in the same directory. Name all the files with .htm as the file extension. Then when you link from one of these files to another, don't use the complete URL as it would be on the Internet (like http://www.mysite.com/presentation/title.htm). Rather just use the file name (like title.htm). That's called using "relative" links. When the address is incomplete -- not specifying the path to where the file is found -- your browser looks for the file in the current directory, whether that happens to be on your hard drive or on the Web.
Hence, with all the files for a given presentation in the same directory on your PC, as you are doing the writing in Word, you can click on the links you have created, and the pages you have linked to will open up as new Word pages, and the images will appear as well. You can go through your entire presentation -- including all the branching paths -- all in Word, thereby making sure that the links work the way you think they should, and making necessary corrections immediately. And when you open any of these files with your browser, the links will work. And if you email your presentation to a friend or give it to him on a floppy disk, all he'll need to do is open the first slide in his browser and all the links will work. And when you upload the presentation to the Web, all the links will work.
When you are done, you not only have a very useful presentation, but also have gained experience and insight into how to create simple Web pages and link them together in a Web site.
You can leave your pages on your hard drive and deliver your presentation locally, with no Internet connection. Or you can deliver it from your hard drive with a live connection, which means you will sometimes be pulling images or pages from the Web. Or you can upload your presentation to the Web -- perhaps to free Web space at a site like NBCi (which used to be called Xoom, and which now offers unlimited Web space for free). In that case, you could deliver your presentation from any machine (whether PC or Mac or UNIX or Linux) anywhere in the world. Or you could simply point colleagues to the URL of the first slide, and they could go through it in their office without having to use email or download anything. You could even have a concall with everybody connecting to the same Web-based presentation and clicking through it together, even though you are thousands of miles apart.
Give it a try. Your presentations will probably wind up taking less than a tenth the disk space of a comparable PowerPoint presentation. A three-hour presentation will probably fit on a single floppy disk, with lots of room to spare. And all anyone needs to see your presentation is a browser, any browser. You don't need to worry about everybody having the same version of PowerPoint.
And your presentations can be delightfully non-linear, with lots of branching paths, and alternate examples, and the opportunity to digress and go into detail, when appropriate, by following links on Web pages that you selected as examples.
It's easy. It's quick. I'm amazed that no company has gone to the little bit of effort it would take to make this even easier and quicker, and to give the final product a slick professional look. If you come across any tool like that, please let me know.
Example of an Internet-style
presentation
Other Internet-style
presentations
Other articles on Web
page/site design
Articles about Internet
business trends
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marketing
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