The Mobile Presenter

Note: This article will not do PowerPoint justice since I do not have an Office 365 subscription - and without it, you can't edit presentations in this version of PowerPoint; you can only view and present them.

Rumours about an iOS version of Microsoft's Office suite have been floating around for a long time. Apparently, it was mainly held up by company politics. Now that Microsoft has a new CEO, some of those politics seem to have changed and Office for iOS is available from the AppStore. The price? The apps are free, but you need a subscription to Microsoft's Office 365 service to create new documents or edit existing ones. The service costs $10/€10 per month or $99/€99 per year for home use (other pricing options available for businesses and for students). This applies to all 3 apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

I'm only going to look at PowerPoint here - without the subscription, so I'll only be able to use it to view PowerPoint presentations.

Last year, I came across the Satechi Bluetooth Smart Pointer Mobile Presenter and to my delight, it worked as advertised. Finally a "normal" remote control that worked with my iPad. It's so much nicer to use than the rather clunky iPhone or iPod with Keynote Remote on it.

And then Apple released iOS 7 and Keynote for iOS 2.0 and the Satechi remote stopped working. Bummer.

A few days ago, I received an email from Satechi support pointing out that things seem to be working again now with iOS 7.1 and Keynote 2.1, which triggered me to try it out again. Here's what I found:

Something that stood out from a bad presentation I had to sit through recently was the speaker's insistence on explaining to us what was coming next, why she chose a photo, where it was taken, that she'd tested the presentation in front of friends before (which is recommendable, of course), etc. This sort of meta information seemed very important to her but didn't really help the audience in understanding the presentation any better. In other words, it was extraneous information that only distracted from the actual presentation.

Stuttgart (Germany, where I live) has a lively startup scene. For startups, as you can probably imagine, presentations are of enormous importance. Whether they're presenting to investors or potential customers - the problem is always the same: Having to convince the audience that this new idea works and is worth buying into. Many founders of startups, however, are more familiar with the (often technical) details of their operation than with the concepts of effective presentation. In making basic mistakes in their presentation, they may fail to reach their target audience and put their business at risk.

To help startups better understand how and why modern presentations works, and in cooperation with Startup Stuttgart, I'm going to give a special "Startup Edition" of my tried and tested Presenting for Geeks workshop on April 15 (6pm to 8:15pm) at Coworking Stuttgart.

When having to sit through a bad presentation, I usually try to entertain myself by making mental notes of all the mistakes the presenter makes (and take photos of the slides for my collection). But, to be honest, it's more frustrating than amusing; there are so many simple things that presenters could do to make their presentation at least a little better. The complete ignorance of all the available help (books, articles on the web, courses, even plain common sense) just baffles me.