September 09, 2009, 9:02 AM — by Tom Bunzel -- If you're in IT, sooner or later you need to present to a team or get colleagues' feedback on a project that inevitably is shown in PowerPoint format. If you don't have SharePoint (or even if you do), it is frequently necessary to show your slides – and to practice your presentation and discuss what you are going to say – with your associates or your team.
So what's the best way to get the show in front of other people for their comments?
Sending your presentation to OneNote and beginning a shared session to discuss your slides and the project at hand is probably your fastest, most efficient course of action.
Microsoft OneNote, perhaps the most under-appreciated program in the Office suite, lets you organize and put comments into its Pages with relative ease. (If you think that OneNote is just for table computer users, you are missing the boat). OneNote installs a printer driver that you can access from PowerPoint to send your presentation directly to OneNote.
This is the easiest and fastest way to get your slides into OneNote.
In OneNote the slides go into a section for Unfiled Notes (you can move this Page to another Section to reorganize the content). If the slides are too large, zoom out or resize them.
The key here is that you can now open Live Sharing Section > Start Sharing Current Session under "Share", and when you go through the short Wizard in the Task Pane, you can send the password and IP address to the shared session to others, who just need to open OneNote's Join Sharing Session Task Pane, and enter the information to join the session. At this point all session members can annotate and comment on the presentation as it appears in OneNote on every session participant's screen.
To discuss the various slides you would obviously use a telephone conference call, and this is a great scenario for getting instant feedback without having to email the presentation to other people, post it on a server, or go through a review process.
OneNote also interfaces really well with Outlook, so that you can easily assign Tasks from the shared OneNote session and have other team members be accountable for fulfilling them. And if you've loaded a series of presentations into OneNote, it's easy to locate a specific slide using Search. OneNote 2007 also has a set of "Tags" that you can use or customize for quick reference to portions of your notes, including the slides from PowerPoint.
Just remember to use the Print capability within PowerPoint to send your slides directly to OneNote's Unfiled Notes Section, and then start a new shared session, to easily collaborate on a PowerPoint presentation with colleagues or associates.
