PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

ShortcutTools 2.0

If you create your share of PowerPoint presentations, you know that you end up doing repetitive tasks all the time — for the most common commands such as aligning, distributing, grouping, or resizing objects, you have to access the menus and toolbars hundreds of times.

PowerPoint ShortcutTools 2.0, the product we’re reviewing is a PowerPoint add-in which allows users to set defined keyboard shortcuts for specific PowerPoint commands.

Read the Indezine review of ShortcutTools 2.0.

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

The Jim Endicott Interview

    Jim Endicott is a nationally-recognized consultant, designer, speaker specializing in professional presentation messaging, design, and delivery. In this interview, Jim discusses the implications of changes in this decade, the influence of technology, the sophistication of the marketplace, and the utilization of potential.

In this interview, Jim talks about changes in the world of presentations over the last five years.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Jim Endicott, PowerPoint

False Backgrounds: Conversation with Glen Millar

    Glen Millar is a MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Microsoft PowerPoint. Based near Brisbane, Australia, Glen is a regular on the Microsoft support newsgroups, and a featured speaker at PowerPoint Live. Visit Glen’s site, PowerPoint Workbench for tutorials on cool animation effects in PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Tell us more about your work, and your involvement with PowerPoint.

Glen: I first began to use PowerPoint a number of years ago to present scientific information. It was critical that we could communicate effectively, as well as efficiently. I discovered that PowerPoint is a very powerful way to help people communicate. It allowed us to span information across time and locations. That is, we could take our audience to locations and across time in ways that simply cannot be done in real life.

Today, I work in a bunch of areas, including environmental education projects. I particularly build presentations for clients and conduct computer training on the features of PowerPoint that allow clients to build presentations faster and more effectively. I still think it is an awful shame that people spend lots of money on their projects and go to a conference and give a very poor presentation.

Geetesh: Tell us about your false background trick, and how you evolved it. Also, what are typical usage scenarios for this trick?

Glen: False backgrounds take advantage of a property of AutoShapes that allows the shape to grab pixels from the slide background and lock them into place. The first time I created a false background was almost by accident. I was preparing for PowerPoint Live in 2004 and wanted to use an AutoShape to pan across the background image of a slide. However, every time I animated the AutoShape to move, it would take the background image with it. I learnt that if I covered the slide background, I could produce some amazing effects such as cropping, highlights, and very cool animations. I mainly used the effect to crop multiple parts of an image and apply animations to them.

With the advent of PowerPoint 2007, the effects are even more amazing. When I have shown them to people, they don’t believe I didn’t use an external image editor. For example, a common comment at PowerPoint Live in New Orleans was that people had spent hours in external programs to create image effects that could be done easier and more accurately right within PowerPoint 2007.

I currently use this technique in a number of situations. I mentioned the cropping of images. That is, I place an AutoShape over a strategic part of an image on the slide background, and the shape drills through the false background in between. This allows a very powerful image crop to occur, but that is only the beginning!

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Animation, Glen Millar, Graphics, Interviews, PowerPoint

Opazity: The Indezine Review

The new versions of PowerPoint seem to have everything apart from the kitchen sink — but yet, it’s amazing to see vendors create small add-ins that provide an impressive capability that PowerPoint lacks.

Opazity is one such add-in that creates opaque effects inside PowerPoint — and if you are wondering what’s so great about an opaque effect in PowerPoint, then read on.

Read the Indezine review of Opazity.

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

New Features on Google Presentations

Google Presentations (Google Slides), a component of Google Docs has added new features. The most significant new option is the ability to create embeddable web slideshows that can be put up on any page, much like a YouTube movie.

The web output uses scripting rather than Flash, which is unlike YouTube. So, it will be interesting to see how Google copes up with animations and transitions in its Presentations through this web output option. Maybe that’s something they will take care of in the future since they don’t have animations and transitions available as of now in Google Presentations.

You can learn more on the Webware site. Search Engine Land also explores these new presentation features.

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