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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
See Also:
PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
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
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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
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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
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Ric Bretschneider is Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint at Microsoft, and he just had his 15th anniversary working on the project! Ric’s put up a great podcast on the new Presentations Roundtable site. This podcast is just first of the many more podcasts you can look forward to hearing and downloading from this site.
The premiere episode of the Presentations Roundtable podcast brings together:
Their discussion is in an easy conversation style. The role of books in learning good design is investigated, along with some easy to follow hints on creating excellence in your own presentations.
Filed Under:
Thoughts
Tagged as: Books, Case Studies, Garr Reynolds, Howard Cooperstein, Nancy Duarte, Opinion, PowerPoint, Ric Bretschneider
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The release of Office:mac 2008 is less than two weeks away, and already there’s plenty of coverage on the product:
Stephen H. Wildstrom on BusinessWeek.com does not believe that “Office 2008 will cause many people to switch from Windows to Macs, though there are plenty of other reasons to do so. But it does give Mac users—especially creative professionals, students, and home users who are the core of Apple’s market—an office suite that’s superior to the Windows version in many ways”.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2008
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2008
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