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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
Day 1 is Sunday, and it starts at 12:30 with Echo Swinford‘s session on animation. Two other sessions follow with Rick Altman and Peggy Duncan.
The registration began half an hour ago, and all attendees were given a T-shirt that’s got an Indezine logo.
The Help Center was busy later. Bruce Jacobs, Steve Rindsberg, and Bill Dilworth set up all the hardware and software. The patrons are here with all their questions, and it’s great to answer their queries. It’s even better to see the many ways in which people use PowerPoint.
Filed Under:
Events
Tagged as: Events, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Live
What do you do when you insert a movie in a PowerPoint slide that refuses to play? There could be any number of reasons for it not to play, but more often than not, it has more to do with a missing codec than anything else!
Luckily, that’s one of the easiest problems to solve. And we don’t want you to download every single codec one after the other, not when you can download and install a pack of popular and some not-so-popular codecs at one go using the K-Lite Codec Pac that you can download free from the free-codecs site.
As the screenshot above shows, the installation routine even allows you to choose which codecs you want to install.
Thanks to Mike Parkinson for this tip!
Filed Under:
Audio and Video
Tagged as: Audio, Movies, PowerPoint, Sounds, Video
In this and the following posts, I’ll give you a small report on PowerPoint Live in San Diego, where I am now at the DoubleTree Mission Valley hotel.
I took the Amtrak from Irvine in Orange County to San Diego: a wonderful journey in itself with spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean from the window seat of the Business Class coach. A taxi from the San Diego Amtrak station got me to the hotel, The taxi driver was from Eritrea, but he was more conversant with Bollywood and Hindi movies than I am, which is surprising, since I’m from India.
In the hotel, it’s great to see familiar faces, and new ones. The Help Center is all set up, the registration desk is done, and Rick Altman, the conference host seems happy, and absolutely ready for Day 1 on Sunday.
More about PowerPoint Live in subsequent posts.
Filed Under:
Events
Tagged as: PowerPoint, PowerPoint Live, Rick Altman, San Diego
Glenna Shaw is an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for PowerPoint. She works for the US government and is also very involved with accessibility aspects for PowerPoint. In another avatar, she creates games in PowerPoint. Some time ago, she started using Crystal Xcelsius. In this conversation, she tells us more about the program.
Geetesh: Tell us about yourself and your technology interests.
Glenna: I originally got into technology because there weren’t many career opportunities as a Mental Health Therapist when I got out of the Navy in the early 1980s. I happened to be in the right place at the right time to get in on microcomputers and local area networking when the technology was in its infancy and for the last 20 years, I’ve led a large variety of simple and complex IT projects. I’m currently a project management professional (PMP) with the U.S. Federal Government and I really love it. What I like best is that since I work on different projects my job never gets stale. Each new project is like a new job and a new challenge.
Geetesh: Tell us more about how you use Crystal Xcelsius and what you think about the product.
Glenna: Over the years I have learned that I am a very visual person. It’s part of what got me interested in PowerPoint and Accessibility and helped me get recognized as a PowerPoint MVP. I just process information more easily when it’s presented in a visual format. What I love about Crystal Xcelsius is that it allows you to do that beautifully. The agency that I work for uses Excel models a lot because we work with finances and economics. Xcelsius allows me to really enhance those models.
When I first saw the software I realized right away the potential it had for use with Project Management. I was able to use Crystal Xcelsius to create a variety of models for use with standard Project Management practices. I really love that I can allow for what-if scenarios that can be demonstrated in real-time to decision-makers. It’s extremely effective when you’re trying to make a business case for a project or even just make a point about the cost or risk of a project. I’ve made the models freely available on my website they can be used online or downloaded. I’d welcome any ideas for new models/tools. I really like the challenge of creating new tools with Xcelsius, especially since the end result always looks so good even if you’re not a great designer.
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, Crystal Xcelsius, Glenna Shaw, Interviews, PowerPoint
Cinematize is a product that walks you through extracting movie clips from a DVD — it then saves those extracts into different movie file formats that are PowerPoint friendly.
Read the Indezine review of Cinematize here.
Filed Under:
Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Movies, PowerPoint
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