PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Presentation Summit 2015: Conversation with Alexander Hanauer

  Alexander Hanauer is a consultant and designer for More Impact, a specialized presentation agency based in Germany. He has a passion for creating high-impact, inspiring slides designed to connect people with ideas. When he’s not at work, Alex enjoys spending time with his family and friends or playing “Rembetiko” music – Greek Blues – on his bouzouki.

In this conversation, Alexander discusses his sessions at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2015 series.

Geetesh: Alexander, you’re doing two sessions this year at the Presentation Summit. One of them is Outside the PowerPoint Box: Smart solutions for making PowerPoint more powerful. Can you tell us more about this session? What can the audience expect to learn?

Alexander: My session addresses three questions:

1. How can I focus the attention of my audience?
2. How can I establish a good connection with them? and
3. How can I work faster with much better output?

Participants will see some new and astonishing animation effects and discover cutting-edge presentation technologies. They will also learn highly effective working methods and see how add-ins boost efficiency.

Geetesh: Can you tell us more about your work? How do you approach good design for slides?

Alexander: I have an advertising and communication background and more than 20 years of experience as a Creative Director, Presentation Designer and Coach.

Usually, creatives in advertising agencies don’t work with Microsoft Office. And the Office experts and MVPs are not trained designers. In our agency, we combine both and create presentations that reach the audience also on an emotional level.

For most PowerPoint users, creating presentations is a chore. For us, it’s pure joy! We love integrating our DNA into projects and adding emotional impact for clients.

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: Events
Tagged as: Alexander Hanauer, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit

Interface – PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Here’s a quick walkthrough of the PowerPoint 2016 interface, the PowerPoint 2016 interface is quite similar to PowerPoint 2013. PowerPoint 2016 opens with a Presentation Gallery. The Presentation Gallery provides several ways to start your next presentation using a template, a Theme, a recent presentation, a not-so-recent presentation, or even a blank presentation. Once you make choices in this Presentation Gallery, you see the actual PowerPoint interface.

Explore a quick walkthrough of the PowerPoint 2016 interface.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Interface, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Tutorials

Presentation Summit 2015: Conversation with Alan Hoffler

    Raised around America’s Space Program, Alan Hoffler has earned degrees in aerospace engineering and applied mathematics, but his true passion is teaching. At some point in his 25 years of training technical corporate audiences, instructing in the college classroom, teaching public high school, and speaking nationally to pilots about flying safety he became passionate about helping others communicate with excellence. With a coach’s passion, a teacher’s heart, and an engineer’s mind, his blog reveals his desire to improve himself as well as his clients.

In this conversation, Alan discusses his keynote at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2015 series.

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Filed Under: Events
Tagged as: Alan Hoffler, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit

Presentation Summit 2015: Conversation with Echo Swinford

   A Microsoft PowerPoint MVP since 2000, Echo Swinford began her PowerPoint career in 1997. She holds a Master’s degree in New Media from the Indiana University School of Informatics. Echo is the owner of Echosvoice, a PowerPoint consulting firm specializing in custom template development, presentation creation, makeovers and cleanup, and training for large and small corporate clients. Echo has written and co-written five PowerPoint books, developed a number of video publications, and has a string of tech editing credits to her name.

In this conversation, Echo discusses her sessions at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2015 series.

Geetesh: Echo, you are doing two sessions this year at the Presentation Summit called Template Creation Workshop: Secrets and Recipes for building awesome PowerPoint templates and Sync Animation to Video: All you need are triggers and bookmarks. Can you tell us more about these sessions, and what takeaways can the audience expect?

Echo: Co-conspirator Julie Terberg and I have led the template workshop for a number of years, but it’s different every time. We ask that the attendees provide us with their templates and specific questions and we use those as a framework for discussion. We end up tackling various design and technical issues and give strategies for overcoming them. The goal is for those in the audience to walk away with practical advice they can apply to their next template project.

I’m really excited about the session on synching animation to video. First, the short format is new, and I’m looking forward to a quick, down-and-dirty session. But more importantly, multimedia is becoming more reliable in PowerPoint, and I’ve seen a definite increase in the use of short video clips in presentations. But nobody annotates them, ever! I think it’s so cool that we can add drawings and text to video to point out things people should pay attention to or add captions or whatever. And the fact that we can control when those things appear is a huge bonus.

Geetesh: You’ve been part of the Presentation Summit for several years — can you share your thoughts about how this event benefits new attendees, and also how it helps repeat visitors?

Echo: I’ve actually been a part of Presentation Summit since it was just an idea, and I haven’t missed one yet. It’s like a family reunion – but one where you actually like all the relatives! Seriously, our community is wonderfully cooperative and welcoming. I find the interaction incredibly inspiring, and I learn something new every single year. It’s amazing to see new attendees as they start to realize they’re not just attending a conference and learning new techniques, but they’re taking the first steps to participating in a true community. That’s a very cool thing.

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: Events
Tagged as: Echo Swinford, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit

Heading Card in Sway

A Sway you create comprises of Sections – these Sections play one after the other when you view the Sway. However, before any Section, you encounter the Title Card, which is akin to the cover page of your Sway. Similarly in Sway, Heading Cards are cover pages of individual Sections!

Explore how Heading Cards work within Microsoft Sway.

Filed Under: Sway
Tagged as: PowerPoint for the Web, Sections, Sway, Tutorials