PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

NXPowerLite 3.5 Released

Tommy Powell of Neuxpower says that NXPowerLite version 3.5 has just been released.

NXPowerLite 3.5 adds support for Microsoft’s Open XML (Office 2007) file formats and offers improved Outlook integration. It is also now available in Chinese. In addition, NXPowerLite 3.5 is available as a free upgrade to existing NXPowerLite 3 users.

Download a free trial version of NXPowerLite here.

For those who are not aware, NXPowerLite is a file optimization program for Microsoft Office file formats.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Neuxpower, NXPowerlite, PowerPoint, Tommy Powell

Office 2008 at MacWorld

Leaders of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit are spending the day showing Macworld Expo attendees the new Office 2008 for Mac applications.

Marcus Aiu, lead program manager of PowerPoint for Mac, is showing many new features in the presentation program. He earned applause, for example, when he demonstrated the ability to use Apple’s remote control to page through slides.

Todd Bishop discusses more on the Seattle P-I site.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2008
Tagged as: Microsoft Office, Office for Mac, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2008

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