PowerPoint and Presenting Blog: December 2004
Thoughts and impressions of whatever is happening in the world of PowerPoint.
See Also:
PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
This book extract from Teach Yourself PowerPoint 2003 in 24 Hours is an Indezine exclusive with permission from Sams Publishing. The book includes shortcuts and ways to accomplish the most common tasks in PowerPoint. Authored by Tom Bunzel, the book has in-depth coverage of working with sound and video inside PowerPoint. It also has a comprehensive chapter on PowerPoint's drawing abilities. Read the excerpts here...
Data projectors are generally split into two categories, fixed and portable. Fixed projectors tend to find themselves mounted to ceilings in board rooms, while portable projectors are used as tools for mobile workers that need to give presentations to clients. The LP600 falls into the latter category, and it has to be said that it's a very small and light unit. This isn't the smallest or lightest projector you can buy, or even the smallest and lightest model that InFocus sells, but it does offer a very tempting combination of features and portability. Learn more on TrustedReviews.com...
More and more presenters are realizing that bullet point filled PowerPoint slides have a negative effect on their audiences. They are therefore looking for ways to liven up their visuals and to support their messages with interesting and meaningful images. The Perspector 3D add-in will help boring PowerPoint presentations to become a thing of the past. Read the press release on the eMediaWire site...
If you are giving PowerPoint presentations and not utilizing video elements, then you are truly missing out on a powerful tool. Here are a couple scenarios where the use of video would be highly effective...
Most communication and public speaking coaches will tell you the best way to deliver a great presentation is to be prepared. But being prepared means different things to different people. For some, it means gathering tons of information that you prepare to dump on other people. To others, it means going over and over your PowerPoint slides and preparing them in order. Steve Adubato explains more on NJ.com...
Adrian Doyle heads Visual Exemplars Ltd, a UK based company tha creates Perspector, the popular add-in for PowerPoint that allows you to use animated 3D objects and effects inside PowerPoint. Adrian has worked in the IT sector for many years implementing large scale business and enterprise applications for clients including British Airways and the UK's Inland Revenue. He also has managed new start-up companies in the Internet sector and helped to turn them into successful businesses. In this interview, Adrian discusses Perspector, 3D and PowerPoint...
Impatica's new 3.32 update adds new features - the most amazing of these is the new BlackBerry support option. I first saw Impaticized PowerPoint presentations on the BlackBerry this October at San Diego, where PowerPoint Live was held. Michael Doyle and Catherine Cormier from Impatica Inc. first showed me how it worked. My first reaction was "wow", because the Impatica people are getting PowerPoint presentations ported on all sorts of platforms and devices. They already are the first online rich media creators to create a Mac version of their main product "Impatica", thus offering a cross-platform PowerPoint repurposing solution. Learn more about Impatica's PowerPoint to BlackBerry conversion...
A PowerPoint transition is an effect that plays over a period of time that changes one slide to another. Purists often rule that simple transitions like wipes and fades are more usable than the more showy ones. The problem is that rules are meant to be broken. Imagine asking a kid to paint with only blues and greens and stay away from reds and oranges. That's akin to stopping creativity. Probably it is the same thing with PowerPoint transitions - we all kill creativity because we are scared that we may create something bizarre. Learn more about making an impression with PowerPlugs: Transitions for PowerPoint...
Let us look at the profile of a typical PowerPoint user. He or she creates presentations from templates contained within PowerPoint or downloads some from the many sites online. They insert pictures and create charts. Most of them also copy and paste content from other applications into PowerPoint slides. What is the result? Often, it is a fifteen slide presentation that has ballooned to the ungainly size of 15 mb or more. That's when a product like PowerShrink can help...
Troy Stein is Camtasia Studio product manager at TechSmith Corporation in Okemos, Michigan. He has over a decade of experience in technology services and product management and has worked with start-ups, Fortune 500 companies, and small businesses. In this interview, Troy discusses Camtasia, his role at TechSmith, PowerPoint and more...
If you've ever had an interest in doing voice-over work, Rodney Saulsberry can help. For many years, he's been a top talent in this closely-knit industry. His work ranges from Toyota and Alpo commercial campaigns, to movie trailers for films like How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Dumb & Dumberer, to voicing the Spider-Man cartoon series. Saulsberry talks to NPR's Tavis Smiley about the art and business of the voice-over trade. More on the NPR site...
