PRESENTATIONS FOR THE WEB: JUST DON'T MISS THE POINT.

It is beyond any question that there is value in teaching, analyzing, and sharing your experiences with others. This represents more than an exciting endeavor; it also means that you are a conscious and dedicated professional, willing to teach and learn in a continuing educational process.

It is a fairly common task in our professional activity to report a technique, explain a guideline, present a protocol or discuss a clinical case. We have to perform these tasks almost as an every day activity. Very often we are requested to show techniques, results or both at one of our service's local meetings. Then, there we are!. Here comes another presentation.

Next thing to happen is a sensation of not being able to demonstrate confidence. We will begin wondering about the audience's acceptance and appreciation of our presentation. Everybody feels a little jittery when facing an important speaking engagement. We want to shine but fear we may forget what we are supposed to say, or fail in other ways.

The ability to deliver a speech in a professional manner is a skill that we will use for a lifetime, and should be educated on every occasion. There are a few general guidelines to prepare and deliver a successful speech. However, only two rules are really important: control the anxiety and be prepared well ahead of time. There is no an absolute or comprehensive directive for the content and style of your presentations. Keep in mind that presenting to an audience can be a difficult task. Rehearse several times. And, just don't worry if you are not perfect at the first time.

FIRST STEPS

In order to prepare a presentation, we thoroughly search the subject, write long notes and prepare a full report that will serve as a source for the information we intend to share, and that will reinforce the critical points we want to discuss.

It is difficult to over estimate the importance of a careful preparation. Five minutes on the floor in front of our boss and peers may represent a lot towards professional success or failure. In order to succeed we plan our speech to formulate a precise objective. This should be represented by a simple and concise statement of intent.

Next we will consider our audience and try to determine how best to achieve our objectives in the context of these people. This includes the identification of their aims and expectations while attending our presentation. We will then give a definite structure and format to our speech, in order to allow for the audience to follow our thoughts. The structure must be simple, direct, and lead the audience to the critical points of our talk with no dangerous shortcomings.

A series of linked statements that will ultimately lead to a conclusion is perhaps the simplest structure for an oral presentation. An experienced presenter may fluently manage more complicated structures, but these require a lot more work to design and prepare. With no doubts, whatever structure is chosen for a given speech, the end result should hopefully be absolutely the same.

It is imperative that the structure of a presentation has the classic beginning-middle-end format, just like a movie or a novel, only with less parallel stories. A presentation must be limited to the essential characters; a large cast is not only unnecessary, it is detrimental.

VISUAL AIDS

Today's presenters, either professional or occasional, will not even try to deliver a speech, no matter how simple it might be, without the help of visual aids. Most people in the audience expect a visual reinforcement for any verbal message being delivered. Also, one of the main objectives of any experienced presenter is to prepare the visual aids to be the prime messenger. His words will just guide the audience throught the aids and as a consequence through the presentation's subject.

Not too long ago, visuals for a presentation were flip charts and mimeographed handouts typed up on an electric typewriter.

PowerPoint®^* and other presentation graphics software have brought us a long way in a short time. The tools we now have give us the ability to create sophisticated pages replete with color, animation, charts, graphs, perfectly set fonts of any size, and illustrative or photographic backgrounds. A well designed set of slides can even deliver a subliminal message that is as effective as the main message to be presented.

For a series of reasons PowerPoint has become the premier software to prepare presentations. Nine out of each group of ten presentation visuals are prepared with this package. PowerPoint has an easy and intuitive interface. It also has an unbeatable advantage that is a near zero learning curve. Any person able to turn a computer on and open an application can use PowerPoint to design a magnificent set of slides to illustrate a presentation. Or, even better, to transform an oral presentation into an unforgettable visual presentation guided by a few spoken words. We do not have to become designers. It suffices to know the 6/6 rule: no more than six words per bullet and no more than 6 lines on a slide. It is also a good rule to prepare just enough slides to fill the available time. Let's call it a 80% rule. A ten minutes presentation should be easily and comfortably delivered with the aid of 8 slides.

SHARING INFORMATION

Preparing and delivering a presentation usually takes a lot of work. We spend many hours researching, writing and reviewing the subject, just to delineate the important points that will constitute the main message. Then we prepare our slides. We make sure that our slides not only perfectly match the structure and sequence of our presentation; the slides should deliver the message by themselves. Our speech will just be an addition to them and ideally would guide the audience to the conclusion.

