PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

New SlideShark Features: Conversation with Jay Wilder

Jay Wilder is director of product marketing at Brainshark, Inc. Brainshark’s cloud-based software lets users create online and mobile video presentations – using simple business tools like PowerPoint and the telephone – and then share and track their content. Thousands of companies use Brainshark to improve the reach and results of their business communications, while dramatically reducing costs.

In this conversation, Jay discusses new features in SlideShark – an app from Brainshark that solves the problem of PowerPoint’s incompatibility on the iPad.

Geetesh: SlideShark provides an amazing option to display PowerPoint presentations on the iPad -– what are the new features that you just announced?

Jay: Since SlideShark’s launch in October, we’ve added exciting, new features to provide an even richer user experience. They’re geared toward helping our users better conduct business on-the-go – allowing for more interactive, live presentation capabilities and additional storage options, among other valuable features. These include:

• Greater storage capacity – To help users who want to view and present large files, all accounts now start at 100MB of free storage. If you’d like to add more storage, you can purchase a “SlideShark Plus” upgrade – 500MB of storage (on top of the free 100MB) is $49/year, and 1GB of additional storage is $98/year.
• Refer a friend – You can also earn extra storage at no cost by referring friends to SlideShark via a personalized URL. Each time a friend signs up for a free account, you both get an extra 25MB of storage. Both free and Plus users can earn up to 500MB of extra storage.
• Upload to SlideShark from the iPad – In addition to uploading PowerPoint files to your SlideShark account from your computer, you can now use the “Open in” functionality to do the uploads and conversions directly from the iPad as well. For instance, files received on the iPad via email or accessed via cloud storage services like iCloud, Box and Dropbox can be uploaded to SlideShark and automatically converted for iPad use.
• Laser pointer – This feature lets you direct your audience’s attention to key points in presentations. While presenting via a projector or TV, simply press and hold your finger anywhere on the iPad. A red laser pointer will appear and follow your finger as you move it across the screen.



• “Hide Slides” functionality – With this feature, you can hide one or more slides prior to presenting. This is helpful when modifying presentations based on different audiences. Simply tap the “Edit” button in the top right of a presentation’s preview screen to access the “Hide Slides” functionality.
• 16:9 widescreen support – In addition to supporting standard 4:3 sized PowerPoint slide decks, SlideShark now also supports the visually appealing 16:9 widescreen format. 16:9 slides are letter-boxed to fit the iPad’s 4:3 screen size correctly.

Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the direction you are looking at for SlideShark in the near future?

Jay: We’ve been thrilled with user adoption since launching SlideShark –- averaging two downloads/minute, 24×7. We’re currently the #5 Productivity App in the App Store, which is a great honor. I think our greatest pleasure comes from user feedback, ratings and reviews. A 4.5 star rating across hundreds of reviews from around the world gives you a great feeling of accomplishment and a drive to keep making the experience better. Users have been great about providing feedback as well, and we’re continuing to add new functionality based on the features they request. We’re very busy and not planning on slowing down –- so we encourage our users to keep letting us know what they think and what would be most helpful to them.

While we’ve introduced the paid storage upgrades, we’ll still be maintaining a full-featured free version too –- enabling any business or education user to benefit from the app. As we head into 2012, we’ll also be looking to address the needs of large, multi-user organizations through user management enhancements to SlideShark. We look forward to continuing to meet our users’ needs by helping them view and show PowerPoints –- reliably and professionally -– on their iPads.

See Also: SlideShark: Conversation with Jay Wilder

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: Brainshark, Interviews, iPad, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Dynamic Reorder of Overlapping Shapes

You have already learned about Dynamic Reordering of shapes, where all slides objects are placed in an individual layered view suitable for reordering. This may work well when you have a few objects on your slide but is entirely unpractical if your slide has anything over 10 objects. Fortunately, there is a variation of this technique that lets you only work with the selected slide objects, and any other slide objects that overlap the selection. This option is called Reorder Overlapping Objects.

Learn about the Dynamic Reordering of the overlapping Shapes and other slide objects in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

PPTools Resize: Conversation with Steve Rindsberg

    Steve Rindsberg has been associated with PowerPoint since the product originated more than two decades ago — his PowerPoint FAQ site is a treasure trove of PowerPoint information. When he’s not updating his site, he’s creating new PowerPoint add-ins that expand possibilities within PowerPoint. Steve’s also into a lot of print technology related stuff.

