PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Emergency Preparedness Systems: Conversation with Greg Friese

Greg Friese, MS, NREMT-P is president of Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC and a paramedic, educator, author, and outdoor enthusiast. To learn more and to receive rapid e-learning design and production tips, subscribe to the EPS blog at their site.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC, and the training programs you create.

Greg: I am the founder and president of Emergency Preparedness Systems LLC. EPS does four things:

• We create narrated multimedia Flash movies for emergency responders.
• We convert existing classroom training for online delivery.
• We design and deliver new lessons and curriculum for online delivery that honor students’ knowledge, experience, and time.
• We teach our proven rapid e-learning for emergency responders production process to educators and training officers.

Our training programs for EMTs and paramedics, generally 25-30 minutes long, are used for continuing or refresher education. Since emergency responders work rotating shifts, it is very difficult for all employees to be in the training room together. Online lessons allow asynchronous delivery of the exact same content across multiple shifts and multiple stations. If users are called out for an emergency, they can resume the training program when they return. Each lesson is approved by the Continuing Education Coordinating Board for EMS, so students know that it will be accepted for local, state, or national recertification requirements. Most EPS content is distributed through CentreLearn and RapidCE.

Geetesh: Why do you use PowerPoint as the starting point for the creation of these programs? And what else do you use to enhance and distribute these programs?

Greg: We use PowerPoint for several reasons. First of all, it is an excellent tool for us to storyboard a lesson. During initial production, each slide is given a working title, and the script for the audio narration is written in the notes view. As production and editing progress, notes for images, objects, and animations are added to the notes view. Once the script is finalized, slide production begins which includes a descriptive slide title and sub-title, insertion of images and objects, and animation formatting.

The final step is to convert the PowerPoint slides to Flash using Articulate Presenter. The audio is inserted and synchronized with the PowerPoint slide animations. The end-user watches a narrated Flash movie inside the Articulate Presenter player. They may not even be aware that they are watching a movie that was created with PowerPoint.

We also use another Articulate product called Engage to create and insert custom Flash learning objects into the PowerPoint. The Articulate Engage Interactions published inside the Articulate Presenter movie.

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, Interviews, Medicine, Online Presentations, PowerPoint, Training

SlideBoom: Conversation with Yury Uskov

      Yury Uskov is the founder and CEO of iSpring Solutions Inc., an innovative software company with their development center in Russia. Yury has a Masters degree in Software Engineering and since 2001 have been working in the rich media industry inspired with the idea of making the best solution for online presentation sharing. iSpring Solutions has already launched several Flash technology projects, including iSpring, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, and SlideBoom, an online service for presentations sharing.

Geetesh: Tell us more about SlideBoom. Did you look at this as a natural evolution process after iSpring?

Yury: I’d rather mention two aspects. First is that iSpring users needed such a site to share their great presentations converted by desktop products. From this point of view, SlideBoom is just a great companion to iSpring.

Secondly, it is not a secret that people use online services more and more each day. This growing tendency inspired us to build SlideBoom as an online alternative to iSpring. From this point of view, SlideBoom looks like a result of the iSpring evolution process.

Geetesh: What sets SlideBoom apart from similar slide-sharing sites?

Yury: Thanks for the good question. Other similar sites are usually good for sharing static presentations only, and this kills some advantages of PowerPoint presentations. SlideBoom is designed for sharing rich video-like presentations with animations, embedded Flash movies, audio narrations, and video clips. The unique feature of SlideBoom is graphical annotations over presentation content, which could be saved with a presentation on the portal.

I can say that SlideBoom leads the second generation of PowerPoint sharing facilities (PowerPoint to Web 2.0), and I know that our competitors also work on similar solutions. We have developed iSpring technology since 2004, and have an advantage over competitors at least for 2-3 years.

We get feedback from people who use SlideBoom and most of them tell that SlideBoom is the service that they were looking for a long time. And I am sure there is room for SlideBoom in the market, and it will have a great future.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, iSpring, Online Presentations, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Flash, SlideBoom, Yury Uskov

Calculate: Conversation with Austin Myers

Austin Myers is a PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional). He is an expert in issues related to the use of multimedia in PowerPoint. Austin creates the PFCMedia and PFCPro add-ins for PowerPoint that have made life simple for many users. He also maintains a detailed FAQ on multimedia issues within PowerPoint. In this conversation, Austin discusses Calculate, a small free utility that he created for PowerPoint users who face a dilemma trying to figure out what their slide size should be to take up the entire screen.

Geetesh: How did Calculate evolve – and what is its purpose of existence?

Austin: As monitors, flat screens, and projectors have changed from the NTSC standard 4:3 ratio for display, users needed a simple way to determine PowerPoint’s slide size in order to fill the display completely without distorting their slides. Calculate is a small utility where the user simply provides the resolution (width and height) of their targeted screen in pixels, and the utility will determine the correct slide size to meet the required screen ratio.

The user is presented with 3 different options for the slide size, all of which will produce the correct ratio for the targeted screen. I decided to provide 3 options, as some users must also meet printing requirements. With Calculate, all they need do is select one of the 3 options that best fits their printer.

Figure 1: The Calculate interface

Geetesh: What type of scenarios can benefit from Calculate?

Austin: Anyone that uses a standard (4:3 ratio) display to develop PowerPoint resolutions but must display the finished presentation on a display with a different ratio will benefit from Calculate. Laptop users that have a non-standard display resolution also can see a real benefit in determining the exact slide size for their display (no black bars along the sides or top & bottom of the screen).

I have many clients that prepare PowerPoint presentations on their PCs but must then display it in a conference room with large displays. This has been a real issue for them in the past, as they were unable to use the entire display, or their slides became badly distorted when “stretched” to fit the display. With Calculate, all they need to know is the display’s resolution, and they can easily set up the correct slide size in advance and avoid the issue completely.

You May Also Like: Calculate: The Indezine Review

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Austin Myers, Delivery, Interviews, PowerPoint

Looking Back at Menus: Coping with the Ribbon

It’s been close to two years since we encountered the Ribbon in Office 2007, and that’s probably not counting the beta period. And there must be many of you who moved up to PowerPoint 2007 since then. Most of you love the Ribbon and the tabs—and the Quick Access Toolbar—but many of you still want to use menus. So, you might be using one of the free add-ins that bring back the menus as a new tab in the Ribbon! These include RibbonCustomizer from Patrick Schmid, and Classic Menu from Addintools.

If you are still struggling with the Ribbon, but don’t want the menus back yet, Microsoft has created this cool interactive demo that lets you locate your favorite PowerPoint 2003 commands within the new PowerPoint 2007 interface, as shown in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 command reference guide

Now, only if they could provide this as a downloadable file; that would be cool. Even more cool: make this part of the PowerPoint help interface that can work offline as well. And we’re not complaining even if we may sound so! Kudos to the Office Online team for creating something so helpful. There are similar interactive demos for other Office 2007 products, including Word and Excel.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Office 2007, Office Online, PowerPoint 2007, Training

Sharing Your SlideBoom Presentations

You already learned how you can join SlideBoom and upload your presentations as part of this SlideBoom series. In this post, we’ll go beyond the basics and show you how you can share your uploaded presentations with others:

1. First, make sure that you sign into your SlideBoom account.
2. Click the My Account button to load up your account page. On this page, you can see all your presentations, as shown in Figure 1, below.

Next, we’ll show you how you can make changes to your SlideBoom profile.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Companion Programs, Online Presentations, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Flash, SlideBoom