Serious Magic, Inc. announced today the availability of its multi-award-winning Visual Communicator software. Ideal for businesses, educators, trainers, and video producers, Visual Communicator 2 is based on a video production process that eliminates traditional editing timelines to allow for dramatically faster video creation while making productions that looks as if they were created for a television newscast. "Serious Magic is proud to launch the biggest upgrade ever to Visual Communicator," stated Mark Randall, Serious Magic's president & CEO. "We maintained its fast and simple interface yet added a powerful new engine that brings fundamental improvements to users' videos and productivity." More info on avvideo.com...
Macromedia announced that Sony Communication Network Corporation (So-net) has adopted Macromedia Breeze to reduce its employee training costs by enabling the rapid delivery and tracking of online training content. Since 1996, So-net has delivered a thorough in-house training program on information security. Due to limited resources, test results and knowledge retention were never previously tracked. This year, the company began using Breeze to deliver and manage its online training programs and has redefined the way the company will train its employees moving forward. More info on the Business Wire site...
Many users including translators, authors, writers and transcriptionists need to count the number of words in a document. While Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint do offer some features to do the count, the end results are nowhere close to professional. So, what is the solution? One option is to use Practiline Software's PractiCount Toolbar...
Most people have a love-hate relationship with PowerPoint. The software is used in a nearly unlimited variety of situations, from boardrooms to classrooms, and for better or worse, it is the de facto standard for presentations. Usually, PowerPoint presentations are dry affairs with someone in a suit trying hard not to vocalize the exact same information that appears on their slides. But what if a group of artists got hold of the software and competed with each other to see who could use it most imaginatively? More on the Wired News site...
Do you know how to do a PowerPoint presentation? In a few years every 9-year-old at Lamprey River Elementary School may. A group of 23 fourth-grade students is using PowerPoint software to spice up its research-based New Hampshire Booklet project. The assignment requires the students to give a presentation on facts about their home state. More on the Rockingham News site...
Most PowerPoint add-ins bring additional features into PowerPoint - these features range from multimedia to transitions and output and design. Graphicae is different - it brings a whole new organizational structure into your PowerPoint creation workflow. Graphicae is from Proof Software LLC, a company based in Canton, MA, United States. The company was founded by graduates of the Harvard Business School who have experience in management consulting, private equity and corporate management. Read more...
Most common missteps in sermon PowerPoint presentations? “That’s hard to answer,” said Kathy Jacobs, Microsoft MVP in PowerPoint, consultant and author of “On PowerPoint.” “There are so many. I would say the biggest ones are not planning, not practicing and not learning the tool.” More on the Church Central site...
Color Theory is a set of principles used to create harmonious color combinations. Color relationships can be visually represented with a color wheel — the color spectrum wrapped onto a circle. According to color theory, harmonious color combinations use any two colors opposite each other on the color wheel, any three colors equally spaced around the color wheel forming a triangle, or any four colors forming a rectangle (actually, two pairs of colors opposite each other). The harmonious color combinations are called color schemes – sometimes the term 'color harmonies' is also used. Color schemes remain harmonious regardless of the rotation angle. Read more...
sofTV.net, a division of XStream Software Inc. that provides software solutions for advanced media presentation authoring, has released the sofTV.Presenter Interactive Learning Pack, a feature-rich product bundle that combines sofTV.Presenter v3.1 with XStream Software’s RapidExam v2.5 Deluxe exam/assessment authoring technology. sofTV.Presenter v3.1 allows users to create Live and On-Demand web-based streaming video/audio presentations. These presentations consist of Microsoft PowerPoint slides that change in synchronization with the video or audio content. The user simply records a video or audio presentation, encodes it, and then synchronizes it with a PowerPoint presentation – all within sofTV.Presenter. More on the Streaming Media, Inc. site...
Back when we released WinPointer version 1, we were looking for a simple way to enhance PowerPoint and other presentations. With the original version, it was easy to highlight certain key areas of a screen to make a point, or for emphasis. Version 2 brought more functionality, and a switch from Visual Basic to Delphi. But our users ended up finding additional uses for WinPointer, including using it to annotate screens to send to others, and even to help with documentation and canned presentations. Now with WinPointer 3, we've added in new functionality that makes it simple to deliver annotated screens to others via e-mail, or even to create AVI-style movies of your annotations and then send them to others for playback. More on the PC Magazine site...
Jim Endicott is a nationally-recognized consultant, designer, speaker specializing in professional presentation messaging, design and delivery. Jim has been a Jesse H. Neal award-winning columnist for Presentations magazine with his contributions to the magazine's Creative Techniques column. Jim has also contributed presentation-related content in magazines like Business Week, Consulting and Selling Power as well as a being a paid contributor for a number of industry-related websites. In this interview, Jim discusses PowerPoint, presentation training and more. Read more...
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