As you may have heard, PowerPoint turned 20 recently. Love it or loathe it, it’s part of business, no question. Maybe exiting it’s teenage years, old PPT will mellow out and start being civil to its parents again.
In the mean time, just back from about 30,000 miles of travel and hours of presentation, I’ll take a moment to recognize my favorite PowerPoint accessory, the wireless presentation remote. Nothing makes a droning presentation drone worse than being tied to the laptop or podium and not moving. A wireless remote lets you engage the audience more naturally and makes it less likely you’ll fall victim to deep vein thrombosis while presenting.
My weapon of choice is the Mobile Edge Slim Line Wireless Presentation Remote, pictured here just about life size. It’s small (stores in your laptop’s PC card slot!), it’s simple (only six buttons), it works anywhere, anytime (with a usb thingie built in), and it has a “laser!” What more could you want? You don’t need full multimedia control, you just need to be able to advance the slides and make your point easily. And don’t forget the power of the period key, which blanks the PPT screen so you can have a heart-to-heart with the audience without the distraction of the slides.
February 19, 2008 at 12:28 am
[...] It took a couple of years. Well, it took a couple of years to finally execute the google search that found me the raw material for the joke I needed. I practiced it, I tested it, and then I deployed it in the field, and it delivered for me. It even worked in France through a translator. It got a laugh in Germany – in English. In Asia, it also helped me figure out how fluent in English my audience was before getting to the meat of the presentation. This joke was almost as valuable as my wireless presentation remote. [...]