PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Convert Your Presentations with SlideGo: Conversation with Hong Nguyen

  Hong Nguyen is a software developer with 15 years of experience. He is currently based in Singapore. He started developing SlideGo as “hobby” software in 2009 due to his personal need to export PowerPoint animations to Flash. SlideGo has now grown into a HTML5 slide builder and still continues to add more features daily.

In this conversation, Hong discusses SlideGo.

Geetesh: Tell us about SlideGo, and what motivated you to create a PowerPoint-compatible online web app?

Hong: SlideGo provides two key services: an online slide editor, and software to convert PowerPoint files for online editing. The idea behind SlideGo is “interactive slides”, that is, to utilize the animation capabilities of PowerPoint. This creates huge options for authoring content that serves purposes other than presentations: e-learning, children’s books, interactive websites. And not surprisingly, users have been using PowerPoint for years for these purposes.

We started with a PowerPoint converter to HTML5, which now works great with high accuracy. But it is only available on Windows, and it lacks ready-to-use facilities to create interactive content (VBA macros are not converted). That motivated us to build a web app that everyone can have access to, and we can easily extend the features. To date, the editor already has the most essential functions of PowerPoint (shape drawing, animation, motion paths, master layouts, etc.), and it has a lot of add-ins that allow creating interactivity with just one click. The output is HTML5, which means it runs on most devices, but we also make it backward compatible with older desktops. In addition, we target tablets as a future platform for content creation, so we build the editor with touch functionalities in mind.

Geetesh: You do provide several output options from SlideGo, such as an ebook format that works with iBooks, Can you share some feedback about how people use these options?

Hong: As a free service, we allow users to download their converted content to view offline, or to upload to their own web server. With the advent of capable devices like iPad and smartphones, users also want to make their content mobile. We initially intended to package HTML5 into a mobile app. But you need approval before content can be available. Some of our users started porting the HTML5 output to the iBooks format manually since they use PowerPoint to create training books. But iBooks is not just a book reader, it can play full HTML5 content with animation and audio as well. And users can download iBooks files to their devices without any restriction. So we added an option to export to iBooks format. Users who are content vendors are happy because they don’t have to force their end-users to download another custom mobile app to view converted files. It just works out of the box. Now our users use it to show presentations offline. They also use it to store product brochures or training materials. We are working to add similar capabilities to other types of devices.

People Also Ask

Which products create online presentations?

There are several products that let you create online presentations such as Microsoft Sway, Powtoon, and even PowerPoint for the Web.

Is Microsoft Sway different than PowerPoint?

Yes, they are completely different products that complement each other rather than competing with each other.

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, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Sound Across Specific Slides

Once you add an audio track to your PowerPoint presentation, you can let the inserted audio span across all your slides from the first one to the last by selecting the Play across slides option. That’s great if you need the same music playing on all your slides. But what if you want the music to play only across some successive slides? What if you want the music to play from slide 1 to 12, and let all slides thereafter play without any music? Or you may want to add another music clip for the next set of slides? Either way, it is possible to limit the number of slides that your music will play across.

Learn how to loop a sound clip across specific slides in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Indezine News: Unwrapping PowerPoint 2013

Last week’s most eventful happening was Microsoft announcing a public preview for Office 2013, the next version of Microsoft Office. Predictably, this means a new PowerPoint version. Expectations are very high for the upcoming PowerPoint 2013 — and what you see in the public preview version is essentially what you will see in the final release. So for those of you who are expecting to send feedback to Microsoft based upon your opinion of PowerPoint 2013’s public preview, be aware that no new features will be added based on your opinion at this time. A public preview is something that gets released to iron out bugs and make users aware of an upcoming version — and nothing else!

If that sounded pessimistic, then it was not intended to. And that’s because there is so much to like about PowerPoint 2013 — in the next few weeks and months we will explore all nuances of PowerPoint 2013, and share them with you.

Read the newsletter here.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Reversing Motion Paths

Now that you have learnt how easy it is to add motion paths using presets, and to draw your own custom motion paths, it is time to start getting more familiar with some tricks used with Motion Path animations. The simplest motion path trick is to reverse the direction of your motion path — this option is very helpful if you want an object to animate using a motion path, and then animate the same object again from the end of the motion path back to the starting point.

Learn how to reverse a motion path’s direction in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Need for PowerPoint Training: Conversation with Joby Blume

  
Joby Blume is a Managing Consultant at BrightCarbon, a presentation agency operating from the UK and Singapore. Joby has been writing sales presentations for the last seven years, during which time he has helped clients to win billions of dollars of new business.

