What's New in June 2006
In this newsletter:

Learn From Google:
The Four “Best Practices” for Online Presentations in 2006

Good News for Road Warriors:
Laptop-Free Presentations

Impatica Presentation of the Month:
MDS Nordion Sales Presentation

2006 Slide Size Update:
Design Impatica with “Screen Real Estate” in Mind

Learn From Google:
The Four “Best Practices” for Online Presentations in 2006

Earlier this year, Google inadvertently released financial information during its analyst day. The company mistakenly posted internal-use-only slide notes in an online PowerPoint presentation.

When a web savvy company like Google makes a major online presentation blunder, it's time for all companies to review their online presentation policies. What are the top four best practices for posting online presentations in 2006...and how can Impatica help make your company's online presentations more powerful, secure, and relevant?

The Four Best Practices for Online Presentations

1. Safeguard your message with exhaustive editing. Do not forget your show notes. Edit your entire presentation—including slide notes and comments—before you even consider posting it online for a public audience.

How Impatica helps: The Impatica interface includes a checklist that lets you choose how you want to output your show notes...or if you want to output them at all. By default, no show notes are selected...so if you want to publish show notes, you have to specifically check your display preference.

2. Put PowerPoint in context. PowerPoint slides are often just visual props for a compelling speaker. You want your message to be heard, not just seen! Convert your PowerPoint presentations to streaming media—with sound and motion—to create a more compelling and persuasive message.

How Impatica helps: Impatica preserves your audio, narration, transitions, animations, and graphics...so that your online audience can experience your presentation the way you intended. Further, Impatica gives your online audience playback controls like pause, rewind, fast forward, and mute.

3. Give your online audience instant gratification. When your audience members click on your presentation link, give them instant gratification—provide them with a streaming media presentation—without any extra plug-ins or downloads.

How Impatica helps: Impatica for PowerPoint transforms your PowerPoint presentations into web-optimized multimedia files that can be viewed on any web browser, across multiple operating platforms...and even on many handheld devices.

4. Reduce your bandwidth. Full-blown multimedia and/or PowerPoint files can be big and bloated. Make sure you compress all your online media files to ease your bandwidth costs.

How Impatica helps: Impatica slims down fat PowerPoint files: often by as much as 95%. This means that you reduce bandwidth requirements: and your audience enjoys faster access to your online presentations.

Remember, Impatica offers a free trial of Impatica for PowerPoint, so that you can evaluate just how easy it is to follow the 2006 best practices for online presentations. Let's learn from Google's mistake...and give our online audiences a better online presentation experience with fully optimized streaming media.

PS: If you know someone in PR or IR—do them a big favor and tell them about this article and the complimentary Impatica trial. It just might let them keep their jobs.
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Good News for Road Warriors:
Laptop-Free Presentations

The Latest from Impatica: You don't have to lug your laptop to your next presentation. With Impatica ShowMate, you can project your PowerPoint presentation directly from your BlackBerry. ShowMate is a pocket-sized device that supports all PowerPoint presentation features including rich text, images, charts, graphs, animations, and slide transitions. Find out more about Impatica ShowMate>>>
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Impatica Presentation of the Month
MDS Nordion

It often helps to get ideas from other Impatica users.  How do they structure their presentations? What kind of graphics and animations work well? And how can you use narration to add excitement to your online content?

In this brief online presentation, MDS Nordion uses Impatica for PowerPoint 3.3.3 to successfully highlight the benefits and features of one of its products.

If you have a presentation you'd like us to feature for future editions of the newsletter, please drop us a line and point to your online Impatica presentation in an e-mail.
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2006 Slide Size Update
Design Impatica with “Screen Real Estate” in Mind

With every passing day, it seems that “screen real estate” becomes more valuable. What is screen real estate? Simply put, it is what you see on your computer screen.

Take a look at your computer screen right now. You see your browser controls, words, graphics, white space—all kinds of programming, design, and information elements.  

The effective use of screen real estate in Impatica is a balancing act—you'll want to show as much of your presentation and control bar as possible to minimize scrolling. But at the same time, your Impatica presentation will need to fit in with the other elements on your audience members' screen to avoid clutter.

And despite higher screen resolutions and larger screen sizes, effective Impatica layouts are getting smaller and smaller.

So which presentation size is best in 2006? It depends upon your audience...and your mode of delivery. To determine your slide size, consider these three venue factors:

• Your website. Take a look at your site's web stats to gain insight on how most of your visitors are experiencing your online presentations. Your 2006 stats may reveal that most of your online visitors are viewing your site with 800 x 600 resolution or greater (slides 7.5 x 5.6 in. or 19.05 x 14.3 cm), but that doesn't mean that you should make your presentation fill up the entire screen. Be sure to leave plenty of room for web elements other than your Impatica presentation or your audience may not see your entire presentation without scrolling.

• E-mail considerations. If you are e-mailing your impaticized presentation, limit your PowerPoint presentation to 6 inches (15.24 cm) wide. People who use the popular e-mail clients like Outlook Express can easily view a 6 x 2.5 in. (15.24 x 6.35 cm) presentation in their preview windows, with plenty of attractive white space. And the shorter height (2.5 in. or 6.35 cm) limits the amount of scrolling needed to see your entire presentation.

• Mobile devices. If you are e-mailing to a large number of people who use mobile devices such as BlackBerry handhelds, you'll want to accommodate their smaller screen size. This usually means 240 x 240 pixels or smaller (2.5 in. or 6.35 cm). The increase in popularity of mobile e-mail devices makes even more of a case for “smaller is better”.

So before you begin designing your next Impatica for PowerPoint presentation, decide on your slide's size, and set it within PowerPoint. As usual, Impatica will automatically preserve your settings and create an online presentation with your dimensions.

Here's how to set your slide's size in four easy steps:

1. In the Main Menu, select File > Page Setup

2. Under Slides sized for: select Custom

3. Enter the Width and Height you want

4. Under Orientation>Slides, select either Portrait or Landscape

And remember, a smaller presentation definitely impacts the real estate within your PowerPoint presentation, as well. Effective PowerPoint design in 2006 uses fewer bullet points, fewer words, and larger fonts. And truly great PowerPoint design relies more heavily on the emotional impact of simple yet compelling graphics.

In 2006, “small & simple” can make your online presentations sizzle.
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