PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Interface in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

A quick walkthrough of the PowerPoint 2010 interface will reveal all the new options, such as the Backstage view. The PowerPoint 2010 interface is quite similar to the PowerPoint 2007 interface, but very different from the PowerPoint 2003 interface.

Explore the interface for PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

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

Addintools Classic Menu: Conversation with Lin Jie

Lin Jie is from Addintools, a line of add-ins for Microsoft Office applications created by Detong Technology Ltd. from China. Lin began programming since 1991 and was first introduced to Microsoft Office in 1994. He started programming Microsoft Office by creating add-ins in 2001. In 2003, he released his first Office Add-in: Addintools Create. When Microsoft Office 2007 was released with the Ribbon, Lin was the first to get back the old menus via the Classic Menu for Office 2007 in February 2007. In this conversation, Lin talks more about his products for Microsoft Office.

Geetesh: Tell us more about your company and products.

Lin: Our company, Detong Technology Ltd., Hainan, was registered in China in 2008. We comprise 5 program engineers who are dedicated in developing software, especially Microsoft Office add-ins. In addition, we have 4 ingenious employees for marketing and after-sales service. We attach importance in our Classic Menu for Microsoft Office products. And we are going to release more add-ins for Microsoft programs in the future.

Our products include:

• Classic Menu for Office 2007 that contains 5 components for Office 2007 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook. Users can also download and install each component individually for corresponding Microsoft Office 2007 programs.
• Classic Menu for Office 2010 that contains 9 components for Office 2010 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, InfoPath, Publisher, Visio and Project. To be in conformity with Microsoft’s Office 2010 bundles, we offer Classic Menu for Office 2010 in 6 variations, which suit different Office users:

  Classic Menu for Office Enterprise 2010

  Classic Menu for Office Professional Plus 2010

  Classic Menu for Office Professional 2010

  Classic Menu for Office Standard 2010

  Classic Menu for Office Home and Business 2010

  Classic Menu for Office 2010 Starter (original Classic Menu for Office Home and Student 2010)

• Ribbon Customizer for Office 2007 is designed for advanced users to customize the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007. With this add-in, users can remove or add tabs, menus, buttons, and create their own buttons and menus.
• Excel Addins: We also create two more add-ins for Microsoft Excel, Addintools Assist for Excel and Addintools Creator for Excel.
• OfficeTab: Our new product OfficeTabs is designed to open multiple Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations within a single window. It contains three components: Document Tabs for Word, Workbook Tabs for Excel, and Presentation Tabs for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Why do you think some people don’t like the Ribbon and tabs in Office 2007 and 2010 too much, and crave to get the menus back? And how does your product help?

Lin: The Ribbon is a great interface revolution. Yet, many users are not able to follow their time-tested usage pattern any longer. What’s worse, there are fewer words and more buttons and icons in the Ribbon, making it difficult for users to adapt quickly. Many experienced users may be reluctant to give up quite on the familiar classic style menus and toolbars and learn new options in the Ribbon step by step. In addition, it may take a lot of money and a long time to train employees in enterprises. Classic Menu will help employees learn Ribbon by themselves at their own pace. No training or tutors are needed anymore, and employees can go to work immediately.

Classic Menu inserts a “Menus” tab at the beginning of Ribbon that brings back the familiar classic style menus, toolbars, and buttons. Moreover, this Classic Menu not only contains all old menu items of Microsoft Office 2003, but also brings in new features of Office 2007/2010. Users can switch between two interfaces at ease: Classic Menu and Ribbon.

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, Microsoft Office, PowerPoint

Create Twitter Backgrounds Using PowerPoint

Have you seen the customized Twitter backgrounds that people create to show an identity for their business? You might think that you need a graphic program such as Adobe Photoshop to create something of that sort, but the easiest tool to create Twitter backgrounds is PowerPoint!

This tutorial shows you how you can upload the new Twitter background.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Tutorials, Twitter

PowerPoint Repurposing

This article appeared in the erstwhile Presentations magazine dated February 2003.

Today, billions of electronic presentations inhabit millions of hard disks in every corner of the world, and more than 90 percent of these presentations were created with Microsoft PowerPoint. Unfortunately, most have a short life span. Typically, these presentations are used only once or twice, then filed and forgotten—an enormous waste of time and valuable information.

Learn more about PowerPoint repurposing.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Delivery, Distribution, PowerPoint

i-Clickr PowerPoint Remote: Conversation with Ray Huang

Ray Huang graduated from Texas Christian University and the University of Texas at Arlington, majoring in Computer Science. Ray has 15 years of experience developing software for Windows and Mac, and heads Senstic, a small development house that provides solutions that run on your mobile computers, PDA, mobile phones, and other portable devices.

In this conversation, Ray discusses the i-Clickr PowerPoint Remote product.

Geetesh: What does iClickr do, and how can it help people who forget to carry their remotes along?

Ray: iClickr is a wireless presentation remote for mobile devices such as iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Windows Phone. With iClickr, you can control your PowerPoint presentation (i.e., going forward, back, jumping to a particular slide). iClickr has a built-in timer that helps you control your presentation time. You can even view your slide notes directly on the phone. iClickr works with Microsoft PowerPoint XP, 2003, 2007 and 2010 on Windows, and PowerPoint 2004 and 2008 on Mac. It also works with the free OpenOffice on Windows, and Apple’s iWork’09 Keynote.

With iClickr installed on your phone, you no longer need to carry a separate remote device. Since the iClickr software for computer is free to download, you can use it with any host computer. When using it with your personal laptop, you can let iClickr set up wireless ad hoc networks directly between your laptop and your phone, and thus bypassing additional network infrastructure.

Geetesh: Tell us more about how you hit on this concept, and about your newest release for the iClickr on the iPhone and iPad.

Ray: I came up with this idea when I was doing my graduate degree at University of Texas at Arlington. There were just too many presentations every week, and I kept forgetting to bring my Logitech clicker. So, I thought it would be nice to have the clicker on my mobile phone. It’s one less gadget to carry, and it’s highly unlikely I would forget to bring my phone. The first version of i-Clickr is on Windows Mobile, and when the iPhone came along, we developed for it with additional features. For the iPad version, we took advantage of its larger screen and made the change to display both slide view and slide notes on the same page.

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, iPad, iPhone, PDA, Phone, PowerPoint