Thanks to Mike Sansone for bringing this very useful tool to my attention. In case some of you didn’t catch it on his site, I thought I’d talk about it here as well. The product is called Slidecast from a company called Slideshare which has built a community around sharing presentations on the web. Slidecast is the ability to mashup a presentation file (PowerPoint) with an audio file (MP3). Yes, there are tools like this out there, but Slidecast gives you the tools to do this online and for FREE!

Here’s a slidecast describing the tool.

Definitely worth checking out! Where do you see this becoming useful in your business?

I’ve been spending alot of time with Microsoft PowerPoint lately. Whether it’s a presentation, training, or interactive display at a trade show, I’ve been working on putting together many slides.

I came across the situation where I had to use a colored background on my slide rather than the standard white. The problem with this arose when all of my product images had a white background. My example of the baseball in the slide below highlights my issue.

Typically, I would have our graphics person do something in Photoshop to get rid of the white background. Then a coworker showed me a quick and easy tip. He showed me this tool on the picture toolbar:

By using this tool to click on the white background in the image, you get this:

Thanks to my co-worker, alot of time was saved removing backgrounds from many product images. PowerPoint can play a large role in marketing products and quick tips like this make creating slides easy for everyone.