PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

VisualBee Improvements: Conversation with Shai Schwartz

Shai Schwartz, VP Marketing & Creative at VisualBee has 10 years of experience in the high-tech industry as a graphic designer and provides services to clients such as Comverse, NICE, Amdocs, Intel and more. He holds an MA in Communications from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In this conversaion, Shai discusses the new improvements announced for VisualBee that lets your presentations interact with social media platforms.

Geetesh: Tell us about VisualBee’s new improvements that let you publish or share presentations to social media sites.

Shai: VisualBee has two new compelling features that provide added power and flexibility to users of social media sites.

VisualBee now lets users send out a tweet on Twitter about each new presentation, and post a Facebook update – all directly from within the VisualBee tab of the PowerPoint Ribbon. Users can also post presentations directly to Slideshare, the online slide hosting service – this again is possible using the options added to the VisualBee tab of the Ribbon. VisualBee thus gives its users the broadest possible exposure for their viewing audiences.

Geetesh: What are the other extras you have added in terms of visuals, templates, and layouts?

Shai: VisualBee now has a great new feature – the Image Gallery. Without even enhancing a presentation, users can now take advantage of VisualBee’s huge 12,000+ (and growing) image library. All they have to do is select a photograph and click the Insert Image into Slide option in the VisualBee Image Gallery side panel.

Image Gallery also has a powerful search function which helps the user isolate relevant pictures about any particular subject.

Users can, of course, still use Select from Gallery, as part of the VisualBee Enhancement process to select or replace images from the Image Bank.

See Also: VisualBee 2: Conversation with Motti Nisani

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: Add-in, Interviews, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Standard Toolbar

PowerPoint 2011 now sports the Ribbon interface but it still continues having menus and toolbars. Among the most important of the toolbars is the Standard Toolbar that is located beneath the menu bar. If you can’t find the Standard Toolbar within the PowerPoint 2011 interface, select the View | Toolbars | Standard menu option to make it visible. Conversely, deselecting the same menu option will hide the Standard Toolbar.

Learn about the Standard Toolbar in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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

Presentations in Action: An Interview with Jerry Weissman

Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix and many others. Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO road show. Presentatons in ActionFollowing its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco’s Board of Directors, attributed “at least two to three dollars” of the offering price to Jerry’s coaching. That endorsement led to more than 500 other IPO road show presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market. In this interview, Jerry discusses his new book: Presentations in Action: 80 Memorable Presentation Lessons from the Masters.

In this interview, Jerry talks about his new book, Presentations in Action.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Books, Interviews, Jerry Weissman, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills

SlideFest: Conversation with Paul Cannon and Gary Kamikawa

Paul Cannon is a Senior Product Manager with the Office team at Microsoft. For the past year he has been dedicated to PowerPoint and helping customers discover the important features of the latest release – PowerPoint 2010.

Gary Kamikawa is a Sr. Marketing Manager with the Office team at Microsoft. Mr. Kamikawa joined Microsoft over 2 years ago to manage the Office Ad network and drive advertising initiatives promoting usage and engagement of the various Office Applications. Prior to Microsoft, he worked as VP of Interactive Marketing for Mpire/AdXpose.

In this conversation, Paul and Gary discusses the ongoing SlideFest contest.

Geetesh: What is the objective of the SlideFest contest, and why does it look like so much fun?

Paul and Gary: SlideFest started out of a simple desire – to demonstrate many of the great presentations the people create each day. While everyone may not be skilled in all the capabilities of PowerPoint, we wanted to provide some common things people can do to improve their use of PowerPoint.

We had choices on how to communicate that information. We could have lectured people about good versus bad PowerPoint habits. Or we could choose to have some fun and a laugh (sometimes at our own expense). Ultimately we chose a path of leveraging both a humorous look at some of the misuses of PowerPoint that we encounter on a daily basis as well as wanting to involve the community to demonstrate some truly impressive PowerPoint presentations.

Geetesh: How has the response been so far?

Paul and Gary: One word: Gratifying. Using our various channels, we’ve been able to drive a conversation with millions of users of Office and get them to watch our “Do & Don’t” videos, Remodel a sample presentation and ultimately share with us their great presentations. If you look at the number of submissions – we have had over 1500. We currently taking votes for the people’s choice award for the top 24 presentations across the 5 categories.

Geetesh: Why is this contest limited to US participants only?

Paul and Gary: This was a tough choice for us. I personally know there are many talented PowerPoint users around the world. But not many people realize the legalities of running a contest that spans multiple countries. We must obey the laws of each and every country. For instance – some countries prohibit contests that are skills-based. Others have specific timing and dates. Our little contest would have been crushed by all of these different demands.

Geetesh: All those cool video promos about the contest – why did you choose all these historic themes?

Paul and Gary: The idea that started us was around talking about the do’s and don’ts of PowerPoint. How could we have fun and still communicate a useful message? Eventually with the input of a great creative agency (Jones Advertising) – we locked on the historic theme. It gave us a chance to be silly – “Really? Cowboys using PowerPoint???” but the messages are so spot on.

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: Contest, Interviews, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Presenter View

PowerPoint 2011 has several views for editing and viewing presentations, and Presenter View is one of them. This view has been completely overhauled in PowerPoint 2011 — Presenter View no longer requires two displays. This is great since you can test this view without working on a dual display environment (such as a laptop-projector combo workspace). Of course, the actual reason for Presenter View’s existence is still for two displays, and you can continue using it that way.

Learn about Presenter View in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

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