PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Animation Events in PowerPoint 2007, 2003, and 2002 for Windows

Before you learn to add animation to any slide object, do remember that there are three ways in which your animation can be set to play. These are called animation events. By default, if you don’t change anything, PowerPoint sets the event to On Click.

Learn about using animation events in PowerPoint 2007, 2003, and 2002 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2002, PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Animation, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2002, PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2007, Tutorials

Motion Path Animations in PowerPoint 2007, 2003, and 2002 for Windows

Motion Path animations determine the route (path) and the direction in which the animated slide object moves across or around the slide. For example, you can move the slide object up, down, right, or left, on a preset or created motion path. We took every single motion path animation available in PowerPoint including the preset and custom options, and created this sample online presentation that you can use as a reference to preview.

Learn about Motion Path animations in PowerPoint 2007, 2003, and 2002 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2002, PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Animation, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2002, PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2007, Tutorials

Toolbook: The Brad Crain Interview

As Vice President and General Manager of ToolBook, Brad Crain is responsible for ToolBook products, including strategy, research and development, and product management. Brad previously held various positions at Click2learn/Asymetrix including Director of Learning Management Systems Engineering and Director of Enterprise Products.

In this interview, Brad discusses the ToolBook product from SumTotal Systems and its PowerPoint related abilities.

Read the interview here.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, PowerPoint, Toolbook

SlideShare Now Supports Keynote

SlideShare, a leading site that lets you upload and share PowerPoint presentations, now also supports Apple Keynote files. All you need to do is ZIP archive your Keynote presentation files and upload to SlideShare.

There’s an interesting tutorial on the SlideShare site that’s embedded here:

Stop Press: The option to upload Apple Keynote files no longer seems to work. You can save your Keynote presentation as a PowerPoint presentation and try uploading.

Filed Under: Keynote
Tagged as: Keynote, Online Presentations, PowerPoint, SlideShare

Slide Executive: Conversation with Liber Rodriguez-Florez

Liber Rodriguez-Florez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but is resident in Sweden. He holds a Master of Science in Engineering Physics and works as the Sales Director of Novatrox AB where he is responsible for the technical sales towards international customers. Prior to joining Novatrox AB, Liber worked several years at Relevant Traffic, a highly competitive Search Engine Marketing company, as Technical Director cooperating closely with the Relevant Traffic sales department.

In this discussion, Liber discusses Novatrox’s Slide Executive product.

Geetesh: Liber, tell us more about the improvements in Slide Executive Professional 2.3?

Liber: We have improved and streamlined a numerous number of things that will increase usability and make working with Slide Executive even easier. I can’t tell you everything we’ve done because I would go on for too long. But here are some top picks:

Search improvements: A search form is now accessible from the toolbar so you can start a search for slides or files without needing to click any menu or button first. This is very handy not only for slides but also if you want to look for some file you know is far down in the folder structure. Just as before you can limit your search by searching just a part of your slide library from folder down to presentation level. Also, the relevancy of the search is improved since Slide Executive takes account of more parameters when sorting the results. We also added some nice shortcut buttons for each slide in the slide search results, allowing you to immediately download a slide’s master presentation or going to that slide’s master presentation directly within Slide Executive.

Auditing and statistics: For managers, we have added auditing and statistics to improve the possibility to track how Slide Executive is used in their user base. We have added both general statistics and audit trails on file and folder level. This way you can see exactly who has viewed or downloaded a particular presentation/file in the system in any period of time. The general statistics give you numbers like the total number of indexed slides and indexed presentations resident in the system and much more. Thanks to the easy access of information we now know that having thousands or even tens of thousands of slides in a Slide Executive slide library, is a common thing among our customers.

Progress details: Now when you import or export presentations to the system you are shown continuous information of what Slide Executive is doing, basically you see the progress slide by slide from indexing to creation of thumbnails. You can also choose to cancel a job at any time.

Export options: Slide Executive has always allowed a variety of export options. A new feature is that you can now export to older PowerPoint versions. Together with the already existing export possibilities to PDF, web archive, web page, etc.. we now offer a complete set of export options reducing the steps for preparing materials for professionals.

Previews: Now you can preview how a virtual presentation will look when new versions of master presentations have been imported. If you have chosen to update your virtual presentations manually (the automatic update works as before, updating immediately) you will be able to see all new versions of updated slides on the forehand, before choosing to update. You can also choose to update slide by slide on an individual level. Of course, you can also preview the new slide version before updating a single slide.

More features: We have also introduced other new features like a garbage can to be able to restore deleted files, the ability to add discussion posts per slide (not just per presentation like before) to allow user comments on ongoing work, new actions added to the roles section for customizing what each user can do within the system, a last visited files section with links to the files you looked at recently and many more minor things to improve the user experience in Slide Executive.

Let me also mention our coming release which I am very excited about. If 2.3 has been packed with new, truly good features, our 2.4 release in the first quarter of 2009 will be introducing some new functionality to improve the user experience dramatically.

Geetesh: Can you give us an idea about your support infrastructure?

Liber: Novatrox always gives personal support from highly skilled people. We provide support in form of phone, mail, and even by remote desktop connection if needed. Having support staff who have thorough knowledge about development allows us to respond not only with immediate qualified support but also to collect new ideas and requirements to implement for “the next version”.

On our website, we have a Support Center where we have all kinds of information available for our users. Apart from document downloads, an extensive forum, and contact information, we also have flash video instructions for paying customers.

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, Liber Rodriguez-Florez, PowerPoint, Presentation Management, Slide Management