A PowerPoint Blog: January 2008

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Wednesday, January 30, 2008 posted by Geetesh 4:55 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Yellow: New PowerPoint Template Set From Ppted Ppted released a new PowerPoint template set -- this one is called Yellow. Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost. Templates Transparent PNGs None of the templates at Ppted.com are free -- these are all designer templates. I just wanted to say that because lots of readers write in to say that their Indezine passwords don't let them download all the Ppted templates for free! Categories: powerpoint, templates Labels: powerpoint, templates 1 comments Links to this post


Tuesday, January 29, 2008 posted by Geetesh 7:19 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Google Presentations Adds Vector Shapes and PDF Output After adding online presentation sharing 20 days ago, Google Presentations adds a quick new update in the form of vector shapes and PDF output. AppScout reports that "Google Presentations is getting the ability to save documents as a PDF and PDF-based printing options. Users are also getting some basic drawing abilities and vector shapes, such as word bubbles and arrows. The Wired Blog Network adds that "Google has released a new desktop uploader for Windows, making to much easier to move a large batch of files into Google Docs." Categories: google, online_presentations, powerpoint Labels: google, online_presentations, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 12:54 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Slide Executive Professional: The Indezine Review A decade or two ago, users played with PowerPoint around twice a month, made some overhead slides through a service provider and hired expensive equipment to show these at really big events. Nowadays, people create PowerPoint slides more often than they sneeze! The result is that there are billions of slides in the presentation sphere -- slides lost and mixed up in a chaotic land where it's easier to spend to a few hours to create new slides than search and reuse the ones that cannot be found. Our review product Slide Executive Professional may be all the help you need. Read on to learn more... Categories: add-in, slide_management, powerpoint Labels: add-in, powerpoint, slide_management 0 comments Links to this post


Monday, January 28, 2008 posted by Geetesh 4:20 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	SlideManager: The Indezine Review There are essentially three PowerPoint related tasks: you either create, give, or archive/share presentations. You know that keeping one or all three of these tasks organized is not a task that can be described as easy as pie. SlideManager is a slide management software that can assist you in each of the three task scenarios -- it lets you maintain an online presentation library that is cataloged down to the individual slide level. Read the review here... Categories: add-in, slide_management, powerpoint Labels: add-in, powerpoint, slide_management 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 11:06 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	St. Patrick's Day Embellishments from Scrapbook Presentations Scrapbook Presentations has put up a whole series of St. Patrick's Day PNG embellishments that can be placed within your PowerPoint presentations. Download these here... Categories: graphics, powerpoint Labels: graphics, powerpoint 1 comments Links to this post


Thursday, January 24, 2008 posted by Geetesh 9:46 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Ppted Cartography Updated with Extras Ppted's Cartography collection has been updated with extras! Take a look here to see... Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost. Templates Transparent PNGs None of the templates at Ppted.com are free -- these are all designer templates. I just wanted to say that because lots of readers write in to say that their Indezine passwords don't let them download all the Ppted templates for free! Categories: powerpoint, templates Labels: powerpoint, templates 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 12:28 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	MathType, TeX, and PowerPoint: Conversation with Bob Mathews Bob Mathews (pictured to the left) is Director of Training for Design Science. A former military pilot, Bob came to Design Science in 1999 after teaching high school mathematics for several years. MathType from DesignScience is probably the foremost equation program available today -- it integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office programs including PowerPoint. Geetesh: Give us a generic profile of the typical PowerPoint user who also uses MathType. Bob: Our customers hold such a variety of positions in education and industry that it's hard to describe a "typical" user. We see people using MathType with PowerPoint to present a 6th grade math lesson, and we see people creating engineering proposals with these products. In almost 10 years with Design Science, I've had only one or two customers ever ask me about doing something with the MathType/PowerPoint combination that couldn't be done, and those were things neither MathType nor PowerPoint were intended to do anyway. Actually, MathType can be used in a wider range of applications than just Microsoft Office (graphing tools, flowcharting tools, illustration apps, desktop publishing, etc.) -- basically anything into which you can insert, paste, or drag a graphic -- so its use in PowerPoint just fits into a normal day's workflow for many of our customers. Geetesh: Tell us more about the new TeX entry feature in MathType, and how it helps PowerPoint users. Bob: This is a really powerful feature for someone who prefers to use TeX but needs to use PowerPoint to prepare a presentation, or needs to use Word to collaborate with colleagues. Simply type the TeX or LaTeX markup into the MathType window, press Enter, and MathType converts the markup into a typeset equation. You can even mix MathType's point & click and keyboard shortcut features with the TeX input feature in the same equation. If a colleague sends you a TeX document and you want to use one of the equations on a PowerPoint slide, you can simply copy the equation and paste the TeX into MathType. In short, the new TeX entry feature provides the utility of being able to use a familiar program you're comfortable with, and combine it with a powerful typesetting language in order to get the mathematical expressions you need into PowerPoint. Categories: interviews, powerpoint Labels: interviews, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


