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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
See Also:
PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
After covering the concept of differences between text placeholders and text boxes using Windows versions of PowerPoint, I heard from some Indezine readers who wanted a similar tutorial for Mac versions of PowerPoint. The concept works in exactly the same way on the Mac, with these observations: Aren’t text boxes and text placeholders the same? Are they really different? And why should I bother even if they are different? All these are valid questions, and the answers to them form one of the most important foundations in learning to create more structured presentations in PowerPoint.
Learn about text placeholders vs. text boxes in PowerPoint 2008 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2008
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2008, PowerPoint for Mac, Tutorials
Motti Nisani co-founded VisualBee based on 18 years of experience in the high-tech industry. Previously, Motti was VP of Business Development at NICE Systems Ltd. He has a B.Sc. degree in engineering from Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
In this interview, Motti discusses the VisualBee product that lets you enhance your PowerPoint presentations with a single click.
Geetesh: What exactly is VisualBee, and how can it help create better everyday PowerPoint presentations?
Motti: Presentations have become the most effective method of conveying messages. Thousands of presentations are held each day around the world, almost all of which include visual aids, such as presentations created using Microsoft PowerPoint.
VisualBee is a Microsoft PowerPoint plug-in (add-in), automatically enhancing PowerPoint presentations to create professional and effective showcases. Incorporated into PowerPoint 2007 or 2010, VisualBee is an automatic graphic design tool that saves hours spent tediously designing PowerPoint presentations.
VisualBee analyzes the text and structure of the original presentation and creates a new professionally designed presentation, incorporating appropriate images, layouts, templates, and style. The final enhanced presentation may be kept, forwarded, and redesigned as a regular PowerPoint presentation.
With VisualBee, it’s easy to create and amend PowerPoint presentations in no time. All one needs is to write or paste text onto a blank PowerPoint presentation and press “Enhance Presentation” in the PowerPoint application. VisualBee will design the presentation for you. One can even choose the presentation style best suited for the venue in which it will be presented: classic, formal, colorful, artistic, or extreme.
VisualBee is also a great solution for businesses wishing to ensure on-brand messaging and look of all their presentations. VisualBee can customize layouts and styles to match each brand and ensure all presentations enhanced by VisualBee be branded accordingly. Customized branded VisualBee layouts have already been created for major companies, such as Alvarion (NASDAQ:ALVR).
Geetesh: What happens if a presentation created by VisualBee needs to be changed — does it allow users to change visual content as well simultaneously? Also, what if a picture selected by VisualBee is not appropriate — can that be changed too?
Motti: VisualBee’s revolutionary software allows users to amend and redesign presentations during and even after enhancement.
Before saving the presentation, one can redesign each slide, replacing its layout and images, as well as reverting back to the original slide design. One doesn’t have to download images from the Internet and insert them – Images are included in the VisualBee image bank. One can find images by keywords or just let VisualBee choose the appropriate image, based on the text.
In addition, unlike other presentation-making tools currently in the market, each presentation enhanced by VisualBee is saved as an ordinary PowerPoint presentation file (*.pptx). That means it can be amended using the regular PowerPoint application – any text can be amended and images replaced after its enhancement. Additional slides can also be incorporated into the enhanced presentation by the VisualBee re-enhance feature, making sure the design of such new slides match the style of the already enhanced presentation.
And of course, the saved enhanced presentation is yours to keep forever. You may use and reuse it in your presentations, amend it, and forward it as much as you like!
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, Design, Interviews, Motti Nisani, PowerPoint
When you start creating a new presentation, many users just launch PowerPoint and start creating their slides. Actually, there are three common ways in which you can create slides. Yet, the best way to start creating presentation slides is not from within PowerPoint but by creating an outline in another program. Many purists say that you should not even launch PowerPoint until you have an outline in place.
We already showed how you can create outlines in Notepad if you are using Windows versions of Microsoft PowerPoint. However, we have many readers who use PowerPoint on the Mac, and in this tutorial, we’ll show you how you can easily create outlines for your presentation using TextEdit on the Mac.
