PowerPoint Plug-ins

This month's Inc. magazine featured two plug-ins to help you with your PowerPoint presentations. These inexpensive plug-ins can pump up your presentations with design and teamwork. I'm really excited about  LiveLoop. I am always working on presentations in teams and the LiveLoop plug-in allows unlimited number of people to to do real-time collaboration inside PowerPoint. Try it out for free, but after 3 presentations you'll pay $9 for unlimited saves. Let Professor Hans von Puppet tell you all about it!

After your one-millionth PowerPoint presentation it can be difficult to make it feel new and fresh.  The VisualBee plug-in offers 150 templates to mix things up. You put in the text and then VisualBee does the design. It changes the fonts and colors and even adds images. About 50 of the templates are free but subscriptions start around $10 for access to more options.

More Ways to Google for Market Research

Last week in the Tracking Down Free Market Research post, Laura revealed one of our secrets to finding expensive market research reports using Google. Here's another trick to use when you aren't lucky enough to find the entire research report. Look for excerpts of  that report, especially charts and graphs, highlighted in PowerPoint presentations. You can look in SlideShare, where you will find lots of presentations posted, but don't limit yourself just to that site. Do an advanced Google search and limit to the specific presentation file types or just add the shortcut filetype:PPT or filetype:PPTX to your keywords. Here's an example of a slide about the US Biodiesel Market that features a graph from Euromonitor International: