PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Linda Johnson’s New Excel Book

The Microsoft Office Specialist certification is an acclaimed, worldwide standard for Microsoft Office usage skills. A certification can help career prospects and provide promotions, not to speak about several other benefits that certified professionals receive. No wonder, there are many books dedicated to such certification curriculum.

Linda Johnson, who runs a premier Microsoft Office and computing site has authored a comprehensive guide on what you need to prepare for certification in Microsoft Excel 2003, both the Specialist and Expert levels.

Linda’s book, Microsoft Office Specialist: Excel 2003 Study Guide uses real-world scenarios to teach the full range of Excel 2003 skills you need. Check out the book here.

Filed Under: Books
Tagged as: Books, Excel

Convert PDFs to PowerPoint with PDF2Office

Recosoft’s PDF2Office 3 (Standard and Personal editions) claims to create editable PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and several other formats from PDFs. Let’s admit that we were quite skeptical about this one. After all, we’ve lost count of how many people have asked about how they can create editable PowerPoint presentations from their PDFs. And maybe you are now wondering why anyone would want to create PowerPoints from their PDFs?

There are two reasons:

1. Many people create PDFs from their PowerPoint presentations and manage to lose (or delete) the original PowerPoints, and everything is fine until they need to make some changes. Then, they will start looking for the original PowerPoint file and they can’t find it.
2. Many other PowerPoint users want to insert one or more pages of some PDF in a PowerPoint slide/presentation, and they don’t like to link to a PDF and have PowerPoint warn them of dire security concerns each time they click on that link.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Companion, PDF, PDF to PowerPoint

Freepath in my PowerPoint software collection

Freepath is a great, new addition to my PowerPoint software collection. So why did I use the term “PowerPoint software collection”? That’s because many users just call Freepath a great PowerPoint alternative! That’s funny since Freepath has no way to create an outline, or print handouts! So without further distracting you about alternatives, let me tell you more about Freepath.

Freepath is a playlist program with a refreshingly, different approach:

1. Freepath plays your PowerPoint presentations one after the other, or even some slides from each of the presentations in your playlist. All your PowerPoint shortcuts work as does your presentation remote since Freepath essentially uses PowerPoint itself to play the PowerPoint presentation. So no surprises there!
2. If you want to add a Flash animation or a QuickTime movie between slides 3 and 4, you can just insert them in your playlist! Activate the playlist and Freepath plays the Flash and QuickTime so seamlessly that your audience might believe that those elements played in PowerPoint! You can also control the videos in ways you could never imagine using PowerPoint – and of course, PowerPoint has almost no QuickTime support!
3. If you want to add live Word and Excel content to your presentation, just put them inside the Freepath playlist – these will open seamlessly again and you can also edit them while presenting. You can also use plain text files the same way.
4. Insert PDFs and live web pages (as long as you are online) in your playlist. You can also navigate between the pages in a PDF document.

That’s what I learned from my initial half-an-hour with Freepath – I’m in touch with Lou Douros, President of Grass Roots Software, who make Freepath.

We hope to do a full review soon. Meanwhile, you can download a free trial from their site (link no longer exists).

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Freepath, Lou Douros

Making a (Power)Point of Not Being Tiresome

Cliff Atkinson published a book last year called Beyond Bullet Points about how to combat PowerPoint fatigue: the deadening sameness of Microsoft Corp.’s commonly used presentation software.

The book caught the eye of W. Mark Lanier, a Houston-based trial lawyer. What happened next sounds like an episode of a ripped-from-the-headlines TV crime drama. Lanier, who was suing Merck & Co. on behalf of a man who died while taking the painkiller Vioxx, hired Atkinson as a consultant to help with his opening argument. The resulting 253-slide presentation was so mold-breaking — so the opposite of boring — that it was dubbed “CSI: PowerPoint.”

Read more on the Los Angeles Times site.

You can also read an earlier interview with Cliff Atkinson on the Indezine.com site.

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Books, Cliff Atkinson, Legal, Opinion

Plextor Rolls Out PX-PA15AW Wireless Projector Adapter

Plextor Corp., a developer and manufacturer of high-performance digital media equipment, announced the PX-PA15AW Wireless Projector Adapter. The new device uses wireless technology to enable users to broadcast Microsoft PowerPoint presentations from most Wi-Fi enabled computers to a VGA/XVGA projector incorporating the adapter.

The PX-PA15AW Wireless Projector Adapter utilizes Ethernet or Wireless LAN (WLAN) technology to receive, in real time, screen-captured images, graphics, and image content broadcast from most Wi-Fi enabled computers. Users can wirelessly share oversized image files, even PowerPoint files with embedded animation. High-performance algorithms detect the differential regions of the screen, allowing the system to present content at 15 frames-per-second on average for Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11a/b/g connectivity.

Read more on the Plextor site.

Filed Under: Hardware
Tagged as: Hardware, Projector