The Webinar Blog

Brute Force Method For Dealing With PowerPoint Font Problems

There are two common scenarios where PowerPoint fonts cause a problem in webinars:

1) Creating the PowerPoint on one computer and displaying it on another

2) Uploading the PowerPoint to a web conferencing product that converts and stores the slides in the conference room for display to participants

In both cases, you have the potential to see discrepancies in the text on slides. One of my clients creates their PowerPoints on a Mac. When I open their files on my Windows computer, the bullet symbols that they see as hyphens show up as little mailbox icons. I have to manually change the bullet symbol selection to get it back to a hyphen on Windows.

If a PowerPoint creator uses proprietary or non-system fonts, there is no telling what may happen when they ship the file to someone else. Even though PowerPoint gives creators a way to embed the fonts in the presentation, it still may not work. If PowerPoint can't find a font on your computer, it just changes the text to a different font for you, usually causing problems with incorrect line wrapping in the process. If the presentation doesn't look right on your screen, it won't look right when you use screen sharing to display it in your webinar!

Situation number 2 in my list is a more special-case scenario. Certain web conferencing products use an alternative to screen sharing for showing PowerPoint slides. You upload your PowerPoint file into the conference room and the software goes through a conversion step (usually turning it into a Flash or HTML5 "movie" internally - although you don't know that).

The PowerPoint may look fine on your computer… You have all the fonts installed, and everything shows up as expected. But when you try to display your slides in the conference, you see text converted to other fonts. That is because some of the most popular conversion algorithms have no way to pick up embedded proprietary fonts.

Fig 1: Fonts as they look in PowerPoint on my computer

 

Fig 2: The same slide uploaded and displayed in a web conferencing product

 

With that background behind us, we are ready to look at a "quick 'n dirty" brute force workaround when this happens to you and you can't think of any other way to solve your problems. This solution has a major caveat that you need to be aware of, but a lot of times it will save you in a crisis.

The short description is to save the presentation as a set of pictures, one for each slide. Then you create a new presentation composed of the slide pictures.

 

STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS

1) Open the PowerPoint on a computer that displays everything properly. Choose "File - Save As" and select the option for JPEG File Interchange Format (*.jpg). Check my notes farther down for an explanation of why this is your best choice.

2) When asked "Which slides do you want to export?" choose the button for "All Slides"

3) Designate a destination folder for the save. PowerPoint will create a series of files named slide1.jpg, slide2.jpg and so on.

4) Open a new PowerPoint file and make sure the slide aspect ratio is the same as your original (4:3 or 16:9). Add a bunch of blank slides… The same number as you had in your original.

5) On slide #1, choose the command to "Insert Pictures." Choose slide1.jpg from your save folder. Page down and repeat the process for each slide.

6) Save the new presentation. You are done. This version can be uploaded or shared through screen sharing on any other computer, with no chance of text getting replaced (since you have eliminated all text elements).

UPDATED May 29: Huge thanks to Chantal Bosse for suggesting a faster insert method for steps 4 and 5. Just use the "Insert Photo Album" command to insert all the pictures at once. You can avoid having to create blank slides and insert each slide picture separately.

 

IMPORTANT CAVEATS AND CONSIDERATIONS

This is a "frozen in time" version of your PowerPoint. You cannot make any last-minute edits and alterations to individual elements, since each slide has been flattened to a single picture.

You lose all slide transitions and animation effects from your original presentation. Each slide is just a static image. You can always add slide transitions back in the new file if desired.

Some "upload and convert" webinar tools reduce the resolution or image quality on pictures. Your mileage will vary. Make sure to test how it looks in your webinar program.

 

OTHER NOTES AND SUPPORTING DETAILS

Your current "view size" does not matter when you save your slides as pictures. Whether you are viewing at 40%, 100%, or 200%, the pictures are saved at the perfect size to fill a slide - 960x720 pixels for older 4:3 aspect ratio presentations, and 1280x720 for widescreen 16:9 presentations.

JPG gives you the best compromise of image quality vs file size. I tried tests with GIF, JPG, and PNG. GIF has noticeably lower image quality and a slightly larger file size than JPG. PNG may result in microscopically better image quality, but I am not convinced that it is not just expectation bias. I find myself squinting and asking myself if there is really a difference. And PNG files are close to three times larger than JPG. Your final presentation size will be noticeably different.

Inserting pictures into your new presentation will go a LOT faster if you add the Insert Pictures command icon to your Quick Access Toolbar. It's faster than using the keyboard shortcut of Alt+N, P. You can get very fast at "click icon, choose file, press page down."

 

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint design,PowerPoint fonts,presentation design,web conference,web conferencing,webinar,web seminar,webcast,webcasting,web meetings,online meeting

New Webex Ad Leaves Me Baffled

Cisco just released a new ad for the rebranded Webex (as opposed to the previous WebEx) collaboration suite of products. Well, it SAYS it's for Webex… To my ears, it sounds like an ad for the concept of collaboration.

You can watch the advertisement and read some of its background on the Ad Age website at http://creativity-online.com/work/cisco-millie-bobby-brown/54613.

Advertising is a tricky business. You never know what will work until you try it, and a new ad may seem ineffective at first until viewed in the context of a larger ongoing campaign. But my take on this is that it sells the wrong value proposition to the wrong audience using the wrong arguments.

We can start with the obligatory carefully crafted sound bite issued by corporate marketing when a company introduces a new ad campaign. The Ad Age article quotes Cisco's chief marketing officer talking about their choice of spokesperson, 14-year-old Millie Bobby Brown from the TV show Stranger Things: "Millie's youth was a determinant in casting her. As we continue to keep the Cisco brand fresh and unexpected, Millie represents us in a new light to a new generation."

