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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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Once you apply a glow effect to any shape in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows, you may find that the defaults just do not work for you! So, you may want to make some changes, probably change the glow color, it’s spread or transparency, etc. In this tutorial you are going to learn how you can access the Advanced Glow Options in PowerPoint 2010, which make all those changes doable.
Learn how you can make changes to glow effect applied to the shape(s) in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Effects, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
By Michael Kolowich
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of the “disembodied voice” approach to online presentations. Whether it’s through webinars or online meetings or voiced-over sales decks, there’s no denying that the narrated online presentation has started to gain traction. But this popularity comes at a cost: most online presentations, to be blunt, lack personality.
Think back over the last couple of years to the most memorable and impactful presentations you’ve seen. And if you haven’t seen any lately, go to TED and take in a couple of the so-called “TED Talks”. Or reflect on some of the great lectures you might have seen in college. Or look at what Steve Jobs does with his product launch presentations. Great presentations are, at their core, performance art, augmented by the power of illustration in the form of powerful images and provocative text. Great presenters are storytellers, and they tell those stories with every tool they have – with the inflection of their voice, with their gestures, with their facial expressions, with the images they show, and with the useful handouts they pass around.
A voiced-over online presentation is handicapped right from the start, because the speaker is denied many of the communication tools that are available to a live presenter. What’s more, presentation narrators often compound the problem by reading from a script, further stripping the personality from the experience.
While narrated presentations certainly have their place as a quick-and-dirty tool in an online communications portfolio, they are hardly the way to put a company’s best foot forward – especially with an organization’s best communicators.
Fortunately, online video presentation tools like KnowledgeVision are now emerging that are easy, affordable, and powerful. And I’m not talking about just dropping video clips into a presentation; I’m talking about a fully-synchronized reproduction of a presentation experience, with all the body language and nuance of the storyteller. Take a look at this 6-minute example of an online video presentation (link no longer works), and I think you’ll see what I mean.
Too expensive to produce? Hardly. At a time when most teenagers know how to create and upload video clips to YouTube, video capture and uploading skills are everywhere you look. And the best video online presentation platforms can create quite serviceable “ad-hoc” presentations right from a webcam, plugged into your computer’s USB port. Video online presentations can be produced in literally minutes from any computer, anywhere an internet connection can be found, with no special equipment.
Today’s most advanced online presentation platforms don’t stop at video synchronization, though. They further enhance the experience by providing just-in-time footnotes, virtual handouts, calls to action, forms, quizzes, surveys, interactive transcripts, and other tools as part of the entire interactive experience. And they augment that experience with powerful analytics that show how the presentation material is being viewed and interacted with.
Will this spell the end of audio-only narrated presentations? Hardly. Both narrated presentations and fully-synchronized video presentations have a place in a company’s communications portfolio at every level – from the corporate communications and training departments to product managers and sales reps. And now that both capabilities can be found in a single flexible tool, there’s no reason not to spread that capability widely in an organization.
Michael Kolowich is founder and CEO of KnowledgeVision, which has developed tools for creating, managing, and distributing synchronized interactive online video presentations for communications, marketing, training, and sales professionals. He writes regularly about online presentations at his blog.
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:
Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Multimedia, PowerPoint, Video
Seema Chaudhary helped establish the US headquarters of Harbinger Group in Redmond; created innovative and effective marketing campaigns to launch several products in the international market; and developed crucial long-lasting relationships with prominent and influential experts in the e-Learning industry.
In this conversation, Seema discusses the just released Interactive Graphs Pack for Raptivity Presenter.
Geetesh: What is the Interactive Graphs Pack for Raptivity Presenter and how can it help PowerPoint users?
Seema: We just announced a new library for our Raptivity Presenter product that will allow users show graphs and charts interactively in PowerPoint for the first time. Raptivity Presenter by itself is a seamlessly integrated add-in that works within PowerPoint to add several interactivity models, helping create meaningful and expressive interactions within PowerPoint slides. This new library, named the Interactive Graphs Pack is now part of the PowerPoint add-in for Raptivity Presenter.
Most presenters show important statistical information in the form of graphs and charts. But more often than not, there is more information to communicate than what is just visible on the slide. The Interactive Graphs Pack will enable presenters to communicate the context, and bring out the implications and insights hidden behind these graphs.
Geetesh: What are these interactions that comprise the Interactive Graphs Pack?< Seema: Although the graphs and charts include the traditional types –line, bar, pie, bubble and others – the interactive elements make them entirely different. With the new library of interactive charts and graphs, presenters will be able to add notes right alongside the data points. For example, presenters might be able to explain more clearly why the sales of a product were low in a particular month than in other months.
Another set of interactions in this pack is called Cluster Annotation Graphs. These interactions help the reader focus on the interpretation of graphs at the series or cluster level instead of each data point of the graph.
The Interactive Graphs Pack adds 11 new interactions to Raptivity Presenter, bringing the total to well over 50 interactions. Last fall, the company added a Business Presentation Pack, which included a powerful set of interactions that covered customer testimonials, showing of hierarchies, memos and others.
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, Raptivity Presenter
Continuing this series on Shape Effects in PowerPoint, this tutorial takes the glow effect options for a shape in PowerPoint 2010 a little further by showing you how you can change the glow color to anything beyond the default Theme Color offerings.
Learn to change the glow effect’s color applied to shapes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Effects, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
In this series of tutorials on Shape Effects, you have already explored how you can apply preset, shadow, and reflection effects to selected shapes in PowerPoint 2010. In this tutorial you will learn how to apply the Glow effect, which adds a hazed color perimeter outside the shape area.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Effects, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
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