PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

The Ric Bretschneider Interview

  Ric Bretschneider is Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint at Microsoft and he celebrates fifteen years as a Microsoft veteran, having joined the company in 1993 to work on PowerPoint for Windows and the Macintosh. Over the years, he’s contributed to the design and direction of the application, and been awarded three PowerPoint related patents.

In this interview, Ric discusses his fifteen years, and his involvement with PowerPoint.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Microsoft, PowerPoint, Ric Bretschneider

NXPowerLite 3.5: Conversation with Tommy Powell

Tommy Powell is from Neuxpower, a software solutions company based in the UK. Neuxpower custom-build both stand-alone applications and add-ins that enhance existing software such as Microsoft Office. Their commercially-available PowerPoint optimizer, NXPowerLite, radically reduces the size of PowerPoint files.

Geetesh: Tell us what is new in version 3.5 of NXPowerLite.

Tommy: NXPowerLite 3.5 features three big changes. The most important change is that it is now compatible with files saved in Microsoft’s new Office Open XML formats (such as DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX).

NXPowerLite 3.5 is the only product on the market that can optimize Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files created in any version of Office, from Office 97-2008 (of course, it also works with files created in other Office suites, such as OpenOffice, StarOffice, and even Google Docs, as long as they are saved in a Microsoft Office format).

Secondly, we’ve improved the way that NXPowerLite integrates with Microsoft Outlook, making it even easier to optimize your email attachments.

The third change is that NXPowerLite is now available in Chinese, increasing the number of supported languages to six (with more languages to follow soon). NXPowerLite detects the language of your Windows installation and automatically displays in that language – so if you’re using a Chinese version of Windows, you’ll now see a Chinese version of NXPowerLite.

Geetesh: NXPowerLite has evolved from an optimization program for PowerPoint to an optimization program for Microsoft Office files – tell us a little more about this evolution.

Tommy: NXPowerLite was originally launched back in 2001 as a program to make PowerPoint files smaller. PowerPoint files could (and still can) get incredibly large, making them difficult to store and share. NXPowerLite solved this problem, but customers frequently told us that they also had file-size problems with Word and Excel. You’d be amazed at what some people try to do with large graphics in Excel! So last year, we added support for Word and Excel files to NXPowerLite. But we haven’t forgotten our core PowerPoint audience — we’ve got some cool new features for PowerPoint users coming later this year!

NXPowerLite has evolved in other ways too, NXPowerLite 3.5 is also available as a Server Edition, enabling organizations to automatically optimize all the Office files on their servers, freeing up large amounts of existing server space and, in turn, contributing to a greener storage strategy.

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, Interviews, Neuxpower, NXPowerlite, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, Tommy Powell

PowerFinish Templates Volume 6

Millions of presentations may be created each day, but you may only see a few each week. And even then, they all look the same to you. Your newspaper changes their layouts, websites rehaul their identities, companies go through image makeovers, and even television looks different and more contemporary each day. So why do people make presentations that look the same? That’s typically because they use the designs that are built into PowerPoint.

PowerFinish Volume 6 is a set of 50 PowerPoint design templates that comprise an assortment of abstracts, geometry, and strokes with a painted canvas look. It is very contemporary, and the entire collection is available in both 4:3 standard and 16:9 HD sizes.

Read the Indezine review of PowerFinish Templates Volume 6.

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

Ric’s Podcast: Presentation Party Invitation to PowerPoint Live

Ric Bretschneider‘s newest podcast is now live on the Presentationsroundtable site.

In this podcast, Ric does a candid conversation with three PowerPoint MVPs, Steve Rindsberg, Echo Swinford, and Glen Millar. They have been regulars at five successful yearly PowerPoint Live gatherings. Indeed, some of the PowerPoint MVPs were responsible for the idea behind the PowerPoint Live conference. This podcast recalls those origins and reflects on why the event gets rave reviews from attendees.

The participants in this podcast are (as shown in the picture above, clockwise from the larger photo) Ric Bretschneider, Steve Rindsberg, Echo Swinford, and Glen Millar.

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Echo Swinford, Glen Millar, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Live, Ric Bretschneider, Steve Rindsberg

Tom Bunzel’s Review on PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit

Here’s a small excerpt from Tom Bunzel‘s review on PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit on InformIT:

There are, in my opinion, two different ways to get proficient in a computer, and more important, a professional discipline of some kind. One way is methodical, and the other way is to wing it.

I must confess that when I get a new program these days, I mainly try to intuit how it works and have little patience for methodical training.

But when I encounter methodical training, as I do in Echo Swinford and Geetesh Bajaj’s Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, I am always reminded of how superior it is.

Particularly in a professional discipline like presentation coaching, consulting or authoring, and a program like the new PowerPoint 2007, taking a project oriented approach and then digging deep into the precise whys and wherefores helps to ground any end user thoroughly in techniques that are empowering and enduring.

Read more on InformIT.

Filed Under: Books
Tagged as: Books, PowerPoint 2007