PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Open and Close Paths with Edit Points

The Shape gallery in PowerPoint contains an assortment of shapes, both open and closed. Most of the shapes in this gallery are closed shapes (rectangle, ellipse, and triangle are some of the closed shapes). There are also a few open shapes such as the straight point to point line. Line drawing tools let you create your own shapes — these can be both open and closed. These line drawing tools are Freeform Line, Curve, and Scribble. In addition, you can convert any closed shape to an open shape and vice versa, as you will learn in this tutorial.

Learn how you can open and close paths for shapes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Animated Slide: Spinning Snowflakes

Three snowflakes that move randomly with the breeze in PowerPoint – actually a clever combination of multiple animations and setting their timings make this look so random! We used the Spin, Grow and Shrink, and a Spiral motion path to create the effect. All colors used are Theme aware – so if you move this slide to another presentations, the colors may change! We used PowerPoint 2010 to create this presentation, and it works best in either that version or in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

You can download and use this slide for your own presentations — but please do let our credit link remain so that others can also know where the slides originated from.

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

Animated Slide: Hearts Perspective

This heart-full slide has several heart shapes that come onto the slide area, one after the other and then gradually become smaller until they drift into a perspective oblivion. All heart shapes are of a different size, are rotated at a different angle, and also use Theme colors. In addition, each heart has a 3D style applied that has more than one animation added so that the shape diminishes in size as it moves to an imaginary perspective point located off the top right part of the slide. All animations are set to repeat indefinitely so that the hearts keep moving until you navigate to the next slide.

Download and use this slide in your presentation.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Language Options on the Status Bar

Typically when you select any text container such as a text placeholder, shape, or text box — then you may (or may not) see which language is specified for the text container on the Status Bar within PowerPoint 2010. It is quite possible that you may not be seeing any language specified on the Status Bar — and this can happen for one of two reasons.

Learn how to make the Language Option visible on the Status Bar in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

3D-Hub: Conversation with Don Brittain

Don Brittain is the CEO and founder of Instant Effects, a California-based company that develops software to visually enhance presentations, communications, and collaboration. Dr. Brittain has designed commercial interactive graphics software for more than two decades, having been VP Research at Wavefront Technologies and one of the principal architects of 3dsmax from Autodesk prior to helping found Instant Effects almost a decade ago.

In this conversation, Don discusses 3D-Hub, a new 3D initiative spearheaded by Instant Effects (USA) and White Space Productions (UK).

Geetesh: What is 3D-Hub – and how can it benefit presenters, educators, or anyone else who wants to show interactive 3D content?

Don: 3D-Hub was designed to meet a rising need in classroom education. The basic goal is to promote 3D software and media to improve learning while maintaining the advantages that a traditional classroom learning environment already offers. This means that the media should be interactive (so that the teacher can easily respond to questions and encourage exploration), compelling (to keep the attention and interest of the students), and allow for animation (so processes, flows, and interlinked components become visually obvious). Furthermore, since many classroom-based studies have shown that using stereo 3D displays improves understanding, 3D-Hub is also able to take full advantage of stereo 3D projectors and 3D TVs wherever and whenever they are available.

Finally, since all of this is on the leading edge, we have also built 3D-Hub to be an online community where people can go to discuss teaching techniques, request additional 3D models, and ask for improvements to current material to help improve its effectiveness. As such, the goal is for 3D-Hub to play a key role in moving classroom education forward in a meaningful way.

Geetesh: What are the 3D models that work with the 3D-Hub Player – what is available now, and what else can we look forward to in the near future?

Don: For our initial launch, 3D-Hub offers approximately 30 interactive models in the fields of biology, geography, space, and engineering. Many, many more models are under construction, and a key tenet of 3D-Hub is that users can ask for new models, and we will custom-create them and quickly make them available on the site. This allows us to meet the needs of real teachers and real students in a timely manner, with the models having the level of detail and interactivity most needed to achieve the best results in classroom education.

Another aspect of 3D-Hub is that we actively encourage others to offer content through our site. People with 3D content right now can offer it for download to the 3D-Hub community. Our media experts will make sure the models have been placed into a consistent presentation environment (designed to work with mouse interaction as well as with interactive white boards) so that navigation of the material will be consistent and easy to follow, no matter which model is loaded. And for the small subset of content that is best presented in “movie form” (e.g., a film of a live event), the 3D-Hub player also supports 3D videos directly.

One other point that may be of interest is that 3D-Hub benefits from the confluence of 3D special effects techniques, as used by the film and game industries, coupled with techniques honed by professional presenters designed to direct audience focus and provide efficient transfer of knowledge. The 3D-Hub models are built using our authoring toolkit plugin for 3dsmax (from Autodesk), and the user interface and interaction components are all originally authored in PowerPoint.

By interviewing hundreds of teachers, educators, and IT professionals working in schools, we have tailored our offerings to augment and complement traditional education techniques. We want to keep what works well while also moving education forward in a manner consistent with the high expectations of today’s students with respect to their media experiences.

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, Don Brittain, Interviews, PowerPoint