PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerFinish Worship Themes: The Indezine Review

PowerPoint presentations or other projected content in churches don’t always follow the rules laid down for corporate presentations. Although the presentation backgrounds used in churches should also be non distracting from the message, you can still use a busier background with flowers, skies, people, religious symbols, and other nature elements. The new Christian backgrounds and worship themes from PowerFinish aim to fulfill that requirement with their graphic styles and contemporary Christian concepts. You can use all of the designs in this product for PowerPoint presentations or within any other worship or church presentation software.

Read the review here.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Christian, PowerPoint, Review, Templates

Office 2008 SP2 Adds New Abilities to PowerPoint 2008

Microsoft’s new Service Pack 2 update for Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac has ushered in improvements that are a pleasant surprise. Topping the list is the option to add motion path animations in PowerPoint that have been available to Windows users of PowerPoint since PowerPoint 2002 (XP)! All this while, Mac versions of PowerPoint have been able to view motion path animations added by their Windows-based colleagues but they have never been able to add or edit them. This changes everything — look at Figure 1 below to see the new motion path animations option in PowerPoint 2008.

Figure 1: Adding Motion Path Animations in PowerPoint 2008 for Mac

I still don’t see the preset motion path options that are available to Windows users of PowerPoint, but that may be a blessing in disguise?

Other improvements in SP2 include the ability to now choose your own default theme including custom themes. Also, when you double-click in any part of a slide, you can start typing. Animated GIFs work as expected (learn more here about the earlier problems), and dynamic guides work better! The last option is still not available to Windows users of PowerPoint.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint

InterActiv™ Presentation Wizard: The Indezine Review

Many of us need to create non-linear PowerPoint presentations where all slides are interlinked to each other using hyperlinks. Think of creating kiosk style PowerPoints or just something that makes a PowerPoint presentation function as a web page. The most important part of such a presentation is to decide how many levels deep you want your slide hierarchies to go, and then creating the actual structure of slides that contain all your content. Something like this is prone to error, even if you do all the planning in the world — and an automated solution that can help you with something like this is a welcome feature. Enter the InterActiv™ Presentation Wizard, a PowerPoint add-in that does just something of this sort!

Read on to learn more.

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

authorSTREAM Desktop: Conversation with Umesh Sharma

    Umesh Sharma is the Product Head at authorSTREAM, an online slide sharing site integrated with social media. Based in Chandigarh, India, Umesh’s profiles includes developing product roadmaps and managing media interactions. In this conversation, Umesh discusses the new authorSTREAM Desktop product.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the new authorSTREAM Desktop product. What is its raison d’être?

Umesh: To help create more compelling content with PowerPoint, easily and fast. It so happens many times while creating a PowerPoint presentation that we need visual content like images and videos. You have the words but it’s really difficult to get graphics to convey the power of the message, or similarly, say you have seen a YouTube video added to your favorites that you thought you would use in some presentation some day. authorSTREAM Desktop does exactly that for you: it helps you search and insert content like images and YouTube videos without making you leave PowerPoint. We will be adding more features in this direction in subsequent versions.

Ease of upload to authorSTREAM is another reason to use authorSTREAM Desktop. With authorSTREAM Desktop installed, you can upload large PowerPoint files along with all linked media files easily, which otherwise is not easily possible via a web upload. Under the hood, we are using an FTP upload, which is much faster than web (HTTP) uploads.

Geetesh: How does authorSTREAM Desktop handle the copyright issues involved in a product of its nature? Do you warn users that some of the search results may not be usable? Tell us more.

Umesh: At the moment, we have an alert at the top search task-pane. In addition, clicking on the title of an image or video in search results will take you to its source page, which in most cases should contain licensing details. Mostly, image copyrights don’t really affect a user for ‘fair use’ – personal, non-profit, or educational and amongst a small group of viewers. However, we do understand that showing users all that there is to the licensing of the image would be more usable. We have plans to include results, which carry these details (Creative Commons or any other) in the next versions of the software.

You May Also Like: authorSTREAM Desktop: Search Bing, YouTube, and Upload to authorSTREAM

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, authorSTREAM, Interviews, PowerPoint 2007, YouTube

authorSTREAM Desktop: Search Bing, YouTube, and Upload to authorSTREAM

authorSTREAM has introduced the new authorSTREAM Desktop product that installs as an add-in to PowerPoint 2007 for Windows. The product is entirely free, and when successfully installed, it shows up as a new tab in the Ribbon of PowerPoint 2007 as shown in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: The authorSTREAM tab in the PowerPoint 2007 Ribbon

Although there are several buttons on this tab, there are three tasks that this add-in lets you achieve:

1. Search images from Bing image search, and insert them into your slides.
2. Search videos from YouTube, and insert them into your slides.
3. Publish any created presentations to the authorSTREAM site.

The image and video searches open up as a separate task pane called Search and Insert, as shown in Figure 2, below:

Figure 2: authorSTREAM Desktop Image Search

Video searches work in the same way, as shown in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3: authorSTREAM Desktop Video Search

Inserting YouTube videos does not actually place the video clip inside PowerPoint. Rather, it places a reference to the clip on the YouTube site, and you need to be online to view the clip. YouTube video clips only show in Slide Show view within PowerPoint. Within Normal view (editing mode), they show up as a box placeholder, as shown in Figure 3, above.

You upload PowerPoint presentations to your authorSTREAM account using the prominent Upload PowerPoint button in the Ribbon tab, as shown previously in Figure 1.

The whole experience of using this add-in is easy and intuitive. However, do remember that most images and videos on Bing and YouTube and copyright protected—and you ought to use caution before inserting anything that you find while searching! Explore our Picture Copyrights page to learn more.

Harman Singh of authorSTREAM has put up this video walkthrough of authorSTREAM Desktop — you’ll find this embedded below:

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: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: authorSTREAM, Harman Singh, PowerPoint 2007, YouTube