BrightCarbon specializes in creating compelling and persuasive sales presentations and Visual Conversations®, training salespeople to present effectively, and supporting clients with large pitches. BrightCarbon also delivers paid-for and free advanced PowerPoint training.

In this interview, Joby discusses the need for PowerPoint training.

Geetesh: Most PowerPoint users are self-taught, and their justification is that PowerPoint is a very easy program to use – do you agree with them? Please share your thoughts.

Joby: Sure, PowerPoint is easy to use without training — but people just use it in the worst ways imaginable. If all you want to do is use PowerPoint as a word processor, then it’s straightforward to open it up and start typing — just don’t ever use your slides for a presentation. There’s no point reading slides aloud to an audience — if they can read your message, they don’t need to listen too.

A lot of people have realized that really crowded, text-heavy slides don’t work that well, and are thinking more in terms of a Presentation Zen approach instead. Which makes perfect sense if you are designing slides for use on a huge stage, almost as a backdrop to a speech. Find a great photograph, insert it, and type a line of text over the top. But most presentations aren’t like that. We look at Steve Jobs and think that we want to deliver presentations the same way he used to, but conveniently ignore the fact that most of our presentations are in a small meeting room to six other people or a sales presentation to a skeptical audience. And we’re not launching a mobile phone to a room full of fans, we’re trying to explain business strategy, or medical diagnostics, or data, or something like that. So, even those people who try to do something better than typing six bullet points onto a slide are modeling the wrong behavior –- because they aren’t giving a speech with a pretty backdrop to a friendly audience.

One of the things that’s great about PowerPoint is that it can help presenters to explain complex ideas clearly. But to do that successfully, slides shouldn’t make sense on their own –- they should support a presenter. All those beautiful decks on SlideShare look fantastic, but they aren’t a presentation –- they are slides that make perfect sense without a presenter. So when a presenter comes to use them, what does the audience do? They just read the slides, and because they think that the most important information goes onto the slides, they feel that they can ignore the presenter. It doesn’t matter how beautiful slides are if they aren’t effective when used in a presentation.

A lot of people think they can use PowerPoint, but they never even thought about what makes an effective slide. PowerPoint might be easy to pick up and use, but it’s actually pretty hard to use well -– and it does tempt people to use it badly, with things like “Insert Text Here” encouraging the use of bullet points.

So, we think that PowerPoint should be used to show things that help to support what a presenter says, with images, graphs, diagrams -– all that sort of stuff -– but not to replace a presenter. To make slides that are highly visual, most people need a bit of help. Partly in visualization -– actually working out how to show their ideas, and then also in PowerPoint doing things like working with images, animation, graphs, groups, manipulating video, and so on. Most people don’t know how to do those things and need training.

Geetesh: You do training sessions on PowerPoint for free – why do you do these sessions, and what have your training experiences been like?

Joby: There are sort of two answers to this. The official one is that we’re on a mission to save the world from awful presentations, one master class at a time. By which I mean that we all actually care about helping people to deliver better presentations. So, we run advanced PowerPoint training sessions online, but also presentation skills sessions, and even sessions for those writing presentations. Some of our teams have been creating visual PowerPoint slides professionally for almost ten years –- so it’s quite easy for us to create training presentations, and to show people how we do things. We want to help, and so we organize the sessions.

We run two master classes each week, most weeks of the year. And as you say, the sessions are free, and we’re getting really good feedback. The classes are based on our advanced PowerPoint training and presentation skills training – which we deliver to companies in-house on a paid-for basis. But this way we can reach more people, and help save the world from awful presentations. All the thanks we receive makes us feel warm and fuzzy, and it works as great motivation.

The unofficial but honest answer is that we’re also trying to get noticed. We’ve all been working on presentations for a long time, but BrightCarbon is a relatively new company. So we want to start conversations with people, and the best way to do that is to openly share things that people find useful. So we share our knowledge via our master class events online.

The sessions are actually pretty good. It’s quite fast-paced, and of course, we don’t get time to answer every question we get asked or give personal support in the way we would for face-to-face training. We get a lot of people though, and the sessions are growing through word-of-mouth, so we must be doing something right. The sessions are aimed at people who already use PowerPoint, but who want to see what more is possible, and so far it seems like we’re pitching it right.

We use Brainshark to send out summaries to the people who miss the session, but the full content is only available to those who turn up. The numbers attending have been growing exponentially -– soon we’ll need to increase our capacity with our webinar provider – but we’re delighted people are finding the sessions useful.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

See Also: BrightCarbon (iPad Presentations): Conversation with John Bevan

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: BrightCarbon, Interviews, Opinion, PowerPoint, Training