PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Voice-over Warmups

Voice-over artist Rodney Saulsberry has put up some great voice-over warmup exercises on YouTube.

These vocal warm-up videos are designed to help you strengthen, refine, and enhance your voice before delivering a critical presentation or attending an important meeting. Whether you need to improve clarity, boost projection, or reduce vocal strain, these exercises will prepare your voice for confident and impactful communication. Taking just a few minutes to warm up can make a significant difference in how you sound, engage, and connect with your audience.

There are also excerpts from Rodney’s books available: You Can Bank on Your Voice | Step Up To The Mic

Filed Under: Audio and Video
Tagged as: Audio, Books, Multimedia, Rodney Saulsberry, Sounds, Voice, Voice-overs

Tjool: Conversation with Sonja Van Halder

Sonja Van Halder from Tjool has years of experience in sales and marketing for shareware and software. She’s been part of several European and US shareware conferences. In her present role at Tjool, Sonja interacts with PowerPoint users.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and Tjool.

Sonja: Tjool is a company based in the south of Germany near Stuttgart. We work with clients worldwide and offer tools in both English and German. We provide add-ins and tools to PowerPoint users. In the past, we developed customized solutions and add-ins for customers and enterprise businesses. We realized during our consultancy services to our partners and customers that tens of thousands of PowerPoint presentations are saved on customer’s sites — and employees were still using different slides with different styles or old masters in their presentation — or their slides contained wrong information, such as out-of-date revenue figures, numbers, etc.

We first developed a web-based presentation management tool (Tjool) for enterprise customers, which is being used to organize and manage their slides and presentations in an indexed server database. This allows their employees to access the presentations anytime, and from anywhere — or to pick the desired presentation and generate a new one based on a template using the corporate design of the company. Over a couple of years, several small and enterprise companies found this solution very practical and useful to manage their slides, maintain a unified look, and provide up-to-date information in their presentations.

We felt the need to provide Tjool as a single-user license compared to a web-based solution. Users needed an add-in tool to PowerPoint, to be used by the sales or marketing departments — and therefore a small number of users between 2 to 30 will use the Tjool — PowerPoint Manager. Therefore, we developed Tjool as a single-user license with a local database or network repository.

The user interface of Tjool comprises 4 parts:

1. Search
2. List of Presentations
3. Categories
4. Slides Overview

Geetesh: How is Tjool different from other presentation optimizer programs, and do you plan to make Tjool compatible with PowerPoint 2007?

Sonja: Tjool indexes all words in the scanned presentations and categories, in the slides, diagrams, and within the objects to make it easy for the users to find the desired slide. The search function of Tjool goes further than the Microsoft search function in PowerPoint. In comparison to other tools, Tjool is available in 3 editions:

1. Single-user license for laptop users or one-person use,
2. Network edition for a team to use the same database and presentations, and
3. A web-based management edition for external users or for all employees.

The customer can decide which edition fulfills his requirements. In addition, Tjool offers the creation of virtual presentations. Virtual presentations mean that the user will be able to build up their own presentations based on slides from other presentations and Tjool will keep these virtual presentations automatically up-to-date. This means if slide 7 in a presentation XYZ was changed and this slide is linked to a virtual presentation, then this will be automatically changed for the user who generated this virtual presentation.

The number of users of PowerPoint 2007 is increasing from day to day. We are expecting the new release of Tjool to be released either at the end of third quarter or at the beginning of the fourth quarter of this year. We are glad that Microsoft released PowerPoint 2007’s file format based on XML — as this will allow the scanning function of presentations in Tjool to perform faster.

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, PowerPoint

OfficeFX V2.6 Released

Instant Effects announced the release of version 2.6 of both OfficeFX and OfficeFX Professional, their PowerPoint add-in that metamorphoses the look and play of your presentations using themes included inside the product.

This new release includes Windows Vista support, and partial compatibility with PowerPoint 2007. This release is a free upgrade for anyone running OfficeFX V2 or higher.

Read more info on the OfficeFX site.

You May Also Like: OfficeFX v2.5 Indezine Review

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

Articulate Online: Conversation with Gabe Anderson

  Gabe Anderson takes care of support and community initiatives at Articulate, a provider of rich media products used for e-learning.

In this conversation, Gabe discusses Articulate Online, and how this service integrates with Articulate’s other products.

Geetesh: Tell us more about Articulate Online, and how it is helping people deliver content?

Gabe: Articulate Online allows you to effectively track e-learning activity without the usual cost and hassle. You can publish directly to your Articulate Online account with a single click from either Articulate Presenter or Articulate Quizmaker. All content is hosted on and delivered from the Articulate Online server, so you can easily get your content to your target users with just a link or via a personalized user portal.

Then you can run a number of detailed reports to see how your users are interacting with your content — who’s viewing your presentations and how your users are scoring on your quizzes and answering your survey questions.

And with plans starting at just $199/month, Articulate Online is easier to use and more affordable than complex and expensive corporate learning management systems that are difficult to use and have more features than you need.

You can learn more about Articulate Online here.

Geetesh: How does Articulate Online integrate with other Articulate offerings such as Presenter and Quizmaker?

Gabe: Articulate Online is the only fully integrated hosting, tracking, and reporting platform available that allows direct, one-click publishing from either Articulate Presenter or Quizmaker. You can even embed Articulate Engage interactions, 3rd-party Flash movies, Web Objects, and more directly in your Presenter content before you publish to Articulate Online.

There’s no more worrying about FTP applications, LMS integration, or file management. Just click and publish to Articulate Online, and your content is ready to be shared publicly or with your private users.

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: Articulate, eLearning, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

SlideShare: Contest Winners

The results of World’s Best Presentation Contest on SlideShare are now up on the site. Two of the three top presentations won in both the judges and people’s choice award sections.

See the results here.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Companion, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, SlideShare