In this conversation, Steve discusses PPTools Resize, his new PowerPoint add-in that resizes slide dimensions.

Geetesh: What is PPTools Resize, and how did this new PowerPoint add-in evolve?

Steve: PPTools Resize is a PowerPoint add-in that allows PowerPoint users to change the size of their slides without distorting anything on the slides.

Oddly, it solves a problem I used to struggle with daily when I was in the 35mm slide service bureau business, years and years ago. The default PowerPoint slide size, then as now, was On-screen Show (4:3) 10×7.5 inches or the equivalent in metric. But 35mm slides are differently proportioned, 11.25×7.5 inches. Early on, when customers would send in default-sized presentations (which most of them did), we’d have to make manual adjustments.

And then, as now, you can’t just change the page size. When you do that, everything on the slide gets stretched or squished. Your pie charts all become egg-charts! So we’d create a new copy of the presentation, change the size, delete anything that got distorted and finally, copy and the paste deleted shapes back into the presentation from the unchanged original. This. Took. Time. Lots. Of. Time.

At the time, there was no way of writing add-ins for PowerPoint, and by the time there was, slide-making software and hardware had evolved to the point where there were relatively simple ways of dealing with incorrectly sized presentations.

So while I began writing add-ins to solve other problems, I forgot all about this one.

Then came wide-screen laptops, monitors, and projectors. PowerPoint got new wide-screen slide sizes in Office 2007 and immediately, users began to have the same problem as we’d had back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and presenters used 35mm slides: the default presentation size didn’t fill their laptop screens and if they changed the page size so it did …. egg-charts again!

I assumed that Microsoft would include a fix for this problem in the next version of PowerPoint, but Office 2010 came out and left users with egg(-chart) on their faces again. If Microsoft wasn’t going to fix the problem, I decided that I would.

Perhaps this feature will appear in PowerPoint 20-whatever’s-next. Perhaps it won’t. But we know that it’ll never appear in PowerPoint 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002 or 2000. Resize is here now, and works with all of them.

Geetesh: What does PPTools Resize do differently than the Page Setup options within PowerPoint?

Steve: When you change the Page Setup in PowerPoint and select a new size that’s not proportional to the current size, PowerPoint stretches your slides to fit. And in the process, it stretches everything ON your slides … remember our egg-charts? To most PowerPoint users, that’s simply not acceptable.

But with Resize, you choose a new size for your presentation from among PowerPoint’s standard sizes or several additional special-purpose pre-defined sizes or any custom size you care to define. Instead of squeezing your original presentation out of shape, Resize creates a copy of it, changes its page size, then copy/pastes all the content from the original presentation, undistorted, into the new slides, masters, and layouts.

By default, Resize pops this content into the center of the newly resized presentation, making it as large as it can without distortion, but it also lets you adjust the left/right and top/bottom position of content on the new presentation or even add a margin all around the content. It’s all a bit difficult to visualize, but your Resize review on Indezine has some great visual examples. So does the PDF Help / Manual included with Resize (which you can also download independently — links to a PDF).

Could you do all of this manually in PowerPoint, no add-in needed? You could, but remember, you have to change the size of everything on every slide. And every Master and Slide Layout. If there’s text, you need to change the font size of every bit of text. And change the line spacing. And paragraph spacing. And line widths of each shape. And … and … and …

Resize will finish your entire presentation in less time than it takes to convert a single slide manually.

You May Also Like: Resize PowerPoint Add-in: The Indezine Review | Steve Rindsberg on Indezine

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, PowerPoint, PPTools, Resize, Steve Rindsberg

Learn PowerPoint 2010: More Spelling Options

We already showed you how to summon the Spelling dialog box and spell check your entire presentation for any misspelled words. While this is a great way of checking your slides once your presentation has been created, there are other ways to spell check, and also some tips to help you understand how you can do better proofing of your text content. This page contains a collection of these tips.

Explore more spelling options in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Dynamic Reordering of Shapes

Although you can change the order of shapes or any other slide objects using the conventional Send to Back and Bring to Front options in the Arrange gallery, you can do reordering in a much intuitive way in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. We call this new technique Dynamic Reordering, and this works by dragging shapes to the required positions in a special reorder view.

Learn about Dynamic Reordering of shapes and other slide objects in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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