Sure, anyone can write 50,000 words on the future economic prospects for the G10, but no-one’s going to read it if it’s written in Comic Sans, right? But with hundreds of thousands of fonts out there, how do you figure out which one to use? (My top tip: there’s never, ever a good time to break out Comic Sans. Even if you're writing a comic.)

Fortunately, Danish designer Julian Hansen has the answer. His work, So You Need A Typeface, guides you step by step through the selection of FontShop’s Top 50 typefaces, so you can be sure your font-appropriate in every situation. This is not mere guesswork either, the flowchart asks you a series of questions about you and your project to get you to the perfect font.

Some of my favourites:

You cried whilst watching Terminator? – OCR
Do people call you boring from time to time? – Times
How does relighting the American tradition sound? – Proforma
Is it for an Italian restaurant? – Bodoni

Next time your Word or PowerPoint document needs that little bit of extra pizazz, you’ll know where to look.

The cool thing about this add-in, which installs itself as new tab on Ribbon-enabled versions of Word and PowerPoint, is that it lets you download and test watermarked images in your documents before buying. You can move them around and even crop them to see how they look.

Once you have an image you like, purchasing can be done right from within your document. Same goes for searches, buying credits, and signing in and out of your Veer account.

The Veer Images add-in is a free download available here for Windows XP, Visa, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 computers.

(via The Microsoft Office Blog)

Probably the most exciting of the updates is the new auto-tweeting functionality which turns your PowerPoint slideshow into a dynamic Twitter application. With this tool, you can update your Twitter status during your presentation without any effort on your part. Any text in your note pages in between special tags - [twitter] and [/twitter] – will automatically be tweeted when you reach that particular slide. What a clever way of tweeting your presentation while also delivering it live! I can just see this becoming a standard for conference speakers everywhere.

The new feedback slide is a variation on the original, but this one shows twice as many tweets as before:

The internal tool lets you forgo Twitter in favor of a private microblogging platform instead like Status.net, a service meant for internal company use only.

The zoom text tool actually doesn’t integrate with Twitter, but provides a nice visualization of floating words across the screen. Meanwhile, the support for predefined values lets PowerPoint users set up templates for others to use.

All these tools are available for download for free from the main download page here: http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/

Although pico projectors aren’t exactly new, we’ve yet to see them incorporated into all that many devices, save for the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj for example. We certainly haven’t seen many mobile cell phones adding them as a selling feature, though. Still, whether or not an added projector will lead to mainstream success remains to be seen. However, it’s easy to imagine the phone gaining a niche following among business users…especially when you take into account its other big selling point: a fingerprint sensor for added security.

The other specs for the device are fairly standard: a 3.2-inch display, QWERTY keyboard, GPS, 5 megapixel camera with flash and video capture, and support for microSD cards.

The only bad news is that LG plans on a limited release starting December 7th which includes a handful of select cities: Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. The reason? The LG eXpo works with AT&T's 7.2Mbps HSPA 3G technology which will go live in those cities shortly.

The phone by itself is $199 after a mail-in rebate with a two year contract, but adding the projector costs another $179.

After identifying the differences between the presentations, Workshare Compare users can then easily combine slides from the multiple presentations into one single presentation file.

This software is not for the casual user though – you would have to have a heavy investment in PowerPoint to make purchasing it worthwhile. A one year subscription starts at $145 USD and includes upgrades. For that price, it’s obviously not meant to be consumer-level technology. However, for those who have desperately wanted this sort of functionality for years, it will likely be a price they’re willing to pay.

Using the company’s SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius technology, they’ve created a presentation template which contains three different types of embedded Twitter tools and the corresponding instructions. The included tools are:

• A PowerPoint Twitter ticker bar
• A PowerPoint Twitter feedback slide
• A PowerPoint Twitter voting slide

The ticker bar sits at the bottom of each slide and displays the last ten tweets based on a particular search string or hashtag. The feedback slide displays live questions from your audience and the voting slide lets people cast their votes on a topic by sending a tweet. This slide supports up to 6 choices and up to 100 votes.

You can download the .PPT files with the embedded tools here. However, please be aware these are only prototypes so you are doing so at your own risk.

(via CloudAve)

With the SlideShare app on Facebook, you can:

• Upload your presentations and documents to SlideShare
• Share them instantly with your friends by publishing to your home page
• Comment on or favorite presentations by your friends
• Add a SlideShare box to your profile to display your presentations

If you’re more into business networking, you can check out the SlideShare app for LinkedIn instead, which operates in pretty much the same way.

SlideShare’s ribbon is a great example of how Software plus Services (S+S) can work. It shows how the web can enhance your current software, without having to move an entire application to the web to do so. Instead, the web becomes a component of the software. With the new SlideShare ribbon for example, accessing the social network built around PowerPoint files is now something that can be seamlessly integrated into the desktop app for a true S+S experience.

The SlideShare Ribbon (.exe) works with PowerPoint 2007, Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. You can see a video of it in action here.

This latest addin called LiveWeb doesn’t appear to be new exactly, but it was new to me. LiveWeb works with any version of PowerPoint from 97 on up to allow you to open a web browser within the presentation itself as opposed to launching an external application (like IE). Its browser can display the real web in PowerPoint including PDFs, java, and VRML. You can download LiveWeb for free from here.

First we get the Cooliris plugin for PowerPoint and now this? Wow, looks like boring slideshows may be a thing of the past.

pptPlex only works with Office PowerPoint 2007 and is available for download here. 

(Image thanks to Chris Craft’s Blog)

1. Hide the Ribbon: To hide the ribbon out of view leaving only the tab names showing, just double-click on any tab’s name.
2. Customize the Quick Access Toolbar: By default, the Quick Access Toolbar has the “Save,” “Undo,” and “Redo” buttons on it, but you can change that. To do so, go to any tab and  right-click on the little pull-down menu symbol next to the window title on any Ribbon app. Here, you have the option to click on “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.” From the menu that displays, you can add and remove commands from the Quick Access Toolbar to suit your preferences. Add your most frequently used commands and you can hide the ribbon to get more screen real estate without losing access to the commands you use the most.
3. Find Hidden Commands: Because the Ribbon is meant to bring more simplicity to working with Office software, there are some infrequently used commands that are not available on the ribbon or are just harder to find. To bring these back into view, follow the steps above in #2 to customize the Quick Access Toolbar and you can get access to these commands once again. A couple examples of hidden commands include Excel’s pop-up calculator and PowerPoint’s Advanced Document Properties, which lets you see how big the file is.
4. Customize the Quick Access Toolbar on the Fly: No need to hunt down the little right-click menu, though, you can just right-click any command on the ribbon and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar.”
5. Scroll Through Tabs With a Mouse Wheel: If you have a mouse with a wheel, you can scroll through the tabs if the cursor is over the Ribbon – very useful for quick switching.

We would like to thank both Steven Levy and Alex Babanov for these great tips!

Once uploaded to the SlideShare service, you can then embed the presentations right onto your web site - something which makes it easy to share information with your customers if you're running a business or provides an easy way to share slides with your friends if you have a personal web site or blog.

In addition to PowerPoint files, you can also use SlideShare to upload PDFs to the web.

The files can be as large as 50 MB in size, which is a lot more than competitors offer, like 10 MB at Zoho Show, for example. Plus, it's much easier to share your presentations than try to compress them into an email.

Best of all, SlideShare is free!

The service lets you upload and store up to five presentations and you can manage and schedule them from your Slidelive account. Presentations can be shared with up to 100 people simultaneously. You can also keep a history of the presentations you have seen. Check out Slidelive's free service here if you want to try it out for yourself. (via)