PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Articulate Quizmaker ’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 Quizmaker ’09 product.

Geetesh: How easy is it to create a quiz or survey in Quizmaker ’09 — does it involve any coding at all? And what’s your favorite new feature in Quizmaker ’09?

Mark: That’s the power of Quizmaker ’09. It allows for very simple quiz and survey authoring and requires no coding at all. If you do like to code in Flash, Quizmaker ’09 easily supports inserting those Flash objects within the quiz. Quizmaker ’09 provides for 2 authoring options – a form view and a slide view. The form view is set up as a template that allows for simple fill-in-the-blank question creation. With it, you get an effective, albeit generically designed quiz. The slide view empowers the author to design a beautiful, engaging quiz. And it’s simple to use. The slide view interface is similar to the PowerPoint 2007 animation, design, and pictures interface, plus we add an audio and timeline editor for precise controls over audio and timings. It really allows for some amazing design options.

My favorite new feature is the slide view authoring capability. It provides a total free-form design but remains extremely simple to use. I can’t wait to see some of the quizzes and surveys that our customers create. I also love the new conditional branching option used in conjunction with our new blank slide feature. The branching option allows Quizmaker ’09 to direct the student to a specific slide or question based on a right or wrong answer. The new blank slide feature allows the author to create non-question slides, which provide for directed remediation when used with branching.

Geetesh: How does Quizmaker ’09 integrate with Articulate Presenter and Articulate Online — and are there any unconventional case studies on Quizmaker that you can share?

Mark: Customers who have Quizmaker ’09 and Presenter ’09 can integrate their quizzes within Presenter ’09 courses. When integrated within a Presenter ’09 course, you can set the number of quiz attempts, and you can direct the student to a specific slide within the Presenter course based on a pass/fail result. All of these settings are easily controlled via a simple drop-down selection.

Articulate Online is an Articulate-hosted offering that allows customers to easily track and manage Articulate-authored content. Quizmaker ’09 authors can publish the quiz or survey directly to their Articulate Online portal via one click within Quizmaker ’09. Once published, Articulate Online administrators can see full answer-level detail for all students and quizzes.

I’m not aware of any unconventional case studies related to Quizmaker. It’s really designed to allow for quick quiz and survey authoring, and that’s how our customers are using it. With the blank slide feature and powerful design capabilities now provided with Quizmaker ’09, perhaps we’ll learn of some new unconventional uses for Quizmaker.

You May Also Like: Articulate Quizmaker ’09 — The Indezine Review

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Articulate, Interviews, Mark Schwartz, PowerPoint

Articulate Video Encoder ’09: The Indezine Review

Articulate Video Encoder ’09 converts almost any popular video format into the FLV Flash video format. In addition, it also allows you to record video directly from your webcam to an FLV file. All videos can be tweaked with some essential edits. Finally, the converted FLV Flash video format files can be used as media elements in Articulate Presenter, Articulate Engage, and Articulate Quizmaker, or anywhere else.

Read the Indezine review of Articulate Video Encoder ’09.

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

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

One of the simplest motion path tricks is using the reverse motion path option. This is very helpful if you want an object to animate using a motion path, and then animate again from the end of the motion path to the beginning!

Reverse the direction for 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

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

We showed how you can add a basic Motion Path animation to any object on a PowerPoint slide. Now, we’ll show how you can use PowerPoint’s drawing tools to create your own motion path.

PowerPoint provides 4 types of drawing options for custom Motion Path animations.

Learn to draw custom paths for 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

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