Publish and Share Your Presentations in the Cloud

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SlideShare provides several ways to share publically or privately your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations on the web. I tested 3 of them and included my quick comments highlighted in boldface fonts.

1. From the SlideShare web site after creating a free account and logging in.

The whole process is very straightforward and there is no need to download and set up any software on your computer.

Note: Supported formats include presentations such as PowerPoint- ppt, pps, pot; OpenOffice- odp, pdf; Apple Keynote- upload as .zip or pdf, and documents and spreadsheets such as Microsoft Office- doc, rtf, xls; OpenOffice- odt, ods, pdf. For pptx or docx (Microsoft Office 2007+), please save in lower version (ppt/doc) or save as pdf. The max size: 100 MB.

2. Using a plugin for Microsoft Office 2007 to edit and publish presentations directly to their SlideShare accounts. You can download the free plugin here.

Note: You need PowerPoint 2007 for Windows. Earlier versions of PowerPoint, and PowerPoint for Mac, are not supported (yet). Supported versions of Windows are Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or greater and Windows Vista. IMPORTANT: Check in "Control Panel>Add or Remove Programs" to make sure you have the latest version of the .Net framework (Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1). This is a mandatory pre-requisite for the SlideShare Ribbon for PowerPoint.

Also, after uploading the file, you may have to wait for a few minutes until the presentation is shown on your “MySlideSpace”.

3. Using a plugin for IE or Firefox. Follow 3 simple steps:

· First download the plugins and install in your browser.

· Hover on the file URL, do a right click and select "Upload to SlideShare".

· Fill out the details as usual and publish; slideshows will be uploaded publicly

Note: The “Upload to SlideShare” option is available on almost any hyperlink even if it is not a link to a valid presentation file. The one exception I found was that it was not available on a link in my skydrive.live.com account b/c the hyperlink was to a tif file or png file.

I ran into one issue with this option. It required me to supply a user account and password for basic authentication, which I did. But for some reason it just didn’t work on my IE 7.0.

According to the SlideShare web site, you can also upload and share presentations using email or url.