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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
In an earlier post last week, we discussed Adobe Captivate’s views and compared them to PowerPoint’s default views. We also explored Storyboard View. In this post, we’ll look at Captivate’s Edit view, which in many ways is similar to PowerPoint’s Normal view.
If you are not already in Edit view within Captivate, choose the View drop-down in the toolbar, and select Edit view, as shown in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: Choose Edit view in Adobe Captivate
Edit view has a tri-pane view that’s similar to PowerPoint’s three panes. These are how they compare:
Figure 2, below, shows you Captivate’s Edit view. At the top of the Slide area, you’ll notice an option called Edit PPT.
Figure 2: Edit View in Adobe Captivate
If you don’t see an Edit PPT option, it means that the Adobe Captivate project you are working on did not originate from a PowerPoint presentation.
The Edit PPT option is actually more than one option. Click it on the menu, as shown in Figure 3, below.
Figure 3: Edit PPT Option in Adobe Captivate
So, what do these different options mean? We’ll look at them soon.
Filed Under:
Companion Programs
Tagged as: Adobe, Captivate, eLearning, PowerPoint
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Glen Millar is an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Microsoft PowerPoint. Based near Brisbane, Australia, Glen is a regular on the Microsoft support newsgroups and a featured speaker at PowerPoint Live. Visit Glen’s site, PowerPoint Workbench, for tutorials on cool animation effects in PowerPoint.
Geetesh: You experiment a lot with animation in PowerPoint – in your opinion, where is the thin line that divides animation that is sufficient and enhancing from one that is too much and distracting? Is there a rule of thumb that can act as a guideline, and what are your opinions?
Glen: Geetesh, that’s a really good question! There is a thin line between what is effective and what is gratuitous or distracting. When I animate a presentation, I ask myself 3 questions:
If it is a kiosk presentation, I give myself more license to be more “animated”- that is, a kiosk presentation is the animated interface between the story and the audience. So, I have more scope to be a bit excited.
If it is a live presentation (which is the majority of what I do) I will subdue the animations somewhat so they don’t compete with the presenter. The live speaker is the animated interface between the presentation and the audience. The animations must not distract from the presenter.
I first work out my storyboard and what elements demand to be animated. For example, a complex concept can be broken into sub-parts, and each sub-part can be animated. My audience can then discover each component without being distracted by all the elements at once.
Once my presentation is fully animated, I then look for artistic opportunities. For example, I have a bunch of cogs spinning on the slide. I use an Emphasis animation, Spin, to show motion or effort. When I want to remove them, if the story does not dictate how to do it, I go for an artistic effect. An example would be a slow fade out. I could choose a different type, but not a new animation. That would not be supported by my story.
Geetesh: Tell us about animation builds when successive animations play one after the other. How effective are such builds – please give examples and share your thoughts.
Glen: Successive builds are critically important! I’ve recently been quite concerned about the lack of continuity in our presentations and our graphics. Let me demonstrate with an example. The following two graphics are available as downloadable clip art within PowerPoint.
Individually, they are great photos and display very good concepts. However, when I put them side-by-side, I realized they contain the same people, but in different clothes. Now, professional movie makers employ continuity folks- people who check every feature of a shot to make sure it is consistent. You don’t want an actor walking down a road to suddenly appear with a new shirt. Now, while this example is dramatic, it illustrates how important consistency is across a movie.
So, how do you get real consistency? Well, I love breaking stories into logical components, and a classic example is some experimental work I have done recently on time-lapse.
The following is some work to encourage people to read a book. I’ve added just three frames from the 43-frame sequence.
If you look carefully, you will see someone (in this case, my son Chris) turning a book. What a powerful way to tell a story! Every second, a new image fades in over the previous one. You can see him turn the pages! While the output image has been modified in a graphic program, it is so powerful!
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.
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Interviews
Tagged as: Animation, Glen Millar, Interviews, PowerPoint
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I frequently deliver PowerPoint training workshops for corporate clients in India, even though this hasn’t been reflected on the site. Over the next few posts, I’ll outline what these sessions cover and how they help teams work smarter.
First, let me talk about my two-day training session on PowerPoint. This is my most successful course, and it is geared towards an audience that creates PowerPoint presentations in a typical office environment. On each of the days, I do 4 sessions each that talk about PowerPoint usage and creation. The entire course comprises interactive exercises, and the goal is to help you create better presentations in less time. Along the way, you learn PowerPoint best practices and options that are buried within the PowerPoint interface. For those of you who have just moved to a newer version of PowerPoint, it’s a great way to learn all the new options available in this version of the program.
If you want to learn more and need details regarding the curriculum and pricing, please feel free to get in touch through the feedback form on this site.
Picture Courtesy: Rikk Flohr, taken during PowerPoint Live in Atlanta, October 2009
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Microsoft Office
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Training
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Peggy Duncan has a way with words, and that influences how she expresses herself. At the recently concluded PowerPoint Live conference in Atlanta, she went out of her way to share all her secrets with everyone. Her topic was Shameless Self-Promotion. And I guess there’s no one better qualified than Peggy to do a session on a topic of that sort, because she’s a rare combination of being humble and confident at the same time. She’s not scared of speaking her thoughts aloud, and she shares her fears, too.
Filed Under:
Events
Tagged as: Events, Peggy Duncan, PowerPoint, SEO
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Let us imagine that you have some video that you want to show within a PowerPoint presentation, and the video format is not something PowerPoint can accept. Looking at another example, what do you do if you want to create some video for display on a website or mobile applications? We won’t go into technical terms like frame rates or aspect ratios that video geeks use all the time. But we do agree that there’s still the need to convert videos between formats and other definitions all the time. Luckily, Reframe from Miraizon is one application that keeps things simple for us.
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