If Cisco is trying to appeal to a new generation, why are they attempting to sell the concept of collaboration as if it is a newly-minted idea that nobody has ever thought of before? The current generation has been collaborating online for their entire lives. They have never known a time when they didn't have immediate access to instantaneous two-way communication with every friend and colleague they have. It's a given, not an awe-inspiring paradigm shift.

Then we have the narration and visuals used in the advertisement itself. The first words are: "What makes us human? Collaboration. It's in our DNA." So does that mean that termites, ants, bees, and killer whales are human as well? Collaboration is sure as heck in their DNA.

Millie walks by a bicyclist in a wind tunnel and gives him a knowing glance while saying: "When we work together and build on each others' ideas, we can create amazing things." Sure, if I think about it long enough in abstract terms, I can appreciate the idea of unseen scientists off-screen somewhere, studying the wind tunnel results. But choosing a competitive cyclist as your focal image seems a strange choice… It's an iconic example of individual effort and achievement in sports.

A bit later in the ad, the narration doubles down on collaboration being used to "create amazing things and move… the world… forward." This just seems WAY too highfalutin' fer your average businessperson wanting to hold a meeting or give a presentation. Nobody buys collaboration software to move… the world… forward. They use it to take care of the day to day minutiae of business, one damned meeting at a time. Who is this concept supposed to appeal to?

It's finally time to hit the core value proposition… that sharing ideas and working with other people is beneficial. But the way it's sold in the ad is that if ONLY there were a theoretical way to accomplish such a crazy idea, "We would no longer feel isolated. We would no longer feel alone." Millie touches the chin of a little girl in a school uniform who seems positively catatonic in her lack of reaction to human touch. Again, I just feel like the ad has completely missed the pain point of its business audience. This isn't a therapy tool for shut-ins. The point of online web collaboration has to be about achieving goals or reducing lost time or being efficient or SOMETHING besides feeling better about your poor lonely existence!

Then comes a visual that makes me scratch my head in complete confusion… Millie stands in front of a group of faceless mannequins, all dressed in similar drab hoodies. She says "The more we work together, the more human we'll be." As she does this, she pulls her own hoodie over her head to look as much as possible like the motionless statues around her. Isn't that the exact OPPOSITE of what the script is trying to convey? Maybe this is a reference to Stranger Things… I never watched the show. But it is weird with a capital Q.

At the very end of the minute and a half ad, we finally learn what is being promoted. A simple text overlay shows us "Cisco Webex" while Millie says "This is Cisco Webex." But for some reason, the director had her pronounce it as if it were still being spelled the old way, with the accent on the final syllable and an implied capital E: "This is web-EX" -- If I were introducing new branding that changed the product label to a normally-capitalized word, I would want people to say it the way it is naturally written, emphasizing the single capital letter at the front: "WEBex."

Well, I'm not a B-to-B advertiser. Good luck to Cisco and I hope the new campaign stimulates more interest in web collaboration. It's good for all of us. Let's get out there and move… the world… forward!

 

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Webinar Presentations Are NOT The Same As In-Room

I was asked to moderate a webinar recently featuring a guest speaker. The speaker was an expert in her field with many decades of experience presenting and leading workshops in her subject. She had never presented on a webinar and was somewhat nervous about the process.

The organizer of the event had apparently assuaged her fears by telling her, "Don't worry. It's just like standing in front of a room and giving a talk. You talk and you show your slides. Easy!"

By the time I got inserted into the process, the presenter had created a workshop-style talk that would have been dynamite in a classroom setting. She had workbooks prepared with long exercises laying out hypothetical study scenarios and lists of discussion questions. She asked me how we were going to distribute the workbooks to the students.

Unfortunately, this particular webinar had been set up as an ad-hoc session. Attendees did not have to preregister. The organizer sent out the join link and effectively said, "Show up online if you want to attend!" So there was no way to know who would be in attendance and no way to send out pre-event communications or materials.

I said that I could make the materials available for download in the session, but that I could not guarantee that attendees would be able to print them out. We often get attendees joining on mobile devices, and I knew of one group that regularly attended together while having drinks and appetizers at a local restaurant.

On the day of the webinar, she started the session by inviting each attendee in turn to open their microphone and tell us about themself. She spent time responding to each person and their experience level. This can be a nice way to start an in-person workshop or class where the attendees share a physical space and can see and relate to the person talking. Online, it quickly gets repetitive and slows down the crucial early portion of the proceedings where attendees are looking for an indication of value. Attendees do not feel the same sense of community and shared experience when they sit alone in front of a computer screen. I find that often a group chat works better as an ice-breaker and community-builder than sequential introductions. Everyone can see and respond at once, without having to wait for their turn in line and without feeling like they are caught in a spotlight.

Later in the session, she invited the audience members to open the document they had downloaded and read through the description. People did not know when to stop reading the 5-page exercise. She could not see them and we just sat in-session with about 6 minutes of silence. When we started the conversation again, it was difficult to get people back into an interactive and contributing frame of mind. They had become passive readers, rather than participating members in a discussion.

My rule of thumb in online sessions is to always minimize "dead air." Don't give attendees long reading assignments (through external materials or on-screen text). Chop reading into small "bite size" pieces. Each snippet should introduce a short, easily understood point that can be discussed before moving on to the next item.

While the mechanics of a webinar CAN be exactly the same as you would use for an in-room class or presentation, it works to your advantage to modify your approach for the online environment. Help your guest speakers to understand the key differences BEFORE they develop their materials, rather than forcing rewrites after everything is completed.

 

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