Creating an Effective PowerPoint Presentation

Hints for a successful presentation:

• Plan carefully
• Do your research
• Know your audience
• Time your presentation
• Practice your presentation
• Speak comfortably and clearly

Effective PowerPoint Slides

• Use design templates
• Standardize position, colors and styles
• Include only necessary information
• Limit the information to essentials
• Content should be self-evident
• Use colors that contrast
• Be consistent with effects, transitions and animation
• Too many slides can lose your audience

Text guidelines

• Generally no more than 6 words a line
• Generally no more than 6 lines a slide
• Avoid long sentences
• Larger font indicates more important information
• Font size generally ranges from 18 to 48 point
• Be sure text contrasts with background
• Fancy fonts can be hard to read
• Words in all capital letters are hard to read
• Avoid abbreviations and acronyms
• Limit punctuation marks

Clip Art and Graphics

• Should balance the slide
• Should enhance and complement the text, not overwhelm
• No more than two graphics per slide

* PowerPoint presentations can also saved in HTML format and inserted in a Web page.

GMail Drive shell extension

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.

Requirement:

1. Gmail Account

2. Gmail Drive Software

Process:

1) Download Gmail Drive from (takes seconds to download)

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/GMail-Drive-shell-extension-Download-15944.html

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/Mail-Utilities/GMail-Drive-shell-extension.shtml

2) Install the software.

3) After installing, a drive named Gmail drive will be created in My Computer (just like C: D:).

4) Double click on this drive, login to Gmail Act. You will get a space of 2.61 GB.

4) Whatever content you copy to this drive will be sent to your mail Act to which you have logged in.

The copy is pretty fast. HATS OFF GOOGLE .

Reinstall Windows without losing important data

Once in a while, you might want to reinstall Windows, especially if your system starts to get bogged down, or if you’d had a catastrophic loss from a virus attack. The problem is that reinstalling Windows will delete personal files and data, so what do you do? Check out this article over at InformationWeek which offers a step by step on the process complete with videos of each step.

You could always do constant backups of your system (NOTE: if you have never performed a backup, start now!), and even if you are, this article is a fairly valuable resource in order to keep your data safe and secure.

GoogleTalk Gadget in Firefox Sidebar

The Google Talk Gadget is clearly more usable than the stand-alone GTalk desktop client or the floating AJAX version in GMail.

Here, each chat session opens up as a tab (like Firefox browser tabs), it can show previews of images or video and the chat client can easily be embedded inside webpages.

There's however a small problem - while we have browser windows in front of us all the time, the same may not hold true for the webpage (like the Google personalized page) where we have embedded the GTalk gadget.

So here's an alternate option - put the Google Talk client in the Firefox sidebar so it always stays in the foreground no matter what website you are on currently.

To add Google Talk to your Firefox sidebar, bookmark the following URL (right-click and choose Bookmark this link)

talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client

Now goto Bookmarks menu, navigate to the above bookmark, right click and choose Properties. Tick the checkbox that says Load this bookmark in the sidebar.

Update: An employee of an investment bank writes that their organization has banned Google talk in office but using the above method, he was able to circumvent the GTalk ban and could chat with friend out the firewalls of his office.

Google Talk gadget will always open in the Firefox Sidebar. Thanks