Wednesday, January 23, 2008 posted by Geetesh 2:42 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	The Ric Bretschneider Interview Ric Bretschneider is Senior Program Manager for PowerPoint at Microsoft and he celebrates fifteen years as a Microsoft veteran, having joined the company in 1993 to work on PowerPoint for Windows and the Macintosh. Over the years, he's contributed to the design and direction of the application, and been awarded three PowerPoint related patents. In this interview, Ric discusses his fifteen years, his involvement with PowerPoint, the MVPs, his podcasts, and how PowerPoint was named. Read the interview here... Categories: interviews, powerpoint Labels: interviews, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


Tuesday, January 22, 2008 posted by Geetesh 12:59 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	NXPowerLite 3.5: Conversation with Tommy Powell Tommy Powell (pictured to the left) is from Neuxpower, a software solutions company based in the UK. Neuxpower custom-build both stand-alone applications and add-ins that enhance existing software such as Microsoft Office. Their commercially-available PowerPoint optimizer, NXPowerLite , radically reduces the size of PowerPoint files. Geetesh: Tell us what is new in version 3.5 of NXPowerLite. Tommy: NXPowerLite 3.5 features three big changes. The most important change is that it is now compatible with files saved in Microsoft's new Office Open XML formats (such as DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). NXPowerLite 3.5 is the only product on the market that can optimize Word, Excel and PowerPoint files created in any version of Office, from Office 97-2008 (of course, it also works with files created in other Office suites, such as OpenOffice, StarOffice and even Google Docs, as long as they are saved in a Microsoft Office format). Secondly, we've improved the way that NXPowerLite integrates with Microsoft Outlook, making it even easier to optimize your email attachments. The third change is that NXPowerLite is now available in Chinese, increasing the number of supported languages to six (with more languages to follow soon). NXPowerLite detects the language of your Windows installation and automatically displays in that language - so if you're using a Chinese version of Windows, you'll now see a Chinese version of NXPowerLite. Geetesh: NXPowerLite has evolved from an optimization program for PowerPoint to an optimization program for Microsoft Office files – tell us a little more about this evolution. Tommy: NXPowerLite was originally launched back in 2001 as a program to make PowerPoint files smaller. PowerPoint files could (and still can) get incredibly large, making them difficult to store and share. NXPowerLite solved this problem, but customers frequently told us that they also had file-size problems with Word and Excel. You'd be amazed at what some people try to do with large graphics in Excel! So last year we added support for Word and Excel files to NXPowerLite. But we haven't forgotten our core PowerPoint audience -- we've got some cool new features for PowerPoint users coming later this year! NXPowerLite has evolved in other ways too, NXPowerLite 3.5 is also available as a Server Edition, enabling organizations to automatically optimize all the Office files on their servers, freeing up large amounts of existing server space and, in turn, contributing to a greener storage strategy. Categories: add-in, interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_2007 Labels: add-in, interviews, powerpoint, powerpoint_2007 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 12:21 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	PowerFinish Templates Volume 6 Millions of presentations may be created each day, but you may only see a few each week. And even then they all look the same to you. Your newspaper changes their layouts, web sites rehaul their identities, companies go through image makeovers, even television looks different and more contemporary each day. So why do people make presentations that look the same? That's typically because they use the designs that are built inside PowerPoint. PowerFinish Volume 6 is a set of 50 PowerPoint design templates that comprise an assortment of abstracts, geometry, and strokes with a painted canvas look. It is very contemporary, and the entire collection is available in both 4:3 standard and 16:9 HD sizes. Read the review here... Categories: powerpoint, templates Labels: powerpoint, templates 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 12:15 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Circle PNGs from Scrapbook Presentations Scrapbook Presentations has put up a whole series of Circle PNG embellishments that can be placed within your PowerPoint presentations. Download these here... Categories: graphics, powerpoint Labels: graphics, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


