PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Articulate Presenter ’09: Conversation with Mark Schwartz

    Mark Schwartz is the executive vice president for sales and marketing at Articulate. In this role, he has worldwide sales responsibility for Articulate leading the direct sales and channel management teams as well as all product marketing activities. Prior to joining Articulate, Mark spent 20 years in sales and sales management roles with IBM and Dell.

In this discussion, Mark discusses the new Articulate Presenter ’09 product.

Geetesh: Articulate Presenter is already such a full-featured program. What did you add to version ’09 to make it better?

Mark: We’re really proud of the great job our engineering team did in improving upon Articulate Presenter. I’ve had an opportunity to demonstrate Presenter ’09 at several trade shows already. The feedback that I’ve received has been extremely positive. The features that seem to receive the most acclaim include: the ability to add annotations to the course, preview publish options, improved image fidelity, branching support, notes formatting, mobile support, and PowerPoint 2007 ribbon interface and new feature support (such as SmartArt).

Geetesh: Mark, tell us more about the support infrastructure in place for Articulate Presenter and your other products.

Mark: According to our own and independent third-party research, Articulate continues to receive very high marks in support. We recently won a Top 10 Best Web Support Site for the second year in a row. We offer free web-based support, and we work hard at providing a comprehensive self-service support site that solves most customer problems almost instantaneously. Should a customer need to open a case, we are able to respond to over 90% of our cases within an hour.

Our community forums, which are a critical element of our support offerings, now have over 32,000 active members. We actively monitor and respond to customer threads, and our customer base also does a great job responding to other customers in need. We truly have a very helpful and amazingly intelligent user community. I believe this is paramount to our success.

Our support site includes over 90 web-based tutorials to get customers up to speed on our products. Should customers desire customized training from us, we offer web-based and instructor-led training sessions.

We offer an enhanced, fee-based support option–the Platinum Membership Plan (PMP), which provides a free Software Developers Kit, chat support, and pre-paid, discounted version upgrades.

Finally, we offer fee-based incident phone support that includes a web conference component where we can take over the user’s computer if that would prove beneficial and if we are granted access.

You May Also Like: Articulate Presenter ’09: The Indezine Review.

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: Articulate, eLearning, Interviews, Mark Schwartz, PowerPoint

Version Hell: PowerPoint 2007 Shadow Problems

If your presentation uses the Formatting toolbar to add shadows to text, you’ll find that it shows fine when played in PowerPoint 2007. However, any shadows that you add through the Drawing toolbar in PowerPoint 2003 or earlier end up looking horrible in PowerPoint 2007. The results work out worse when the text is animated. In that case, the text animates, but the shadow doesn’t!

Read more and comment here.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, Version Hell

Office Moves Browser-wards — More Details

Continuing with my Office Moves Browser-wards post, more details have started emerging.

Sci-Tech Today reports that “the apps will be made available at the end of next year, when the new Office 14 is released. A technology preview is being planned for the end of this year.”

The National Business Review has many screenshots including one that shows the PowerPoint version of the web incarnation—their report adds: “Pushing the boundaries still further, Microsoft says Office 14 Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files will also be able to be viewed, and edited, on a smart phone’s web browser—and again, you won’t necessarily have to own a Windows Mobile handset.”

vnunet adds that, “Customers tell us they want to be able to share information and collaborate with others seamlessly across the PC, phones and the web,” said Takeshi Numoto, general manager for the Office client. Speaking at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, Numoto demonstrated how the web applications allow two people to open and edit the same document stored in Office Live Workspace, with any changes synchronised between the two copies almost instantly.”

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: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Microsoft Office, Office for the Web, PowerPoint for the Web

Add PowerPoints to LinkedIn

You can now add PowerPoint presentations to your LinkedIn profile through the new SlideShare integration feature. First upload your presentations to SlideShare, and then sync your LinkedIn and SlideShare profiles so that all your SlideShare presentations will start showing up on LinkedIn.

SlideShare has put up a tutorial that shows you how—play it to learn more.

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: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: PowerPoint, SlideShare

Office Moves Browser-wards

In a single most important indication of things to come, Microsoft pulled the curtains to announce that Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote would be available as light-weight, browser-based apps, much like Google Apps. However, unlike Google Apps, Microsoft Office Web applications won’t be available entirely free. Expect to see both paid and advertiser-supported versions. Significantly, Microsoft has also announced that these online programs would run beyond Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer in other browsers including Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. These answers and announcements were part of the PDC (Professional Developers Conference), being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from October 27th to 30th, 2008.

PC Magazine adds that “users will be able to sign up for an Office Live beta at some point in the future at the Office Live Workspace site, Microsoft said Tuesday. A technical preview of the software/service will be released later this year.”

CNET has more info: “In an interview, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop said that the browser-based editing capabilities are being developed in conjunction with the next version of Office, known as Office 14. Microsoft won’t say when that version will arrive, but Elop said that a technology preview of the browser-based products will come later this year and that a beta version will be released in 2009.”

InfoWorld folks wonder about the timing when they ask: “Why is Microsoft announcing this now when it could have brought out browser-based versions of its apps long ago? “We’ve been figuring out the right thing to build for quite some time,” said Kapner. “The company had to feel good about its [services] strategy across the company. We had to make sure our Office strategy fit with the larger strategy.”

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Excel, Microsoft Office, Office, OneNote, PowerPoint, Word