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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
Echo Swinford is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional). When she’s not working on new media, she is answering almost all the questions on the PowerPoint newsgroup. Echo is also the author of Fixing PowerPoint Annoyances, published by O’Reilly.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Echo Swinford, Interviews, Personalities, PowerPoint
Carmine Gallo has been authoring some amazing posts that bring up the right questions we need to ask ourselves.
In this new article, he has some thoughts to share about PowerPoint, PowerPoint is a blessing and a curse for business professionals. Most of us use it to convey information, but many of us are bored to tears when we watch the finished product. The problem is not in the software itself, which can be an incredibly valuable tool to enhance the transfer of knowledge. It’s how we use it. As a communications coach, I face mind-numbing presentations that I know can be made much more engaging, effective, persuasive, and exciting with some simple fixes. Let me give you an example. I was asked by Goldman Sachs investment bankers to prepare a CEO for his company’s IPO road show.
Carmine then adds, Write your presentation’s story first and consider the slides complimentary to your message. By building too many slides, adding too much information to the slides, and reading the text on the slides word for word, you force the audience to focus on the slides instead of you.
Carmine Gallo explains more on the BusinessWeek site.
You May Also Like: The Seven Deadly Sins of PowerPoint Presentations | A Guide to No-Nap Presentations | Making a (Power)Point of Not Being Tiresome
Filed Under:
Thoughts
Tagged as: Carmine Gallo, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills, Techniques
In a surprising move, Microsoft has decided to not include PDF export options in the upcoming Office 2007 product. This was the result of talks between Microsoft and Adobe breaking down, and the looming threat of an antitrust suit on Microsoft by Adobe on this issue. Even more surprising is that Office competitors like OpenOffice and Corel WordPerfect Office have provided this option for years now, and Apple allows any program on OS X to print to a PDF! So why the double standards from Adobe?
Here’s what others are saying:
Microsoft has decided to delete from the next version of Office an option to save documents in PDF after Adobe Systems threatened to take legal action…We offered to them that we would do this, and now we’ve unilaterally made the decision to do it, Microsoft spokesperson Jack Evans said on Friday. The company also will remove a feature to save documents as XML Paper Specification (XPS) files in Office; XPS is Microsoft’s rival file format to the PDF file format.
Read more on the PC World site.
Microsoft’s negotiations to use Adobe technology in its new Office business software broke down earlier this week and Adobe threatened legal action, Microsoft’s top antitrust lawyer said on Friday. The previously undisclosed talks between the two sides centered around Microsoft’s plan to allow users to save work under Adobe’s Portable Document Format, or PDF, within the company’s Office 2007 suite of applications and its new Windows Vista operating system…Adobe objected to Microsoft building the “save as PDF” option into Office and Windows, arguing that the ability to save a document in a fixed document format, such as PDF, is a separate product and should not be free, Microsoft said.
Read more on the Reuters site.
Microsoft’s decision not to include the ability to save files to Adobe’s PDF format in its upcoming Office 2007 product, after arguments with Adobe, is bad news for users. Adobe really needs to explain to the world why it has forced Microsoft to do this. At present, both Microsoft’s open-source office suite rival, Open Office.org 2.0, as well as Apple’s Mac OSX operating system, provide the facility to save documents as PDF (Portable Document Format) files. The PDF has become a widely used defacto standard for publishing non editable paginated documents. An argument could be made that excluding the same facility from Office 2007 that is provided freely elsewhere is unfair discrimination.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2007
Tagged as: Adobe, Microsoft Office, Office 2007, PDF, PowerPoint 2007
Steve Hards is Director of Sales and Operations for Perspector, the well-known 3D add-in for PowerPoint that’s been released in a new version. Version 3 adds to the many features and possibilities available in the earlier versions including 3D charting from PowerPoint and Excel data, support for international characters, and multiple light sources.
In this conversation, Steve talks about the new features and the Perspector community.
Geetesh: What do you think is the most significant new feature in this release?
Steve: The star feature of the new Professional Edition is its charting facility, but it would be an oversight not to mention that many valuable enhancements have been made to both the Professional and Standard editions. The most significant of these is the ability to use international character sets for users not producing presentations in English.
Back to the charting, it is very quick and easy to set up a chart from a PowerPoint table or Excel spreadsheet. After selecting the data you simply select a chart type from a series of thumbnail images in the Perspector Panel and the 3D chart appears on your slide! If you want to change part of the chart to highlight it – perhaps changing a color or adding a picture fill – you can do it directly. Alternatively, you can control the chart elements from a Chart Properties box. Together they give you easy, straightforward, and total control of the whole chart.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the Perspector community.
Steve: The Perspector community is building nicely. On the one hand, there are a number of particular people who have been incredibly helpful with questions and comments. We do enjoy the challenge of trying to help them and they have been the inspiration for a number of the developments. On the other hand, there are people who just write to tell us that by using Perspector they are creating great presentations and, in some cases, building themselves a good reputation within their company as a result.
But in terms of a two-way process, we are also seeking ways of giving more back to users. Making it easier, for example, for them to find answers to questions on the website, pointing the way to other helpful PowerPoint resources and, through a carefully constructed series of tip emails, to help them explore why they might want to use particular effects. That’s always the hard bit, isn’t it–you see a great effect, and then wonder about how you can use it in a communicative context. Well, we are trying to help with that too.
You can download a trial version of Perspector, and find more about the product at the Perspector site.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, Perspector, PowerPoint
A fortnight ago, we showed you how you could use the Stamps feature in TechSmith Snagit, and now you’ll learn how you can create your own SnagIt stamps. In this tutorial, we’ll show how you can create these stamps within Adobe Photoshop. If you are using a different image editor, the concepts will still remain the same.
Read the tutorial and download the free stamps here.
Filed Under:
Companion Programs
Tagged as: Photoshop, Snagit, Techsmith
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