Sunday, January 20, 2008 posted by Geetesh 9:37 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Ric's Podcast: Presentation Party Invitation to PowerPoint Live Ric Bretschneider's newest podcast is now live on the Presentationsroundtable site. In this podcast, Ric does a candid conversation with three PowerPoint MVPs who have been regulars at five successful yearly PowerPoint Live gatherings -- indeed some of the PowerPoint MVPs were responsible for the idea behind the PowerPoint Live conference -- this podcast recalls those origins, and reflects on why the event gets rave reviews from attendees. The participants in this podcast are (as shown in picture above, clockwise from the larger photo) Ric Bretschneider, Steve Rindsberg, Echo Swinford, and Glen Millar. Make sure you put up a comment on the podcast page! Categories: powerpoint, powerpointlive Labels: powerpoint, powerpointlive 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 9:03 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Photography 02: New PowerPoint Template Set From Ppted Ppted released a new PowerPoint template set -- this one is called Photography 02. Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost. Templates Transparent PNGs None of the templates at Ppted.com are free -- these are all designer templates. I just wanted to say that because lots of readers write in to say that their Indezine passwords don't let them download all the Ppted templates for free! Categories: powerpoint, templates Labels: powerpoint, templates 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 7:50 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Tom Bunzel's Review on PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit Here's a small excerpt from Tom Bunzel's review on PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit on InformIT: There are, in my opinion, two different ways to get proficient in a computer, and more important, a professional discipline of some kind. One way is methodical, and the other way is to wing it. I must confess that when I get a new program these days, I mainly try to intuit how it works and have little patience for methodical training. But when I encounter methodical training, as I do in Echo Swinford and Geetesh Bajaj’s Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, I am always reminded of how superior it is. Particularly in a professional discipline like presentation coaching, consulting or authoring, and a program like the new PowerPoint 2007, taking a project oriented approach and then digging deep into the precise whys and wherefores helps to ground any end user thoroughly in techniques that are empowering and enduring. Read more on InformIT... Categories: books, powerpoint_2007 Labels: books, powerpoint_2007 0 comments Links to this post


