PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

WildPresenter creates Flash from PowerPoint

There are many advantages in converting a PowerPoint presentation into a Flash SWF movie since they tend to be smaller in size, cannot be edited, and can easily be viewed in almost any operating system or computer these days. And with dozens of PowerPoint-to-Flash converting applications available, it’s easy to be spoilt for choices.

And with so many choices, every such application has to either do things better than others or add more capabilities. WildPresenter, the product we are reviewing tries to do both. In this review, we will explore if it succeeds or not.

Read the full review here.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Flash, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Flash, Wildform, WildPresenter

The Kirk Cunningham Interview

Kirk Cunnigham is Executive Director, Marketing at Business Objects, creators of Crystal Xcelsius software. Prior to Business Objects, Kirk was VP Marketing and Planning at Estee Lauder, responsible for launching and growing their successful ecommerce subsidiary.

In this interview, Kirk discusses Business Objects, Crystal Xcelsius, and its charting abilities in comparison to Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Crystal Xcelsius, Interviews, Kirk Cunningham, PowerPoint

WildPresenter: Conversation with Jonathan Blank

WildPresenter is a new product from Wildform that has more abilities than you can count. It is one of those things that you want to keep always installed on your system.

  In this Indezine exclusive interview, Wildform CEO Jonathan Blank discusses WildPresenter and its PowerPoint-specific abilities.

Geetesh: Tell us more about Wildform and WildPresenter.

Jonathan: Wildform develops and sells presentation, animation, and video software. Our products are designed to empower our customers to easily create multimedia presentations, product demos, online tutorials, websites, and e-learning courses that are ready for the widest possible deployment on the Web, intranets, CD-ROMs, and mobile devices. We started in 1999 and are based in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Our latest product is WildPresenter, a powerful yet easy-to-use software that is the ideal solution for creating Flash and video presentations, product demos, training videos, and sales & marketing materials. As Tom Arah of PC Pro Magazine (which gave WildPresenter 5 stars) wrote: WildPresenter offers everything you need to produce impressive results. In particular, it brings together the core features from a whole host of applications – Adobe Flash Professional, Microsoft PowerPoint, Articulate Presenter, Sorenson Squeeze, and Adobe Captivate – and at a fraction of their cost, especially at a heavily discounted introductory price. That’s extraordinary power and value.

In creating WildPresenter we built on our long experience developing easy-to-use Flash software such as our text animators and Flash video encoders, as well as our experience as Internet marketers who often found ourselves looking for software that could do what WildPresenter can do. We found a number of products which could be purchased separately for a few thousand dollars, and which still did not provide all the capabilities that we were looking for. So, we created WildPresenter and are offering it at a very affordable price. Our goal is for WildPresenter to be the best Flash and video presentation software on the market and we believe that we are well on our way.

Geetesh: Can you explain more about the PowerPoint conversion features in WildPresenter?

Jonathan: One of the great capabilities of WildPresenter is its PowerPoint-to-Flash converter which features a unique editable import option. Using this option, when you import a PowerPoint .ppt or .pot file, WildPresenter will convert it into WildPresenter’s native format, so that all the text, images, animations, and transitions can be edited after import. This method of conversion has many benefits including the following:

• The file size of the Flash output is drastically reduced (because unlike other PowerPoint to Flash conversions we are not just taking a screen capture – or bitmap – of the elements in the PowerPoint).
• The clarity and quality of the images and text are maximized.
• Vector-based text and images scale to any size without pixelation or distortion.
• You can make changes to your project.
• You can use your existing PowerPoint projects as templates.
• You can use PowerPoint .pot template files directly in WildPresenter.
• You do not need to have PowerPoint installed to use the PowerPoint to Flash converter.

Admittedly, PowerPoint is a huge program with a lot of features, and we do not support all of them, but we support virtually all transitions and the majority of animations and we are continuously adding support for the rest of the features. In fact, since we released WildPresenter in February, we have already provided two significant updates that have greatly enhanced our PowerPoint support. Our goal is to support all the features which can be implemented in the Flash format.

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, Interviews, Jonathan Blank, PowerPoint, Wildform, WildPresenter

PowerPoint Attachment Trojan?

Symantec released an advisory about a new trojan that may arrive as a PowerPoint attachment in an email. The presentation itself shows some Chinese characters.

Learn more on the Symantec site.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Security

OfficeFX on a MacBook Pro: Conversation with Mike Wilson

First, look at this screenshot:

You might find nothing unusual about this screenshot, because it’s just the OfficeFX interface inside Microsoft PowerPoint. And let us not even ask you to look closer or look again because that’s exactly what it appears to be. What’s surprising is what you can’t see!

Here’s a picture that will show you what you should rather see.

Mike Wilson of Instant Effects sent us this screenshot and picture. For the rest of this post, we’ll take this over to Mike.

It may not be obvious, but this is OfficeFX running on a MacBook Pro (with Intel processor and ATI X1600 graphics). The only thing that gives it away is the window style.

To be VERY clear, this is NOT OfficeFX running under MacOS. We did nothing to enable this. It’s done with an Apple utility called BootCamp that allows users to install Windows XP and Windows applications on their Intel-based Mac’s. What I find impressive is that it also allows very Microsoft proprietary layers like DirectX and .NET to run, which in turn enables relatively complex 3D apps like OfficeFX.

Obviously this is a pretty expensive way to go as you have to own both operating systems. The perspective of our users is that for those higher-end types running Mac-based applications like Final Cut Pro for video and DVD creation, it’s a great option to be able to also run their 3D apps like 3D Studio MAX and OfficeFX on the same system.

Don is less amazed than I am about this from a purely technical standpoint. He may have a comment or two. From a business chess board perspective, we both find it an intriguing turn of events.

Thank you, Mike. Don Brittain, referred by Mike in this conversation is also from Instant Effects, the company that creates OfficeFX.

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, Interviews, Mike Wilson, OfficeFX