PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Motion Path Animations

The three basic animation types in PowerPoint: Entrance, Emphasis, and Exit animations are something we have already explored. The fourth animation type is called Motion Path animations, and this is something more advanced in nature than the basic animation types explored so far. Motion Path animations play on a path that determines the direction in which the animated slide object moves across or around on the slide area. For example, you can move the slide object up, down, right, or left — or on any preset or drawn motion path.

Explore Motion Path animations in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

iSpring Converter’s PowerPoint to HTML5 Conversion: Conversation with Yury Uskov

Yury Uskov is the founder and CEO of iSpring Solutions Inc. an international software company focused on providing professional e-Learning authoring tools based in PowerPoint. Yury has a Masters degree in Software Engineering, and since 2001 has been working in the rich media industry inspired by the idea of making the best solutions for online presentation delivery. iSpring products are widely recognized as robust, effective, and extremely easy-to-use software with an outstanding price/quality ratio. iSpring is headquartered in New York, NY.

In this conversation, Yury discusses the new iSpring Converter that does PowerPoint to HTML5 conversion.

Geetesh: The new iSpring Converter now creates HTML5 output from PowerPoint presentations. What motivated the move from Flash output to HTML5 output? Was it the iPad? Tell us more.

Yury: Yes, the decision to start up PowerPoint to HTML5 conversion was triggered by the Apple iPad. As you may know, iPad doesn’t support original PowerPoint presentations, and it doesn’t support Flash presentations as well. Obviously, for millions of iPad users, this is very inconvenient that they can’t use their top-notch devices to play and share presentations.

It is expected that the HTML5 technology will replace Flash in rich media. This aroused the need in a PowerPoint to HTML5 conversion tool that would keep the interactivity and look of a PowerPoint presentation as precisely as Flash did. At iSpring, we have received countless requests for such tool by our customers, aware of the high engineering level of iSpring’s PowerPoint to Flash solutions.

For now the HTML5 technology is far less mature than Flash: it provides poor cross-browser support and lacks security. Nevertheless, we did our best developing iSpring Converter, and managed to provide excellent performance. I believe that our PowerPoint to HTML5 solutions will perform as solidly as our time-proven PowerPoint to Flash products.

Geetesh: How does the HTML5 output created by iSpring Converter fare compared to the original PowerPoint content – can you tell us more about the fidelity and the faithfulness to the original content?

Yury: When it comes to PowerPoint to HTML5 conversion accuracy, we honestly feel iSpring Converter stands in a class by itself. It accurately preserves even the most advanced elements of a PowerPoint presentation.

Firstly, the converter preserves virtually all animations and transition effects, including complicated 3D transitions and trigger animations. Secondly, it supports embedded audio and video while converting PowerPoint to HTML5. By the way, iSpring Converter allows you to specially configure embedded video to play on a larger range of devices and PCs. Finally, the converter maintains all PowerPoint styles, keeping the original PowerPoint look in HTML5.

What’s even more important is that iSpring Converter keeps the presentation’s interactivity. It features strong support for triggers, on-click animations, and hyperlinks, which allows users to interact with your HTML5 presentation.

See Also: Brandon Hall Award for iSpring: Conversation with Yury Uskov

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: eLearning, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Video Compression Options

PowerPoint 2010 has better video capabilities, accepts more video file formats, and can do a lot more with videos, including trimming of video clips. However, it also embeds all inserted video clips by default — and this can result in huge presentations that contain huge video files! This ultimately occupies oodles of disk space and may also make PowerPoint work a wee bit slower. To tackle this problem, you can explore the new media compression abilities built right inside PowerPoint 2010 — you no longer need any third-party media compression tool since PowerPoint’s native Media Compression options make this task very easy indeed.

Learn about Video Compression options in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Higgs Boson, Comic Sans, and Bad PowerPoint!

OK, the title of this post is a little confusing, and I wish there was a simpler title I could use — but in all fairness to the three nuances of this post, I had to have them all in the title!

Let’s start with some introductions:

1. Higgs Boson, often called the “God particle” is a proposed elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics — let’s just say that scientists have called this a great breakthrough.
2. Comic Sans is a typeface released by Microsoft in 1994 — the typeface is hugely popular and has been severely criticized for its lack of aesthetics. That criticism though has made no dent in Comic Sans’ huge popularity. It often shows up on PowerPoint slides — and people either love it or hate it — almost no one is indifferent to this typeface.
3. Bad PowerPoint is well, just a bunch of really bad PowerPoint slides!

Look at this article on the Guardian site. The article explores criticism caused by the use of Comic Sans in all the Higgs Boson slides. Love this comment on the same page:

I don’t get this rabid hatred of Comic Sans. However, many scientists are scared that if their presentation looks anything less than boringly stiff and formal with standard Helvetica, someone with influence on the grants committees will see it and mark down their next application. Never mind the science … he, she or it uses Comic Sans.

Kudos to CERN for bucking this trend, although I suspect it’s just down to an individual assigned to making the slides and no-one bothered to change this aspect.

Memo to self: as Comic Sans p*ss*s people off, must remember to use it more often.

So that was about Higgs Boson and Comic Sans. But it looks like Comic Sans was the least of the problems on the CERN slides. The slides themselves were very, very bad. In fact they are great examples of bad PowerPoint — so bad that PowerPoint designers would love to create makeovers with them!

Don’t believe? Take a look yourself — the CERN folks have these slides available on their site for public to download. Here’s a link to a great example of a bad presentation — it’s a 25 mb download for the PPTX file.

For those of you who would rather not download the PowerPoint slides, you can see them on SlideShare:

Thanks to Echo Swinford, Ellen Finkelstein, and Julie Terberg.

You can also follow this discussion on our LinkedIn group.

Filed Under: Thoughts
Tagged as: Opinion, PowerPoint

LinkedIn’s SlideShare Acquisition: Conversation with Amit Ranjan

  Amit Ranjan is the Cofounder and COO of SlideShare, the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web. With 50 million monthly visitors, SlideShare is amongst the top 200 most visited websites on the web. Recently SlideShare was acquired by LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network site.

In this interview, Amit discusses LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Amit Ranjan, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint, SlideShare