Being the loyal Mac user that I am, I use Keynote rather than PowerPoint when presenting to an audience. (Plus, I love those transitions!)
Earlier today I put on Social Media and Your Brand: Go Viral! for the Maine Marketing Association's lunch and learn. I was asked if I could share my slides, and since the presentation was on social media, I decided to use some of the social media tools at my disposal.
Two popular options are Google Presentation (part of Google Docs) and SlideShare. Both allow you to create, import and share slideshow presentations. Both also can be embedded into your LinkedIn profile. Both also choke on Keynote presentations.
The first thing you need to do in Keynote is save your presentation in the PowerPoint format (PPT.) You can do this by choosing File > Export…. Next you'll see this screen:
Choose PowerPoint and hit Next…. Then you can save your ppt file.
You can then import your .ppt file into Google Presentation or SlideShare. I tried both and found that the Google Presentation version was way off in terms of alignment. Not surprisingly, the fonts that worked well in the presentation weren't supported on the Web. However, many of the words bled off the edges of the screen, the centering was all off, and links and bullets were inconsistent.
I thought I could maybe tweak some things in PowerPoint and then reimport to Google, but PowerPoint–perhaps sensing I had been unfaithful–quit every time I tried to open the file.
I had never used SlideShare before, so I decided to give it a chance. Importing the file was as simple as clicking a button. Although there were still changes in fonts, and there were also inconsistencies with links and bullets, overall, it did a much better job of keeping the integrity of the original slideshow. One major frustration is that it replaced my Web-friendly Trebuchet MS with a less interesting font.
Please note that both of these presentations are a bit wider than this blog column, but I didn't feel like fiddling with the fine tuning. One nice thing about both Google and SlideShare is that they kept the links in the presentation live.
If you'd like to compare that to the Google Presentation you can check that out here:
