Using Napkin.AI to Streamline Presentations

There is a lot of focus on artificial intelligence (AI) in the media right now. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. Yesterday I had a colleague ask me how I use AI in my job right now. I had to confess that I know lots of areas where it can be used, such as summarizing lengthy articles or generating complex code, but that I don't feel the need to use it. Then I thought back to when I created my last presentation. That is a classic example of where anyone can use AI to help.

I sit through a lot of presentations and hate it when someone creates overly-wordy slides. It makes for a very uninteresting presentation and is often called "Death by Powerpoint." When I find myself putting a bunch of text on a slide, I take a step back and try to figure out how to replace all the words with a simple picture. Sometimes that can be rather difficult and so I told my colleague that AI is a great way to streamline a presentation. We have an internal engine at Sony that we are encouraged to use. That keeps our confidential text from falling into the wrong hands.

My colleague asked if I had ever used napkin.ai, which is a website specifically designed to take presentation text and turn it into a picture. I immediately logged in and gave it a shot. I didn't have to create a new user or anything as I just logged in using my Google account. Then I copied some text from a personal document I had open and it generated several images for me to select. It worked amazingly well.

Should you find yourself trying to create a presentation and have a slide filled with text, I highly suggest you give napkin.ai a test. It may just help things become more easier to understand. Of course be sure not to input confidential or sensitive information as there is no guarantee it will remain so. 

My Favorite Short Cut: ALT-TAB

You can tell how long someone has been using computers by paying attention to the short cuts he/she uses to navigate on the computer. I usually have quite a few application running on my computer and I need to be able to quickly switch between them. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Windows 3.0 first came on the market, I used to only have one or two apps running and could easily just click between them. It didn't take long to quickly exhaust that functionality, especially with the small screens on laptops we had back then.

I remember leading a training session on a new database tool and I kept having to switch between a PowerPoint presentation and the tool. I would escape out of presentation mode, minimize PowerPoint, and show my demo. Once I completed the demo, I would expand PowerPoint and go back into presentation mode. Then someone showed me the power of ALT-TAB that allowed me to instantly switch between all running applications. I thought it was great and still use that key combination today even though there are more advanced ways of switching between running applications. For instance, you can see the running applications in Windows by just looking at the toolbar on the bottom of your screen. I still prefer ALT-TAB.

There are a number of other computer short cuts that will give away the length of time someone has been using computers. My work laptop run Microsoft Windows but I am an old Unix guy. When I open the Windows Power Shell it is a hard to remember not to use the "ls" command to get a directory listing of files instead of the preferred "dir" command familiar to those who learned "DOS." Fortunately Power Shell understands both commands and so I don't get the old "Syntax Error" I used to.

Another trick that really shows how old I am is from when I started using Oracle version 4. When you wanted to get a list of all the tables in the database, you would run the following command:

SELECT * FROM tab;

The result was a very simple listing of tables and some other basic information. Oracle later added more complete table definitions but I still use this simple command. Why? Because it is so simple and easy to remember. Are there better ways to find out what tables are in your database or schema? That depends upon how you define better. If you have to go to a manual and look it up, nope.

I used to work for a company that took PostgreSQL and made it look like Oracle for a lot less money. The first thing I tried when I sat down to play with the product was the command listed above. When it worked, I knew there were others at the company that appreciated quick and simple. I also knew they had people on the development staff that had used Oracle for a very long time, an important fact to me at the time.

Multitasking in Microsoft Teams is Painful

I have spent time working on multiple projects for my employer today and one of the tools we use is Microsoft Teams. I discovered a serious flaw when it comes to multitasking with it. The interface does not lend itself to switching between multiple projects as easily as a web browser. It cost me a lot of productivity today and I need to remember that in the future.

When you are in a browser you can open up multiple tabs for different websites and keep them all open at the same time. If you see a link that you want to visit but don't want to navigate away from your existing site, right-click on the link and it pulls up another tab. I generally only have 5 tabs open at a time. After that it gets too confusing. I wish Microsoft Teams had something similar.

We store a lot of files in Microsoft Teams so that we can share them easily instead of passing them around in e-mail. They are stored in OneDrive but most people share the link in the chat feature. Today I had two different presentations I started working on within Teams. When I needed to make an update in the other presentation, I would go look for it and lose my place in the first presentation. Then to make matters worse, I would get a chat message and lose both presentations.

There are some workarounds that would have allowed me to keep both presentations open in different windows and still be able to answer chat messages. Unfortunately that requires a bit of preparation before starting to work on the presentations in Teams. By the time I figured out I tried to do too many things at once, I had already wasted a lot of time. In the future, when I go to work on a presentation found in Microsoft Teams, I will be sure to open it in the stand-alone PowerPoint application so I don't have to keep searching for it after interruptions. Hopefully this tip helps you if you are a Microsoft Teams user.

Alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Ever since I gave back my work laptop I have been having to work without Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This has forced me to look at alternatives to those 3 pillar applications. Fortunately there are a number of other solutions you can use. While you may have to fix a few issues due to missing features, these other solutions work well for most tasks.

My home desktop computer is actually a Mac Mini. The Mac comes with 3 alternatives to Microsoft's suite of office products. Pages is the replacement for MS Word, Numbers is the replacement for Excel, and Keynote is the replacement for PowerPoint. I have to be honest and say that Pages does a pretty good job of replacing Word but I prefer Word. I also have to say that I prefer Excel to Numbers. I have used both of the Microsoft products for years and am probably just used to them. However there are some differences that make me wish I still had access to MS Word and Excel. That being said, Keynote is much better than PowerPoint. This is one area where I prefer the Apple product. It has a much cleaner interface and just seems to do things better.

Don't worry, you don't need to have a Mac to replace Microsoft's Office software. There are a number of other alternatives. My favorite is probably LibreOffice. It used to be called OpenOffice and was owned by Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice was originally developed in Germany as a replacement for Microsoft Office when Sun purchased it. Sun then open sourced the software and it gathered quite the following. When Oracle bought Sun, the open-source contributors were afraid Oracle would ruin the product and so they created a fork of the project that became LibreOffice. Both are actually great replacements and work well.

I have done a lot of work helping both the LibreOffice and OpenOffice communities. I think they are very full-featured products and don't hesitate to recommend them as alternatives to Microsoft Office. Unfortunately I have been too lazy to load either of them on my Mac as the Apple alternatives also work and allow me to do anything I need related to my current job search. Perhaps when I have access to the Microsoft suite of products, I will continue to use the alternatives and save my next company some money.

Creating Computer Map Animations

One nice thing about creating a video for YouTube is having a good example of technology that I can reference. Collecting videos and photos is relatively easy. When it came to adding animated maps of where Goblin Valley is located, I did not know what to do. I knew that Google has a pretty good maps of anywhere in the world and so I started there. I tried to do everything with Google Maps but then thought about using Google Earth. Earth is better for doing flyovers like I have at the beginning of the video (at 0:29). You are limited with the web version of Google Earth and I recommend the stand-alone application as it is significantly more flexible.

So how did I do the animations for the other 2 maps (at 1:25 and 5:56)? I asked one of my coworkers for ideas and he suggested using Microsoft PowerPoint. I know how to do that and so I took a screen shot from Google Maps, loaded it into PowerPoint, then added some circles and arrows. Now I just needed to record the animation on my screen. I used the Quicktime player on my Mac to do that. How? Well Quicktime allows you to do screen recordings. I simply started Quicktime and went into the "File" menu where there is a "New Screen Recording" menu item. It brings up a red record button. When I clicked on the button, it asked me to select the part of the screen I wanted to record. Once I selected it, a large "Start Recording" button appeared. Then when I was done recording, I brought up the application bar and right-clicked on the Quicktime icon. It brought up a menu with a menu item to "Stop Recording." Quicktime then allows you to save the MP4 movie file anywhere you want.

Once I had all of my videos, photos, and animations, I combined them all together using iMovie. Everything came together quite easily looked great. The last thing I did was to add in music and my narration. For that I used GarageBand, but this is a topic for another post.

Creating a PowerPoint Template

I have to give a presentation in about 6 weeks and needed to create a new PowerPoint template. Normally a company will have a standard set of templates to use, but my presentation will be given to numerous organizations and other presenters will have the option of using the template that I created today. So none of our existing templates seemed like a good choice.

At first I thought creating a PowerPoint template was going to be easy. I looked at a few of the standard ones I have used but quickly realized none of them were going to work for me. So I started with the blank white template that comes with every version of Microsoft Office. There was a company logo I wanted to use and so I added it from one of my other templates. Then there were some graphics that I copied over from others. Finally I pulled in a background that I like as it does a good job of representing large amounts of data, which is what my presentation is all about. Unfortunately the graphic was just too colorful and nobody could read any text placed on top of it regardless of the color or font. PowerPoint provides a few tools to lighten up the graphic and so I did to the point where black text was easily recognized and actually looked good.

I was pretty happy with the few sample slides I put together and called over one of my coworkers to let me know his thoughts. He thought it looked pretty good except for the font. Naturally I listened to his advice changed the font to something I have liked in the past. It was amazing how the presentation popped off the page with such a subtle change.

I must say that I am pretty happy with the presentation so far. It took me about five times as long to put together the template as I expected and probably am not finished. Remember that if you have to put together any presentations and want to create your own template. There were a lot of trips between "Master Slide" view and my presentation, but in the end it turned out pretty good.