Slick Presentations Without Bloatware

Think of making an electronic presentation and, if using the ubiquitous Windows OS, one automatically thinks: PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is good, of course. Very good. In fact, it’s so good, presenters often go overboard in adding sounds and special effects, turning a simple presentation into a three ring circus. Three Ring Circuses have their plus points, but those points don’t go down too well in a corporate setting.

Let’s face it. What do you need in a corporate presentation? Some slides to display certain tables and charts. Some slides to highlight the salient points of your talk. Some kind of transition between slides and some way to control the transition. That’s it. The other bells and whistles make nice selling points for the software, but use them in a presentation, and you’re likely to send your audience home with bells ringing and whistles blowing in their heads, instead of what you want them to remember.

Ever think of using Adobe Acrobat? That’s right, that software you use to zip files across the Internet without having to face font-matching issues or long upload and download waits. Acrobat has a pretty nifty presentation feature, and the PDF you create is far smaller than a ppt file. As a test, I created a two-page presentation in Acrobat, and, using the same graphics and text, created one in PowerPoint. The resultant ppt file was 45 K. The PDF? 11 K.

But what if you don’t have Acrobat?

There’s still a way – and a pretty quick way at that – to create your PDF presentation.

Here’s how.

First, download the free PDF reDirect printer from:
http://www.topshareware.com/PDF-reDirect-download-7757.htm

Install the software. It adds a “virtual printer” called PDF reDirect onto your PC. I’ll tell you how to use that to create a PDF file in a minute. First, let’s create your presentation. You can create it using any document creation software, or, for more sophisticated presentations, graphic utilities like CorelDraw, Corel Photopaint or Adobe Photoshop. Beware the bells and whistles, though.

For now, let’s talk about making your presentation using Word. Open a new Word document. Go to File > Page Setup. Click the Paper Size tab. Choose SVGA. Click OK. Choose a background if you wish, by going to Format > Background and then selecting Fill Effects. Choose a texture, pattern or picture and OK your way out. Now lay out your slide, putting a picture if you wish, bullet points, whatever you wish your slide to have. Press Control+End, then Control+Enter to go to the next slide. Repeat these steps to add as many slides as you need.

Now you’re ready to make your PDF. Go to File > Print and choose PDF reDirect as the printer. Click OK and type a name for your PDF, after navigating your way to wherever you wish to save the PDF. Click Save. Depending on the number of slides, creating the PDF may take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two.

Once it’s ready, here’s how you can set up your PDF into a presentation:

Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader (use the latest, it’s free to download and use anyway. I use 5.0). Click Edit > Preferences (or click Control+K). You’ll get a dialog box showing you various options and check boxes.

If you wish to have your slides advance automatically, check the “Advance Every” box and type the number of seconds you wish each slide to be displayed.

Check the “Advance On Any Click” box. (Even if you check the automatic advance option, it’s a good idea to keep this box checked too)

If you wish to have a repetitive presentation (such as at a kiosk at an exhibition) check the “Loop After last Page” option

Make sure the “Escape Key Exits” box is checked.

Below these options, you’ll see the Default Transition drop list. Random Transition is usually good enough, but if you prefer one type of transition, select that one. This is where PowerPoint scores over PDF, since you can specify specific transitions for each slide in PowerPoint, which you can’t do here. To my mind, it doesn’t really matter, though. Random Transition works fine for me.

Click OK.

To view your presentation, Go to View > Full Screen (or press Control+L)

That’s it! Your presentation’s done!

Note: If you make your presentation this way to an open audience, you are likely to be approached afterwards by someone with suggestions to make your presentation better. He (it is almost always a he) will offer you kindly advice on adding bells and whistles. Then he will offer you his card, which will say he belongs to a design house. Smile at him and say thank you, then ignore his advice. He isn’t your target audience.

Disclaimer: The author has no affiliation with Adobe or Microsoft. All trademarks and copyrights are acknowledged.