PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Test Your Color Sense

Here’s a cool site called the Online Color Challenge that ascertains how well you see color, and how much you can differentiate between the various hues of a color as it evolves from one value to another.

In its original form, this site contains four self-contained rows of jumbled-up color chips that you need to drag and place so that each color chip is suitably similar to the ones before and after them.

This example demonstrates how the color chips were rearranged, even though the result is not entirely correct. Figure 1, below, shows the rearranged chips.

Figure 1: Rearranged Color Chips

Figure 2, below, shows the results, with a score of 12, where smaller scores are better than larger ones. Another participant scored 3, while someone else had a score close to 90.

Figure 2: The score

Participants were then asked to provide their age and gender, and the score was compared with others of the same gender within a similar age group. This comparison is shown in Figure 3, below.

This is great fun if you have 10 to 15 minutes to spare. Go here to play.

Filed Under: Color
Tagged as: Accessibility, Color

PowerFinish Video Backgrounds: The Indezine Review

A PowerPoint presentation is a great platform. It lets you create a framework for the content you are presenting. However, since most PowerPoint presentations look so similar and static, there’s been a move to use animated, yet subtle backgrounds for slides. Now, we are not very big fans of adding animated backgrounds, yet we do believe that if you use the right animated loop, you can achieve a different, contemporary look. Again, everything works best in moderation.

The product we are reviewing is looping video backgrounds from PowerFinish. These video backgrounds can be directly used in your presentations or can be used through third-party video engines that we explore later in this review.

Read the Indezine review of PowerFinish Video Backgrounds.

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

PowerPoint Malware Flaw

Vnunet reported concerns about a flaw in Microsoft PowerPoint that may be exploited by malware writers. Their post adds:

“This PowerPoint exploit is in the wild right now,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “It comes in the form of a presentation showing naked Japanese girls bathing in rockpools, or as an IQ test, to lure the user in. We’re hoping Microsoft will patch this soon.”

Read more on the Vnunet site.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Malware, Microsoft Office, PowerPoint

Speaking Visually: Eight Roles Pictures Play in Presentation

This article by Robert Lane and Andre Vlcek explains why including pictures in presentations is a simple and powerful way of expanding your expressive potential as a speaker. Pictures communicate at levels beyond the descriptive possibilities of words and bathe the brain in much desired visual stimulation. At the same time, not all pictures are created equally.

Choosing the right images, and using them in the right ways, can greatly impact your effectiveness.

We look at 8 roles that pictures can play within your presentations.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Andre Vlcek, Design, Microsoft Office, Opinion, PowerPoint, Robert Lane

Using the Save as PDF Add-in in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows

The Save to PDF option is not built within PowerPoint 2007 or the other programs in Office 2007 by default. However, you can easily download a small add-in that makes it possible to save PDFs from within PowerPoint 2007 by following the steps in the Getting Office 2007’s Save as PDF Add-in tutorial. Once you have downloaded and installed the Save as PDF Add-in, follow these steps to use it in PowerPoint 2007.

Learn how to use the Office 2007 Save as PDF add-in in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: PDF, PowerPoint 2007, Tutorials