PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Concept Slides: Triangle Cycle

This is a triangle formed out of three small triangular shapes that overlap each other. It successfully denotes a process or cycle within the constraints of a triangle and works great for any sequential process that has three steps or concepts. It also works great to illustrate three concepts that work together, thus creating a sort of triangular matrix. Text can be superimposed on all individual shapes, and each shape can be filled with PowerPoint’s fills.

You can download the file here.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, Shapes

Concept Slides: Horizontal Credits

Having seen the vertical credits screen, inspired from the end-of-the-movie credits so often in PowerPoint, we wondered why no one did a horizontal credits animation? Yes, it is a little more difficult, but you only need to do the task once as you can see in the downloaded presentation. Feel free to use the content in this slide. All you need to do is change the words in your credits screen, and the entire text formatting is Theme friendly so it should work within whichever presentation you add the slide to.

You can download the PowerPoint file here.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Animation, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, Shapes

Brainshark Mobile: Conversation with Joe Gustafson

Joe Gustafson, CEO of Brainshark, Inc., founded the company in 1999 to help knowledge experts accelerate the flow of information to their audiences in a highly effective format. Under Joe’s leadership, Brainshark has become a leader in on-demand business communications and a successful Software-as-a-Service company. Joe has been instrumental in the development of Brainshark Mobile, which Brainshark is launching today.

In this conversation, Joe discusses Brainshark Mobile.

Geetesh: What is Brainshark Mobile, and how does it make viewing and delivering presentations easier for smartphone users?

Joe: We’re excited to be launching Brainshark Mobile today, which enables Brainshark-delivered communications to be viewed on mobile devices and platforms, including the BlackBerry, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Palm Pre, and Android. Now, with Brainshark presentations automatically mobile-enabled, it’s easy for our users to create content that can be viewed anywhere, anytime, and on just about any device.

With video and other rich media playing an increasingly important role in business communications – and with business becoming ever-more mobile and geographically dispersed – being able to provide ubiquitous availability of Brainshark multimedia content is an important capability for our users. They can reach their on-the-go audience instantly, and let that audience choose the most convenient and productive way to experience their content.

This means salespeople can view a Brainshark presentation while walking into a big meeting, and employees can view training materials and other content while killing time at the airport. Companies can also take advantage of Brainshark Mobile to improve mobile marketing, as well as HR, corporate, and in-the-field communications. Plus, with Brainshark’s analytics, they can see who viewed their content and when, as well as what type of mobile device was used.

For Brainshark’s customers, Brainshark Mobile is included at no extra cost as part of our core platform. The new mobile capabilities are also available to users of myBrainshark.com, our site where you can create, narrate, share, and track multimedia presentations for free. Users can share a link to a Brainshark presentation via e-mail, text message, mobile IM, etc., for viewing on the mobile Web. And, with one Brainshark presentation already viewed every 3.5 seconds in locations all over the world, this is exciting news for our company as well.

Geetesh: Apple products like the iPhone and iPad don’t support Adobe Flash – so how does Brainshark Mobile get over that limitation?

Joe: Good question. As you know, when people upload PowerPoint slides and other content to Brainshark to create multimedia presentations, we convert the file to Flash for playback on PCs. The final product, which is shared as a link – can include voice narration and/or other audio, slides, video, and more.

However, when viewed on a mobile device, Brainshark presentations appear as streamed video files, and it’s not necessary that the mobile device support Flash. When you access a Brainshark presentation, Brainshark detects the type of device being used and serves up a compatible format. So, for Apple products including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, Brainshark delivers an MP4 file.

As I mentioned, the platforms and devices supported by Brainshark Mobile currently include the Blackberry, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Palm Pre, and Android, and all must support streaming video.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Brainshark, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

ActivePresentation Designer: The Indezine Review

Presenters need to make a connection with their audiences, and if you have an audience that’s curious, it is not uncommon for you to have a need to navigate quickly between various slides in a presentation. It can be cumbersome moving back and forth slides if they are far apart, and fortunately many presenters use hyperlinks between slides to alleviate this problem. However, maintaining and editing these links and creating the actual menu structure for something of this sort can be more tedious than creating the actual presentation! Our review product, ActivePresentation Designer can help.

Read the Indezine review of ActivePresentation Designer.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Review

Concept Slides: Triangles On Stage

These triangles dramatically enter the stage area (slide) with three animations happening simultaneously: Fade (an entrance animation), Grow and Shrink (an emphasis animation), and a right-to-left Motion Path. Click once and three similar animations help the triangle in doing a graceful exit. As soon as the exit is over, the next triangle animates into the stage.

Download this presentation and reuse as required in your PowerPoint slides.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Animation, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, Shapes