Finding PowerPoint Presentations Online...

Here's a neat, 2-step trick for finding content-rich PowerPoint Presentations online:

1. Go to Google.com and type in a search term of interest in quotation marks
2. Directly after your search term, type in the term filetype:ppt

Like so: "Your Keywords" filetype:ppt

Google will present you with a list of PowerPoint presentations only -- no html at all, only posted PowerPoint files. I can think of two good reasons why you might want to do this:

• Type in the name of the presenter to download a specific presentation you saw and liked...
• Enter a topic of interest, and you'll typically get an educational presentation, instead of a sales pitch (for an even greater likelihood of an educational presentation, type in -.com after your search phrase: this will eliminate all URLs that end in a .com, so that you're more likely to get .edu, or educational presentations.)

And as you might imagine, this also works with pdf files -- type in pdf instead of ppt, and you'll get nothing but pdf files. This type of search is very useful for finding packaged content on a topic of interest.

¶ 12/16/2005 10:40:00 AM