PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint User: Joachim Fritze

Joachim Fritze was born and grew up in nothern Germany. He is a chemist by profession with twenty years of experience in the sales and marketing of dentistry stuff. An avid PowerPoint user for almost a decade, Joachim churns up PowerPoint presentation all the time and loves to use Perspector, the 3D add-in for PowerPoint.

In this interview, Joacim discusses PowerPoint and Perspector.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Perspector, PowerPoint

Make PowerPoint Do More

Peter Norvig (a Google bigwig) once said, ‘PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: you can do very bad things with it.’ But maybe PowerPoint is misunderstood. Delve into these tips and tools for making it work better.

Robert Luhn teaches you how to make PowerPoint files smaller, build presentations in Word and beef up security with these easy tips on the PC World Canada site.

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Death by PowerPoint, Education, Opinion, PowerPoint, Techniques

FreePPT Templates.com Launched

We launched the FreePPTTemplates site for more PowerPoint templates. As of now there are 15 templates to start with.

Check out FreePPTTemplates for PowerPoint templates.

Filed Under: Templates
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Templates

TurboDemo

No amount of words can explain what a screenshot or a video capture of an onscreen activity can do since this is essentially showing to an audience how a task can be performed — and you can add narration to such captures to make them even more informative.

TurboDemo, the program being reviewed on this page allows you to do all sorts of still and video captures — and then create tutorials and demos which can be output to various formats.

Read the full review.

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

OfficeFX: Using Video Backgrounds from Other Sources

It’s always fun to do something more with a product than what’s visible on the surface. By itself, OfficeFX Professional is a great product that lets you bring in animated, moving backgrounds into your PowerPoint slides, much like television style backdrops. But let’s face it, at some time, you’ll want to bring in some other movie background for your PowerPoints. Fortunately, it’s easy to do that as long as your movie clips fulfill these requirements:

• They should be of high quality.
• They should not be too crowded. Look at clips that contain one or two colors so that any text or other visuals placed over them has sufficient contrast to stand out.
• They should be loopable, so that even a small movie clip can work.
• The clips need to be in a compatible file format. AVIs work great, although MPEGs and WMVs can be used as well. Stay away from QuickTime MOVs though.

Many such movie clips can be found in Digital Juice’s Jump Backs library, and there are other sources too.

Once you have chosen a movie clip, follow these steps:

1. Choose a simple theme (see note in the end of this post) in OfficeFX Professional and add a Standard default video scene to any slide within the Insert tab, as shown in Figure 1, below.


Figure 1: Match your screen with these options

2. Once you have selected the video you want to play in the background, set that video to:
• Repeat Continuously (that’s the default).
• Set the Placement to Maximize so that it takes up the full screen.
• Uncheck the Interactive option so the insert scene will not respond to user mouse clicks.
• Select the Place Behind PowerPoint Content option. That’ll display the video behind your PPT content.
3. Now, click the Assign to All button.

That’s all you need to do! Now, in PowerPoint you’ll see that OfficeFX has placed a stand-in image that represents your video on all the slides. It’s no longer an option to have the stand-in image or not. If you’ve got a video insert added, its stand-in image is always displayed in PowerPoint. This maintains the WYSIWYG relationship between PowerPoint and OfficeFX. What you can do is select the stand-in image in PowerPoint and change its display order to push it to the back. You’ll then see all your PowerPoint content on top of it.

Thanks to Mike Wilson of Instant Effects for help in creating this quick tutorial!

I did mention that you should use a simple theme for this tutorial, and Mike provides more insight:

The recommended theme for this approach is “Light Pools” from the standard Instant Effects theme pack. The why is because when you do a video background this way, the 3D elements of whatever theme you choose are still being played behind your video. With Light Pools, those 3D elements are very simple. They cause virtually zero overhead and won’t slow down your display.

You May Also Like: OfficeFX review

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