Learn how you can create outlines for PowerPoint presentations in TextEdit.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: PowerPoint for Mac, TextEdit, Tutorials
Damian McDonald is the founder of Visual Newmedia and has over 15 years’ experience in developing communication solutions for a number of leading global brands. Visual Newmedia just released Presentation Deployer, a program that lets you export PowerPoint presentations to CD that self-runs presentations on computers with or without PowerPoint installed.
Damian discusses Presentation Deployer in this conversation.
Geetesh: What need does your new Presentation Deployer product fulfill?
Damian: Presentation Deployer was designed to overcome some limitations we saw in PowerPoint 2010. For some reason Microsoft decided to remove the ability to include the viewer with exported presentations. In addition, they changed the functionality that automatically ran the presentation when an exported CD was inserted into a CD drive. This now shows the user an HTML page with the presentation or presentations in a clickable list with a button to download the PowerPoint 2010 Viewer.
We had two issues with this.
It seems such a shame that Microsoft have put great effort in improving the functionality of what PowerPoint can offer but have ignored the reality of how presentations are distributed and the slow adoption rate of businesses upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Office.
Presentation Deployer is designed to overcome these issues. It allows you to create an exportable presentation folder that can run from a CD or other media. You are able to target the version of PowerPoint you would ideally want to use to minimize version compatibility issues. The exported CD includes the PowerPoint 2010 Viewer Installer locally on the disk for installation only if required. We have focused very much on the user experience. When the exported CD is inserted into the client machine it searches for the target version of the PowerPoint application or Viewer, including checking for the Compatibility Pack. If it finds a suitable version, it selects that application and automatically runs your presentation in full screen mode. If your folder includes a presentation playlist it runs the list automatically. If you are targeting PowerPoint 2010, you have the option of running the presentation automatically as with previous versions of PowerPoint, or showing the client a form with the playlist. We decided to replace the Microsoft HTML form with a more intelligent solution that gives the user the ability to select a presentation which then automatically runs full screen in slideshow mode. If a compatible version of PowerPoint is installed it also shows a note icon next to the playlist so the user has the option to open the presentation in PowerPoint for printing, saving etc. At any point during the checking process, if Presentation Deployer recognizes that the 2010 Viewer is required, the Microsoft license is presented to the user and on acceptance the Viewer is automatically installed in the background then the presentation is automatically run.
A far more elegant solution I think.
Geetesh: Can you share scenarios in which Presentation Deployer can help, and what inspired you to create this product?
Damian: I think Presentation Deployer is applicable to any company that wishes to take advantage of the new functionality of PowerPoint 2010 and be able to distribute their presentations in PowerPoint with confidence.
We had a situation recently where we created a presentation for a client that was using PowerPoint 2010 for a major product launch; we struck this issue when they requested for CD’s to be created for distribution to clients and channel partners. The video effects of PowerPoint 2010 really improved the quality of the presentation so they were reluctant to save to an earlier version of PowerPoint and sacrifice quality. We ended up writing some rough code to get around the issue and then decided to enhance the solution for other clients that might have been having the same issue. Presentation Deployer became the final result of this thinking.
Presentation Deployer is applicable to presentation companies wishing to give clients a deployable presentation option in PowerPoint 2010 and companies using PowerPoint 2010.
Filed Under:
Uncategorized
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, PowerPoint
When you start creating a new presentation, many users just launch PowerPoint and start creating their slides. Actually, there are three common ways in which you can create slides. Yet, the best way to start creating presentation slides is not from within PowerPoint but by creating an outline in another program. Many purists say that you should not even launch PowerPoint until you have an outline in place.
Several programs can be used to create outlines but Notepad, a small text editing application that has been bundled with every release of Microsoft Windows is probably the easiest option.
Learn how you can create outlines for PowerPoint presentations in Notepad.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: Notepad, Outline, PowerPoint, Tutorials
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