PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Apple Releases Keynote 3.0.1 Update

Apple has released an update for Keynote 3, their presentation program that ships as part of their iWork 06 productivity suite. The new 3.0.1 update adds better texture fidelity and some more features.

Download the Keynote update here.

Filed Under: Keynote
Tagged as: Apple, Companion, Keynote

Free Java-based PowerPoint Viewer

Tonic Systems has released a new Java-based PowerPoint Viewer that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. That’s great news for Mac OS X users who have been asking for a new PowerPoint Viewer for a long time. And Linux users no longer need to have a copy of OpenOffice installed to just see PowerPoint presentations.

The TonicPoint Viewer is free for non-commercial use and only allows you to see static slides without any animations or transitions. In addition, Tonic Systems plans to eventually release a pro version of the TonicPoint Viewer with additional features like save-to-PDF.

This screenshot shows you how TonicPoint Viewer looks on Mac OS X (Tiger).

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Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Companion, Google Slides, Interviews

Making Your (Power)Point

The May issue of Inc. magazine features 6 products to liven up your presentations, including Indezine’s own Thermometer add-in for PowerPoint, which is a free download.

Among the products featured are TurningPoint’s polling system, Ovation from Serious Magic, Keynote from Apple, Thermometer from Indezine, Panasonic’s Toughbook CF-18, and Ontra Presentations.

Ellen Neuborne explains how these products can help make your next presentation less of a snooze and more of a blockbuster.

Read the article on the Inc. magazine site.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Press, Review

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.

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