PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Instant Effects Presenter v5.6: Conversation with Don Brittain

Don Brittain is CEO and a founder of Instant Effects, a California company that develops software to visually enhance presentations, communications, and collaboration.

In this conversation, Don discusses the new v5.6 release of Instant Effects Presenter.

Geetesh: You announced a new 5.6 update of your Instant Effects software -– tell us more about the new abilities.

Don: Many of our Presenter customers produce high-end events that require capabilities that go well beyond standard PowerPoint or video-based presentation techniques. For example, Presenter supports moving backgrounds with smooth transitions, stereoscopic 3D output, ultra-wide screen multi-projector configurations, and picture-in-a-picture techniques that can be used to embed live video or speaker presentations into a broader visual context.

While these capabilities meet many needs, modern media is becoming more interactive and dynamic. With the rise in popularity of touch-screen devices like smart phones and tablets, people now expect media to be more expressive and exploratory.

Thus, the v5.6 update of Presenter was designed to support the creation and delivery of fully interactive presentations. It’s now possible to create and drive presentations that respond in some fairly amazing ways to interactive input (touch, mouse, and gamepad input, for example) while still leveraging our support for stereo 3D, ultra-wide aspect ratios, and video-intensive presentation techniques.

This is especially important in the context of teaching, training, and product promotion. Interactive media is more engaging, which in turn increases excitement, cognition and retention. And because Presenter has always been based on a real-time 3D multi-media software foundation, our new interaction techniques fit in naturally with the other benefits offered by previous versions of our platform.

Geetesh: Does your product continue working within PowerPoint? Also tell us more about improvements in this area.

Don: Yes, Presenter is first and foremost a PowerPoint plug-in. This allows the presentation author to work in a familiar environment for initial design and layout work. After that, Presenter adds in the moving backgrounds, transitions, and interactive media components.

But the process is very much iterative. Our tight integration with PowerPoint means that it’s natural to iterate on all components of the presentation, right up until “show time”. And because Presenter is a real-time system, there are no long compile or render requirements — last minute changes are easy and instant to implement.

Version 5.6 of Presenter builds on this tight PowerPoint connection. Indeed, pop-up user-interfaces used to drive dynamic media are authored in PowerPoint, offering direct support for things like fade-out panels, toggle buttons, virtual touchpads, and sliders. And thanks to the PowerPoint connection, it is easy and quick to make changes to interaction techniques and UI layout right up until the last minute.

Despite the tight PowerPoint connection, most viewers would be quite surprised to find out that what they are watching originated in PowerPoint!

See Also: Instant Effects Presenter v4: Conversation with Don Brittain | Instant Effects Presenter v3.5: Conversation with Don Brittain

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, OfficeFX, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Custom Backgrounds for Slide Master and Layouts

A simple looking presentation with a clean background is always a great idea since that doesn’t overpower your message. Yet, there are plenty of opportunities to go beyond a plain background and use a less restrained background instead — your choice for a slide background should complement the content of your presentation. PowerPoint 2011 does provide you with 12 default slide Background Styles which can be applied to both the Slide Master and individual Slide Layouts — other than these default background styles, you can also opt to use a custom slide background such as a solid color, a gradient, a pattern or texture, or even a picture.

Learn how to apply custom backgrounds to both the Slide Master and Slide Layouts in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Templates, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2013: Task Pane

The Task Pane is a docked window within the PowerPoint 2013 interface that provides more options than dialog boxes — also unlike most dialog boxes which cover the Slide Area, you can view both the active slide(s) and the Task Pane at the same time — thus the Task Pane provides a more streamlined experience.

Learn about how the Task Pane works in PowerPoint 2013, and you can toggle its view.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials

Electric Slide 2: Conversation with Jim Phelan

  Jim Phelan has architected, designed, and developed numerous business productivity, healthcare, and e-learning applications. He is the co-founder of elucidate llc, where he created Electric Slide, elucidate’s core product, as well as several healthcare applications. Jim lives in Brooklyn with his mischievous cat Zeus, whose spirit name is Peeve.

In this conversation, Jim discusses the new Electric Slide 2.

Geetesh: Tell us more about Electric Slide, how it evolved, and how it fulfills the requirement for a presenting app that takes advantage of the iOS platform?

