PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint (2003) Mechanics: Conversation with Mark Normand

Mark Normand was born in Chelmsford, England, and he has lived and worked for almost two decades in Singapore. In his present position as the founder and managing director of Impress Training, he has traversed much of Asia to deliver training in management and business communication. With a keen interest in graphic design and amateur photography, he is a regular contributor to such sites as SlideShare and Stock.XCHNG.

In this interview, Mark discusses his PowerPoint (2003) Mechanics ebook.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, and how this book evolved.

Mark: Together with my business partner, we run Impress Training, a training firm based in Singapore, providing soft skills training to organizations in various areas such as management, sales, service, communication, and more.

During my years of work, like many others, you’ve either sat through or provided many PowerPoint presentations. And like so many others, they just look bad and take a lot of value away from the delivery of the presenter.

The blog site and the book evolved out of a course we run at Impress Training to train normal business professionals to achieve a higher quality of PowerPoint visuals. Looking around, I thought there is still something missing, there’s a lot of books out there that can be too technical, too wordy, or that talk about ‘what’ should be done but never the how, and many of them feature graphics that you’ll come to realize are designed by professionals, use Photoshop or Illustrator and many other applications to produce these visuals. What I really wanted to do was provide the means to ordinary businesspeople to whip up a presentation quickly, look good, and not use any external tools to produce the visuals – just plain PowerPoint, because at the end of the day, this is all that most people have. The ebook is basically a straight-to-the-point step-by-step guide to producing some of the visual effects that many people see around them – and why 2003? Because for many businesses (here in Asia at least) we’re still some way from everyone upgrading to 2007. However, I’m working on a new ebook just for them in the future.

Geetesh: What do you believe is the most important thing that any reader will gain from the book?

Mark: As mentioned, this book doesn’t have any text on the dos and don’ts because there are many other books out there that do a good job of that, i.e., explaining what. What I wanted to give them is “the how.” The main aim is to provide the mechanics and let them use those techniques and apply them to their own presentations. As with the blog, I try not to touch on effects that are too readily available, but something a little more unique.

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: Books, Interviews, Mark Normand, PowerPoint

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

Many PowerPoint users still haven’t mastered working with motion path animations, and we don’t blame them, for unless you just want to add a preset path, the whole process is not too intuitive. So, in the next few days, we’ll cover motion paths extensively on the Indezine site through a set of tutorials.

Learn to apply Motion Path animations to slide objects in PowerPoint 2007, 2003, and 2002 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2002, PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Animation, Motion Path, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2002, PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2007, Transitions

Articulate Engage ’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 Engage ’09 product.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the improvements to Engage ’09–and what is your favorite new feature?

Mark: Engage ’09 has introduced some wonderful improvements over the previous version, which was driven by customer feature request submissions and the ingenuity of our amazing engineering teams.

I’m really excited about the new Community Interactions option. Often, we receive requests to create more Engage interaction options. When we would ask 10 people which interactions they would like to see, we’d get 10 different suggestions. So we introduced a free Software Developers Kit (SDK) to empower Flash programmers to create their own Engage interactions. We expect to see many new interactions created by and shared within our community. Now there will be a virtually unlimited number of Engage interaction types.

I also think several other new features will be very well received including interaction branching, increased color palette, template customization, and the ability to publish directly to a Learning Management System (LMS) from Engage.

Geetesh: Beyond Engage’s synergies with Articulate Presenter and Articulate Online, I found it to be a great product to create quick electronic brochures, especially for users who are Flash-challenged. Can you share your thoughts on this concept?

Mark: Yes, we see many customers using Engage as a Flash authoring tool. While it was really initially designed to be primarily used as a way to enhance Articulate Presenter courses, we realized that many customers were actually creating entire courses using Engage. That is why we introduced the ability to publish Engage interactions directly to Articulate Online and to LMSs to enable tracking of these Engage-only courses.

You May Also Like: Articulate Engage ’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, Mark Schwartz, PowerPoint

PowerPoint Version Hell

If you are still working with PowerPoint 2003, and work in a mixed environment where some users have upgraded to PowerPoint 2007, you know that it’s no easy task working with presentations that have been opened, edited, and saved on both versions. The opposite is also true. If you are using PowerPoint 2007 and need to share files with users who are still working on PowerPoint 2003 (or even older versions), you know that there have been some unhappy times!

When you gain something, you almost always also gain something unwanted as well.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Version Hell

Articulate Engage ’09: The Indezine Review

Explaining a concept, a process, or even showing a series of pictures can sometimes become so complicated, just because you may be using the wrong sort of computer program to do the explaining! When you run across a scenario like that, you will find that Engage, a quick and easy-to-use program that lets you create interactions is just what you want!

What we like about Engage is that it does not try to do everything. It takes a simple approach of being a one-trick pony and does that exceedingly well. The folks at Articulate, the company that creates Engage like to call anything you create within Engage an interaction. Think of these interactions as small brochure-like Flash movies with rich-media interactivity that can be embedded within presentations, e-learning content, and web sites.

Read the Indezine review of Articulate Engage ’09.

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