Author-it Slide Show Presentations

An Introduction from the CEO and Founder of Author-it

For many years I have been involved in producing slide show presentations for various reasons including speaking engagements, sales presentations, training and eLearning, and numerous management meetings. The problem is it takes up so much time, and I often end up making silly but costly or embarrassing mistakes - like the time I left a prospective client's name in a slide when presenting to another.

I find myself reusing slides from past presentations regularly, and the only way I can do that with standard office tools like PowerPoint is to copy and paste. That does not sit well with my love of single sourcing.

So, to cut a long story short we decided to do something about it. The Author-it team have developed a set of templates and styles sheets that allow publishing of high quality slide show presentations right out of Author-it using HTML. This means I can present it in a browser and include all sorts of "cool" stuff, like flash and other dynamic effects.

The advantages have been quite staggering. I can now quickly assemble presentations from existing single sourced components. I can reuse individual points, whole slides, even sets of slides (say, for a case study). I can use variables to act as place holders for changeable information - including client names. This has made my life much easier, and my presentations much more professional.

When I am ready, I simply click a button and I have a presentation. I can publish to HTML for the slide show and to Word for the handouts. We have designed a number of presentation themes and no matter what style a slide is used in, it takes on the look of that presentation. Best of all, when our styles change the content is never affected. The next time I publish, everything works and looks great too!

As an international company, we have clients and business partners all over the world and often need to translate presentations into other languages. Now that I have all my presentations in Author-it this is easily managed through the Author-it Localization Manager. Now reused slides are only translated once, and I only update the slides that have actually changed, rather than the whole presentation. I not only save time and money, but deliver a consistent message.

The most amazing thing about this development was that it did not require change to a single line of code in Author-it. It was all done with Author-it's current functionality! Just goes to prove how flexible and configurable Author-it is.

So if you think publishing presentations with Author-it could benefit you, please follow the simple instructions to setup the required objects and templates in Author-it.

Regards,

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation