PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Speech-Over Professional 4: The Indezine Review

It’s often very time-consuming and expensive to record voice-overs with professionals — of course you can record your own voice these days but not everyone is entirely audible and has the proper pronunciation, vocal control, and confidence to do that. And trust me — lots of users want to add high quality narration to their PowerPoint presentations so that these can be shown as a sequential walkthrough without a live presenter. Fortunately, a product that we have reviewed in the past has been updated to make this task automatic, easy, and usable!

Read our review of Speech-Over Professional 4.

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

XL-Addin: Conversation with Aurelian Laic

  Aurelian Laic has worked in software development and IT consultancy since 1997 creating many business and enterprise applications. He’s been working as consultant for large companies listed in DAX and M-DAX and has been writing articles for various security magazines. He is now the owner of a software company that creates XL-Addin.

In this conversation, Aurelian talks about how XL-Addin can help PowerPoint users.

Geetesh: Tell us about your XL-Addin product and how it works with PowerPoint.

Aurelian: XL-Addin is an Excel add-ins suite designed for business and enterprise use.
All components are designed for business users, not experts or technologists, but the results will look as made by experts. The main purpose of XL-Addin is to improve the productivity by spending less time involved in tasks that could be easy automated.

One component of XL-Addin is Export to PowerPoint, a feature that automates the export of Excel ranges into new or existing PowerPoint presentations. Export to PowerPoint allows user to transform Excel workbooks into professional PowerPoint presentations with progress bars, content slide, navigation etc. using existing presentations or new presentation.

Geetesh: What are the scenarios in which this Excel add-in can be useful to PowerPoint designers — how does it make their work easy and their workflow faster?

Aurelian: XL-Addin is helpful especially when you regularly have to create or update PowerPoint presentations using data stored in Excel workbooks (financial or budgeting data, monitor HR changes; sales data, project management data).

Normally this operation is done manually, by copying the ranges and charts from Excel and then pasting it to PowerPoint slides. But this operation is time consuming and the quality of the export is poor in many cases.

By using XL-Addin the copy/paste procedure became totally automated and the user can create large presentations in less than a minute. For exporting to PowerPoint, XL-Addin uses a different approach: it saves the ranges/charts as images, process them and then inserts the images into slides. This technique assures a good compression level keeping the quality of the images very high.

Furthermore the user is able to set exactly the format, position and sizes for each exported range. A special feature of PowerPoint exporter allows the user to visually adjust the position and size using a preview of the slide where the export will be done. Anything can be customized: the user can create custom presentations by selecting the slides to be exported with just a few mouse clicks; the slides/page order can be changed very easy, the picture format or sizes and positions for all slides can be adjusted/changed quickly. All settings for export are saved and stored in workbook for later use.

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: Add-in, Excel, Interviews, PowerPoint

Better Beginnings: The Carmen Simon Interview

    Dr. Carmen Simon‘s presentations and workshops help business professionals to use communication and presentation skills to increase revenue, train or motivate others, and overall to stand out from too much sameness in the industry. A published author, Carmen is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at various conferences. In this interview, she talks about her book, shares ideas about creating better presentations, and then discusses imagination and sincerity.

Read the interview here.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Books, Carmen Simon, Design, Interviews, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2007 for Windows: Text Placeholders vs. Text Boxes

I already covered this concept using PowerPoint 2003, and now will be exploring the relationship between text boxes and text placeholders in PowerPoint 2007. But maybe someone just said stop, and asked me these questions: Aren’t text boxes and text placeholders the same? Are they really different? And why should I bother even if they are different?

All these are valid questions, and the answers to them form one of the most important foundations in learning to create more structured presentations.

Read more here.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Outline, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, Text, Tutorials

Create a Presentation the Steve Jobs Way

Carmine Gallo is a communications coach for the world’s most admired brands. He is a sought after speaker and author of the new book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.

In this Indezine exclusive article, Carmine discusses how you can create better slides, and become a better presenter. All techniques are inspired by Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ presentation skills.

Read Carmine Gallo’s article here.

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Books, Carmine Gallo, Opinion, Presentation Skills