Saturday, January 19, 2008 posted by Geetesh 2:04 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit: Conversation with Echo Swinford Echo Swinford (pictured to the right) is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional). When she's not working on new media, she is answering almost all the questions on the PowerPoint newsgroup. Echo is also the co-author of Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit, published by Que. The other author of this book is the owner of this blog -- so I thought it will be fun for one author to interview the other! Visit Echo's site Echo's Voice to find several PowerPoint usability tricks... Geetesh: How much ground does this new book cover for the everyday PowerPoint user? Echo: Well, I think the PowerPoint 2007 Makeover kit actually covers most of the PowerPoint 2007 hills and valleys, at least enough to get you started walking through the woods! Seriously, the book does cover almost all of the features in PowerPoint 2007, some to a greater extent than others. One of the goals was to teach users about PowerPoint 2007 while reviewing some basic best practices users can rely on to help make their presentations more polished. As a result, we talk a lot about leveraging themes and color schemes and slide layouts and the like to create consistency throughout a presentation. Because themes are new in PowerPoint 2007, and slide masters and layouts are not well understood (even though they do exist in previous versions of PowerPoint), even accomplished PowerPoint users should learn some helpful tricks. I was really excited to do this book because I think it's important for people to see that even non-designers can make good-looking presentations. Just because it's PowerPoint, it doesn't have to be ugly. There are a million design books out there, and there are a million PowerPoint books, but I don't think there's another "here's how to design in PowerPoint," with some practical things you can do to make your presentations look better. Geetesh: What types of presentations do you cover, and why were these particular types of presentations chosen? Echo: Well, we wanted to offer a good representation of the types of presentations we see every day, and of the types of presentations we're asked about frequently on the Microsoft PowerPoint newsgroup. So you'll see things like a couple of corporate presentations, a school report, a photo album with a background music track. This way, hopefully at least one makeover will be specifically relevant to most readers. Now, that doesn't mean the others won't be relevant -- they will be. For example, in the medical presentation makeover, we discuss using tabs instead of spacebar-spacebar-spacebar to align text on an agenda slide. But there are a gazillion other types of presentations that use agenda slides, and, for that matter, there are even more types of slides where you might use tabs to align the text. So the skills and best practices you learn about are transferable to any number of presentations. Really, though, there seem to be some issues we just see repeatedly, no matter what type of presentation we're dealing with, and having a variety of presentation types allowed us to highlight those in different ways. To illustrate the point, I'll confess that I worry a little that readers will get sick of us harping on them to use the placeholders to ensure consistent text placement and formatting...but I'm telling you, that's one of the fundamental issues I see day in and day out as I clean up slides for various clients. If people only knew how to use the layouts and placeholders to their advantage, they'd save a ton of time -- and end up with better looking presentations to boot! I hope the book helps them realize that. Categories: books, interviews, powerpoint_2007 Labels: books, interviews, powerpoint_2007 0 comments Links to this post


Friday, January 18, 2008 posted by Geetesh 12:45 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Using Excel in PowerPoint Although you can copy and paste an Excel sheet inside a PowerPoint slide, there's so much more you can do to make the entire Excel-in-PowerPoint thing more useful. Microsoft Excel possesses an amazingly intuitive and powerful calculation engine -- and tons of formulae. We would like to leverage these capabilities of Excel while running a PowerPoint slide show. Learn more with Naresh Nichani and Brian Reilly... Categories: powerpoint, tutorials Labels: powerpoint, tutorials 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 12:36 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Feather PNGs from Scrapbook Presentations Scrapbook Presentations has put up a whole series of Feather PNG embellishments that can be placed within your PowerPoint presentations. Download these here... Categories: graphics, powerpoint Labels: graphics, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 10:05 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Design for the Close: Interactive Sales Presentations The linear presentation approach has gone fundamentally unchallenged until recent years when something changed. It wasn’t the presenters (they actually liked the straight-forward simplicity) and it wasn’t really the software. It was certain audience types and we had better pay attention. In this month’s column I want to challenge a long-standing norm and offer a simple solution. You see there’s been a fundamental change in how many of us interact with certain audiences – especially in a sales context when our goal is to persuade and move them to action. Jim Endicott explains more in this article... Categories: opinion, powerpoint Labels: opinion, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


