PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Office 2004 for Mac Gets Updated

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit released an update for Office 2004 for Mac. According to Microsoft, this update enhances security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.

PowerPoint unexpected quits have been resolved.

Read more on the PC World site.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2004
Tagged as: Microsoft Office, Office for Mac, PowerPoint

Mix07: Expression, Silverlight, and Harmony

The just-completed Mix07 conference was the launching pad for more than just Microsoft Corp.’s Expression and Silverlight products. Independent software vendors also demonstrated upcoming products that work within the same Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) graphical subsystem as Expression and Silverlight.

Boulder, Colo.-based Electric Rain released Harmony, which it claims is the first software to convert applications built in Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash to the XAML code used by Expression and Silverlight. It also showed off beta software called StandOut Presentation Solution, which CEO Mike Soucie said is similar to Microsoft’s popular PowerPoint software.

Read more on the Computerworld site.

Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: Events, PowerPoint, Standout

InfoComm International Annual Presentations Professional Survey 2007

Every year, Lisa Lindgren coordinates with the media for this professional survey on presentations for InfoComm — and this year too, she sent these details. All participants will receive a free survey report. Make sure you participate.

How do you compare with your peers:

• What types of organizations do presentation professionals work in?
• What areas of expertise and background do presentation professionals have?
• Do you outsource your content development/delivery/overall communication strategy/technology/visual/graphic development, or do you do it in-house? How often does your organization contract with outside production firms for presentation development?
• What types of challenges do presentation professionals experience today, and how concerned are they about these challenges?

Find out by participating in InfoComm International’s annual 2007 Presentations Professional Survey. This online survey should only take you about 15 minutes to complete.

To thank you for sharing your opinions and experiences, you will receive a free survey report by email.

To be sure your responses are included; please complete this survey by May 18, 2007.

This survey is completely confidential and anonymous. All data will be consolidated with other participants and will not be available to anyone as individual responses.

To participate, click here.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous
Tagged as: Infocomm, Opinion, PowerPoint, Survey

Designing the Perfect Presentation

    Carmine Gallo, author of 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators wrote a nice feature for BusinessWeek recently. He sent me this link, and it makes great reading. He’s discussing Duarte Design, a design firm based out of Mountain View headed by Nancy Duarte.

Carmine says, Former Vice-President Al Gore raised the bar on presentation skills with An Inconvenient Truth. But he didn’t do it alone. I wrote a column about the movie when the DVD was released because it demonstrates some very good techniques that we all can apply to our own presentations. At the time, however, I was unaware of the firm behind the presentation: Duarte Design, based in Mountain View, Calif. I sat down recently with one of the firm’s principals, Nancy Duarte, and a group of designers to learn how to turn any presentation into a multimedia powerhouse.

Carmine adds, Listening to Duarte’s designers describe the process they take to develop presentations for corporate clients such as Google, Cisco, and Hewlett-Packard left me with a sense of what’s possible in contemporary storytelling.

Read more on the BusinessWeek site.

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Carmine Gallo, Case Studies, Nancy Duarte, PowerPoint

RibbonCustomizer v1.1 Update

RibbonCustomizer, the add-in product for Microsoft Office 2007 that allows you to customize the tabs within the Ribbon has now been updated to version 1.1. The new update is free for all users. See screenshots later on this page.

New features include:

• Classic UI tabs for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word 2007 in English and German.
• These are available in the Starter Edition already, and therefore can be used without purchasing RibbonCustomizer.
• Vista standard user support: Standard users in Windows Vista can now install and use RibbonCustomizer.
• Support for Vista with User Account Control (UAC) turned off. Users with administrative rights were previously unable to use RibbonCustomizer if User Account Control was off.
• RibbonCustomizer can now be used with the Office setting requiring application add-ins to be digitally signed.

You will find more info on the RibbonCustomizer site.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Microsoft Office, Patrick Schmid, PowerPoint 2007