PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Bring Training to Life with Avatars

Tuesday, October 17, 2006, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 9:03 am

Let’s face it: long presentations can be boring, and you can lose your audience in less time than it takes to click forward to the next slide. Corporate trainers and salespeople are now discovering that they can sustain attention, and ensure a higher content retention level, by using animated characters called avatars that talk, sing, dance, gesture, tell jokes, and generally liven up the proceedings. Avatars can introduce the presenter (or be the trainer), advance slides, demonstrate products, have interactive conversations with the audience, and even exhibit a personality. A character can behave skeptically, for example, raising questions about what the presenter is saying while simultaneously serving as a foil allowing the presenter to counter issues in Mutt-and-Jeff fashion.

Tom Atkins explores how avatars can bring your training to life and hold attention of audiences.

Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Tom Atkins, Vox Proxy

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Office 2004 for Mac Also Gets Patched

Thursday, October 12, 2006, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 10:47 am

In addition to four security bulletins issued Wednesday for Office on Windows, Microsoft has released Office 2004 for Mac version 11.3. The update includes undisclosed security fixes, along with bug fixes in Word and PowerPoint.

SlideShare: Sharing Slides and Presentations

Wednesday, October 11, 2006, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 6:58 am

In this series of posts on SlideShare, we have shown how you can get an invite and join SlideShare, and also how you can upload your PowerPoint presentations to the SlideShare server. In this post, we’ll explore how you can share your SlideShare slides and presentations.

Follow these steps to share your uploaded slides and presentations:

Log into SlideShare and click the My Slidespace tab to get into your Slide space area.
Click the title of any one of your uploaded presentations to bring it up in slideshow mode, as shown in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: An open presentation
Click the Share button which is at the bottom left of the slideshow player, as shown in Figure 1, above. Doing so opens the share window, as shown in Figure 2, below.
Figure 2: The Share window
Provide one or more e-mail addresses, add an optional message, and click the Send button.

Note: Shared presentations can be viewed by SlideShare members.

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

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Articulate Presenter 5

Tuesday, October 10, 2006, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 11:27 am

Articulate Presenter enables you to convert a PowerPoint presentation to a Flash SWF based online rich media content — Presenter also includes several bells and whistles such as the ability to insert quizzes, Flash animations, narrations, and web objects. The output is entirely customizable, includes interactivity, and reduces the file size so that the content can also be sent by e-mail.

Read the Indezine review of Articulate Presenter 5.

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

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SlideShare: Uploading Presentations

Tuesday, October 10, 2006, posted by Geetesh Bajaj at 5:45 am

In the last SlideShare post, we showed how you can join SlideShare and get an invite. In this post, we’ll show how you can upload a presentation to the SlideShare site. In the next SlideShare post, we will show how you can share the uploaded presentation slides with others.

Follow these steps to upload your presentation slides:

Once you have logged in to SlideShare, click the Start sharing your slides now button, as shown in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: Start uploading your slides
Doing so brings up the upload page, as shown in Figure 2, below. Click the Choose button and locate a presentation file located in your system. As of now, SlideShare accepts PowerPoint (PPT and PPS), and OpenOffice (ODP) files only. Apple Keynote users can save their presentations to PowerPoint files and then upload.
Figure 2: Provide upload details
Enter a title, description, and tags for the presentation you are uploading. Then, click on the Upload button.
The uploading can take a while, depending upon the size of your presentation, and the speed of your Internet connection. Behind the scenes, SlideShare also converts your entire presentation to a Flash SWF file that’s more compact than your original presentation slides.
Once this is done, the uploaded presentation can be viewed as an online Flash-based slideshow. Click the Title link, as shown in Figure 3, below, to see the slideshow of the uploaded presentation.
Figure 3: The uploaded presentation

In the next post on SlideShare, we will show you how to share your uploaded slides.

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

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