I had urged RASC Toronto Centre Council members to prepare handouts for future presentations. For branding. To ensure first-time attendees have a take-away. With our URL. In particular, I was thinking of the impending meeting on Wednesday, and the "what's up" presentation often made by a member of the executive. I wasn't too worried about Brenda and her The Sky This Month. Eric would surely have some DDO Doings there. I wanted to improve on our meetings, inspired by the recent strategic planning conference.
So, what shows up in my inbox? A message from Ralph, with the presentation file attached, saying, "So how do we make a handout from this?"
Rather than explain it, I performed the procedure myself. It was a PowerPoint 2003 file so I used the File, Send To command. And it was then I learned just how badly constructed the file was. Took me twice as long to make it. Still, 15 or so minutes later, I sent Ralph a sample handout in Word 2003.While waiting for his response, I decided to improve the PowerPoint file. It was a dog's breakfast. I thought it might be best to build a new file from scratch. When done, I sent this to Ralph as well. It looks so much better with better font colouring, consistent (left) alignment, smaller font size (so less overpowering), more graphics, final black slide, good transitions, consistently styled URLs, consistently styled dates, and so on. The proper use of the default layouts will improve future efforts at making handouts...
Along the way, I found a number of typos and missing bits of information. Some of which affected the handout. So I reissued the handout and also sent the "new and improved" PowerPoint.
It was then Ralph revealed that he wasn't going to the meeting. Gah! I told him I wasn't either.
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