PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

OfficeOne Shape Locker: The Indezine Review

Limited Time Offer: Until August 31, 2012 you can get OfficeOne Shape Locker for 50% off the listed price — so you pay only $24.97 instead of $49.95 — just remember to use the promo coupon code: INDEZINE-SHAPELOCK50

For the longest time, PowerPoint users have been asking Microsoft to provide lock and unlock options for slide objects so that some objects cannot be moved from their positions, resized, or even selected. We haven’t been lucky yet, but looks like there’s a third party vendor who’s taken up this challenge to create an add-in that does all the locking and unlocking. Shape Locker is a PowerPoint add-in that allows you to lock several attributes so that slide objects are prevented from further modifications. These objects can be on slides, Master slides, and even Slide layouts.

Read the Indezine review of Shape Locker.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Add-in, PowerPoint, Review

Getting the Office 2013 Customer Preview Beta

Now that Microsoft has released a publicly available customer preview of Office 2013, there’s so much to explore and learn. In a few months, the next version of PowerPoint will be officially released — but you do not have to wait that much longer to play with it. In fact, you can get your hands on this new version of Office (and PowerPoint) today, as we shall show you in the rest of this post.

There are two Office 2013 customer preview releases that you can download — both of them differ in how they are downloaded and installed:

1. The public preview of Office 2013 can be downloaded from Micosoft’s Office preview site.

   The site uses the term Office 365 all the time rather than Office 2013, although the downloaded product is still called Office 2013. Sounds confusing? You get to install Office 2013 as part of your Office 365 subscription. Still sounds confusing? OK, let’s just call this the new version of Office.

   This new version installs straight from Microsoft’s servers using a cloud-enabled technology called CTR (Click-To-Run). That means there’s no ISO, MSI, or other setup files to download. All you need is Windows 7 or 8 installed, and a nice fat pipe connection to the internet. Also add a few hours to the requirements list — don’t try this if you need to be somewhere else in an hour, although I know people who needed 7 hours for the installation to get done! It took me an hour and half to get done with this installation — the installed version number was MSO (15.0.4128.1014) 32-bit.

2. Yes, there’s also a conventional MSI package available that runs the setup locally on your system — if you choose this option, you cannot run Office 2013 along an older version of Office. You get this version by clicking the link right at the bottom of this page — Microsoft probably wanted to make this link as difficult as possible for you to find!

In addition, there’s also a third option available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers — this is a conventional download option. You essentially get a simple EXE file that works even if you have an older version of Office installed. Why doesn’t everyone else get this simple download? That’s the price you pay for not having an MSDN or a TechNet subscripton! It looks like you end up with the same product with the CTR or the MSDN / TechNet download — the version number for my MSDN download version was the same: MSO (15.0.4128.1014) 32-bit.

In subsequent posts we will explore all these installation options, especially the CTR experience.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Open and Closed Motion Paths

Motion Path animations are movements that happen along a path. You can choose from several preset Motion Paths for simple animations — these include lines, curves, stars, and several other paths. These paths may indicate an animation, but for all other practical reasons, they are essentially just ordinary lines (shapes) that have curves, points, etc. You can edit these Motion Paths in the same way as you can edit any other lines in PowerPoint. If you are familiar with the drawing tools in PowerPoint, or if you use a graphic illustration program like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, you know that paths can be either open or closed. A circle is a good example of a closed path, whereas a curve is an open path.

Learn about the open and closed Motion paths in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

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