PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Office Online Web Comics: Conversation with David Salaguinto

  David Salaguinto is a writer on the Office User Assistance team at Microsoft. He creates comics to have fun and to connect with readers at his Office Online Web Comic blog. In this conversation, David discusses how he got started and where he gets inspiration from.

Geetesh: Tell us more about your work at Office Online. And how did you get started with the web-comics blog?

David: Mostly, I write about Visio for the people who use it, although I do occasionally write about other Microsoft Office programs if a team needs my help. Every month, we look at the feedback we receive from customers, and we try to address it. Sometimes it means we write new articles or update existing ones. Sometimes it means we produce a video demo or online training. Sometimes it means we try new things. They don’t always work, but we like to think we learn from our failures.

One of the things we wanted to try was a comic. A colleague of mine found a fascinating article about comics being used in unusual places. What if we did a comic for Office Online? I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so I jumped at the chance to create a comic using Visio. For my first comic, I did a rather simple one about printing:

I personally thought it was kind of corny, but my coworkers seemed to like it, so I made more. Pretty soon, I was posting them online. You can read more about how I got started in this column I wrote for Office Online.

Geetesh: I love all the content you put up on the Office Online Web Comic blog — what inspires you for all the ideas based on Microsoft Office applications?

David: I get a lot of my ideas from my coworkers. Sometimes, someone will send me an idea for a comic, but more often than not, I’ll read something in an e-mail or overhear something in a meeting that strikes me as a possible source of humor. It turns out that jokes aren’t that hard to write. Finding irony and surprise in everyday things—like Microsoft Office—now, that’s hard. For example, I was reading something written by a coworker about how a PowerPoint deck can have multiple slide masters. I immediately thought of the saying, “No man can serve two masters,” which led me to this comic about PowerPoint and Marketing:

That’s where the ideas come from. As for the punch lines, well…I don’t actually know. They seem to come out of nowhere, but only after throwing out dozens of bad ones. You’d cringe in horror if you saw some of the bad punch lines I came up with for the preceding comic.

Geetesh: Tell us about some favorite posts you have put up, and why they are your favorites.

David: I think my favorite comics are the ones with the little pink girl in them. I have two young daughters myself, and I love the way they talk and how they look at the world. For example, I‘ve noticed that a lot of kids have started using PowerPoint in their school projects, which led me to this comic:

For this comic, I spent a lot of time crafting the words so they would ring true and sound believable. I also wanted to capture the excitement in the child and the caring in the father. In so far as the comic succeeds, I think it succeeds because of that (and not just because of the jibe at marketing—although that certainly helps). As you can probably tell, I have a lot of fun creating these comics, probably even more than you have reading them.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: David Salaguinto, Graphics, Interviews, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Visio

Google Presentations Adds Vector Shapes and PDF Output

After adding online presentation sharing 20 days ago, Google Presentations adds a quick new update in the form of vector shapes and PDF output.

AppScout reports that “Google Presentations is getting the ability to save documents as a PDF and PDF-based printing options. Users are also getting some basic drawing abilities and vector shapes, such as word bubbles and arrows.

The Wired Blog Network adds that “Google has released a new desktop uploader for Windows, making to much easier to move a large batch of files into Google Docs.”

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Companion Programs, Google, Google Slides, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Slide Executive Professional: The Indezine Review

A decade or two ago, users played with PowerPoint around twice a month, made some overhead slides through a service provider and hired expensive equipment to show these at really big events. Nowadays, people create PowerPoint slides more often than they sneeze!

The result is that there are billions of slides in the presentation sphere — slides lost and mixed up in a chaotic land where it’s easier to spend to a few hours to create new slides than search and reuse the ones that cannot be found. Our review product Slide Executive Professional may be all the help you need.

Read the Indezine review of Slide Executive Professional.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Slide Management

SlideManager: The Indezine Review

There are essentially three PowerPoint related tasks: you either create, give, or archive/share presentations. You know that keeping one or all three of these tasks organized is not a task that can be described as easy as pie.

SlideManager is a slide management software that can assist you in each of the three task scenarios. It lets you maintain an online presentation library that is cataloged down to the individual slide level.

Read the Indezine review of SlideManager.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Slide Management

MathType, TeX, and PowerPoint: Conversation with Bob Mathews

  Bob Mathews is the Director of Training for Design Science. A former military pilot, Bob came to Design Science in 1999 after teaching high school mathematics for several years. MathType from DesignScience is probably the foremost equation program available today — it integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office programs including PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Give us a generic profile of the typical PowerPoint user who also uses MathType.

Bob: Our customers hold such a variety of positions in education and industry that it’s hard to describe a “typical” user. We see people using MathType with PowerPoint to present a 6th-grade math lesson, and we see people creating engineering proposals with these products. In almost 10 years with Design Science, I’ve had only one or two customers ever ask me about doing something with the MathType/PowerPoint combination that couldn’t be done, and those were things neither MathType nor PowerPoint were intended to do anyway. Actually, MathType can be used in a wider range of applications than just Microsoft Office (graphing tools, flowcharting tools, illustration apps, desktop publishing, etc.) — basically anything into which you can insert, paste, or drag a graphic — so its use in PowerPoint just fits into a normal day’s workflow for many of our customers.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the new TeX entry feature in MathType, and how it helps PowerPoint users.

Bob: This is a really powerful feature for someone who prefers to use TeX but needs to use PowerPoint to prepare a presentation, or needs to use Word to collaborate with colleagues. Simply type the TeX or LaTeX markup into the MathType window, press Enter, and MathType converts the markup into a typeset equation. You can even mix MathType’s point & click and keyboard shortcut features with the TeX input feature in the same equation. If a colleague sends you a TeX document and you want to use one of the equations on a PowerPoint slide, you can simply copy the equation and paste the TeX into MathType. In short, the new TeX entry feature provides the utility of being able to use a familiar program you’re comfortable with and combine it with a powerful typesetting language in order to get the mathematical expressions you need into PowerPoint.

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: Add-in, Bob Mathews, Education, Interviews, PowerPoint