PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint to Flash: Articulate or Camtasia?

Someone asked this question today:

I am researching software to convert PowerPoint presentations to Flash. What do you recommend? I briefly tried Articulate, Camtasia, and PPT2Flash. Only Camtasia converted everything in the original PowerPoint slides. But the file was very large. The other programs left out font characters and had problems with animation. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

It all depends on your requirements. We haven’t worked with PPT2Flash, but you can choose from one of two approaches:

1. Edit the source presentation, to work within the capabilities and limitations of the rich media converter product such as Articulate Presenter. This approach results in smaller files.
2. Use your existing presentations unchanged and capture its playback onscreen with a product like TechSmith Camtasia. This approach requires that you use a powerful system, and results in larger files.

We do this sort of work all the time in-house in our studio, and every presentation is different. We wish we could say that there is a way with which you can attain one-click nirvana as far as your PowerPoint to Flash conversion needs are concerned. But that’s not the case today.

Articulate does a great job, but as you have discovered they don’t replicate the PowerPoint model entirely. We normally suggest that you do a quick conversion with Articulate Presenter, and then tweak the areas that don’t get converted too well. This normally involves changing some animation styles, and some more fine-tuning. Using Articulate Presenter again after this housekeeping will get you better results.

With Camtasia, try to reduce your computer resolution to 1024 x 768 pixels (or even 800 x 600 pixels) and then do the capture. Since Camtasia has to work with a smaller area, this results in better captures, and files with smaller output sizes. Camtasia 4 does a much better job with the sound capture than earlier versions; this is important if you have narration within your PowerPoint presentation.

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: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Articulate, Camtasia, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Flash

Digital Vector Maps for PowerPoint

Digital Vector Maps provides several hundred maps on their site. Most maps are available in Adobe Illustrator and PDF format; so, you’ll need to resave them in a PowerPoint compatible format if you want to use them in your next presentation.

Shelly from Digital Vector Maps informed me that all of their blank outline state maps for the US are available at no charge. For example, here’s a link to the page for the California state map.

Other maps need to be purchased, and most maps range from $3.95 to $279.

The royalty-free maps are fully editable in Adobe Illustrator 8 or higher, with all major map features residing on intuitively labeled layers to make possible separate editing of such map elements as lines, colors, symbols and text. Such objects as geographic place names, country borders and reference text are provided as separate editable objects.

Filed Under: Clip Media
Tagged as: Clip Media, Maps, PowerPoint

Microsoft Posts, Then Pulls Mac Office Update

Microsoft accidentally posted a pre-release update for Office 2004 for the Mac Wednesday, but quickly yanked the security and stability patch once it noticed the mistake.

According to the update description still on the Microsoft website, the unspecified fixes were to vulnerabilities in Office 2004 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code, as well as a stability patch for PowerPoint and several improvements to Entourage, the suite’s e-mail client.

Read more on the InformationWeek site.

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

Playlists for Looping Media in PowerPoint

    First, check out this tutorial on using media playlists in PowerPoint 2003. You can also use the same trick in PowerPoint 2007.

Glenna Shaw, Microsoft MVP says how cool this is for looping presentations. Follow these remaining directions for looping music. Just treat the “movie” like a sound!

Thank you, Glenna!

Filed Under: Audio and Video
Tagged as: Audio, Glenna Shaw, Movies, Multimedia, PowerPoint, Sounds, Video

Book Extract: Step Up to the Mic

This book extract from Step Up to the Mic is an Indezine exclusive with permission from Rodney Saulsberry and Tomdor Publishing.

In a series of no-brainer inspirational chapters, Rodney explains the voice-over sphere in a simple, uncomplicated manner that will be useful to both beginners and professionals.

Read the excerpts here.

Filed Under: Books
Tagged as: Books, Rodney Saulsberry, Sounds