Nervousness and Turbo-Charging Powerpoint

One oft asked questions for would-be facilitators or presenters of technical topics like procurement or consulting is: How do I get rid of my nervousness? For the more experienced ones, the answer is simply: You don’t! With nervousness, you can enhance your performance by preparing more, rehearsing more, and making your nervousness work to your advantage. But what if you are really just a would-be presenter who still need to master your topic fully? What if you are still unsure if you can confidently deliver the topic? How would handle situation? Bring in technology....off course!

I would like to introduce a new Powerpoint plug-in called Adobe Presenter 7. Given your completed Powerpoint slides (as we all usually does), this plug-in will allow you to add narration (videos or other objects too) for each slide, prepare a nice theme, and publish the completed shows. A topic can have as many as three or four 3-minute shows (placed in one folder) that you can ask the participants to play in the respective computers, one show at a time. You can have one set in English and another in Chinese (or other language, too). You can assign the participants to view, listen, learn and digest each slide sets. They can also have the option to repeat the show if they did not get it during the first run. After each set, you can intervene by giving more information, clarifying confusions, asking more questions or answering questions raised.

Sounds like a dream come true! Is this doable with Powerpoint? Right now, Yes! We can use, Adobe Presenter 7 to turbo-charge the usually dull Powerpoint slides. The plug-in rapidly creates high-impact Adobe Flash presentations and eLearning courses. With just a few clicks in PowerPoint, you can transform drab presentations into engaging Adobe® Flash® multimedia experiences. You can easily add narration, animations, interactivity, quizzes, and software simulations to your presentations...all within Powerpoint.

You can create professional and highly interactive Flash presentations and self-paced courses. You can also import and edit video in any format and export them as SWF in addition to recording and editing high-quality audio. For more details visit: the overview, a quick-start document, and an actual tutorial as an example.

The potentials are enormous. This will free you from reading each slide for the participants. This consumes much of your patience and energy. And like it or not, bores them all the more. The pre-prepared shows will insure that the instructions are “perfectly” and uniformly transmitted. You will still be present and visible to deliver your most valuable contribution…practical experiences and actual lessons derived from true stories. And do not forget, you can still revert back to use actual deliveries if you no longer feel nervous and tired. Once the sets have been assembled, a combined internet and face-to-face learning becomes a real possibility.