Jim: Electric Slide lets you present PowerPoint, Keynote, documents and videos to any web browser (or via an adapter or AirPlay), all from your iPhone or iPad. It was conceived of as a way to eliminate the hassle involved when presenting in person. Coming from the web collaboration space, I was aware that there are lots of high-quality PC based tools for sharing and presenting content to a remote audience, but what didn’t seem to exist was a quality way for the mobile-equipped presenter to easily share their presentation in a physical meeting and also around the world.

For the presenter who wants to present PowerPoint, documents, video and (now) Keynote from their iPhone or iPad, there weren’t many good solutions. We really focused on making mobile presenting accessible regardless of the scenario, so whether you’re in a conference room with an adapter or presenting to a group of viewers on web browsers, it just works. We also invested a lot of time in making the app work in less-than-perfect conditions, such as degraded or non-existent Internet connectivity.

We decided to make the app a native iOS app to take advantage of some of the more advanced features of iOS. One example of this is how we allow users to snap and share a photo. Imagine you’re presenting in a conference room with a couple of attendees on the phone, and someone decides to sketch something out on the whiteboard. With this feature you can quickly snap a photo and share it in real-time to your remote audience. We also do some pretty interesting stuff with Bluetooth pairing where we enable devices to control each other even in the absence of an Internet connection. This is reinforced by our syncing feature, which automatically downloads and stores your content to your device so you can present it anywhere.

In terms of evolution, every new version of Electric Slide has brought new features, increased performance and higher fidelity when making PowerPoint, document, and video content web friendly. We actually support most of your PowerPoint (and now Keynote) animations and transitions in a web browser. So, your audience just goes to your simple URL and will see your presentation as you intended it to be seen. Our new version brings greatly improved document quality (such as PDFs and Word documents) and also adds page thumbnails for quickly navigating documents.

Geetesh: What are your favorite new features in Electric Slide version 2?

Jim: There are so many new features in version 2 that it’s hard to choose, but I think the big winner with our users will be the new version’s ability to control Keynote presentations from iPhone and iPad. This is by far our most requested feature; the current version supports PowerPoint, documents and videos, but not Keynote. It was also a technical feat to accomplish, so we’re quite happy about the way it turned out.

I think the Email Inbox feature will make a lot of people’s lives easier as well. Rather than upload presentations directly to Electric Slide you can now email them to a private email address we provide you with. This feature is included in the free version and will make things simpler for a lot of people — if you receive an email with an attachment you want to present, simply forward it and it will appear in your account. If you have an assistant or agency doing your presentation work they can easily send it to your address as well. One fun way to use this feature is to record a quick video on your device and email it off — in a short time you can broadcast this video for all of your viewers to see.

This version also introduces web-based, monthly payments. Before we were only allowing Pro account upgrades via in-app purchases in the App Store, but now any user can get a Pro account online — we’re offering this for a limited time for just $4.99 a month as an introductory price.

Sharing your PowerPoint and Keynote presentations is now possible with this version as well. Just tap the share button and a web-friendly link will be delivered to recipients of your choosing. This web viewer link lets viewers check out a web based version of your content at their leisure and is great for following up to a meeting without having to attach your bulky PowerPoint file to an email.

Personally, however, the Broadcast Zoom feature is my favorite. It’s deceptively simple — just pinch to zoom on your document or slides while presenting. Once you do, your audience (whether on the web or watching on a TV or projector) will see you zoom in real-time. This nicely complements the laser pointer feature and gives you several options to call out important content. We also provide an option to let you zoom privately which can be quite helpful for users presenting from a phone.

Prev: Mad for the iPad Survey: Conversation with Joan Babinski

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: Interviews, iPad, iPhone, Jim Phelan, Keynote, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

PowerPoint and Presenting News: May 28, 2013

Get started in this issue by learning how you can speak concisely — Claudyne Wilder teaches you how. Rick Altman, the host of the annual Presentation Summit discusses this year’s conference at Fort Lauderdale, Florida — and Aaron Khoo of 9Slides tell you more about why he believes that 9Slides is a great platform for sharing presentations. This issue, we focus on the PowerPoint Web App — did you know that many keyboard shortcuts associated with the desktop versions of PowerPoint do actually work within the Web App? We get you a comprehensive list for both Windows and Mac users. We then explore the amazing Eyedropper tool — this is new for PowerPoint 2013 on Windows. PowerPoint 2011 for Mac users can learn more about changing backgrounds in Slide Masters and Slide Layouts.

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint