PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint Heaven: Conversation with Shawn Toh

Shawn Toh started creating PowerPoint presentations since secondary school and his interest in PowerPoint animations kept growing. Shawn loves to do advanced animation tricks using PowerPoint.

In this conversation, Shawn discusses animation in PowerPoint and his PowerPoint Heaven site.

Geetesh: Shawn, tell us more about yourself and PowerPoint Heaven.

Shawn: I have graduated from the Singapore Polytechnic with a diploma in Business Information Technology with merit and have enrolled in the National University of Singapore. During my free time, I work as a freelance presentation consultant where I do project consultations, conduct workshops, training, and speaking engagements with companies and schools.

I have been actively participating in the Microsoft Office Discussion Group for PowerPoint (under the alias “tohlz”) and has been working closely with Korea’s PowerPoint Expert Club.

Geetesh: PowerPoint Heaven is distinctly different from other PowerPoint sites since it looks more at drawing and animation in PowerPoint. What made you choose this direction?

Shawn: PowerPoint Heaven is both an entertainment and educational site that offers you with advanced animations and PowerPoint works. You will be able to find works such as PowerPoint games, artworks, anime, and even webcomics. On this site, the goal is to show users that PowerPoint is not simply a presentation tool, but is also capable of leveraging into other areas such as creating games, artworks, and animations comparable to those created in Adobe Flash and Photoshop.

The aim of this site is to create the WOW factor and go beyond the capability of PowerPoint, where visitors entering PowerPoint Heaven will get amazed by the works featured on the site. And through this site, users can get to learn how these advanced works are done by accessing the tutorials section.

PowerPoint Heaven started off as a personal site, where I published my tutorials and works. Being more animation and entertainment-focused, PowerPoint Heaven started off by showing works that are unique from other PowerPoint sites and has greatly shown the differences. Thus, the site began receiving more exposure and has attracted people who are interested in contributing to PowerPoint Heaven.

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: Animation, Interviews, PowerPoint, Shawn Toh

ShowLogic wins Meeting TechOnline Top Technology Suppliers Award

ShowLogic, a presentation platform designed for sales and marketing professionals, was announced as a winner of the Meeting TechOnline Top Technology Suppliers 2008 Awards. The awards honor innovative technology suppliers in the meetings and events industry that have shown outstanding leadership and advancement in technology tools.

Indezine interviewed Christina Deatherage of ShowLogic earlier this year.

Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: Delivery, PowerPoint

Create Slides on a Whiteboard

Life moves on to a full circle, and so does technology. We stumbled on this blog post about 8 Ways to Use a Whiteboard in Your Home Office — and it struck us how often we like to use a whiteboard (or even a piece of white paper) to sketch out ideas for a slide.

We have a large whiteboard in the office here that’s always running out of white space! We add our list of things to do, our workflows, contact info that we may need very often, and then we need to find some white space to create a visual representation of a slide (or a set of slides). Maybe there’s something about whiteboards (or white paper) and a pen that no computer peripheral or software can match. Not even a Tablet PC! And as they say, when some things work so well, let them remain the way they are.

Image: Yay Images

Filed Under: Case Studies
Tagged as: Case Studies, Inspiration, Whiteboard

Never-Ending PowerPoint Blues

The NJBIZ site has a very interesting and inspiring interview with Steve Adubato, author of Speak from the Heart and Make the Connection. In this interview, Steve discusses how PowerPoint can be a huge communication crutch.

We may not agree with him all the time since it is possible to make statistics look interesting in PowerPoint slides as well—but we do agree with him that PowerPoint by itself is no help at all unless it is accompanied by a good speaker (and good slides).

Read the interview here.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, PowerPoint

How To Make Conferences Great

I just read this inspiring article by Max Kalehoff on how conferences can be made better. It doesn’t look like you to need to do much to make attendees happy; and yet many conference organizers won’t even do that much!

And yes, I did observe Max’s comment on halting PowerPoint abuse: I’m shocked at how many conferences will charge thousands of dollars for a ticket and then subject attendees to boring presentations made excruciating by PowerPoint abuse.

Read more on Max’s blog here.

Filed Under: Case Studies
Tagged as: Case Studies, Conferencing, Delivery, PowerPoint