Presentations

... ever been to a conference and your (Powerpoint) presentation did not work the way you expected?

Of course, there are other "work-arounds" to this common problem like using PDF instead of PPT and other presentation programs, but Plone (the Content Management System used here) has a special and useful - though at the moment still VERY SIMPLE - alternative:

If you structure your document with Headings and Subheading, these will show up in the presentation as new slides (= headings) and bulleted lists (= subheadings) of the items you want to talk about, while the normal text - usually being identical with the words you want to speak in front of the audience - does not show up. (This prevents you from creating too long presentations with lots of texts that you then read from the screen: Your audience is usually able to read themselves, so in such cases your presence is, in fact, not needed anymore... ;-) )

In addition to the advantage of having your presentation available wherever you are and have an internet connection, it also allows the audience to go to the website and read the full text again if they are interested - long before the paper might be published - and even leave comments for you. Of course, you may as well hide the document from view.

 As mentioned above, at the moment the graphical and other possibilities of these presentation are only very simple, but the should be good enough to present your ideas in a structured way. (I hope to have time to work on a rather better template for our portal, so you may be able to present your information in a more beautiful way.)

I created a simple example to demonstrate the possibilities and restrictions of this presentation mode.