Wednesday, January 16, 2008 posted by Geetesh 8:51 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	NXPowerLite 3.5 Released Tommy Powell of Neuxpower says that NXPowerLite version 3.5 has just been released. NXPowerLite 3.5 adds support for Microsoft's Open XML (Office 2007) file formats and offers improved Outlook integration. It is also now available in Chinese. In addition, NXPowerLite 3.5 is available as a free upgrade to existing NXPowerLite 3 users. Download a free trial version of NXPowerLite here... For those who are not aware, NXPowerLite is a file optimization program for Microsoft Office file formats. Categories: add-in, powerpoint Labels: add-in, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 8:17 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Office 2008 at MacWorld Leaders of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit are spending the day showing Macworld Expo attendees the new Office 2008 for Mac applications. Marcus Aiu, lead program manager of PowerPoint for Mac, is showing many new features in the presentation program. He earned applause, for example, when he demonstrated the ability to use Apple's remote control to page through slides. Todd Bishop discusses more on the Seattle P-I site... Categories: office_mac, powerpoint Labels: office_mac, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 11:57 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	ShortcutTools 2.0 -- The Indezine Review If you create your share of PowerPoint presentations, you know that you end up doing repetitive tasks all the time -- for the most common commands such as aligning, distributing, grouping, or resizing objects, you have to access the menus and toolbars hundreds of times. PowerPoint ShortcutTools 2.0, the product I am reviewing is a PowerPoint add-in which allows users to set defined keyboard shortcuts for specific PowerPoint commands. Read the review here... Categories: add-in, powerpoint Labels: add-in, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 11:42 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Cross PNGs from Scrapbook Presentations Scrapbook Presentations has put up a whole series of Cross PNG embellishments that can be placed within your PowerPoint presentations. Download these here... Categories: graphics, powerpoint Labels: graphics, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


Tuesday, January 15, 2008 posted by Geetesh 9:22 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	Ppted Photography 01 Updated with Extras Ppted's Photography 01 collection has been updated with extras! Take a look here to see... Not only do you get five great template designs, you also get the actual backgrounds so that you can use the same designs elsewhere. In this collection, you also get wide screen templates and backgrounds, and ten transparent PNGs you can use in your presentations -- at no extra cost. Templates Transparent PNGs None of the templates at Ppted.com are free -- these are all designer templates. I just wanted to say that because lots of readers write in to say that their Indezine passwords don't let them download all the Ppted templates for free! Categories: powerpoint, templates Labels: powerpoint, templates 0 comments Links to this post


Friday, January 11, 2008 posted by Geetesh 3:24 PM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	The Jim Endicott Interview Jim Endicott is a nationally-recognized consultant, designer, speaker specializing in professional presentation messaging, design and delivery. In this interview, Jim discusses the implications of changes in this decade, the influence of technology, the sophistication of the marketplace, and the utilization of potential. Read the interview here... Categories: interviews, powerpoint Labels: interviews, powerpoint 0 comments Links to this post


posted by Geetesh 11:09 AM Comment and PermaLink Subscribe for Email updates Tell A Friend!	False Backgrounds: Conversation with Glen Millar Glen Millar (pictured to the right) is a MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Microsoft PowerPoint. Based near Brisbane, Australia, Glen is a regular on the Microsoft support newsgroups, and a featured speaker at PowerPoint Live. Visit Glen's site, PowerPoint Workbench for tutorials on cool animation effects in PowerPoint. Geetesh: Tell us more about your work, and your involvement with PowerPoint.. Glen: I first began to use PowerPoint a number of years ago to present scientific information. It was critical that we could communicate effectively, as well as efficiently. I discovered that PowerPoint is a very powerful way to help people communicate. It allowed us to span information across time and locations. That is, we could take our audience to locations and across time in ways that simply cannot be done in real life. Today, I work in a bunch of areas, including environmental education projects. I particularly build presentations for clients and conduct computer training into the features of PowerPoint that allow clients to build presentations faster and more effectively. I still think it is an awful shame that people spend lots of money on their projects and go to a conference and give a very poor presentation. Geetesh: Tell us about your false background trick, and how you evolved it. Also what are typical usage scenarios for this trick? Glen: False backgrounds take advantage of a property of AutoShapes that allows the shape to grab pixels from the slide background and lock them into place. The first time I created a false background was almost by accident. I was preparing for PowerPoint Live in 2004 and wanted to use an AutoShape to pan across the background image of a slide. However, every time I animated the AutoShape to move, it would take the background image with it. I learnt that if I covered the slide background