PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PresentationPro PowerSLIDES: The Indezine Review

Expressing ideas using visuals is always a great option, as long as you use relevant content. Visuals are actually a much larger family than just pictures. They can also include content like maps, illustrations, charts, etc. In addition, they often include collections of shapes that function as frameworks. Our review product is called PowerSLIDES, and it is a collection of such multi-purpose framework slides.

Read the Indezine review of PowerSLIDES.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, Review, Templates

PresenterMedia: Conversation with Art Holden

Art Holden has been in the animation and presentation industry since 1996. He helped start Animation Factory in 1997 and served as general manager of Animation Factory for thirteen years. He currently lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA, and works with PresenterMedia, a media content creation company.

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Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Art Holden, Clip Media, Interviews, PowerPoint, Templates

Recolor Picture Backgrounds in PowerPoint 2010 and 2007 for Windows

One of the worst things that you can do to your PowerPoint presentation is to add a busy, multi-colored background to your slides. However, people do that all the time, and in the process, they compromise the subtlety and contrast of any content on their slides.

Learn how to recolor a picture background in PowerPoint 2010 and 2007 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Photos, PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint 2010, Tutorials

Launching LegalPPT

We have some news to share with you all. This is especially awesome, if you work in the legal field, or if you have friends or colleagues who do.

The legal profession is one of the most high-profile users of PowerPoint presentations, and we are glad to announce the launch of a whole new site, LegalPPT, to address the needs of this niche market.

This site has been a work in progress for far too long! We wanted to make sure that we were not doing any training sessions, traveling to conferences, or even on vacation when we get this moving ahead. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done, and hence the delay.

Now that we are going ahead with launching this site, let us tell you that we already have a few legal PowerPoint templates for you to download. More templates and other stuff should be coming soon.

By other stuff, we mean PowerPoint sample presentations, book reviews, resources, interviews, and more, for all PowerPoint users in the legal domain.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Legal, PowerPoint

Gantt Chart Generator for PowerPoint: Conversation with Rouwen Stallwanger

Rouwen Stallwanger studied physics and astronomy in Munich, Potsdam, and England. His business career started in large companies for insurance and banking in Germany and France. In 2007, he created his own company, Stallwanger IT.dev involved in the development process and control that creates individual software solutions (business intelligence) for clients in finance, human resources, and real estate. In this conversation, Rowen discusses his Gantt Chart Generator for PowerPoint product.

Geetesh: Tell us more about your GanttChart Generator product for PowerPoint.

Rouwen: The Gantt Chart Generator is a helper application that lets you create Gantt Charts right within Microsoft PowerPoint. In general, you need a lot of resources and time to generate these Gantt charts and to maintain them, especially if you want to implement them inside Microsoft PowerPoint.

Clearly, you can use Microsoft Project to maintain and create Gantt charts, but in practice, a lot of project managers, CEOs, and CFOs want to see a simple chart without using any extra software. All they want is a clear visual that shows where they are, what are the next steps, and what is the current status of the project.

Therefore, we decided to develop a Gantt chart generator especially for PowerPoint users, where you can easily manage the data within an Excel spreadsheet and visualize it later in PowerPoint through a simple macro. An additional goal for this product was to ensure that an office secretary, or an amateur PowerPoint user, can create professional Gantt charts quickly and easily.

Our Gantt Chart Generator product is not a full software solution, but an add-in that saves you time.

Geetesh: What are the scenarios you witness for the use of Gantt charts within PowerPoint?

Rouwen: We are developers of products for IT in finance and controlling for human resources departments. And lots of clients want to know where they are with our analytics. So, my team and I use the Gantt Chart Generator internally to create a timeline to analyze how often the salary increases in different departments of a company in last 3 or 5 years. For real estate (finance departments), we use the Gantt Chart Generator to see when it’s the next time to pay the interest (loans). And for myself I use the Gantt Chart Generator to see how long it will take for my team to create different geographical maps for PowerPoint, or what is the next step for developing software products. With the Gantt Chart Generator, it’s easy to create slides to show to my clients and receive feedback from them.

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, Charting, Gantt Charts, Interviews, PowerPoint, Rouwen Stallwanger