PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Xara 3D Maker 7: The Indezine Review

Xara 3D Maker 7 is an application that lets you create 3D text and graphics such as headings, logos, titles and buttons. You can also create 3D animations and export them to GIFs, AVIs and simple Flash movie sequences, and screensavers for your desktop. With several ready-to-use 3D styles and animations, you can create 3D animations or images for your web pages, mailshots, movies and presentations.

Read the review here.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Graphics, PowerPoint, Review

Snagit for Beginners: Conversation with Jennifer Bedford

Jennifer Bedford is the Marketing Project Manager for TechSmith Corporation. She has been with TechSmith for over 10 years working in the Administration, Sales and Marketing departments. After growing up in Massachusetts, Jennifer moved to Michigan for college. Jennifer is a 1997 graduate of Michigan State University with a degree in Hospitality Business. She lives in Howell, MI with her husband and two daughters.

In this conversation, Jennifer discusses how beginner users can easily use Snagit, especially for their PowerPoint presentations.

Geetesh: What exactly does SnagIt do, and how easy is it for a complete novice to use?

Jennifer: Snagit is a screen capture tool. You can use it to capture anything on your computer screen from an image, to a scrolling window, to an entire webpage. You can then save or share your capture, or edit it first with Snagit Editor.

I consider myself comfortable with computers, but not an expert and I use Snagit every day. Taking a basic capture is really simple for even a novice. Some of the editing capabilities are more complex and take a little practice and help. Personally, I use some editing, but I don’t have the need to do a lot of really complex things, so Snagit is really quick and simple to use.

Geetesh: Many PowerPoint users also work with Snagit – to get screen-shots into their presentations -– can you tell us a little more about how PowerPoint users can benefit from having Snagit installed on their systems

Jennifer: With Snagit you can easily add screen-shots to your presentation and better demonstrate exactly how something is done or how it should look. In addition, you can automatically add Snagit to your toolbar in PowerPoint so that anytime you want to do a screen-grab, you don’t need to open another application. It is already built into PowerPoint.

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: Interviews, PowerPoint, Snagit, Techsmith

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Types of Points (Vertexes) in PowerPoint

Every shape in PowerPoint is a combination of segments and points (vertexes) — and these segments and vertexes are only visible in Edit Points mode. We discuss more about segments in a subsequent tutorial but for now, let me help you explore the different types of vertexes (points) in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Learn about different types of points (vertexes) in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Lines, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Add or Delete Points (Vertexes) for Shapes in PowerPoint

You learned what Edit Points in PowerPoint are and how they work. These Edit Points give you control over how you want a shape to look, but sometimes you might find it difficult to edit a certain segment in a shape because there are no points available to manipulate — or maybe there are far too many points! PowerPoint provides a simple solution for this problem — you can add and delete vertexes from a shape.

Learn how to add or delete points (vertexes) for a shape in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Lines, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2010: Align Shapes to Center of Slide in PowerPoint

I already showed how you can align shapes in PowerPoint 2010 — however for alignment to work, you need to have more than one shape (or any other slide object) selected so that they can align to each other. However, you may want to align just one shape (or even a group of shapes) to the exact center of the slide. Fortunately, that is easy as explained in these steps.

Learn how to center a shape on a PowerPoint 2010 slide.

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