It is unfortunate that so much work and so much useful information is shared only with a few individuals or with a small audience. Right now, at the cyber age, the world wide web has turned into a reality the dream of an universal accessibility to information. At this information era, it is quite obvious that anything less than 1,000 individuals may be considered a small audience. Why should someone restrict a well elaborated body of information to a group of individuals sitting in a room?. Well, you are reading this article, then you know how immense an audience is eagerly waiting to share your information on the world wide web. Internet is the best available vehicle to share information. Our peers are really spread all over the world and our presentation is a just a few mouse clicks away from them. No matter where they live - be it Japan, China, Australia or next door.

Dissemination of research was, of course, one of the original purposes of the Internet. Today the web is used for this purpose to a large extent and this tendency is continuously growing. Websites and homepages have usually replaced printed journals to disseminate first hand scientific information.

POSTING PRESENTATIONS ON THE WEB

Publishing information on the web is an easy job for everyone with an Internet access account. All ISPs offer some disk space for their customer to upload a personal homepage. It is a very easy matter to upload a PowerPoint presentation and make it available to the world. Is it not?. Well, "yeah" and "nope"! .

PowerPoint was designed to create presentations to be delivered offline. PPT files are large, and the whole presentation has to be downloaded before the reader starts viewing it. If the author adds a little background audio or a narration to the presentation, the final files will be so large that downloading and viewing them becomes virtually above any websurfer's tolerance. Besides, the computer must have a copy of PowerPoint or at least a PPT viewer installed in order to view the presentation. A little shortcut is to publish the presentation as an HTML file. Unfortunately, in this case all animation, synchronization and special effects that grab the audience's attention are lost. And, even worse, the slideshow continues to be slow and dependent upon the Internet traffic speed and connection.

No matter how important the subject might be, most people will not be able to watch those presentations. We should not forget that over 80% of websurfers use a slow, irritating dial up connection. Cable and other high speed connections are still a luxury for most people worldwide.

FLASH TECHNOLOGY

Well, now comes the good news. A single word makes all the difference. It is probably the most read and heard word in today's Internet. This magic word is "Flash®"^**. These 5 letters have brought a lot of new possibilities to the Internet. Flash is a multimedia technology that permits to combine text, images, graphics, audio, video, animation and special effects in a single file.

Flash has functioned primarily as an authoring application for web developers and designers, enabling the creation of high-impact, fully interactive web sites and presentations. Previous to Flash, creating animated presentations (complete with sound) involved large PowerPoint files, which required equally robust bandwidth. Flash files, in contrast, can be very small, making bandwidth less of a concern.

Flash has been developed to constitute the best available technology to present images and animations through the Internet. Flash is very stable and resourceful, and permits an experienced designer to create the most exciting and impressive presentations. It has truly set a new standard for online graphics manipulation. Nothing, absolutely nothing compares to a flash presentation. In addition to its magnificent quality and definition, two unique advantages of flash are the small files size and the intrinsic capacity to stream its own files. Streaming a flash file does not require any special program. It does it naturally.

POWERPOINT TO FLASH CONVERSION

As a natural evolution of technology, both PowerPoint and Flash have been joined to facilitate our lives as presenters. New software can convert a PowerPoint presentation into a Flash presentation without a single line of coding. All it takes is a mouse click. Yes, you read it right. With a single mouse click a fully animated and narrated PowerPoint presentation can be converted into a flash presentation by anyone. It may sound like magic. And it really does, at least for us.

Roboflash®^*** is a new word in the presentations world. Roboflash is a toolkit that includes PPT Converter among its seven programs. Converting PPT to Flash really "shrinks" the file. A regular PowerPoint file will result in a flash file that is about 10% the size of the original file. Such a small file will load very rapidly, and more importantly, the file will naturally stream. Flash "natural" streaming technology will make our presentations start as soon as the visitors click on the link. Those ancient days of never ending downloads are gone.

In addition, PPT Converter prevents others from changing or modifying our presentations by converting them to Flash format. And if you want to distribute your presentations on a CD you may save the same file as an autoexecutable (.exe), which not only protects your work but preserve the animations and transitions, and can be seen on any computer with no special viewer requirements.

Roboflash has a few other tools that can be very helpful to those who prepare presentations very often and for professional webdesigners.

Now we cannot see a single reason to explain why our presentations are not shared with our large perfusion community worldwide.

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