Slideshare: Get Your Presentation Out There!

In my perusals and journeys through the library infosphere, Slideshare is a website that I have stumbled across multiple times. Basically, instead of presenting a PowerPoint and have your participants forget it in a couple of hours (unless they took notes or you just knocked them dead of course), you could just share the PowerPoint and have them look at it again and again.

While Slideshare's primary purpose is sharing presentations, it supports documents, PDFs, videos, and webinars. Slideshare allows you to easily embed a presentation on a blog or website, share on social media, or download a presentation that you found of particular interest.

The Zipcast feature allows you free, no-download web meetings, and Slidecast allows you to sync MP3 audio files with slides to create a webinar. Slideshare also boasts 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million monthly pageviews.

Although I haven't uploaded any presentations myself, I've glanced over the slides of multiple presentations that I wished I could have attended, and some places like ALA TechSource even have their webinar presentations archived on Slideshare. Needless to say, I get more and more excited the more I find out about Slideshare, and I'll definitely be uploading and browsing in the future.

PDFescape: Edit Those Uneditable PDFs

What do you think of PDFs? Kind of an odd question, but there is a reason for it. PDFs can be really nice if you need to reach a wide variety of computers with a single file type. Pretty much anything can read a PDF while other file extensions can't be opened unless you have that exact program.

For example, I work on a Windows, and I normally create posters in Publisher and then create a JPG file. Unfortunately, when I send that to our Community Resources Administrator who uses a MAC, it won't open the Publisher file, or the JPG extension.

So, PDF makes that problem go away because both MACs and Windows will open it. But, therein lies the rub! PDFs don't like to be edited.

When you are sending information back and forth that two people have to edit, or the PDF is actually a form you have to fill out, some PDFs don't let you edit them, and it is SO ANNOYING!

But, PDFescape has an answer to that problem. It allows you to edit a PDF by whiting an area out, and then adding text, images or web links. PDFescape can also be utilized for viewing PDFs, filling out forms, annotating PDFs, or designing PDF forms. While the premium version (the pay-some-money-version) has no ads, the free version has a few. But, they aren't overly obnoxious.

Personally, I have only used the edit side of things, and even though it was very useful, it didn't have a copy and paste feature! Once you create an element by whiting something out and then typing into it, it wouldn't let you copy it.

Now, the poster I was trying to create had a lot of repeating text, so this particular lack of feature was very agitating. But, if you are only filling out a form or fixing one area of a PDF, PDFescape is going to be awesome!