PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Indezine News: PowerPoint at 25

PowerPoint celebrated its 25th birthday last month, and in a special world exclusive, we have Robert Gaskins, the founder of PowerPoint reminisce about how PowerPoint might have been named Presenter if someone else did not trademark that name. And in a curious turn of events, one of the commentators of his post owns up to trademarking the Presenter name. Post 25 years, the world is a small place! We also look at the new PowerPoint 2013 from a developer perspective this week.

Read the newsletter here.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Hanging Indent Marker

How your paragraphs get positioned as a bulleted list within PowerPoint’s text placeholders or another text object is influenced by three types of Indent Markers: The First Indent Marker, the Hanging Indent Marker, and the Left Indent Marker. Of the three Indent Markers you can see on the Ruler, the Hanging Indent Marker is used to tweak the position of the paragraph following the bullet. The Hanging Indent Marker is also known as the Middle Caret.

Learn how to tweak the start position of paragraphs in bulleted lists using the Hanging Indent Marker in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Change Animations

Once you have an animation applied to a particular slide object, the need to change that animation may arise for several reasons: You realize that another animation effect would work better, or you want to make all animations across the entire presentation consistent. You may also want to use a more subtle or exciting animation effect. Typically, in the situations like these, users can just remove the animation and apply another animation to the slide object. But, PowerPoint’s Change Animation option makes this a one-click step.

Learn how to change an existing slide object animation to another animation in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

authorSTREAM’s HD Video Output

Among the various improvements that authorSTREAM made to their video engine, HD video conversion is the one that stands apart. This improvement is significant since it will make all the difference in the world to those who need to quickly create high resolution video output. So what do you need to create this high quality video output, and where can you use it? Let’s first answer the second question and then look at the first one for the rest of this post.

Video is no longer the realm of only those who sit in front of high end systems with software worth thousands of dollars installed. Everyone wants to create a quick video — perhaps for one of these reasons:

Digital signage

A new offer, product, or feature has been introduced and you need a quick video promotional — som1. ething quick, or even a prototype before you meet with your ad agency to do a shoot with models, locations, and hundreds of other nuances.

Television series

You work in a television studio and need a quick mock up of your ideas for a full production or just a single episode.

Event showcase

You are taking part in a large event that includes an expo — you can provide a quick 4 or 5 minute video clip that will be shown on LEDs all over the venue.

Photos keepsake

You want a quick video clip with music and photographs to show for a family wedding, anniversary, or birthday party. You’ll show this on a high res display — so the resolution has to be high quality.

PowerPoint alternative

You want to do a semi-presentation session that has slides with text — and also many pictures, animated objects, and video clips. However all this needs to be shown on a television without a laptop or tablet connected — and it may have to be a self running video clip.

Of course, we just highlighted five typical scenarios — and no doubt, there will many other situations that may be similar to these.

You can of course fire up PowerPoint and easily add all the pictures and text that you need. Add sound or video clips as required, and what do you do next? If you use PowerPoint 2010, you could use the Create a Video option — but that again has limitations. It does not loop media such as audio and video clips, and does not provide HD quality output. Also, you may be using an older version of PowerPoint — or one of PowerPoint’s Mac versions that has no Create a Video option.

authorSTREAM’s solution lets you to upload your PowerPoint to their servers, and you then let them take care of the rest. Soon after you upload the slides to their site, you can choose an HD video output option. As soon as your HD video is ready, you’ll receive an email asking you to download your video clip!

Do note though that authorSTREAM’s HD output options are not free, and you may have to pay a small amount to access this feature. If you already are subscribed to one of their premium subscription plans, then the HD video output options are already included within the plan.

To get started, you can follow these steps:

1. You must first upload a PowerPoint presentation to your authorSTREAM account. Here’s an embedded presentation that we uploaded for this post:

Do note that the presentation we uploaded was in the wide screen format. If you still have not played the embedded presentation, above — then you might see a 4:3 window, but play it and it shows thereafter in 16:9. Although authorSTREAM doesn’t seem to officially support the 16:9 wide screen format, it did work for us!

2. Next you go to your My Presentations page on authorSTREAM. You need to be signed into your account for this to work.
3. Find the presentation you uploaded, click the Video button shown in the screenshot below to open a popup menu. Choose the Convert to Video option, shown highlighted in red, below.



4. You’ll see the Convert presentation to video dialog, as shown below. Open the Select video format drop-down list, and choose the MP4 HD Quality option. Then, click the Next button.



5. If your slides have no set transition timings, you can now choose how long you want each slide to be shown (see screenshot below). Then click the Convert Now button.

   

6. You will see a message that says Your presentation will be converted into a video in a short while. You will receive a confirmation email as soon as it’s ready. Check your mail — in a few minutes, you will receive a link to download your presentation in the form of an HD video.

Our contact at authorSTREAM for this post was Dinesh Awasthi. Thank you, Dinesh.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: authorSTREAM, PowerPoint, Video

People Chain Silhouettes for PowerPoint – 02

These ready-made silhouette graphics of people holding hands are inspiring, and also so practical to use since they don’t represent any community or nationality. You can use them to depict themes such as unity, togetherness, diversity, team spirit, etc.

Download the slides and use the silhouettes in your presentation.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Graphics, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples