PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

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

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