PowerPoint and Presenting Blog: May 2006

Today's free template is Reflect Checks - download here...

Today's free template is Waterfall - download here...

These are free Cell Phone/Mobile Phone PowerPoint templates created by the designers at Indezine.com. Just click the thumbnail for any of the designs to get to its download page.





At Indezine.com, we love your feedback - if you want to share your stories about how you use our templates, send them through our feedback form...

You can also suggest a template theme, but be aware that we already have a long list of requested themes that we are working on.

Categories: templates, powerpoint

These are free Father's Day PowerPoint templates created by the designers at Indezine.com. Just click the thumbnail for any of the designs to get to its download page.





At Indezine.com, we love your feedback - if you want to share your stories about how you use our templates, send them through our feedback form...

You can also suggest a template theme, but be aware that we already have a long list of requested themes that we are working on.

Categories: templates, powerpoint

The new ezine issue has now been issued. There are two free giveaways:

• Spirograph PowerPoint Templates from ppted
• Grayscale Printing PowerPoint add-in from Jim Gordon

Today's free template is Orange Butter - download here...

Today's free template is Canvas Drape - download here...

Jeff Van West puts his get-the-job-done philosophy into practice in training movies on Effective Presentations which is available online from Lynda.com. Other movies cover Home and Small Office Networking and Illustrator CS2. He is also the author of several books, articles, and custom training curricula for software, hardware, and aircraft systems.



In this interview, Jeff discusses PowerPoint experiences, design and improvement ideas...

Categories: powerpoint, interviews

Today's free template is Starburst Keyboard--download here...

T-Mobile now makes it possible for its subscribers to leave their laptops behind them for presentations by making available to them Impatica ShowMate, the first and only presentation solution that allows users to project PowerPoint presentations directly from their BlackBerry wireless devices. ShowMate is a pocket-sized hardware device weighing less than nine ounces and supports all PowerPoint presentation features including rich text, images, charts, graphs, animations and slide transition effects.

More on the TMCnet site...

Categories: blackberry, projector, powerpoint

Microsoft has quietly added a high-end retail edition of Office 2007 to the suite's stable, the company confirmed Thursday. The new Office Ultimate -- the name identical to Vista's Ultimate edition -- will be priced at $679 in retail channels, and will include all the applications scheduled to ship within Office Enterprise 2007, the top-end corporation version to be available only to volume license customers. Ultimate will include core applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, but will also offer Access, Publisher, InfoPath, Groove, OneNote, and integrated functions such as content management, electronic forms, and rights management. All of those pieces are also in the Enterprise bundle.

More on the InformationWeek site...

Categories: microsoft_office, powerpoint

Today's free template is Emerald Horizon - download here...

Today's free template is Solar Liquids - download here...

Austin Myers, a PowerPoint MVP is a good friend--and he created the wonderful PFCMedia add-in for PowerPoint that makes inserting media files in PowerPoint so easy. And now he has released PFCExpress, his new PowerPoint add-in that makes it so simple for you to email your PowerPoints. The add-in takes care of everything--from links, to file format, attachments, and the actual mailing.

I did a small interview with Austin discussing PFCExpress:

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and the PFC range of PowerPoint add-ins.

Austin: Having been a PowerPoint MVP and designing presentations professionally since 95, I've seen just how difficult using the ever increasing types, and sources, of media within PowerPoint can be. With the success we enjoyed with PFCMedia and the feedback from our customers we made the decision to tackle a number of additional media related problems in PowerPoint. With customer feedback it became clear that additional features were both wanted
needed, so many in fact we felt we needed to provide them with multiple add-ins as opposed to building a single large and expensive add in.

By creating multiple add ins with a low price point we hope to meet the specific needs of the customer at a reasonable cost. Value is always the driving force as we design and build our PowerPoint add ins. Hey, I am a user too and I always want a great value for my hard earned dollars, I have to believe other users feel the same.

Geetesh: What prompted you to create PFCExpress - and tell us more about typical usage scenarios.

Austin: The concept of PFCExpress came about from user requests and input from the PowerPoint newsgroup. Because of the way PowerPoint links to media files, and the fragility of those links, users were experiencing very high failure rates when they emailed their presentations. PowerPoint also has a limitation in that should the path to the folder containing the presentation and media be too long the media would fail. PFCExpress was designed to
overcome these issues.

Typically users don't understand how PowerPoint links to media files or how important it is to create the presentation in a manner that secures the links. As an example, if I create a presentation on my computer and save it to "C:\..My Documents", and have a video that is linked from "C:..\MyDocuments\My Videos" it will play fine on my machine but when sent
to another machine it will fail. The reason of course is that the path is different on the other machine and PowerPoint doesn't know where to find the media. In cases where the user follows the guideline to place the video in the same folder containing the presentation before inserting it on the slide we still run into the issue that "MyDocuments" is different on every PC and PowerPoint may still fail to play the media properly.

Assuming a user creates a presentation and includes a media file PFCExpress examines the presentation for media content and creates a temporary copy of both the presentation and media. With a little bit of programming wizardry the path/link to the media is destroyed and in it's place we create what we call a "pathless" link. Once completed the presentation and the media file are combined into a single compressed file (zip) and made ready to email. From within PowerPoint you simply tell it who the recipient is, include any text in the body of the email and if desired run a spell checker on it. From there a simple click on "Send as email" and your done. PFCExpress offers you the option of sending it as a normal (*.ppt) PowerPoint file for editing or as a playable (*.pps) file so the person receiving it simply starts it and it plays.

One other feature we included addresses the issue of an email and attachment being too large. Almost all ISPs have a size limit and as media tends to create large files and the email will not be delivered. PFCExpress will warn the user if they have exceeded the size limit and offers to save the compressed zip file for them so it may be placed on a web site or FTP server. It also lists several sites that are free to use for sending large email and attachments and instructions on how to use them.

Our goal here was simple, when you email your presentation containing media, it will "Play For Certain" on the receiving Windows PC. Or at least as certain as we can possibly make it.

Download a free trial of PFCExpress from the PFCMedia site...

Categories: add-in, powerpoint