One of the joys that the internet has brought to the world of public speaking is the abilityt to watch and replay some of the worlds best (and worst!) speakers online wherever you are in the world.

My favourite site for this is TED  (www.ted.com). The speakers on TED vary from good to outstanding in terms of their delivery and the content is always thought provoking and highly educational.

Today I spent some of my lunch hour watching a presentation by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink.

I recommend that you too check it out.

Malcolm Gladwell on TED

Enjoy & learn!

After giving a talk last night in which I used a lot of images and very little text, one of the participants emailed me with the following question:

“Dear Gavin,
I attended you very helpful presentation at the Basingstoke Country Park Hotel yesterday.  There is a 13^th tip that I would find helpful.  When I put photos into my presentations the file size grows massively and it becomes difficult to manage.  I have real difficulties e-mailing presentations with lots of photos in for example.

How do I insert photos in a PowerPoint presentation and yet keep the file size down? I know there must be a way of doing it.

I would appreciate your advice.”

My response was as follows:

“Thanks Steve – What a great question:

 For Powerpoint 2003:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA011168821033.aspx

 For Powerpoint 2007:
http://presentationsoft.about.com/od/powerpoint2007/ss/080508compress.htm

 Or you could buy a purpose built file compression utility such as

http://www.balesio.com/fileminimizer/eng/index.php?gclid=CIGrodblxZsCFVUA4wodiEucDw

 or

http://www.neuxpower.com/products/nxpowerlite-desktop/

 I haven’t tried either of these myself but i think they both have free trial versions.”

 Later in the day he emailed me back and this was his response:

Brilliant!  I’ve just reduced the size of a presentation from 27,843 kb to 519 kb.

Based on his response I thought that some of you might find these links useful too.