PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Adobe Captivate’s Storyboard View: Similarity for PowerPoint Users

Let me imagine that you started your eLearning project with a PowerPoint presentation, and then you imported that presentation into Adobe Captivate. It’s worth noting here that Captivate 4 includes this new PowerPoint roundtrip workflow that we discussed in an earlier blog post.

OK, now that you have imported your PowerPoint presentation into Captivate, it’s time to get working. First of all, let us tell you that at least two of the three views in Captivate look and work exactly like PowerPoint’s own views, although they are called different names.

• Captivate’s Storyboard view is similar to PowerPoint’s Slide Sorter view.
• Captivate’s Edit view is roughly the same as PowerPoint’s Normal view, and we’ll cover this in a future post.
• Captivate does have a third view called Branching that we’ll discuss some other time. Of course, PowerPoint also has another view called Slide Show that well, just plays all the slides full-screen.

Now, about the Storyboard view in Captivate 4, as you can see in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Captivate’s Storyboard View

In this view, you can drag and reorder slides just like you can within PowerPoint. You can also right-click any of the slides to be presented with a menu that provides some familiar options, as shown in Figure 2, below, such as Hide Slide, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. In addition, there are some options here that PowerPoint does not provide (and we wish it did!). These are the Lock Slides and Properties options.

Figure 2: Slide Right-Click Options

Now, let us choose the Properties option in the right-click menu. This brings up this cool Properties dialog box that seems to include everything except the kitchen sink! Look at Figure 3, and you’ll see that there’s an awful lot you can do with your slides in Captivate.

Figure 3: Slide Properties in Adobe Captivate

Here are some of the options available to you within the Properties dialog box:

• Label: You can change the name of your slide.
• Display Time: Set the slide display time.
• Transition: Not half as many transitions as within PowerPoint, but the simple ones are covered.
• Quality: Set the image quality. This is important since Captivate outputs to Flash, and you’ll want to create files that have a smaller output size.
• Hide Slide and Lock Slide: Means just what they say!

We haven’t covered all the options in the Properties dialog box, but as you can see, these are quite extensive and powerful.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Adobe, Captivate, eLearning, PowerPoint

Shameless Self Promotion: Conversation with Peggy Duncan

Peggy Duncan is an international conference presenter, personal productivity expert, consultant, and author. She’s also the founder of The Digital Breakthroughs Institute, an Atlanta, Georgia (USA) training center whose mission is to improve the technology and productivity skills of small business owners and professionals. Media appearances include CNN, Today, O-The Oprah Magazine, Smart Money, Fortune Small Business, Black Enterprise, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. Links to free articles and her award-winning technology blog are on her site.

In this discussion, Peggy discusses her Shameless Self Promotion concept and how it has a PowerPoint angle.

Geetesh: Tell us more about what you mean by Shameless Self Promotion, and how it helps?

Peggy: At first glance, you might think I mean boasting to everyone who will listen about how wonderful you think you are. But I’m referring to promoting what you know, and doing it online, to boost your search engine rankings.

This whole notion started when I continued to get emails and calls from journalists wanting to interview me and public relations agencies wanting to hire me for their clients as a product spokesperson. They all mentioned finding me in Internet searches for my expertise (personal productivity expert, time management expert, email overload expert). Hmmm. I hadn’t realized that I was on the first page of major search engines.

When I started to investigate to see what was showing up, I realized that my how-to tips were getting indexed. I started writing and publishing more, using good keywords that people would actually type into the search engine.

I had no idea what search engine optimization or SEO was, but I knew that whatever I was doing was working. I’m now sharing my do-it-yourself tactics in seminars, Webinars, and an e-book. I totally enjoy discussing how all this happened, and audiences love it that I offer ways to improve their SEO without spending one red cent.

Geetesh: I remember you recommending the upload of PowerPoint presentations to sites such as SlideShare as a way to increase popularity on search engines. Can you tell us more about this concept?

Peggy: Popular Websites such as Slideshare.net show up well in search engines because of the number of incoming and outgoing links. When you post your content there, it gets indexed quickly by search engines because they like fresh, topical content. I recommend that people take articles they’re giving away and turn them into PowerPoint slides, tagging them with appropriate keywords. Before you know it, you’ll start to get rankings for that topic.

Plus, when visitors view your slideshow, they’ll see a link to your website or blog for more information.

There are many do-it-yourself ways to boost your search engine rankings. For the same reasons as mentioned above, you should also have a blog, online press releases, and full and active social media profiles. (It’s not important anymore to publish your content to the thousands of article sites you’ve probably heard of.)

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: Interviews, Peggy Duncan, PowerPoint, SlideShare

PowerPoint Live 2009: Conversation with Rick Altman

  Rick Altman is a presentation consultant based in Pleasanton, CA. Rick is well-known as the host of the annual PowerPoint Live User Conference and has a strong sense of the needs of the presentation community.

In this conversation, Rick discusses the recently completed conference that was held in Atlanta, October 2009, and the big news he made for 2010.

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Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: Events, Interviews, PowerPoint Live, Rick Altman

PowerPoint Presentation Formula 01

By Geetesh Bajaj

There’s no official term called a PowerPoint presentation formula. You won’t find it in any dictionary, and nobody’s going to hand you a certificate for using one correctly. It’s simply a way of describing a structured approach to building presentations that actually work.

Think of it like a pasta sauce recipe. Everyone has one. Everyone thinks theirs is the best. And if you’re being honest, yours probably looks a little different every time you make it. That’s fine. That’s the point.

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Filed Under: Presentation Skills
Tagged as: Delivery, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills, Public Speaking

FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0: Conversation with Nate Anderson

Nate Anderson is Senior Product Manager at balesio AG, a leading provider of file optimization and compression solutions. He is a software industry veteran and was part of the core development team of the company’s new FILEminimizer Pictures software.

In this discussion, Nate discusses the new FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0 product.

Geetesh: Tell us more about FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0, and how everyday computer users can benefit from the program.

Nate: FILEminimizer Pictures is one of the small utilities that makes your everyday computer life a lot easier. The software is able to compress your images, photos, and pictures by up to 98 percent making them a lot smaller and ideal for the Internet. Whether you want to send some pictures to your friends or upload your latest photos on Facebook, there have always been problems. You can send only one or two pictures via email because of the email size limitation and if you want to upload your photos to Facebook, it takes hours until they are uploaded and processed. FILEminimizer Pictures is great because it saves you a lot of time and frustration. You can batch optimize your photos and images and share them easier via Email and the Internet. While there are some freeware tools out there which resize your images and decrease image quality and size, what makes our tool stand out and special is our lossless compression which is greatly appreciated by our users.

Geetesh: What is lossless compression, and why is it an important feature in FILEminimizer Pictures 2.0?

Nate: FILEminimizer Pictures features a unique image optimization technique which works on a single image and optimizes this image based on the image characteristics. We achieve file size reductions of over 80 percent without resizing the image or affecting the quality. Lossless compression means that you have still the same beautiful image after the optimization, in the same size, with the same quality. It is just a lot smaller! I cannot tell you more technical secrets about our lossless compression technique but I want to encourage at this point all users to try it out for their own.

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: Interviews, Nate Anderson, Photos