PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Presente3D: Conversation with Dennis Cafiero

Dennis Cafiero, the chief visionary for Presente3D, realized in 2011 that many of his customers were turned off to 3D because of the high cost of development. It just wasn’t simple to make 3D unless you were a trained 3D professional. Before starting Presente3D, Dennis was Technical Director at EON Reality which provides 3D solutions for business and educational needs based on 3D Virtual Reality technology. With over 16 years of experience in the 3D industry, he understands the challenges facing the industry and consumers in the 3D marketplace.

In this conversation, Dennis discusses Presente3D, a new 3D add-in for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: What motivated you to create Presente3D? Also, what are the types of presentations where your product can make a difference?

Dennis: For the last 16 years, I have been developing 3D Interactive simulations and stereoscopic presentations for 3D immersive environments. What I found was that the cost of creating these simulations and presentations was expensive and most of my customers were happy with simple text and images popping out at them. I knew that most of my customers wanted the ability to create their own 3D presentations, but they did not have the skill set to learn 3D modeling, editing, or graphics. I decided that I would then create a simple 3D presentation software that just contained simple 3D objects like text, shapes, and images.

I then told a good friend my ideas and he said people don’t want to have to learn a new program and everyone knows PowerPoint. Microsoft PowerPoint is what 95% of the people use for presentations. We did not want to have to win over users. Microsoft had spent so much time in creating an easy-to-use presentation tool, and we had to incorporate 3D into Microsoft PowerPoint.

I knew that when we did this integration with PowerPoint, we had to make it simple for a user by just adjusting a couple of values to their existing presentation. We could not make our users take hours to create a slide in 3D. We had to give the ability for users to add 3D to their slides in minutes. Everyone knows that most people create presentations the day before or at the last minute. We had to make sure Presente3D still gave you this ability at a cost that was affordable too.

So, with these goals in mind, we started to develop Presente3D which was just recently released out of beta.

Geetesh: How easy is it for a newbie to get started with using Presente3D – how much of a learning curve can one expect?

Dennis: We made it simple to use Presente3D by adding all functionality to Microsoft’s Ribbon Bar.

Below you can see an image of the ribbon bar:

A user can easily learn Presente3D in under 15 minutes just by adjusting Z-Depth (Pop-Out and Pop-in) and thickness levels on their existing slide objects. We have simplified the process to assigning two values to each object; we even give you some presets to make the process easier. Once you have assigned your 3D attributes, all you have to do is select your output display properties for your 3DTV, or 3D-enabled projector. We even allow you to run on non-3D displays through our support for Anaglyph 3D.

We really made this simple for the other 99% of the people that know nothing about 3D. Every time I do a demo for people to show how easy it is, they say it looks simple enough for them to do it. I promise you, you can!

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: 3D, Add-in, Graphics, Interviews, PowerPoint

Huge PowerPoint Content: Last Day Today

Indezine is glad to partner with PowerFinish to bring you something that has been a very successful promo in past years — and this is the last opportunity you have to take advantage of this amazing offer. This is what you get:

• 15,000 PowerPoint Templates and Backgrounds
• 8 Volumes of Looping Video Background Sets
• 4 Volumes of HD video clips
• A full single user license for business use
• Includes everything on the PowerFinish site — except worship products
• Free Shipping

This offer is only valid through November 15th, 2012 — so please act soon if you don’t want to miss this amazing option.

Filed Under: Templates
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Templates

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Artistic Effects for Pictures

PowerPoint is a slide program but that doesn’t mean that it does not have some cool picture editing tricks up its sleeve. When we say “cool”, we certainly do not mean just inserting a picture, or even the fact that you can apply corrections or recolor hues. PowerPoint 2010 introduced a new option to make your pictures look different, almost like using a filter effect in Adobe Photoshop. PowerPoint provides around 23 filters as part of its new Artistic Effects option. Some of these filters (effects) can make your pictures look like paintings or sketches, and others can change the texture of your pictures. Apply any effect of your choice, and make sure you play around with all the options available to be aware of the surprisingly different results you can achieve right within PowerPoint.

Learn how to apply Artistic Effects to pictures in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Pictures, PowerPoint 2010, Tutorials

Book Excerpt: HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations

This excerpt is from Nancy Duarte’s HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. This is a book that’s easy to carry along with you, and easy to read too. All content is presented as bite-sized chapters of a few pages, and there’s so much presentation wisdom to be gained from reading and implementing the content from this book.

Read the excerpt here.

See Also: Nancy Duarte on Indezine

Filed Under: Books
Tagged as: Books, Presentation Skills

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Text Autofit Options

When you are typing in some text into your text box, you might have seen that PowerPoint automatically reduces the size of your text when you type in too much text, or the text container itself increases in size when you type in a little extra text than what can fit. Does this automatic hand-holding by PowerPoint interrupting your work? Well, you really don’t have to worry because you can control this default behavior of PowerPoint.

Learn about text autofit options in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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