Experts talk about a lot of techniques which help in becoming a great presenter and one of them is being “interactive”. The word interactive take a whole new meaning when a bit of technology is used to make the audience feel that they are a part of the presentation and are very much involved.

SendSteps is a company which helps you do just that! Involve your audience. SMS2Vote is one of the products offered by SendSteps which helps you conduct live polls by letting you audience vote using their mobile phones during a presentation and show the results on a PowerPoint slide immediately. Ain’t it cool?

The process is very simple. Download and install a Plugin, open PowerPoint, create a Poll using the newly installed plugin and you are all set! Users will be presented with a number where they can send their votes and express their opinion.

Following images will run you through the process of creating a poll for the presentation.

Once installed you will see a TXT2vote toolbar in your PowerPoint application, Click on “Add a vote” button to create a poll

You will see the following pop-up where you can enter a Poll-question and answers

The “Options” lets you decide if the results should be shown in numbers or percentage, or, if the audience can vote more than once, etc..

Once you click on “OK” 3 slides are created, 1) Instructions to vote, 2) Poll Question & Answers and 3) Poll results slide.

Following is one of the three slides with polling instructions for the audience

TXT2vote is not a free product but you can try it out for free which offers up to 5 votes for free. Click on the “Start a free session” button on the toolbar.

Once the free session is setup, you will see the following screen with the information for conducting polls.

Once the audience start texting and voting during the presentation here is what the polling-result slide will looking like..

So make use of this tool and impress your audience and capture the mood of the audience before starting the presentation or some meaningful feedback at the end of an interactive presentation.

Click here to visit SendSteps and here to download the PowerPoint plug-in.

Lets start with the essentials an then move on to the more funky ones..

PowerPoing Viewer and Converter 2007 : For office users using different versions might need viewers and converters from Microsoft. Click here to download Office converters and viewers.

Share PowerPoint Presentation Online: There are several sites which let users to upload their PowerPoint presentations and share them with their family and friends. Following are few such services..

• Slideshare.net
• Slideboom.com
• Authorstream.com

PowerPoint Search Engine: Brupt.com lets you search for all the PowerPoint presentations indexed by Google. In addition you can search for other office documents as well. Brupt.com

Insert WebPage in PowerPoint Presentations: LiveWeb is a free tool that lets you insert WebPages into a PowerPoint presentation.

Embed Youtube Videos in PowerPoint Presentation:  Download the Youtube Video Wizard plugin from skp.mvps.org which lets you embed Youtube videos into your presentation easily. Click here to download.

Convert PPT to PDF: There are several utilities which let you print any office document to PDF. These utilities can be used to convert PPT to PDF.
Following free utilities let you print to PDF..

• Cutepdf.com
• Primopdf.com

Convert PPT to Flash: iSpring Converter helps you convert your PowerPoint presentations to Flash (SWF) format. iSpring converter preserves the audio and all the animations including slide transitions while converting.

Download it from here.

Convert PPT to AVI, WMV, MPEG, MP3:  EffectMatrix offers to versions of its converter softwares. One which lets you convert PPT to limited video formats (AVI, WMV, MPEG) which is free and does not add any watermark to the video file and the paid version lets users convert PPT in almost all video formats, including for mobile phones, etc..

Click here to download the software.

Use iPhone as a PowerPoint Clicker:  i-Clickr PowerPoint Remote Lite is an iPhone application which converts your iPhone or iPod Touch into a visual clicker which lets you see the slides and control it from your iPhone.

Click here to download.

Create PowerPoint Presentations Online: Don’t have office installed on your computer; you’ve got nothing to worry about. There are quite a few online solutions available which let you create online presentations.

• Officelive.com
• Docs.google.com
• Show.zoho.com

Convert PowerPoint to ScreenSaver: Several tools allow users to convert PPT to Screensaver. Check out the following applications.

• Dgolds.com

With web influencing so much of our daily activity on computers, I am sure most ofyou would have inserted those links in your presentation to show a web page. However, what happens when you click the link when you are presenting. You end up opening that web page in your default browser and then explaining the details related to the page you opened from powerpoint. Then you close the browser and maximize your powerpoint presentation to continue with the presentation.

Seems like things could have been much more easier if you avoided steps like launching your browser, opening the page, closing the browser and then moving the focus back to your presentation. I’d have liked it if I could just navigate and explain the web page from right within my presentation. I am glad to let you know that there’s a plugin that caters exactly to this need of your. The plugin called as LiveWeb integrates seamlessly into your presentation and makes your presentation a one window stop. You can get the plugin here.

Follow the steps to add the addin in your powerpoint.

PowerPoint 97