Welcome to the inaugural edition of my Friday 5 posts. During the course of a normal week I read a lot and cover a pretty good size bit of the online world related to learning design, technology, presentations, elearning and other similar topics. I share a lot of these on Twitter (from Feedly via Buffer – which might merit an entire post of its own?)

I’m taking inspiration from others like Harold Jarche, Christy Tucker and Jane Hart who’ve been doing this sort of thing for quite some time now.

• Harold Jarche’s Friday FInds
  http://jarche.com/category/fridays-finds/
• Christy Tucker’s ID & E-learning Links
  https://christytucker.wordpress.com/category/bookmarks/

I save these and a lot of other things over on Diigo:  Friday5, PowerPoint, Helpful Tech Tips, and more.

So here we go! These are 5 of the things I’ve noodled on this week that I think you should know about. Thanks for reading!

3 LinkedIn Email Responses For Invitations to Connect by Helen Blunden

Like Helen, I get 10-20 LinkedIn invitations every week and have always looked for a better way to respond to them. I’ll be using these great responses from now on.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-linkedin-email-responses-invitations-connect-helen-blunden

The Scientific Reason Why Bullets Are Bad for Presentations

You know that bullet points are not a good way to convey information don’t you? If not, or if you don’t know why this will give you the scientific reason you shouldn’t use them based on the results from The Use of Visualization in the Communication of Business Strategies.

https://blog.slideshare.net/2015/08/31/the-scientific-reason-why-bullets-are-bad-for-presentations/

Introducing Clipping on LinkedIn SlideShare

LinkedIn/Slideshare has introduced a new feature that allows you to “clip” slides onto your own personal clipboards. This is a great way to create a swipe file of design inspiration, good ideas or anything else you want to keep at hand. You can find mine at: http://www.slideshare.net/tmiket/clipboards

https://blog.slideshare.net/2015/08/25/introducing-clipping-on-linkedin-slideshare/

Top 3 reasons to use Docs.com

I’ve kicked the tires on Microsoft’s Docs.com service which lets you easily share unlimited PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Office Mix, and PDF documents, as well as Sways, for free. You can share documents individually or as part of a collection like this one for a presentation I did this week in Louisville for their ATD Day of Learning annual conference.

http://docs.com

Learn Eight Helpful Microsoft Excel Tricks with This Handy Cheat Sheet

You don’t have to be a data nerd to benefit from these handy Excel tricks. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve saved over the years with simple, yet powerful VLOOKUP formula.

http://lifehacker.com/learn-eight-helpful-microsoft-excel-tricks-with-this-ha-1726467916